Kanji Pict-O-Graphix: Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics

by Michael Rowley

Japanese written characters, or kanji, have their origin in a picture-language developed in ancient China. Over time this language evolved into stylized abstract forms that are hard to memorize. In Kanji Pict-o-Graphix, Michael Rowley offers a whole new set of contemporary visual and textual memory aids—mnemonics—that reveal the meanings of over 1,000 Japanese kanji. Fully indexed and cross-referenced.

"Kanji Pict-o-Graphix offers an engaging way to learn and memorize Kanji."—Rocky Mountain Region Japan Project

"A fun book for studying kanji. The illustration reveals more of its contents and method than any description ever could."—Japan Times

"It is a very nice book, simple and pretty effective. A useful addition to the library of all beginners who aspire to learn Japanese. Recommended."—Protoculture Addicts 

Learn more about kanji from Stone Bridge Press: Kana Pict-o-Graphix, Designing with Kanji, Kanji Starter 1&2, and Crazy for Kanji

Genres: Japanese Literature, Language, Nonfiction, Reference, Japan, Linguistics, Self Help

216 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1992

About the author

I'm into health, fitness, graphic design, illustration, environmental and social justice, and writing. I often have dozens of books from the library and read multiple titles at once — many I don't finish.

Author of educational books with visual mnemonics to learn Japanese and U.S. Geography: Kanji Pictographix and Fifty States of Mind.

New books in the works for learning the times tables and learning to recite the alphabet backwards.

CreativeKi.com is my design studio for books, covers, packaging, logos, and branding. I work with authors to design and produce titles.

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on Kanji and a glimpse into Japanese culture. Years ago I made a very weak attempt to learn Japanese; and failed spectacularly! But I do remember becoming fascinated by the form of the characters and what they were based on. It truly is a very different way of organizing information! Wish I was better at learning languages.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book for building a pictoral-memory oriented base of review for Kanji.
For those who are skilled in drawing or copying drawings from books, or even those good with computer copy and pasting, this book is great to use as a guide for home made Flash Cards!

It's not complete, but is an excellent starter for those just learning Kanji.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent aid in the memorization of kanji characters. Each kanji in the book is grouped by subject rather than by dictionary order, making it easy for beginners to find the kanji they're looking for. The illustrations are helpful in giving an mnemonic device to better memorize it, and each kanji is also broken down into radicals, making it easier to see its composition.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

See, this book is much better than the Kanji Starter books. For one, the pictures for the most part remain true to their meaning and do not venture off into more abstract areas to explain the kanji. If a kanji is made of dog and man, the picture will be of a dog and a man and have a little phrase or sentence explaining the meaning. Another reason this is better than the Kanji Starters is that it gives both the kun and the on readings while KS gives only the kun and then later expects you to know the on. I like the way the book is arranged and I like the story element.
I still can't see these pictures working for me.. well some of them might, but mostly this doesn't work on my brain.
However, my brother used this book to learn kana and it worked extremely well for him.

[Adriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this book is supposed to teach you ways to actually remember the many complex and varied Kanji, I found that in my case it works better as a reference. I continually remembered the image on the page more than the definition, so I could just flip thru the book and find the kanji I was looking for really easily – a lot easier than with a traditional kanji dictionary.
Mnemonics tend to not work with me because I dedicate brain cells to remembering the mnemonic as is instead of what it’s supposed to be helping me remember, but the combination of images, definition and mnemonic that Rowley created works surprisingly well.
I’m still a bit lost when it comes to reading kanji, but this book is a good road map to help me get better at it.

[Natacha Okazaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is AWESOME and made me start liking kanjis as I could find the individual meanings of the complex kanjis and it made it so easy to remember. I definitely recommend this book to anyone studying Japanese kanjis.

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Makes Japanese people laugh hysterically. But quite effective.

[Iris Castillo mendoza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me encanta... Muy fácil de estimular mi memoria y aprenderme los Kanji más fácilmente

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to a growing interest in Japan over the past few years, and especially to a current obsession with the sport of sumo, I have another long term project in the works: learning Japanese!

This will of course be a slow process so I thought I would record my new Japanese reference library now since I very greatly doubt I will actually be finished with the books any time soon.

My rating for each book will be based on my first tentative peeks inside the covers. First impressions can be important! I will try to make individual comments about each book, even though I am still merely getting acquainted with them all, and then later on when I have progressed a bit, I can come back and add more comments.

Oct 18, 2024
This book is a little intimidating. It is an attempt to help the reader remember the different kanji characters by creating associations between the kanji and what they represent. I think once I get further into my project this will also be helpful but at the moment it seems a bit scary.

[Rory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ohhhh, this book is cool. Just go look at it.

[GONZA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful.

Meraviglioso.

[Black Tea Lady ☕️📚 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome way to learn the kanji!! <3 it!

[Valerie S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

AWESOME!

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

its a tough book but interesting. Decent tool to learn kanji.

[Ollie · Rating 5 out of 5]

素敵です！
Книга про японську ієрогліфічну писемність для візуалів-відчайдухів.

[Satvrnino Satvrnvs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curioso, inventivo; excelente. Sólo para aprendices de la lengua japonesa.

[Till Raether · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is delightfully kooky and disturbing (I refer you to the entry "dead bodies") and it might even have helped me remember a kanji or two.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

tl;dr For serious learners, use WaniKani. For others who are curious, could be worth a glance.

Not tl;dr:

Keep in mind, this review is coming from someone who uses WaniKani, so I might be.../very/ biased, haha.

I've had this book sitting around for years, and only occasionally glanced through it. It wasn't until just now, as I was cleaning out my bookshelf that I decided to see if it was worth keeping or to donate. The short of it is: I'll be donating it.

For an absolute beginner, I can see this book being quite useful. It's engaging, fun, and actually helpful. I don't know why mnemonics aren't more common place, they're SO HELPFUL! So I'm glad that this book takes advantage of that way of learning. The kana are already difficult, and kanji doesn't make things any better, so why not make things as easy as possible?

The content of this book is almost entirely kanji with an image to help depict the meaning to help you remember it. (The cover is the perfect example to understand.) Had I not already picked up WaniKani, this would've been a great addition to my studies, though it has some pretty large draw-backs.

This book teaches you the meanings...that's it. Sure it has the readings, but it doesn't utilize them with the meanings. By memorizing the contents of this book, you'll be able to say 止 is stop, but if asked how it's read, how to pronounce it, you'll likely have no clue! (Which is additionally unfortunate, as the index of this book has the kanji and their readings only. So if you need to find a specific kanji, you'll have to manually flip through, or by chance come across it in the index.) If you truely want to learn Japanese, you'll absolutely need to know kanji readings. (As a nit-pick, for the kunyomi readings [they include both on and kun], they underline the additions not part of the reading, such as いれる, like, you'd think they'd underline the kanji reading, but whatever.)

And for those curious: there are no sections on writing, nor are there any vocab or example sentences to see the kanji in action.

For serious learners: I HIGHLY recommend looking into WaniKani. Not only does it use mnemonics that cover BOTH the meaning and reading, but it uses a spaced repetition system, which makes for faster and more efficient memorization. They also include vocabulary, seeing kanji tied together to make words, and example sentences for every. single. kanji. Plus a super active forum community to interact with and get help from. (I cannot recommend this service enough!) #notspon

For those more casual, or wanting to just explore, this book isn't all that bad, and can make it pretty fun. (Even if some of the pictures can be a bit of a stretch, haha.) Given that it's so beginner friendly, I tacked on an extra star. If I was being more strict, I would put this closer to 2/5 stars.

[Luís Nunes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Drawings are very imaginative. If we can monitor the excelent drawing performance of the author with a book of verbs and a kanji dictionary we would have more advantage. It helps to remember some important kanji, but it is far from an etymologics based study. This was lacking in my reading. I think a dictionary builds on the acquisition of kanji (summarizing radicals, pronunciations and meanings) - would be more appropriate. But this experience was rewarding and worth as a good start.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Отличная книга для запоминания кандзи. К сожалению, есть несколько замечаний.
Ассоциации в книге могут строиться не только по значению радикалов, но и другим критериям, связанным с переводом на английский. Или же для ассоциации автор берет не значение или звук, а описание начертания кандзи не связанное со значением слова.
Тем не менее, воспринимается хорошо и однозначно стоит со временем освежить память о книге.

[Konan · Rating 2 out of 5]

it not bad, not sure it the pictures really makes them easier to remember or not but the characters where nicely organized and explained. i liked that they explain radicals as well as the complete kanji. the only thing i missed was the use of the kanji in a sentence or examples of words that where written with the kanjis. a good book to start out with

[Santosh]

read

[Nomeeqa2009]

jjjj

[Theempathogen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn't have learned kanji without it! I recommend it to all Japanese language students.

[Ezequiel Santos · Rating 1 out of 5]

Garbage. If only all the drawings were like the one in the cover...

I felt like of the drawings are quite a stretch, like one of the "to plant" kanji, which to me was clearly the image of a small stickman holding a tree and sticking it down. Not all kanji are like that, but many are self-explanatory. The author drew a very messed up image of a man standing next to a pinus tree while stretching one arm down and another above while holding a small seedling on his hand, like, "wtf man!?"

Another one is the "pole/extreme" kanji, where there's the tree radical on the left (literally a small tree), then on the right side there's sort of a small curved branch/stick with two symbols on each side. To me it is clear that it represents a line in the middle and two blocks on the sides representing the poles. The author drew a tree with a huge fucking magnet on it's side. I was like"wtf man!?".

I mean, it's just bad, and I'm not even getting into how it doesn't have examples or pronunciation of the kanji.

[Clodjee · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you are trying to learn Japanese, the easy part is to learn the hiragana and katakana (two sets of forty-six syllables and their variants). The kanji (complex symbols that evolved from Chinese pictograms), however, are much harder to memorize (and I am not talking about drawing them properly, but simply to recognize them from one another!). They say that you need a minimum of 2000 kanji in your “vocabulary” in order to be able to read the Japanese newspaper! Obviously, you need good tricks or memory aids (aka “mnemonics”) to mentally link the characters to something easier to recall. That’s what this book is about: it provides visual and textual mnemonic devices for 1,200 kanji (half of what your need to read a newspaper or... a manga).

After a brief introduction explaining the origins of kanji and how mnemonics work, the book starts with the kana syllabaries and then divide the basic kanji in eleven themes: world, food, animals, people, body, spirit, power, learn, tools, places, and journey. It concludes on a few notes and an index. Each entry shows the character, its meaning, plus a visual and textual mnemonic. It is a very nice book, simple and pretty effective. A useful addition to the library of all beginners who aspire to learn Japanese. Recommanded.

Previously reviewed in Protoculture Addicts #79: 16.

[VampireNovelFan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this book as a sort of visual mnemonic to learn kanji, but if you are seriously studying the language, it probably isn't as helpful as it could be. It doesn't have any stroke order information so that you could draw the characters yourself. There is no better way to learn kanji than to write it. I also felt a lot of the images were stretches. I would never remember some of them. I didn't retain a lot from using this book, but perhaps it would make an interesting coffee table reference. It does at least provide the on'yomi and kun'yomi pronunciations, but there are many times where the kanji used in combination (which is most common) takes on a completely different meaning, rendering the mnemonic useless. The best way to learn it is to go there yourself.

[mahatmanto · Rating 3 out of 5]

kadang nampak maksa tapi memudahkan mengingat karakter visual aksara kanji dengan memiripkannya denga benda sehari-hari.
seperti aksara 川 yang artinya "sungai" diterangkan dengan menggambarkannya sebagai tiga garis aliran air. demikian pula aksara 止 yang artinya berhenti diterangkan dengan gambar pak polisi sedang menghentikan jalan di depannya (ini dijadikan gambar sampul buku ini).
begitulah kamus visual ini disusun untuk proses belajar yang mrnyengkan!

[Juliana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didático.