Customer Reviews:
Great Flashcards For A Student of Japanese!
These cards are great! I'm a beginner in Japanese and I'm using James W. Heisig's, Remembering the Kanji Vol. 1 (and Vol. 2) along with these cards (and the second set of flashcards) to teach myself the Kanji. While they don't cover all 2042 Kanji in the Remembering the Kanji books, they have dramatically improved my memorization and retention of a lot of characters. The cards are very sturdy and well designed. The front gives the character, the stroke order, vocabulary using the character, and similar Kanji that you can mistake for the character your looking at. On the back you are given the On and Kun readings, the meaning, and the translation of the vocab on the front. The only negative statements that I can make about these cards relates to the second volume, and that is that they are no longer split into decks like in the first volume (it's because there are about 3-4 times as many in this set), and that they smell bad! Like an unpleasant chemical kind of smell. But I still definitely recommend these flashcards and the second volume if you are learning the Japanese Kanji. Buy them!!!

Great for kanji, just make sure you use em!
Clear, durable cards and tons of em! They give around 6 example words for every kanji marking the more common and useful ones with a star so you know. Just make sure you use the damn things...which is my problem.

Follow the White Rabbit!
The hallmark of any gaijin teaching her or himself Japanese is this: a bookshelf full of books, workbooks and flashcards of disappointingly low usefulness (and often exclusively in Romaji - WTF?!!) Throughout my own trial-and-error, I'm grateful to have stumbled across one nugget of gold: White Rabbit Kanji Flashcards.

I'm taking University-level Japanese (we use Genki) and was looking for some supplemental Kanji materials (the Genki text is a little Kanji-light, methinks). I tried several different books and cards without satisfaction (including Tuttle) until I discovered White Rabbit. Now my Kanji skills are way ahead of everyone else in my class--I know on-yomi and kun-yomi, common compounds, stroke order.

Don't be daunted by what looks like TMI! As other reviewers have pointed out, these cards are extremely well thought out and organized:
- They follow the JLPT levels (although I can attest that they are great even if you have no intent to ever take the JLPT)
- They use kana for all pronunciation (Sayonara romaji!)
- They incorporate 6 frequently used compounds on each Kanji (this has turned out to be a huge aid for me in memorization as it provides a "context" for the individual Kanji)
- Plus radical breakdown, stroke order, commonly mistaken Kanji, an excellent index, and they're really durable cards!

I've now moved on to Volume 2 and just cannot recommend these cards highly enough! Max and Tomoko-san have earned an A+!

BTW, if you carry your flashcards around with you, White Rabbit sells some cool plastic cases that fit around 60 of these cards.

Wonderful resource.
Wonderful Flash Cards! A lot easier than one of those "complete books" of Kanji, at least for my purposes. My class just started doing Kanji we do about 15 per lesson. So i just grab the ones I am doing that week and stick them in my binder. They are very helpful nice big pictures, they are sturdy and don't bend to easy. The stroke order is a must for your Kanji as well, which some books have and some don't. Also you get some nice vocabulary. I would recommend these to any Japanese Student. I have used them plenty!

Great cards, but what happened to the Mneumonics?
On the White Rabbit Kana cards, they provide nifty mneumonics for each of the symbols. (These are memory devices to help you remember the symbol). While the features of the Kanji cards are nice, mneumonics would have *really* been useful. If the Tuttle--or any other brand--have mneumonics, I suggest you give them a look. The mneumonics on the White Rabbit Kana cards had a *significant* impact on my ability to memorize them.

To compensate, I have Tuttle's "Remembering the Japanese Characters" (or something like that--I may have misremembered the title), which I strongly recommend. For each character they provide a breif historical analysis and mneumonic. I use Tuttle's book to learn the symbols and the cards to practice. The only headache is that the book and the cards are not in the same order--White Rabbit uses the JPT ordering while Tuttle uses the ordering taught in Japanese elementary school--so I have to order the cards myself.

Still a good product and I'm happy with it.

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