Manga: - Kanji De Manga Volume 4: The Comic Book That Teaches You How To Read And Write Japanese! (Kanji de Manga)

Kanji De Manga Volume 4: The Comic Book That Teaches You How To Read And Write Japanese! (Kanji de Manga) The popular Kanji de Manga series continues with an all-new selection of 80 kanji geared toward English-speaking manga fans who want to learn how to read, write and speak Japanese. Original manga characters help students identify the most common kanji characters used in everyday Japanese. Includes definitions, pronunciations and sample compounds, all in a fun, friendly and familiar format.
Customer Review: Good books, but weird organization of the volumes
While I do like these books, and I have found them to be useful in my and my families learning of kanji, they are organized in a completely non-sensical way. At the back of each book, they proclaim that they are useful in studying for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficieny Test) exams. They are useful.. just not comprehensive.

For example, Volume 1, which has 80 kanji in it to learn, (despite what the paragraph at the back of the book says) is NOT the full list of kanji you would need to learn to pass the first level exam (JLPT4). The JLPT4 test requires 103 kanji at the current time, as well as like 700 vocab words, and basic grammar and listening skills. If you were to just study this book, and nothing else, you would surely fail.

At first I thought maybe the authors had just made an error and meant to say that the books were organized loosely based on the elementary school grade level. However, this is also not true. An example of this is ±(oj"hana") which is a grade level 1 kanji taught to first graders, but is in fact in Volume 2.

The only other glaring problem I've found with these books is the lack of any sort of English definition lookup or table of contents. While you can look the kanji up if you know the spelling in kana, being able to look it up in English would've been really nice. However, the books are cheap and fun and pretty easy to use.