Henshall Mnemonics

The default sequence for the Kanji Joyo Grade One Kanji in the Sketch Pad is currently equivalent to those in Henshall's book, "A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters" (Tuttle, 1995). For the Grade One Kanji, some characters carry a tag in the List View that refers to their Henshall number (e.g. 学 [✍8 ❉1 10] : study ; learning ) - note that the tag uses a character that fails to appear in some encodings, so I'll have to change it.  Ultimately this information will be added for all characters.

The Henshall sequence can be found here, along with the mnemonics Henshall recommends. You might find these useful when writing your own mnemonics, though they sometimes rely on the more detailed explanation that is found in the book.

I still like this book, and was initially very pleased to have bought it, though I am now more aware of its limitations. On the upside, it has interesting background on the history of each kanji character, a couple of examples of usage and readings for each character, and it uses an engaging painted version of each main character. It also uses mnemonics, which I think are essental for the quick acquisition of kanji. (Although ultimately the mnemoncs have to be ditched in favour of a true linguistic understanding of the characters, I think they are a very useful bridge).

On the downside, the readings and usage examples use romaji, which I think is an impediment to the comfortable use of kana. Someone whose knowledge of kana is so poor they need readings in romaji should probably spend time learning the hiragana and katakana, rather than tackling the 1945 joyo kanji in Henshall's book. I find it hard to imagine the setting in which there was a valid reason to learn kanji before kana, so I think Henshall should have used kana for readings, although the romaji does probably add to the book's immediate appeal when a beginner is browsing in a bookshop. It certainly seems less intimidating at first.

Another flaw in this book is the sequence of characters, though it shares this flaw with most official lists of kanji. There seems to be no real attempt to present the characters in a logical order. For instance, the kanji for study or learn, 学, comes in before the kanji for child,  子, even though the child radical needs to be understood for efficient learning of the study kanji. Effectively, when using a tool like the Sketch Pad, anyone learning the study kanji has to learn the chld kanji at the same time, so that when the child kanji finally comes up, it can simply be claimed as prior knowledge. Why not put the child kanji first, especially when they are both Grade One Kanji?

Because of these flaws, the final version of the Sketch Pad will offer kanji in other sequences, as well as a tool for resorting the joyo kanji into any preferred sequence. Many people prefer the approach taken in RTK (Reviewing the Kanji), and I was also impressed with the Kanji Damage website (Language Warning!), which shows a good awareness of the importance of the kanji sequence.

If you have a specific sequence you would prefer, please let me know. All I need to create a sorted version of the list is any text document in which the kanji appear in the correct sequence. Non-kanji characters will be ignored by the sorting algorithm.