James W. Heisig – författare

The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in such a way as to make them both easy to remember. It is intended not only for the beginner, but also for the more advanced student looking for some relief from the constant frustration of forgetting how to write the kanji, or for a way to systematize what he or she already knows.The author begins with writing the kanji because—contrary to first impressions—it is in fact simpler than learning how to the pronounce them. By ordering the kanji according to their component parts or “primitive elements,” and then assigning each of these parts a distinct meaning with its own distinct image, the student is led to harness the powers of “imaginative memory” to learn the various combinations that make up the kanji. In addition, each kanji is given its own key word to represent the meaning, or one of the principal meanings, of that character. These key words provide the setting for a particular kanji’s “story,” whose protagonists are the primitive elements.In this way, one is able to complete in a few short months a task that would otherwise take years. Armed with the same skills as Chinese or Korean students, who know the meaning and writing of the kanji but not their Japanese pronunciations, one is then in a much better position to learn the readings (which are treated in a separate volume).Remembering the Kanji has helped tens of thousands of students advance towards literacy at their own pace, and to acquire a facility that traditional methods have long since given up on as all but impossible for those not raised with the kanji from childhood. The 6th edition has been updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the government in 2010 as “general-use” kanji.

RTK en Internationell succé - nu i svensk version. Syftet med denna bok är att erbjuda den som studerar japanska en enkel metod för att koordinera de japanska skrivtecknens skrivning och betydelse på ett sådant sätt att de båda blir lättare att minnas. Den är inte enbart inriktad på nybörjaren utan vänder sig också till den avancerade studenten som söker en lättnad från den eviga frustrationen av att glömma hur en viss kanji skall skrivas, eller som söker ett sätt att systematisera vad hon eller han redan kan. Författarens utgångspunkt är att – tvärt emot vad man först kan tycka – det är klart lättare att lära sig att skriva kanjitecken, jämfört med att lära sig att uttala dem. Genom att ordna kanjitecknen enligt deras ingående delkomponenter eller ”primitivelement” och sedan tilldela varje ingående del en distinkt betydelse tillsammans med sin egen distinkta bild, kan studenten utnyttja kraften i sitt ”föreställningsminne” för att lära sig de olika kombinationer som ger ett visst kanjitecken. Dessutom får varje kanji sitt eget nyckelord för att representera betydelsen eller en av de viktigaste betydelserna av den karaktären. Dessa nyckelord ger scenen för en viss kanjis ”berättelse”, vars huvudpersoner är de primitiva elementen. På detta sätt kan man på bara några få månader slutföra en uppgift som annars skulle ta år. Beväpnad med samma färdigheter som kinesiska eller koreanska studenter, som redan vet innebörden och skrivningen av kanjitecknen, men inte deras japanska uttal, är man då i en mycket bättre position för att lära sig utläsningen (som behandlas i en separat volym). Denna bok presenterar originalmetoden (RTK av Heisig) som har hjälpt tiotusentals studenter att nå läskunnighet i sin egen takt och att förvärva en förmåga i nivå med dem som vuxit upp med kanji sedan barndomen. Något som sedan länge bedömts vara omöjligt med traditionella metoder. Här behandlas 2 200 kanjitecken, inklusive samtliga 2 136 jōyō kanji som godkänts av japanska utbildningsdepartementet som ”kanji för allmänt bruk”.James W. Heisig är professor emeritus i religionsfilosofi vid Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture i Nagoya. Ola Feurst är ekonomie doktor (PhD) från Stockholms universitet.

In Jesus' Twin, a scholar shares his personal reflections into the Gospel of Thomas offering a learned, accessible introduction as well as inspiring insights into these ancient texts that have long stirred curiosity and inquiry. James Heisig, who has read and studied the texts throughout his distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of religions, shows that the reasons for excluding the Gospel of Thomas from the Christian tradition are largely meaningless for us today. After more than half a century of concerted dialogue with other traditions, we are in a better position to recognize that not every alter Jesus is a Jesus alias. At the same time, attention to the spiritual demands being made on Christianity by our present age helps draw us more deeply into the text itself and control the tendency to immunize ourselves against its discomforts, whether through the distractions of scholarly disputation or the preoccupation with preserving orthodoxy.

James Heisig has spent his life traveling along many roads—living in Japan, Spain, England, and the United States, and listening to other religious traditions while remaining a Roman Catholic. In this book, Heisig draws from this worldly insight, and presents an invaluable dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism.

Can Zen tell us whether particular wars are right or wrong? What role did D. T. Suzuki and other Zen figures play in the Japanese nationalism that fueled World War II? What are we to make of nationalistic elements in the thought of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, and other philosophers of the Kyoto School? What connection was there between the Japanese project of overcoming the modernity of the West and the militarism of its 15-year war in Asia?In a collection of carefully documented essays, 15 Japanese and Western scholars take up these and other questions about the political responsibility of Japanese Buddhist intellectuals. This well-indexed and meticulously edited volume offers a variety of critical perspectives and a wealth of information for those interested in prewar and wartime history, Zen, Japanese philosophy, and the problem of nationalism today.

The past twenty years have seen the publication of numerous translations and commentaries on the principal philosophers of the Kyoto School, but so far no general overview and evaluation of their thought has been available, either in Japanese or in Western languages. James Heisig, a longstanding participant in these efforts, has filled that gap with Philosophers of Nothingness. In this extensive study, the ideas of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji are presented both as a consistent school of thought in its own right and as a challenge to the Western philosophical tradition to open itself to the original contribution of Japan.

The past twenty years have seen the publication of numerous translations and commentaries on the principal philosophers of the Kyoto School, but so far no general overview and evaluation of their thought has been available, either in Japanese or in Western languages. James Heisig, a longstanding participant in these efforts, has filled that gap with Philosophers of Nothingness. In this extensive study, the ideas of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji are presented both as a consistent school of thought in its own right and as a challenge to the Western philosophical tradition to open itself to the original contribution of Japan.

Following on the phenomenal success of ""Remembering the Kanji"", the author has prepared a companion volume for learning the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of modern Japanese. In six short lessons of about twenty minutes, each of the two systems of ""kana"" writing are introduced in such a way that the absolute beginner can acquire fluency in writing in a fraction of the time normally devoted to the task. Using the same basic self-taught method devised for learning the kanji, and in collaboration with Helmut Morsbach and Kazue Kurebayashi, the author breaks the shapes of the two syllabaries into their component parts and draws on what he calls ""imaginative memory"" to aid the student in reassembling them into images that fix the sound of each particular kana to its writing. Now in its third edition, ""Remembering the Kana"" has helped tens of thousands of students of Japanese master the Hiragana and Katakana in a short amount of time...and have fun in the process.

At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. ""Book 1 of Remembering Simplified Hanzi"" covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the simplified Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process.Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ 'imaginative memory' to associate each character's component parts, or 'primitive elements', with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a 'story' that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory.

This book is the second of two volumes designed to help students learn the meaning and writing of the 3,000 most frequently used traditional Chinese characters. (A parallel set of volumes has been prepared for simplified characters.) The 1,500 characters introduced in Book 1 include the top 1,000 by frequency, plus another 500 best learned at an early stage. Book 2 adds the remaining 1,500 characters to complete the set.The lessons of Book 2 have been arranged in such a way that they may be studied either after those of Book 1 or simultaneously with them. Students who wish to focus initially on the 1,000 most frequently used characters in the language can do so by studying Book 1 before moving on to Book 2. Many, if not most, learners will find this preferable. Students who wish to apply the logical ordering found in these pages to the entire list of 3,000 characters from the very beginning can take the more exacting, but also more rationally satisfying, approach of studying the parallel lessons of the two volumes together.The lessons in this book are followed by two short, additional sections, one that introduces a number of “compounds,” or characters that are best learned in pairs, and another that adds two “postscripts.” The book also includes a number of comprehensive indexes that are designed to facilitate work with both volumes. Of central importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memory. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters. These characters, in turn, can serve as parts of more complicated characters, and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process.Guidance and detailed instructions are provided all along the way. Students are taught to employ “imaginative memory” to associate each character’s component parts or “primitive elements” with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through creation of a “story” that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable ways, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping prevent characters from slipping out of memory.

Following the first volume of Remembering the Kanji, the present work provides students with helpful tools for learning the pronunciation of the kanji. Behind the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China lie several coherent patterns. Identifying these patterns and arranging them in logical order can reduce dramatically the amount of time spent in the brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms.Many of the “primitive elements,” or building blocks, used in the drawing of the characters also serve to indicate the “Chinese reading” that particular kanji use, chiefly in compound terms. By learning one of the kanji that uses such a “signal primitive,” one can learn the entire group at the same time. In this way, Remembering the Kanji 2 lays out the varieties of phonetic pattern and offers helpful hints for learning readings, that might otherwise appear completely random, in an efficient and rational way. Individual frames cross-reference the kanji to alternate readings and to the frame in volume 1 in which the meaning and writing of the kanji was first introduced.A parallel system of pronouncing the kanji, their “Japanese readings,” uses native Japanese words assigned to particular Chinese characters. Although these are more easily learned because of the association of the meaning to a single word, the author creates a kind of phonetic alphabet of single syllable words, each connected to a simple Japanese word, and shows how they can be combined to help memorize particularly troublesome vocabulary.The 4th edition has been updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the government in 2010 as “general-use” kanji.

Students who have learned to read and write the kanji taught in Japanese schools run into the same difficulty that Japan university students themselves face: the number of characters included in the approved list is not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialisation requires supplementary kanji of its own, there is considerable overlap. With that in mind, this book employs the same methods as Volumes 1 and 2 of Remembering the Kanji to introduce additional characters useful for upper-level proficiency, bringing the total of all three volumes to 3,000 kanji.The 3rd edition has been updated to reflect the 196 new kanji approved by the government in 2010, all of which have been relocated in Volume 1. The selection of 800 new kanji is based on frequency lists and cross-checked against a number of standard Japanese kanji dictionaries. Separate parts of the book are devoted to learning the writing and reading of these characters. The writing requires only a handful of new “primitive elements.” A few are introduced as compound primitives (“measure words”) or as alternative forms for standard kanji. The majority of the kanji are organised according to the elements introduced in Volume 1. As in Volume 2, Chinese readings are arranged into groups for easy reference, enabling the student to take advantage of the readings assigned to “signal primitives” already learned.Seven indexes include hand-drawn samples of the new characters introduced and cumulative lists of the key word and primitive meaning, and of the Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, that appear in all 3 volumes of the series.

The six lectures that make up this book were delivered in March 2011 at London University's School of Oriental and Asian Studies as the Jordan Lectures on Comparative Religion. They revolve around the intersection of two ideas, nothingness and desire, as they apply to a re-examination of the questions of self, God, morality, property, and the East-West philosophical divide.