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 Traditional Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the traditional 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...

Updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the Japanese government in 2010 as "general-use" kanji, the sixth edition of this popular text aims to provide students 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...

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.

Rather than attempt to harmonize East and West philosophies into a single chorus, Heisig undertakes what he calls a "philosophical antiphony." Through the simple call-and-response of a few representative voices,...