Most kanji textbooks suck because learning kanji sucks for westerners. Westerners are generally trying to learn several things at once: the stroke order, the re

Most kanji textbooks suck because learning kanji sucks for westerners. Westerners are generally trying to learn several things at once: the stroke order, the readings, and the meaning. This causes information overload. For example, looking at the word "knowledge" -- imagine that you've never learned to write the alphabet and you're expected to learn to write the letters, the order of the letters, and the pronunciations of specific combinations of the letters! It's simply overwhelming. The easiest way to tackle this is to reduce the information given, which is what books like Heisig's Remembering the Kanji try to do. He tries to teach the stroke order and associate it with a meaning through a mnemonic -- no worrying about the various readings. It's an interesting idea and works great for some people, not so great for other. Kanji in Context is a really good series that focuses on an intermediate learner who already knows enough Japanese to intuit the stroke orders of kanji and can read Japanese sentences. It gives sentences with kanji compounds in them -- you then have a context in which you can focus on learning ONE reading and meaning for that particular kanji in a context. After all, that's how we learn words in our native language -- in context. There are a bunch of other noteworthy books and approaches, and they work for different people. Some people are a lot better with brute force memorization, some people are a lot better with a Japanese context, some people want a story in English, some people remember better with some kind of etymological history... all of these preferences have led to a bunch of different books. I wouldn't really say any of them suck, but the approaches may not work for you or your friends. That having been said! I'm always up for looking over a new book, so Kanjidamage looks interesting, even though it's not actually a book. The slang and "hipster" talk is a major turnoff, though. For people like me who don't use or see that kind of slang often, it just makes another interfacing problem that makes learning kanji harder. Even after reading all of the stuff on the site, I still don't really understand how it's meant to be used, though. It's too long-winded.