Beginning Japanese

Over the next few months I intend to take most of my instruction from dead-tree books; here's one that that I have that's very useful and is available free on the web, entirely legitimately: Reading Japanese by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin.  According to the copyright page it was released into the public domain at the end of 1990.  The book teaches the reading and writing of the two sets of kana and a few hundred kanji.  The kanji diagrams are pleasingly clear, and show printed forms, clear handwritten forms and scrawled versions.  The stroke order diagrams indicate not only stroke order but which end of the stroke you begin with, which is very useful if like me you get confused over those strokes that rise from left to right.  The advice at the start of every book on the Japanese writing system is that strokes are writen left to right and top to bottom, but these strokes are clearly one (which one?) and not the other.  For many months, until the Jorden book corrected me, I was writing the water radical in its left-hand position, as exemplified in 洗, with its bottom stroke top-to-bottom rather than bottom-to-top, which is how it should be written.

There's a lot of drill and practice of kanji in this book (which assumes some familiarity with the spoken language).  My vague plan for the next few months is to do Heisig quickly (just the first book, getting all 2000 kanji into my head), then go quickly through a few romanized spoken-Japanese textbooks and then have a go at Reading Japanese.  I don't think I'll do all of the drills though.

Another useful resource: this book has a useful partial view available on Google, including some very nice tables of radicals showing stroke order and stroke direction.