When I first got this book I loved it. It has tons of practice exercised, it uses the kanji you already know, it has a great formula for learning kanji, blah blah blah. But I could never get over the pronunciations, they are so frustrating. I can't tell you how aggravating it is to try and figure out the pronunciation of a kanji when you have to decode the authors pronunciation. And it's not just the "ti"s being "chi", it's the "tsu"s being "tu"s, and the "ji"s being "zi"s, and the lines over the letters and all of this would have been fine if they just gave the kana next to the pronunciation garble. Not to mention the book is 34 years old. I don't want to say this is a bad book because it has a lot of good parts in it but I can't in good conscience give this book a good rating. There are plenty of books out there that do the same thing that are more up to date and a lot less confusing.