Keep Calm and Kanji Volume 1 is a new self-published book that aims to teach the top five hundred most-used kanji over a period of ten weeks. To achieve this, the author has developed a method based on the 80/20 rule and spaced repetition. The idea is that you learn ten new kanji, along with forty-odd vocabulary items that use those kanji, every day from Monday to Friday. The weekend is devoted to reviewing the week's fifty new characters and two hundred new words. The method doesn't include mnemonics, but instead relies on writing out the characters, quizzes, puzzles and gap-fill exercises. Weekend reviews involve character recognition and writing out kanji from memory.
According to the author, this approach allowed him to learn kanji, but it won't suit everyone. It takes a lot of discipline to learn ten new kanji and forty new vocabulary items every day, and the manual spaced repetition requires a lot of organization to follow the lists of kanji to be reviewed. While Keep Calm and Kanji Volume 1 is a well thought-out method, it might be intimidating, especially for beginners, and the author himself recommends the book to intermediate students. On the other hand, it's a good complementary resource to be used in combination with an app like WaniKani, especially for people who want—or need—to learn to write kanji by hand.