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It might be somewhat handy to have the rough meanings memorized, but it's a very long way from there to actually reading and writing Japanese. I never tried it

It might be somewhat handy to have the rough meanings memorized, but it's a very long way from there to actually reading and writing Japanese. I never tried it myself, but I've heard many advanced Japanese learners say they did it early on and later felt it was mostly pointless. I read and write Japanese fluently and never studied kanji alone; I learned them along with the vocabulary they appear in, which is the approach recommended by the best advanced Japanese schools.

Tesl 8y ago
Just wanted to +1 this. I also read Japanese at a high level (JLPT N1) and I've always learned characters in context of the vocabulary they are in. Spending months learning 2000 "meanings" for characters isn't a great way to spend your time in my opinion, the hard part of learning a language is remembering tens of thousands of words. Kanji is relatively not a big deal. The exception I suppose is if you really want to be able to write characters by hand, then the Heisig method has value. If you can live without being able to handwrite well, then it's hard to justify spending months up front remembering unhelpful meanings than actually learning the language itself...
- Tor3 8y ago
  The time spent to learn Kanji via RtK is in my experience only a very little part of the time spent on everything else related to learning Japanese. The RtK way (and I don't do flashcards) is actually a fun diversion, and I find that I enjoy drawing the characters. And that's from a guy who can't stand writing by hand in general.. I started using a typewriter at 14. And I can't draw pictures to save my life. Unlike the previous time some years back, this time I'm using a cheap click-to-erase mechanical 'magic' drawing pad. Much better than the stack of paper I used back then.
- matt4711 8y ago
  Funny enough "learning characters/words in the context of the vocabulary they are in" is exactly what NLP machine learning models use to learn "rich" word/text representations based on the "distribution hypothesis" which states that the choice of words in the same context share a common meaning.
emtel 8y ago
This is certainly true - I thought about emphasizing this point but didn't want to make my comment longer.

Tesl 8y ago

Just wanted to +1 this. I also read Japanese at a high level (JLPT N1) and I've always learned characters in context of the vocabulary they are in. Spending months learning 2000 "meanings" for characters isn't a great way to spend your time in my opinion, the hard part of learning a language is remembering tens of thousands of words. Kanji is relatively not a big deal. The exception I suppose is if you really want to be able to write characters by hand, then the Heisig method has value. If you can live without being able to handwrite well, then it's hard to justify spending months up front remembering unhelpful meanings than actually learning the language itself...

Tor3 8y ago
The time spent to learn Kanji via RtK is in my experience only a very little part of the time spent on everything else related to learning Japanese. The RtK way (and I don't do flashcards) is actually a fun diversion, and I find that I enjoy drawing the characters. And that's from a guy who can't stand writing by hand in general.. I started using a typewriter at 14. And I can't draw pictures to save my life. Unlike the previous time some years back, this time I'm using a cheap click-to-erase mechanical 'magic' drawing pad. Much better than the stack of paper I used back then.
matt4711 8y ago
Funny enough "learning characters/words in the context of the vocabulary they are in" is exactly what NLP machine learning models use to learn "rich" word/text representations based on the "distribution hypothesis" which states that the choice of words in the same context share a common meaning.

emtel 8y ago

This is certainly true - I thought about emphasizing this point but didn't want to make my comment longer.