"Remembering the Kanji" does work. I'm re-visiting it right now. I used it many years ago (when I was younger and my memory was a bit better..), and at that tim

"Remembering the Kanji" does work. I'm re-visiting it right now. I used it many years ago (when I was younger and my memory was a bit better..), and at that time I managed to, with relatively little effort, learn between ten and twenty new Kanji every day. I spent maybe half an hour every day, or at least never as much as a full hour. The trick isn't really flash cards - because it's not really about imprinting them to memory. The trick is to create a working association, something that calls forward not only the meaning when you see the Kanji, but also tells you how to write it when you think about the meaning. With the right association it'll stick after one try, or, at worst, after two or three. When I started visiting Japan a couple of years later I found that when I ran into a Kanji I knew, on some sign or whatever, it immediately transferred to learning the sound where it was used, and remembering the meaning of words with Kanji I knew (e.g. parking lot entrances and exits, to name a couple of simple ones). But for various reasons I stopped working with the Heisig book after I knew less than two hundred of them, so I've started it up again. As I'm older now I've noticed that it's a slower process than before, and I have to work a bit more to get working associations. The net result is that I can't do as many Kanji per day as the previous time, and sometimes I run into bumps where I don't get the associations really working, and then I have to work on that for a while before I can continue. So there may be a week with no progress. When that's said - I'm not sure this would be that useful for Chinese characters. The set of characters to learn is just so much larger. The reason for using the Heisig method to remember the Kanji is simply because you can learn all of them (as used in Japanese) in a relatively short time, and it turns out that when you already know them it's a much shorter step to learn them for real (as in when you start learning to read and write Japanese). And Heisig himself mentioned that, he noticed that Chinese students of Japanese learned to read and write Kanji much faster, because they already knew the meaning. Even though the languages are totally different. And, as I know a Chinese who is now learning Japanese, I've seen the same first-hand.