4 ms·

I've actually never read any of Heisig's books, but have a number of friends who swear by his methods. Unfortunately whenever his name comes up in Japanese stud

I've actually never read any of Heisig's books, but have a number of friends who swear by his methods. Unfortunately whenever his name comes up in Japanese study forums, you can be sure of a flame war -- people either love him or hate him. While I have a large reading vocabulary, my written is horrible, largely due to the fact that my job requires me to use a computer all day, so the amount of physical writing I do compared to the amount of henkan I do is severely lacking. I've always wanted to sit down with Remembering the Kanji and try to get my writing skills back up to snuff. As someone who can read, but can't write, I wonder how much of a benefit Heisig would give me over some other methodology. I think the biggest detractor against Heisig are some of his followers, ;) A lot of people seem to think that the stories that Heisig gives you are not mnemonics, but rather "meanings," and that by reading the first book you can then simply infer the entirety of kanji just by putting the radicals together. I had a person on a forum I frequent say that even without knowing the meaning, he could infer that 社会 was "society" because it was "God, Meeting with the ground." I asked him then why 会社 didn't have the same meaning, and he was rather silent about that one. ;)

redcap 17y ago
While you can try infer the meaning of words by knowing the english 'meanings' of the relevant characters, what's worked for me has been just learning a lot of vocabulary by rote and doing a lot of reading. I think the Heisig approach has let it sink in more - there have been a lot of "aha!" moments when I look up the actual english meaning of a compound and figure out the relation to the individual kanji meanings. In terms of actually writing the characters, Heisig effectively taught me how to write each individual component/radical, so I think my writing is pretty decent in that regard. If you are practicing heisig (book 1), you should also be practicing stroke order, or at least a way to compose the character that works for you.
- harisenbon 17y ago
  My teacher in High School was very strict about stroke order, and I studied shuuji for about 2 years so stroke order is less of a problem for me than just remember what 篇, 旁, etc goes with what kanji. Also I get performance anxiety when people watch me write for some reason.. :/ One of the nice things about using the reading trick that I talk about in the article up there is that it impresses the bejesus out of native speakers when a hard-looking kanji like 状態遷移系 comes up, and you can use the 旁 to pronounce the whole thing (even if you have no idea what it means laugh )
  - donw 17y ago
    Heh. I could figure out the translation, but needed to Google for the meaning: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系 http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系
    - harisenbon 17y ago
      Same here. Except for the fact that I didn't look up the meaning until just now when you linked me. ;) And I just finished an entire book based around 状態遷移系! (They explained it in the book, so while I knew what it was talking about, I had no idea what it meant in english. laugh
donw 17y ago
Aaah, ワプロ馬鹿... Both my girlfriend and I have the same problem, and she is Japanese. There's a writing game for the Nintendo DS that I've had some success with, but it's really hard to make time to practice writing. I've tried keeping some of my daily notepad-jotting in Japanese, but most of it is at too technical of a level for my lousy writing skills to keep up. Let me know if you come up with anything good. And I know exactly what you mean by people who think that RTK is the end-all be-all of learning kanji. While a lot of the stories and mnemonics might be useful, and knowing meanings is genuinely useful, it takes a lot more than that to master the language. Do you work in Japan? I'm heading back to Tokyo in January, and would love to meet up with some HN people there.
- harisenbon 17y ago
  I work in Nagoya, at a small but apparently very well-connected Digital Media company called NanoOPTMedia ( http://www.nanooptmedia.jp http://www.nanooptmedia.jp ). I mostly do their webprogramming and system creation works. I'm the only foreigner working here, so when I started it was pretty sink-or-swim. I've done some of the DS games as well (100万漢字検定 and.. some others..) but they never seem to stick with me because as soon as I finish using them, I'm back to typing on the computer and 馬鹿ing my ワープロ... or is that ワープロing my 馬鹿? Either way it's not a path I'm happy with. Where do you work in Tokyo? I was just there for a cakePHP conference (but that's a post for another time)

redcap 17y ago

While you can try infer the meaning of words by knowing the english 'meanings' of the relevant characters, what's worked for me has been just learning a lot of vocabulary by rote and doing a lot of reading. I think the Heisig approach has let it sink in more - there have been a lot of "aha!" moments when I look up the actual english meaning of a compound and figure out the relation to the individual kanji meanings. In terms of actually writing the characters, Heisig effectively taught me how to write each individual component/radical, so I think my writing is pretty decent in that regard. If you are practicing heisig (book 1), you should also be practicing stroke order, or at least a way to compose the character that works for you.

harisenbon 17y ago
My teacher in High School was very strict about stroke order, and I studied shuuji for about 2 years so stroke order is less of a problem for me than just remember what 篇, 旁, etc goes with what kanji. Also I get performance anxiety when people watch me write for some reason.. :/ One of the nice things about using the reading trick that I talk about in the article up there is that it impresses the bejesus out of native speakers when a hard-looking kanji like 状態遷移系 comes up, and you can use the 旁 to pronounce the whole thing (even if you have no idea what it means laugh )
- donw 17y ago
  Heh. I could figure out the translation, but needed to Google for the meaning: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系 http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系
  - harisenbon 17y ago
    Same here. Except for the fact that I didn't look up the meaning until just now when you linked me. ;) And I just finished an entire book based around 状態遷移系! (They explained it in the book, so while I knew what it was talking about, I had no idea what it meant in english. laugh

donw 17y ago

Aaah, ワプロ馬鹿... Both my girlfriend and I have the same problem, and she is Japanese. There's a writing game for the Nintendo DS that I've had some success with, but it's really hard to make time to practice writing. I've tried keeping some of my daily notepad-jotting in Japanese, but most of it is at too technical of a level for my lousy writing skills to keep up. Let me know if you come up with anything good. And I know exactly what you mean by people who think that RTK is the end-all be-all of learning kanji. While a lot of the stories and mnemonics might be useful, and knowing meanings is genuinely useful, it takes a lot more than that to master the language. Do you work in Japan? I'm heading back to Tokyo in January, and would love to meet up with some HN people there.

harisenbon 17y ago
I work in Nagoya, at a small but apparently very well-connected Digital Media company called NanoOPTMedia ( http://www.nanooptmedia.jp http://www.nanooptmedia.jp ). I mostly do their webprogramming and system creation works. I'm the only foreigner working here, so when I started it was pretty sink-or-swim. I've done some of the DS games as well (100万漢字検定 and.. some others..) but they never seem to stick with me because as soon as I finish using them, I'm back to typing on the computer and 馬鹿ing my ワープロ... or is that ワープロing my 馬鹿? Either way it's not a path I'm happy with. Where do you work in Tokyo? I was just there for a cakePHP conference (but that's a post for another time)