(2016-06-06, 2:27 am)JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:(2016-06-06, 1:39 am)Nukemarine Wrote:(2016-06-06, 12:57 am)JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:(2016-06-05, 11:19 am)cophnia6 Wrote:Quote:"And to be completely clear, I really doubt James Heisig “learned” Japanese, at least to any appreciable level.
Any evidence to support this?
I met Heisig in Tokyo a few years ago, and in two hours with roomful of Japanese people, he spoke zero Japanese, although he did draw the kanji for "flower" on the board. Nice enough guy, but he's a spinner of tall tales and quite the used-car salesman. When I asked him how he learned how to speak Japanese, he said, "I played baseball with the kids." Fair enough. I learned how to play baseball the same way.
Before you follow in his footsteps, you might want to look for evidence that he does know Japanese. Unless your real objective is to learn how to sell books.
Here's a collection of his published Japanese writings on the Nanzan website. I'm not seeing translation credits given to another which is usually the case so it's possible he wrote these himself. However, Dr. Heisig's Japanese level is actually quite irrelevant. He created a method that worked for a large number of us with regards to remembering kanji and honestly for that alone he has my thanks and two purchases of his book to back it up. Hell, most people here ignore his second book that deals with the reading and pronunciation of kanji so really we're not following Heisig to learn how to speak Japanese from him anyway.
Your anecdotal two hours is interesting, but if it mattered that much to you, why didn't you speak to him in Japanese yourself?
Thanks for the list. You might want to look at it a bit closer. Heisig has his name on papers in languages that appear to be Spanish, German, Russian, and possibly Greek. For example: http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2013...tzakis.pdf
Quite the linguist, it seems.
Yes, and some of those papers seem to give translation credits at the end such as "Traduction de Françoise Vinel" for the "As seen when the lights arise" paper. And again, it DOES NOT MATTER. Last I checked, none of us have bragged about Heisig's Japanese ability. We brag about his ability to use a method to memorize the stroke order of 2000 kanji based on a single English keyword.
He already knew English and Spanish prior to being hired by Nanzan University in 1977. He had a Ph.D. in religious studies and was hired for works he created while living in Latin America. I don't know his language abilities, but it seems he is a well studied person that publishes in the Religious Studies area which is his job. Not sure on why all of a sudden people want him to be a polyglot or ramble in Japanese for 2 hours at some event of unknown purposes all of a sudden.