(2016-06-06, 10:39 am)anotherjohn Wrote: So Heisig arrived in Japan in Sep 1978 without knowing a word of Japanese.
Heisig doesn't name any of the books he referenced while devising RTK. Was it a kanji dictionary with English keywords by any chance? Hard to see how it can have been anything else, given that by his own account he didn't know a word of Japanese at that stage and claims to have been working entirely alone.
1875 kanji working 10 hours/day for 30 days = about 10 mins per kanji total. Break down into components, "invent" a keyword, come up with a story, write out the kanji ... yeah right. Where did those keywords come from again?
At the link provided by Zgarbas there is a paper published in Japanese in 1981 with Heisig as sole author and no credit to anyone else. Remarkable progress! I guess those kids playing baseball really knew their stuff.
There also appears to be a distasteful political angle which I won't go into - starting to wish I hadn't looked into it.
Of course none of this has any bearing on whether learning kanji meanings in advance is an effective way to get started, which it obviously is.
Now, if one wants to write critical opinions in a witty and effective way, anotherjohn's answer is a good example to take inspiration from
