Why are some people in the Japanese self learning community so down on Heisig?

I don't think anyone says RTK is useless - it is obviously useful, because many people have used it and it worked. For them. Which is great.

That said, I could not recommend it, because I personally found it excruciating, gave up, and learnt Japanese anyway.

Dudeist Wrote:If you are going to grind in 4K hours + into the project than it makes more sense to do RTK and do it up front.

Dudeist Wrote:Yeah it sucks, it's boring and it feels like you are just mucking about when you really just want to do whatever you want with the language. Again though, in the long run it is better to eat bitter in the short term.

And claims like this really annoy me. Can you back that up with hard evidence? Almost everything argued on this topic is anecdotal or conjecture based on almost nothing. I think it's quite arrogant to ignore other people's experiences in this when your claims aren't based on anything solid. And even if you have had huge success by doing RTK and whatnot, you have a sample-size of one. It's meaningless.

Until someone does some real research on this, it would be nice if everyone refrained from making sweeping claims about the validity of one method or another. All you have there is opinion, so don't dish it out like it's a sure thing. Appealing to Heisig as an authority is silly too - AFAIK he knows exactly as much as we do on this topic.