@Iryoku

Keep in mind this forum is first and foremost in support of Heisig, and only constructive, polite discussions of alternatives are allowed. (Read the Rules section.)

Goodness knows, I know especially, a little douchery is allowed, but only if you keep it off topic. ^_-

If you're going to rehash old Heisig arguments (that have been refuted and/or debated in-depth years ago) or take the time to quote others, have the decency to find something new to say, say it politely, and demonstrate interest in others' points of view on the Heisig topic, or just don't say anything at all. That would be truly efficient.

Now if you want to insult each other on something in the Lounge, let's have it, punk. I will quote and dismiss you in less words than you will me.

Do I have to support the Heisig method to post here?

I went through the first 2042 characters using Heisig, and you can see plenty of my stories here on this site, but I think Heisig isn't the best way to go, for me. After finishing, I kept my reviews up for about 6 months but then quit because they got boring. I found KO2001 to be a much better route, but I started after KO2001 when I was already into an intermediate level, about a year after I stopped reviewing my Heisig cards.

captal Wrote:I went through the first 2042 characters using Heisig, and you can see plenty of my stories here on this site, but I think Heisig isn't the best way to go, for me. After finishing, I kept my reviews up for about 6 months but then quit because they got boring. I found KO2001 to be a much better route, but I started after KO2001 when I was already into an intermediate level, about a year after I stopped reviewing my Heisig cards.

Is that supposed to be a convincing argument, or just an unsubstantiated opinion? Sounds like you went through RTK, reviewed it for 6 whole months, and then, aided with all the benefits that brings, smoothy went through KO2001 a year later.

I think we need an :ayashii: smiley.

EratiK Wrote:I'm sorry for your wasted time feelings ropsta

Eh!? I didn't say...

*rechecks post*

Oooohhh.... the power of the missing word.

Iryoku Wrote:I find it a somewhat waste of time. Why? He's going to learn them anyways, why not do so at first?

I didn't learn Kanji readings. Apparently it works quite well.

Iryoku Wrote:Did I actually wrote that I use flashcards? No, I don't. What I use is 漢字辞典 (or at least at start), 類語辞典, 広辞苑, plus pen and paper.

It's 2010. Download Anki.

Iryoku Wrote:I'm not even aware of what KO2001 (maybe I was supposed to?) is, nor do I care. But a few seconds per review? Seriously?

To come here and slag off the entire forum, you should be very aware of what you're talking about. You've done little more than write a typical flame that shows your complete lack of understanding of the method and how it fits into the greater scope of Japanese study. And, yes, seriously.

Iryoku Wrote:You're saying that your 3 years of practice, and the result, which is being able to "read to decent level", justify the method?

Despite your own godlike abilities, many Japanese learners would be happy to read/write within that time-frame with relatively little effort. Considering how little I actually study, I'm happy with my progress, and could never have done it without Heisig.

Iryoku Wrote:I can't take someone who spends a few seconds per review seriously enough ^^'

I look at the word and can either read/remember it or I can't. Anki takes care of the rest. Why would I spend more than 2-5 seconds on that? Do you spend 30-sec+ trying to remember each word when you pick up a newspaper?

Frankly, I don't think you and your pen and paper are in a position to lecture anyone about efficiency.

.

Anki is a program to assist with reviews, it's not a collection of sentences. You can put whatever you want into it.

Hooray for arguing from a position of complete ignorance.

nest0r Wrote:Look everyone, it's dingomick... dingomick! *awed whispers*. Dingomick is Legend.

Wait, nest0r, are you still subscribed to this thread, or are you still using the site?!

Iryoku Wrote:Anki's translations (rather those of edict) and the example sentences aren't good

Okay, now you've lost me. Anki's translation? Are you talking about pre-made decks..?

JimmySeal Wrote:Apparently this is an e-peen comparing contest and we need a full set of credentials to comment on RTK. Ok...
I've been reading Japanese at an adult level for 4 years now, and I'll be passing Kanji Kentei level 2 next month. I think RTK is a godsend. Even 5 years after using it, the stories are still there to boost me up when a character's writing slips my mind or I need to distinguish two similar characters. And the solid foundation of primitives I built up by going through the book in one shot helps me get a grip on characters that the book didn't cover. I think it would be a different story if I picked stuff up in dribs and drabs like Hereticalrants is suggesting.

Maybe some of you are smarter than me and have no problem juggling 5-7 pieces of disconnected information at once, but I tried that for a long time and it didn't work. For an average joe like me, RTK is the only way to go.

Oh sh1t! JimmySeal is in here too?! He's, like, the ancient one. m(-_-)m

BTW, why is this thread turning into a crapstorm...? The title itself is a troll. Share your opinion (yes, it's not a fact), and be civil. For example: after almost two years of rather fruitless Japanese study, I blazed through Heisig 1 in several months and my Japanese understanding exploded. I know it was Heisig because I was studying it almost exclusively during that time. It is THE most efficient way I can even imagine to have learned the meanings of 2000 kanji and kept them straight consistently for just a few minutes of study a day. I know there are other great study methods that other people prefer, but having tried many, and understanding that learning the language ASAP with retention is the priority, Heisig wins hands down. So, "How can anyone POSSIBLY argue against the Heisig method...?"

IceCream Wrote:what, what?!?

Ropsta is Nest0r? Thora is Jimmy Seal??

i'm lost ¬_¬

Hmmm... --Clicked on quote below instead of above. Whoops!-- *Fixed*

Iryoku Wrote:@nest0r,

My first post was more than nice enough and I threw no abuses. Try to point me one.

Thora already Daily Show'd your *ss so learn from her post.

Iryoku Wrote:@Javizy,

Yeah, it's 2010 and there are still notebooks and pens. Anki's translations (rather those of edict) and the example sentences aren't good, from my point of view, since there are no special uses, etc. Plus, its job becomes limited from word 4000+.

Huh? As JimmySeal implied, so snarky and yet... you don't even know what you're talking about.

Iryoku Wrote:I don't see why I should? I only use the forum. If you think it's a crime, sue me. That reminds me, you don't want people to mess with your methods, but you surely abuse others' without any justification.

*again*

Iryoku Wrote:If you're happy, OK.

Just seeing a word won't mean that you'll practically be able to use it. I can even spend 5 minutes to write down a word I already know and haven't forgotten, if it's slipping out of my mind when I need it.

*again*

Iryoku Wrote:Everyone can use 2000-3000 words when speaking/writing, but it doesn't sound/feel right, doesn't it? If you're studying Japanese just for the fun of it and not going all out (as it seems), well, that's another story.

*again*

Iryoku Wrote:Bark all you will, the truth won't change.

*"*
______


Then again, looking at other folks' posts, this actually might be better than finishing RTK and then claiming you totally could've learned kanji without it. Which is much more ironic and much less useful than simply finishing RTK and then modifying it, minimizing it with the wisdom earned from finishing it and sharing those mod ideas for posterity, in part out of a sense of appreciation for what RTK did for them. Since this site is filled with and thrives on such proactive customization.

In general, I will say that I think that any learning method that doesn't use a bottom-up visualization of kanji components till the kanji is perceived as a whole, incorporate some form of sensorimotor encoding to develop an internal motor program to aid recall, and review with the SRS is scientifically and anecdotally shown to be inferior. ;p

Likewise the 'assembly line' process, an efficient method developed a bazillion years ago in many societies, and its strategic regimental relevance to the limitations of working memory and progressive development of multimodal chunking strategies.

Doesn't knowing the general meanings of Kanji help reading Japanese a whole lot? Even if you don't know how to read them? They are ideograms after all. I would assume learning all Jyoyo Kanji this way would greatly boost your ability to read native materials. And there are a lot of native things that are with ふりがな, so you can pick up the pronunciations while you are at it.

Learning all 読み is more time consuming, so logically it takes more time until your knowledge of Kanji accumulates to a critical mass where you can start consuming the real-world materials. That's not a problem if you are following text books and you can probably get more through understanding of each Kanji this way. So it sounds like a matter of preference to me. I would probably prefer digging into the real-world stuffs ASAP though. I hate classes.

Iryoku Wrote:You're saying that your 3 years of practice, and the result, which is being able to "read to decent level", justify the method?

You joined the forum almost three years ago, so presumably you've been studying for at least that long. How's your level?

.

masaman Wrote:Doesn't knowing the general meanings of Kanji help reading Japanese a whole lot? Even if you don't know how to read them? They are ideograms after all. I would assume learning all Jyoyo Kanji this way would greatly boost your ability to read native materials. And there are a lot of native things that are with ふりがな, so you can pick up the pronunciations while you are at it.

They're not ideograms. From the standpoint of a learner, kanji meanings are not as useful as many people think. Native Japanese people get more use out of them because their "meanings" are Japanese, not English, and they already know all the grammar and vocab so they just need to connect the written symbols to stuff they already know. Learners have to learn the symbols, plus all the vocab and grammar.

Kanji meanings, depending on exactly what you mean, can be of use to a learner, but in my experience they have a great potential to mislead as well. I can't count the number of people I've run across both in real life and on the Internet who believe that learning English meanings for characters is a huge part of learning to read Japanese, often because they believe that you don't actually need to learn the vocab, you can just put the meanings together and you have the word.

(Heisig ostensibly does not introduce the meanings for this purpose, although some of the RTK 2 material seems to muddle the issue, but some people who don't have access to this kind of forum are misled into thinking that Heisig's meanings enable you to read Japanese.)

ib4Nest0r hehe

Iryoku Wrote:I don't see why I should?

This question kind of answers itself but: ignorance.

Iryoku Wrote:Just seeing a word won't mean that you'll practically be able to use it.

This has nothing to do with learning to read.

Iryoku Wrote:I can even spend 5 minutes to write down a word I already know and haven't forgotten, if it's slipping out of my mind when I need it.

I don't have vocabulary Spidey-sense, but Anki generally reminds me before I forget. 5-seconds vs a 5-minute ordeal.

Iryoku Wrote:Everyone can use 2000-3000 words when speaking/writing, but it doesn't sound/feel right, doesn't it?

That's why I've learnt 3 to 4 times as many words/phrases as that arbitrary figure.

Iryoku Wrote:If you're studying Japanese just for the fun of it and not going all out (as it seems), well, that's another story.

Why wouldn't I study for the fun of it? It is fun. That doesn't mean I can't progress efficiently. All this mention of pen and paper makes me want to start idly surfing the web.

Iryoku Wrote:Bark all you will, the truth won't change.

ワンワン

yudantaiteki Wrote:They're not ideograms.

Really? My New Oxford American Dictionary says they are though.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Native Japanese people get more use out of them because their "meanings" are Japanese, not English, and they already know all the grammar and vocab so they just need to connect the written symbols to stuff they already know.

But I can somewhat read, or more like make a guess at the meanings of, Chinese writings though? I have no knowledge of Chinese grammar and I have no idea how the Kanji, well Hanji, are pronounced. And I remember the meanings of Kanji in Japanese, not Chinese. Still, I can sometimes get the gist of a newspaper article if I got lucky.

Sure, you still need to memorize vocabulary and get a hold of grammar points one way or another, but you need to do it anyways how ever you memorize Kanji, right? It sounds logical to me knowing the shapes and the general meanings of Kanji makes it a lot easier to read and remember Kanji vocabulary. For instance, If you don't know what 中国語 means, yes, you still need to look up a dictionary, but if you can associate these Kanji to something like middle, country, word, isn't it much easier to remember? And if you don't even know the shapes of the Kanji, you may not even recognize the word the next time you see it. There are also a lot of single Kanji usages that are pretty straight forward.

Of course, I've never done RTK, so this is just a conjecture but there are actually people saying it helped, and I just think it's logically very plausible, so I don't know how it can be a waste of time…

masaman Wrote:Sure, you still need to memorize vocabulary and get a hold of grammar points one way or another, but you need to do it anyways how ever you memorize Kanji, right? It sounds logical to me knowing the shapes and the general meanings of Kanji makes it a lot easier to read and remember Kanji vocabulary. For instance, If you don't know what 中国語 means, yes, you still need to look up a dictionary, but if you can associate these Kanji to something like middle, country, word, isn't it much easier to remember?

Well, yes, but I think most learners of Japanese via the "traditional" (ie not Heisig) route will probably already know 中(なか) and 国(くに) and some other word with ~語 by the time they get to 中国語, so this isn't particularly specific to Heisig. Basically you're going to build up this kind of thing as you go along, in the same way that you can pick up the general construction (radicals etc) of kanji.

The key things I think Heisig involves are (a) using consistent keywords and image-based mnemonics (b) a particular systematic order and © learning 2000-odd characters right at the start. Although there are clearly some good ideas there, it's not clear to me whether the particular combination Heisig picked is necessarily the best possible way. My guess would be that perhaps starting with 500 common kanji and adding the others later (in further blocks of 500 or so) would be just as good and less off-putting.

I also personally found Heisig, if not a complete waste of time, at least rather a low return for the time I ended up investing in it. That's because I came to it after I'd learned a lot of Japanese (vocab, and kanji, mostly recognition rather than being able to write them). The problem I found there was that it basically didn't integrate at all into what I already knew. I think if I were to do it again I'd want to significantly modify things, most notably using Japanese words as the keywords, using a smaller set of kanji, and blending it into vocabulary learning/practice. As it is, I think the time I've spent recently running through the bits of the Core6K vocab I didn't already know has had a much bigger effect on my reading ability than doing RTK did.

masaman Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:They're not ideograms.

Really? My New Oxford American Dictionary says they are though.

Some are ideograms but most are not (phonetic, morphemic, mixed ideogram/phonetic etc)...

JimmySeal Wrote:

captal Wrote:I went through the first 2042 characters using Heisig, and you can see plenty of my stories here on this site, but I think Heisig isn't the best way to go, for me. After finishing, I kept my reviews up for about 6 months but then quit because they got boring. I found KO2001 to be a much better route, but I started after KO2001 when I was already into an intermediate level, about a year after I stopped reviewing my Heisig cards.

Is that supposed to be a convincing argument, or just an unsubstantiated opinion? Sounds like you went through RTK, reviewed it for 6 whole months, and then, aided with all the benefits that brings, smoothy went through KO2001 a year later.

I think we need an :ayashii: smiley.

It is just my experience. By the time I did KO2001 I'd forgotten nearly all of my stories- though I will admit I haven't forgotten stroke orders for the rare occasion that I write. (I should mention that I was living in Japan at the time and doing a lot of other study- grammar, etc for 3kyuu, so maybe Heisig helped there, I'm unsure)

I'm not saying Heisig is a bad thing- but I think the 3 months I spent going through it and 6 months of reviews could have been more efficiently spent. I had a friend who just used the white rabbit cards and watching movies/reading anime, etc and he had faster, better results.