Greetings.

This post will be part a story of my life, part testemonial, and part a question. So, without further ado:

Being an anime fan, and later japanese culture fan, and later picking up Kamen Rider / Super Sentai (super hero drama for kids that airs since 1976 and ongoing) and getting interested in Japanese mahjong (like, a better version of poker), I guess it was inevitable that I essentially decided to learn Japanese. Just because, I listen to Japanese, I see Japanese, why not know it? Of course, that was not a very good motivation, so I went about it here and there and never really achieved anything in the past several years.

The biggest obstacle and demotivating factor was, of course learning, the writing system. I'm Russian, our alphabet (cyrillic) is very closed to latin (like, we have an inverse of your R that sounds like "ya", we have an inverse of your N that sounds like "e"), so learning english was not hard at all to me, and learning to write enlish was piece-o-cake. Of course, I still speak "russian-english", meaning, I often use word order specific to russian language (and strictly saying, unappropriate in english), or I use english words in a way englishman would not ever consider(in russian there's no fixed word order, also in russian double negative is often used, like, where english say "never do it" we say "never don't do it", also russian is famous for constructs that are mindboggling for english people, like a common russian phrase "yes no maybe" meaning "I'd rather not" or "rather no than yes"), but more often than not, people do understand me. That, and being a programmer, learning to speak japanese felt like a simple task really - learn vocabulary, learn grammar rules, and voila.

But learning to write and read.... Yeah. Different story. Having to learn all those thousands of pictures that all have multiple meanings and pronounciations felt like insurmountable task. I bought Genki I and tried to study using that, but I didn't get far, just because I saw that with their way of studying kanji (repetition) I'm progressing very slowly... I couldn't even learn the kana fully! It would take ages to learn all the kanji I need to be able to actually read or write (by hand) japanese.

And then, after giving up, and a year later, trying to get myself together and actually make effort again, I found out about Heisig method. Controversial stuff, people saying left and right that it's a godsent and a miracle method, or that it's crap and does not work. People who learnt japanese (using other methods) were saying "it's pointless to learn only one meaning and no pronounciation, you get a dead skill that won't help you communicate at all". Still, trying to find out more about it, I decided it was worth a try.

I must say, I don't regret it at all!

Even despite me being Russian, which meant some stories did not translate into my language at all, and some meanings were hard to grasp (like, I didn't even know plane is a carpenter's tool, I thought it's either an aircraft or a flat surface from 3d geometry or dimension from sci-fi). Even despite not getting several of his stories or references and having to think of my own. This method is something that made me learn kanji at a record speed, and I actually started recognizing stuff when I see it on japanese food and in videos I watch. I can study a lesson per day (unless I behave like a lazy ass or a distracted lunatic and forget) and it only takes me like 30 minutes or less per day! And I'm learning stuff at great speed.

Moreover, after getting to lesson 9 (~180 kanji, yeah I know it's a long road yet to overcome, but this is much further than I have ever gotten before), I came up with a question:

How do people actually learn the kanji otherwise?

I mean, these poor japanese kids, and people who use course books for adults, they learn kanji in a completely bizzare order! Why? How do they even manage to do it?

For example, Genki I, on the first lesson where you start learning kanji, you learn your usual 1-10,100,1000,10000,and then yen mark and ... TIME! Erm... okay... this is time!? You stare at this 10-stroke behemoth and go like... "WUT!? How do I even grasp that thing? How do I even begin memorizing it?" Fun fact: you haven't been even taught the Sun kanji yet! It's going to happen in the next lesson. But the second part - 寺 - you will learn like twelve lessons later. And you will not learn 寸 until a loooong time later (it's not even in Genki I book). So, you can't even break it down into smaller elements that combine it, you just have to memorize the whole bunch at once. And when you actually get to 寺, you are like "okay this is time without a sun". and then you get to 寸 and "its a buddhist temple without earth". This is ridiculous! I looked this up on jisho.org, and kids in japan learn 寸 in 6 grade, but 寺 in grade 2. They also learn 工 in grade 2 but 左 in grade 1 and so on.

I get it that some people learn better by repetition, some by writing over and over again, some by thinking about "stupid stories", that's to each their own. You can hardly teach kids how to remember kanji in class by telling them that story about "posession being a meat hung up at the side of the body so that the stench makes the spirit go away" or "utensil being a stuffed big dog with four mouths waiting for utensils to start eating it". But the order is something you just cannot ignore. It is just stupid, illogical and detrimental to learn 時 before you have learnt 日, 寸 and 土 (and then 寺). And same goes for other numerous examples. And I mean, first grade is for people of about 7 years old, right? (at least In Russia people go to 1st grade of school at the age of 7). Can't a 7 y.o. comprehend the meanings of "measurement"? I mean it is just basic logic, and everyday use - kids measure their height when they grow, don't they?

Naturally, a method that teaches you something by taking a logical approach is THE way to teach. Of course, you must not deconstruct everything and explain all the details and inner workings (like, when teaching how to drive you don't have to explain the detailed physics of car engine or inner workings of onboard car computer). But when teaching someone how to grasp a complex writing system, it seems just natural to start at the primitives of that system and work up to the complex stuff. Just like people learn real numbers before complex, 2d geometry before 3d geometry, calculus before probability theory, biology before medical education, and so on and so forth.

You can always make a human person do illogical or stupid work, you can force him, you can motivate him with all sorts of punishment and reward, but still, a human will rebel when illogical or poinless tasks are put before him. It is in our nature to try to understand what we are doing before we are doing it. To understand the repercussions, the positive outcome, potential frutis of our labor. With learning something, there is a great gap between being told to learn something that you know how to apply, how to use, how to operate, and being told to learn something with no purpose whatsoever (this often happens in parent-child conflict, when parent tells his child he needs to study because "you'll need it in the future" or "because I said so" and child rebels because he doesn't understand "why would he need this useless crap")

Heisig's method teaches you to actually USE the japanese writing system - understand how it operates, how the symbols transform, combine and form new symbols, how they are modified or alternated... Instead of just "write these 10 strokes in this order in this relative location when you want to write TIME", you actually feel like you operate a kind of language-inside-a-language, where time indeed is symbolised by a sun rising over a buddhist temple, left hand is the hand that's holding the ruler and right hand is the hand that puts food in the mouth, truth is found out by looking at stuff through the eye of the needle, and name is something given to you in the evening by your father. This is fun, this is logical, this is interesting.

I don't get it why people still clutch to the old method of illogical order of learning kanji....

I did it. It's not impossible. You don't need Heisig to see different parts of kanji.

I assume you never encountered anki before?

Its very simple, if your main goal is:

"I want to learn an English keyword for 2000 Chinese character symbols"

Then Heisig is your best bet, as its the most logical way to achieve this, building up from the beginning and simpler characters making it easier later.

However that isn't what most people are setting out to do, my main goal is:

"I want to learn to speak, read and understand the Japanese language"

Since the Heisig system doesn't use any Japanese, it is of course completely useless for speaking or listening. For reading its also useless in itself - any advantages you would gain from completing Heisig come later when you are learning to read Japanese vocabulary in Japanese. Having an early familiarity makes this easier.

However learning Japanese is extremely time consuming given the huge amount of vocabulary required as well as very different usages to English. These are by far bigger barriers than learning the characters to actually write them with.

You wouldn't know though since you are a beginner who speaks no Japanese and knows 180 keywords (not even real meanings) for characters. With respect, you have no idea whatsoever whether the system is really helping you for actually learning the Japanese language itself. Which is afterall the whole point of it (for most of us).

Istrebitel Wrote:Heisig's method teaches you to actually USE the japanese writing system - understand how it operates, how the symbols transform, combine and form new symbols, how they are modified or alternated...

It absolutely does not, which is its main weakness.

I, personally, would not recommend Heisig to anyone given the huge time investment it requires for what I really believe is such a small benefit when it comes to learning the Japanese language, and not for random keywords.

Its really all mental. As you said yourself, your first fear was the writing system. That tends to be the same for everyone that "needs" Heisig. I was never scared of the Japanese writing system and I just learned the characters as I went and as I needed them, and now I read at a high level with very few Kanji related problems.

2 NightSky
Hmm, interesting, could you please tell me of a system that does teach you to use the writing system? Really really interested.

Japanese culture is one that heavily looks down on pointing mistakes to the boss (probably because the boss used to carry a katana). Therefore, they just do what they're told to do in the way that it was always done, and try to be as plain and simple as they can, and try not to stand out.

They have a system called bushu that tries to categorize kanji by their strokes. Except that there are strokes that allegedly don't exist, and they are also inconsistent, because common components that appear in many kanji are treated as if they were composed by totally different bushu, which is counterproductive for categorization, search and research purposes.
Rather to fix these inconsistencies, the japanese government nonsensically force this broken system down the throats of their population, as you need to memorize the bushu composition of each kanji if you want to pass the higher levels of the kanken exam, just for the sake of artificially raising the difficulty of the test.

Also, whilst the japanese did simplify their script after the second world war, their changes were inconsistent, leaving some characters in their traditional form and also ignoring etymology and pronounciation, resulting in a written language that in some cases is harder to learn, read and write than before the change (the chinese simplification was merely cosmetic, as they reduced the number of strokes but failed to reduce both the number of characters AND the number of components to memorize).

Heisig's method isn't the best, either, it was just a hack he did in the first months after arriving to Japan and without previous knowledge of language, which is why it's riddled with mistakes and the order isn't optimal (it also contains hundreds of useless kanji, but that's the fault of the japanese government). However, that his improvised hack is thousands of times more efficient than what japanese have been doing for hundreds of years should tell you a lot about how their society works (work hard instead of work better).

The sad part, is that practically every learning resource for japanese is in english. English is the WORST possible bridge to study japanese (in fact, the user of any other language will have an easier time learning Japanese than them), so it's not just that japanese don't know how to teach their language, but we also choose to learn it through the worst possible source.

NightSky Wrote:Its very simple, if your main goal is:

"I want to learn an English keyword for 2000 Chinese character symbols"

Then Heisig is your best bet, as its the most logical way to achieve this, building up from the beginning and simpler characters making it easier later.

However that isn't what most people are setting out to do, my main goal is:

"I want to learn to speak, read and understand the Japanese language"

Since the Heisig system doesn't use any Japanese, it is of course completely useless for speaking or listening. For reading its also useless in itself - any advantages you would gain from completing Heisig come later when you are learning to read Japanese vocabulary in Japanese. Having an early familiarity makes this easier.

However learning Japanese is extremely time consuming given the huge amount of vocabulary required as well as very different usages to English. These are by far bigger barriers than learning the characters to actually write them with.

You wouldn't know though since you are a beginner who speaks no Japanese and knows 180 keywords (not even real meanings) for characters. With respect, you have no idea whatsoever whether the system is really helping you for actually learning the Japanese language itself. Which is afterall the whole point of it (for most of us).

Istrebitel Wrote:Heisig's method teaches you to actually USE the japanese writing system - understand how it operates, how the symbols transform, combine and form new symbols, how they are modified or alternated...

It absolutely does not, which is its main weakness.

I, personally, would not recommend Heisig to anyone given the huge time investment it requires for what I really believe is such a small benefit when it comes to learning the Japanese language, and not for random keywords.

Its really all mental. As you said yourself, your first fear was the writing system. That tends to be the same for everyone that "needs" Heisig. I was never scared of the Japanese writing system and I just learned the characters as I went and as I needed them, and now I read at a high level with very few Kanji related problems.

I find it funny that you called Heisig a time waster when the alternative is much, much worse and arguably less effective.

As someone who finished RTK last year(and didn't shout to the heavens every time Heisig got a definition wrong and made sure everyone around me knew how angry I was, or used an obscure word for a primitive) I can say that words just 'clicked' for me after studying them on this website. If I saw a word composed of Kanji characters I didn't know, I would often forget it, or fail to associate it with the Kanji, often confusing other compounds with one or two characters from the first one.

For some reason people who are against RTK switch back and forth between it giving immediate gratification, and serving no purpose. I'd argue that memorizing Kanji by rote is the one serving you immediate, albeit useless gratification. Those who choose rote often go after the most common Kanji first(since most textbooks take this approach) with the goal of knowing the most common words in mind. This is what puts a lot of people off Heisig for his weird order.

Nonetheless, I'd rather spend 3 months actually memorizing the characters and being able to recall/write them and then moving on to vocabulary than spending a year learning 1000 or so and only remembering 200 with their respective compounds. I do firmly believe that mnemonics combined with SRS(Not necessarily Heisig) are more efficient than rote memorization, and having finished RTK in just under 4 months, with a persistent 90% recall rate, I have the knowledge to prove it.

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Arupan Wrote:I learned all the kanji, including their on/kun readings, by starting from ア and going all the way to ワ. Never really had any problems with it and I finished somewhat pretty fast (in a single semester).

Those are kanas.

DrJones Wrote:

Arupan Wrote:I learned all the kanji, including their on/kun readings, by starting from ア and going all the way to ワ. Never really had any problems with it and I finished somewhat pretty fast (in a single semester).

Those are kanas.

I do believe he meant that he went from 亜 (ア) to 腕 (ワン), or a similar order.

Istrebitel,
a nice nick.

There's a lovely Russian proverb: Всех пизд не переебешь, но надо стремиться. It always comes to mind when I think about learning languages. I mean kanji are not the real trouble but the vocabulary: a never ending ocean.

By the way, I didn't use Heisig or SRS (SuperMemo, Anki) - I knew about them but decided to ignore them.
http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading_...c346179176

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blankkor Wrote:I find it funny that you called Heisig a time waster when the alternative is much, much worse and arguably less effective.

Obvious strawman, since I never stated an alternative. And there is obviously more than one single alternative.

Quote:As someone who finished RTK last year(and didn't shout to the heavens every time Heisig got a definition wrong and made sure everyone around me knew how angry I was, or used an obscure word for a primitive) I can say that words just 'clicked' for me after studying them on this website. If I saw a word composed of Kanji characters I didn't know, I would often forget it, or fail to associate it with the Kanji, often confusing other compounds with one or two characters from the first one.

The keywords aren't important and being inaccurate doesn't really matter. They cannot be 100% accurate since many Kanji are used in too many different words with completely different meanings. One keyword per character will get you nowhere regardless of which word you choose to represent it.

For the second half of that paragraph that happens anyway through constant exposure to them. RTK just gives that exposure up front, but at a cost of X number of months it takes to go through it.

Quote:For some reason people who are against RTK switch back and forth between it giving immediate gratification, and serving no purpose.

Both are probably true. You get immediate gratification for sure in being able to count how many Kanji you "know" - but I think that serves very little purpose.

Quote:I'd argue that memorizing Kanji by rote is the one serving you immediate, albeit useless gratification. Those who choose rote often go after the most common Kanji first(since most textbooks take this approach) with the goal of knowing the most common words in mind. This is what puts a lot of people off Heisig for his weird order.

Strawman, I never said anything about rote memorization of Kanji.

Quote:Nonetheless, I'd rather spend 3 months actually memorizing the characters and being able to recall/write them and then moving on to vocabulary than spending a year learning 1000 or so and only remembering 200 with their respective compounds. I do firmly believe that mnemonics combined with SRS(Not necessarily Heisig) are more efficient than rote memorization, and having finished RTK in just under 4 months, with a persistent 90% recall rate, I have the knowledge to prove it.

A 90% recall rate of English keywords doesn't help your Japanese at all, so no you cannot prove anything. Infact its far to say it cannot be proved anyway, otherwise this debate wouldn't constantly happen.

4 months is a heck of a long time to spend concentrating on characters before learning any of the target language. In my Chinese learning after 4 months I was quite conversational and had already got into a relationship with a girl with whom I only use Chinese to speak. You can do a lot in 4 months.

I've spent basically 0 hours of isolated Kanji study and can read almost anything without any problems. Noone can say whether that up front study saved you 4 months later down the road, but I'm not convinced.

This thread is pretty insulting, honestly. For someone who is only 180 frames into the book to come here and say that people who don't use Heisig (including native Japanese learners) are using illogical and stupid methods, without even knowing what those other methods even are...how are we supposed to take this thread seriously?
At the 180 mark, Heisig is still pretty easy. Those first few hundred kanji are no problem to learn and remember, no matter what method you're using.
I just find this attitude with some Heisig users, especially beginners, that Heisig is THE only way to learn kanji tiring. Never mind that there are plenty of people who have learned to read and write Japanese just fine without it, or even actively dislike using it.
Okay, enough procrastinating, time to get my kanji for the morning done.

[ファブリス]

Xanpakuto Wrote:I assume you never encountered anki before?

How is Anki even related to this discussion?

When it comes to Japanese we are looking at a way to breakdown the characters, which is very helpful and way better than mere repetition.

Of course you don't need to study the character breakdown with Heisig. There's gazillions of dictionary and character reference apps/web apps out there.

What Heisig provides is a straightforward path to follow, plus some common ground for people to work through the characters and help each other out.

There's probably a few alternatives that break down the characters and also guide you through the minimum amount of kanji for every day read/writing. If I recall, someone mentioned an upcoming book from Kodansha?

There are however, bad methods out there, which provide mnemonics based on the appearance of the character instead of its components, and/or don't teach the components, and/or try to teach so many things all at once (multiple readings, words) that you're likely to be discouraged long before you even master 1000 kanji.

2 quark
Insulting why?

This thread is an expression of opinion! And in a form of question! You think people are not entitled to opinions?

I made every effort to note that:
a) I am not "very serious" in learning japanese, aka I don't have to go work in Japan in a year or so, I don't have to migrate to Japan, my work does not require me to learn Japan, my wife isn't Japanese, etc.
b) I'm not very far into learning japanese

I also made every effort to show that I am a person who adheres to rules of logic and tries to think and act logically

Therefore, you could easilly deduce that I have no intent of insulting anybody AT ALL. I merely stated the inputs and then outputs I came to based on the inputs. What I wrote here is exactly as I think, and if anything, I'm looking for people to counter my statements and prove me being wrong, because, if they prove I'm right, well, what do I gain? Nothing. But if proven wrong, I gain knowledge I didn't had before.

I dunno, it's like a person comes to a man with a scientific approach to life and says "I'm convinced earth is flat, because of this, this and that", and the man says "How dare you!? You insult me by saying that, ***** off bitch!". Lol? Wouldn't it be more productive to, I dunno, to sympathize with the man and show him some pictures (or even a live stream) from the world space station?

Istrebitel Wrote:Fun fact: you haven't been even taught the Sun kanji yet! It's going to happen in the next lesson. But the second part - 寺 - you will learn like twelve lessons later. And you will not learn 寸 until a loooong time later (it's not even in Genki I book). So, you can't even break it down into smaller elements that combine it, you just have to memorize the whole bunch at once. And when you actually get to 寺, you are like "okay this is time without a sun". and then you get to 寸 and "its a buddhist temple without earth". This is ridiculous! I looked this up on jisho.org, and kids in japan learn 寸 in 6 grade, but 寺 in grade 2. They also learn 工 in grade 2 but 左 in grade 1 and so on.

I get it that some people learn better by repetition, some by writing over and over again, some by thinking about "stupid stories", that's to each their own. You can hardly teach kids how to remember kanji in class by telling them that story about "posession being a meat hung up at the side of the body so that the stench makes the spirit go away" or "utensil being a stuffed big dog with four mouths waiting for utensils to start eating it". But the order is something you just cannot ignore. It is just stupid, illogical and detrimental to learn 時 before you have learnt 日, 寸 and 土 (and then 寺). And same goes for other numerous examples. And I mean, first grade is for people of about 7 years old, right? (at least In Russia people go to 1st grade of school at the age of 7). Can't a 7 y.o. comprehend the meanings of "measurement"? I mean it is just basic logic, and everyday use - kids measure their height when they grow, don't they?

The reason kids learn 時 before they learn 寸 is simple - 時 occurs more often and since it is used to tell time, is more essential. Also 寸 isn't used as a standard measurement anymore, so it's not necessary for conducting measurements. Basically, school order goes from common characters to less common characters probably so that kids kanji vocabulary increases faster...時 is simply going to give you more bang for the buck than 寸, and will be seen in more places. School order seems to get a lot of flack, but I honestly don't think it's as bad as people make it out. If you're a native Japanese speaking kid who already has an extensive spoken vocabulary, the school order will let you access more of that vocabulary in writing faster than simply going from less complex characters to more complex characters.

Istrebitel Wrote:2 quark

It's insulting, because you're not even far into using Heisig, but you're stating that your way of learning is the superior method. You actually said that other methods are 'bizarre' 'illogical' and 'stupid', and basically insinuated that you feel sorry for people who learn kanji with other methods than Heisig.
Also, I never said '***** off bitch' or anything even approaching that.
You don't see how it's a little arrogant for a beginner to come wandering in here and telling people who have been studying for years who are at an advanced level that they're doing it at all wrong?

Let's calm down with the insulting/personal stuff please.

Hi istrebitel!

Wow, the thread seems to have gotten really full on pretty fast. But I am kind of new like you - though I'm now (can't believe it) up to 1000 characters already. And yes, I share your feelings about kanji learning - which, if I understand properly, is simply 'whoa Heisig makes one part of Japanese learning super easy!'

It was sooooo hard for me to memorise characters "the old way". I remember that 'writing brush' was one of the first ones that came up in my Japanese textbook. I was stunned at all the strokes going everywhere - I actually said to my Japanese co-worker that I couldn't believe how complex it was. He laughed and said 'writing brush' was pretty straightforward as far as kanji went.

Then the 'dachi' in 'tomodachi' got me EVERY time (it's in Heisig as 'accomplished'). I wasted so much brainpower trying to remember 'plus, then horizontal, then two slopey verticals, then three more horizontals and a tally mark through, then dot and curvey line'... Insane.

Then I got the free sample chapter from Heisig's website and before I knew it I knew a hundred characters - easy. Two months later I can write 1000. Now, 'accomplished' is not a weird series of strokes but rather a girl out of Pride and Prejudice burying a sheep on a roadside (long story).

Of course, I understand that it's perfectly possible to learn kanji without Heisig. Duh. It makes sense (for kids especially) to learn common kanji first. And the vast majority of foreign learners seem to do fine learning kanji organically with the rest of the language. But for some of us Heisig is a kind of revelation because for us, as adult learners with certain thought patterns, it just 'clicks'.

A lot of the controversy around Heisig (especially as it's exhibited here on the forum) seems to be not really a controversy, but just a result of non-Heisig people hyper sensitive to Heisig learners saying they 'know' kanji. Of COURSE we can't speak Japanese after getting through Heisig. We know that. It's just that before discovering Heisig, kanji was a huge roadblock in making progress with certain aspects of language learning. Now that particular block has been removed for us.

And a last point: going thru Heisig while my actual language ability is still v basic has had some really interesting side effects that non-Heisig people might not be aware of but might be interested to know. I can now look at signs in Japanese and understand a TON of info on them. Again, I know it's not comprehensive understanding, but I can generally identify main concepts. I can do the same with Chinese posters too! In Australian cities this is hugely exciting as this stuff is everywhere. And my rate of attainment in comprehension is much faster than if I was working thru vocab the normal way. It's like suddenly getting a super power

Once I'm finished I'll go back to my proper language learning and re-start the same slog everyone else has to go through too. But Heisig will have helped a lot.

I enjoy Heisig's method, although I've only used the method for kana so far. It's effective and after several reviews my retention rate, at least for hiragana, seems to be at 99.9% if not 100% in recognizing all of the characters and even writing them in the proper stroke order (at least I think the stroke order listed in the books are the proper way to write them).

The only thing that I didn't like about Remembering the Kana was the absence of mnemonics for learning the extended hiragana characters like Ga, Gi, Gu, Ge, Go, Kya, Kyu, Kyo, etc, so I had to spend a bit of time compiling all of them and making my own mnemonics for them. But it proved effective.

I just hope my experience with Reviewing the Kanji is the same.

In response to a part of Nightsky's first post where he mentions that using Heisig's method and being a beginner means that the learner doesn't really have any idea whether the system is helping to learn the language. As a beginner who hasn't even touched the Kanji part of learning yet, I strongly disagree.

Having only learned Hiragana, the process of using keywords and mnemonics can strongly and effectively aid someone in learning Japanese. For example. With Remembering the Kana, it teaches people how to use keywords and mnemonics in order to recognize, read, and write the kana.

That task alone immediately teaches someone how to read any number of the 50,000+ kanji as long as there is furigana involved. Basically, if someone just spent a day learning Remembering the Kana and the rest of the kana characters by applying Heisig's method, then they could feasibly read anything in the language after just one day. So it's reasonable to assume that the method in Remembering the Kanji would be similar, even though Book 1 acts as a standalone method for mostly just learning the writing for Kanji, rather than the reading. But in Book 2 it touches more on the reading of the onyomi.

So aside from teaching a fairly easy and valuable learning tool, if someone applies what they learned in Remembering the Kana with Remembering the Kanji books 1 and 2, then they should probably be able to find that not only can they learn how to remember recognizing and writing the kanji characters, but also how to read them, which I imagine would really help when learning vocabulary.

Istrebitel, I agree with you about Heisig and everything, but I have to agree with this:

NightSky Wrote:You wouldn't know though since you are a beginner who speaks no Japanese and knows 180 keywords (not even real meanings) for characters. With respect, you have no idea whatsoever whether the system is really helping you for actually learning the Japanese language itself. Which is afterall the whole point of it (for most of us).

You really need to get your feet wet before you can come back and start going on about the benefits of such a system. RTK is great, and for me, I found there was a way it helped beyond what I even expected. However, in terms of total hours spent, I'd estimate RTK represents ~10% of the work I've done so far. And I'm not even there yet.

So I'd say stick with RTK (and get anki if you haven't already-- with all this talk of logic, I'm sure you'll love it), give it a good effort, and you'll be a great success story, and can brag about the benefits all you want. But you need to become a success story FIRST, then talk.

Also, there's a bit of a phenomenon around here of people who make it through RTK, give themselves a pat on the back, then just vanish. Usually we can safely assume the worst. I think RTK tends to be a nice structured goal that a lot of people make it through, only to find the rest of the language not so nice. You seemed to imply you don't care too much about learning the language too. I'd advise you to GET serious ASAP. You need to care. This language is hard, and the path to fluency is long and winding.

Haych, I don't think the OP was bragging about anything. Simply expressing genuine beginner's excitement at finding something fun and great that works for them (and also works for many of us, including me as I say in my reply above, and you as you state yourself). So stop trying to squash their enthusiasm and maybe join in with it instead.

EDIT： removed. Internal 500 error kept screwing up post, and for some reason duplicated it.

Well maybe not bragging, but all that talk about logic is a bit pretentious for his level, you gotta admit.

And, I was more going for tough love. You know the drill. I tell you all about the harsh/cruel realities of REAL LIFE, how you'll never make anything of yourself, then you ignore me and rise up to the occasion, then in the end I say with a gruff and ragged voice "Son, I'm proud of you." All that stuff