I remember buying RTK for the first time and I've always found his opening writings about his own personal history interesting. For example, his travels to Japan as a student at Japanese university with not much knowledge of Kanji so he had to devise his own method - his anecdotes about impressing his peers/professors when they test his handwriting using keywords - the fact that native Japanese students came to him to ask for Kanji learning advice - the challenges in trying to get his book about his own methods published - and so on. Further little bits of nuggets of information/advice can be found in selected chapters of RTK.

But has he ever wrote about the Japanese language and about his own books in more detail?

Here is a list of some of his works:
http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/staff/heis...ed-essays/

Unfortunately, everything to do with religion (not interested) and philosophy (not interested) and nothing about the Japanese language. His wikipedia page is a bit sparse.

Or are we to believe that RTK and the Japanese language are simply very small parts of Heisig's character? Would Heisig even have any interesting insights for Japanese language learners in this day and age that hasn't already been said? As author of RTK, I would like to believe so.

[Katsuo]

qwertyytrewq Wrote:Would Heisig even have any interesting insights for Japanese language learners in this day and age that hasn't already been said?

You could email him and ask.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:Or are we to believe that RTK and the Japanese language are simply very small parts of Heisig's character? Would Heisig even have any interesting insights for Japanese language learners in this day and age that hasn't already been said? As author of RTK, I would like to believe so.

I remember some guy of the forum met him at one of his religion conference, and went to see him at the end to thank him for RTK. When he mentionned RTK, Heisig turned blue. Not to say that he'll take RTK back if he could, but it seems he would rather have people focus on his philosophical and religious works. And I don't blame him. He's not a linguist or a didactician, if he had wanted to speak about the Japanese language, I think he would have already done so.

Katsuo Wrote:

qwertyytrewq Wrote:Would Heisig even have any interesting insights for Japanese language learners in this day and age that hasn't already been said?

You could email him and ask.

Seconded. I emailed him once about working as a philosopher in Japan and he replied a few hours later.

someone should invite him here and have a chat with us

vileru Wrote:Seconded. I emailed him once about working as a philosopher in Japan and he replied a few hours later.

And not to derail anybody's thread, but what was the general substance of that exchange? I'm just curious, as a holder of a philosophy degree working and living in Japan.

If you've not read it already, this is probably of interest:
http://www.kanjiclinic.com/riverainterview.htm

Sounds like the OP has, anyway.
As this was in 2006 it kind of puts EratiK's anecdote in perspective. There's probably an embarrassed humility about the whole thing, and a real academic worry that he has pushed a method into wide circulation without the specialist language education to criticise and take confidence in it.

He's brief anecdote of the Chinese and Korean students therein as actually stung my own insistence on learning readings along with kanji. I can only read about 280 characters, but I can read them. I wonder whether overtime I will arrive at the same destination as promptly as he did or not?

Another person that always comes to mind is Eleanor Harz Jorden. By learning readings I've been able to get more into texts and watching than I otherwise would (I have terribly low level grammar)...but I wonder if a dual-stream approach of her focus on spoken (or one might improve it to say phonemic/kana-based) language and a purist Heisig approach is the better.

Well I started my Japanese learning journey with pure audio, so why shouldn't it be possible?
It's very doable. Literacy and language are connected, yes, and knowing the kanji makes vocab acquisition easier and faster, but it's not a prerequisite to learning the language.
I'm pretty sure you can do both methods simultaneously and arrive, or do one after the other. You'll do a lot of beneficial stuff anyways by enjoying content in the language.

ocarrollcian Wrote:Another person that always comes to mind is Eleanor Harz Jorden. By learning readings I've been able to get more into texts and watching than I otherwise would (I have terribly low level grammar)...but I wonder if a dual-stream approach of her focus on spoken (or one might improve it to say phonemic/kana-based) language and a purist Heisig approach is the better.

Though I haven't met Heisig (even though I could easily make a trip to Nagoya to see a talk), I did manage to meet Jorden before she died. The head of the Japanese department at my university had studied Japanese under her on Cornell's FALCON program, and the native speaker who taught my Japanese labs--an amazing woman--also knew her somehow.

Anyway, I went with them and a few other people to see Jorden do a lecture at Cornell in 2006 or 7 (so she must have been about 86). I remember her cracking a lot of jokes during the lecture, including how when someone first mentioned 'the Jorden method' to her she mistook it for a birth control method. And I remember listening to her talk to my lab professor and trying my best to understand anything (I didn't). She was a very energetic old lady.

I met James Heisig several years ago at a writers' conference in Tokyo. He gave a brief talk about his life, and RTK. From this I came away with two impressions. I only spoke with him briefly, and I certainly don't know him personally, so that being said . . .

My first impression was that he is a very good, and slick, storyteller. He had well-rehearsed tales about traveling in South America and about how he avoided Japanese classes in Kamakura and developed RTK. He has a real salesman/showman personality, and it was clear that he was bullshitting a bit, but his stories were nonetheless entertaining.

The second impression I got was that he doesn't speak much Japanese, and probably doesn't speak it well. The conference was a mix of Japanese and English speakers, and the entire time he only uttered one word in Japanese. That struck me as strange, since most of us who live here freely mix both languages, so I asked him about it.

Specifically, I'd read online that he'd learned to speak by playing with Japanese children. That struck me as insane, because I've worked and played with Japanese kids for years, and they're the *hardest* damn people to understand. They're always babbling about some cartoon or toy or such, and half of what they say doesn't make much sense.

So I asked Heisig how he learned to speak, and he gave the same answer I'd read, something about playing baseball with the kids.

"And that's how you learned to speak Japanese?" I said. "Just by playing with children?"

"That's how," he replied, and then launched into a tale about meeting someone reading RTK in an airport.

He was a nice enough guy, but he seemed like more of a salesman than a scholar.

Re: Heisig's japanese ability

http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/ja/staff/heis...ed-essays/
These publications appear to by written in Japanese by Heisig himself. Am I missing something here?

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:That struck me as strange, since most of us who live here freely mix both languages

Some people don't like mixing languages, even when they are fluent in them. To me, such a mixing is a sign of either laziness ("Why would I bother to say "pozbyć się", when the "get rid off" rolls out much quicker?") or negligence (I will leave it to you to decipher "Daj car na corner." - two words in that sentence are in Polish and the other two are in English.)

BTW, you are too a smooth talker Ken Seeroi.

Inny Jan Wrote:BTW, you are too a smooth talker Ken Seeroi.

Well, that's true, I suppose. I grew up in a big city in the U.S., and it taught me not to trust anybody who's smoother than myself. Okay, that's a lot of people, but still.

I'm pretty wary of anything that sounds too good to be true.

I've talked to kids for five hours a day, five days a week, for just about two years now. Allow me to share a brief summary of all the useful language they've taught me over that time period:

うるさい
黙れ
デブ
うんこ
ウンチ
くそ
トイレ
おっぱい
...

Annnd you get the idea. I just had a 11 year old girl (literally 30 seconds ago) quizzing me on kanji--her lesson? 死ぬ、殺す、自殺. Charming, those Japanese kids.

If just talking to kids was enough I'd probably have learned a little more than how to say "Shut up, you're fat, boobies" in the last 2500 hours of class-time.

With all this talk about Heisig, it made me wonder if their were any videos of him online. I think I found one, though it's him talking about philosophy, not RTK:
http://vimeo.com/m/23311173

ocarrollcian Wrote:Another person that always comes to mind is Eleanor Harz Jorden. By learning readings I've been able to get more into texts and watching than I otherwise would (I have terribly low level grammar)...but I wonder if a dual-stream approach of her focus on spoken (or one might improve it to say phonemic/kana-based) language and a purist Heisig approach is the better.

They actually have an unexpected compatibility. Jorden was one of a small group of pedagogists who believed that at first you should study exclusively the spoken language, and that you must not try to learn Japanese characters at the same time. After you have some spoken proficiency you can start learning characters, at first learning to read only things that you already know how to say, and only things that are written as a native speaker would write them (so no sentences of all hiragana unless that's how a native speaker would write the sentence).

So it actually would work to do the spoken method along with Heisig, and then by the time you finish Heisig you would have enough of a spoken foundation that you could immediately start learning how to use the kanji in what you know how to say. I've never heard of anyone actually trying this, but it's kind of interesting to think about.

afterglowefx Wrote:

vileru Wrote:Seconded. I emailed him once about working as a philosopher in Japan and he replied a few hours later.

And not to derail anybody's thread, but what was the general substance of that exchange? I'm just curious, as a holder of a philosophy degree working and living in Japan.

Well, since his position at the Nanzan Institute for Religion & Culture (hereafter referred to as "The Institute") is extremely unusual, he basically said it's not representative of what it's like to work as a philosopher in Japan. He was invited to help found The Institute, and so was permanently tenured from day one. There was no hiring process. He was invited, and that was it. Furthermore, as a research center, faculty at The Institute have a minimal teaching load of graduate level classes and no university committee meetings. In short, he has the dream researcher job where he's only responsible for research and teaching courses that will help his research, i.e. grad-level courses.

Oh, and he obtained this kind of academic position, which (in the academic world) is as legendary and mysterious as the Ark of the Covenant, without having to sit through a single interview or even give a job talk.

Given the competitiveness of academic philosophy today, where Ivy League grads compete for jobs at state schools, even the words "envy" and "sheer amazement" cannot capture my how I feel about Heisig's career.

Edit: I have some contacts for other philosophers who have "regular" academic positions (post-docs, adjuncts, and tenured), but I've been putting it off for a while. I'll update the thread once I contact them and hear back.

EratiK Wrote:I remember some guy of the forum met him at one of his religion conference, and went to see him at the end to thank him for RTK. When he mentionned RTK, Heisig turned blue. Not to say that he'll take RTK back if he could, but it seems he would rather have people focus on his philosophical and religious works. And I don't blame him. He's not a linguist or a didactician, if he had wanted to speak about the Japanese language, I think he would have already done so.

Fair point about him not being a linguist. Then again, that didn't stop Benny Lewis (from Fluent in 3 Months) or Khatzumoto (from AJATT) from writing.

hazwanium Wrote:someone should invite him here and have a chat with us

I wonder how the thread would go? Any predictions?

ocarrollcian Wrote:If you've not read it already, this is probably of interest:
http://www.kanjiclinic.com/riverainterview.htm

I would like to see more from Heisig similar to that.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:He was a nice enough guy, but he seemed like more of a salesman than a scholar.

Interesting perspective. If he's more of a salesman than a (language) scholar, then perhaps it is just as well that he hasn't been writing about languages. If I wanted a salesman approach to learning languages, I have plenty of options already (Benny Lewis, AJAAT, etc).

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:I'm pretty wary of anything that sounds too good to be true.

Fluent in 3 Months: Achievable by most or too good to be true?

Bokusenou Wrote:With all this talk about Heisig, it made me wonder if their were any videos of him online. I think I found one, though it's him talking about philosophy, not RTK:
http://vimeo.com/m/23311173

The name has a face! He is exactly as I imagined him: A caucasian male homo sapien. I confessed that I closed the window about 2 minutes in (after it was confirmed which one was Heisig).

Tzadeck Wrote:I went with them and a few other people to see Jorden do a lecture at Cornell in 2006 or 7 (so she must have been about 86). I remember her cracking a lot of jokes during the lecture, including how when someone first mentioned 'the Jorden method' to her she mistook it for a birth control method. And I remember listening to her talk to my lab professor and trying my best to understand anything (I didn't). She was a very energetic old lady.

That's a nice anecdote, thanks. I've an old book (pre-Beginning Japanese, etc.) of her's on kanji study that I thumb through sometimes and had quite a good impression.

yudantaiteki Wrote:After you have some spoken proficiency you can start learning characters, at first learning to read only things that you already know how to say, and only things that are written as a native speaker would write them (so no sentences of all hiragana unless that's how a native speaker would write the sentence).

I don't know that being so proscriptive about written language at first (especially in this day and age, how much and how early can we begin reading - including reading native materials? Not that it's easy, but I'm finding it easier than I thought - so to miss such an avenue...), or purist about native-only writing styles is actually a good idea. But what I love about her is the boldness of suggesting it. I just wish there were studies done since.

yudantaiteki Wrote:So it actually would work to do the spoken method along with Heisig, and then by the time you finish Heisig you would have enough of a spoken foundation that you could immediately start learning how to use the kanji in what you know how to say. I've never heard of anyone actually trying this, but it's kind of interesting to think about.

Yeah, every time I muse on the notion I wonder about making myself a guinea pig. I'm a bit far gone to do it quite so purely though. Anyone out there?

This thread has kinda inspired me a lot.

One day, I want to be able to read Heisig's Japanese-language writings and be able to understand them. They're subjects I'm interested in anyway.

Of course I cannot answer you that, but, another day I was talking to a friend of mine who is fluent in Japanese and is here in Japan studying Japanese philosophy that I was studying Kanji using the book of a guy called James Heisig and he asked me" The professor of philosophy?.

So, to me. it looks like thats Heisig's thing.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:The second impression I got was that he doesn't speak much Japanese, and probably doesn't speak it well. The conference was a mix of Japanese and English speakers, and the entire time he only uttered one word in Japanese. That struck me as strange, since most of us who live here freely mix both languages, so I asked him about it.

He was a nice enough guy, but he seemed like more of a salesman than a scholar.

Apart from the fact that he is a nice guy, everything else you say about him here is completely wrong.
1. Heisig reads and writes in Japanese about Japanese philosophy. His Japanese is as good as can be.
2. Heisig is a major scholar of the Japanese Kyoto School of philosophers. He works at Nanzan University in Nagoya and has no need to be peddling books about kanji-learning. (In fact, some of his scholarly books, essential reading for the growing numbers of English-speakers getting interested in contemporary Japanese philosophy, are available for free on the Nanzan website, that is how much of a 'salesman' he is.)

raharney Wrote:

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:The second impression I got was that he doesn't speak much Japanese, and probably doesn't speak it well. The conference was a mix of Japanese and English speakers, and the entire time he only uttered one word in Japanese. That struck me as strange, since most of us who live here freely mix both languages, so I asked him about it.

He was a nice enough guy, but he seemed like more of a salesman than a scholar.

Apart from the fact that he is a nice guy, everything else you say about him here is completely wrong.
1. Heisig reads and writes in Japanese about Japanese philosophy. His Japanese is as good as can be.
2. Heisig is a major scholar of the Japanese Kyoto School of philosophers. He works at Nanzan University in Nagoya and has no need to be peddling books about kanji-learning. (In fact, some of his scholarly books, essential reading for the growing numbers of English-speakers getting interested in contemporary Japanese philosophy, are available for free on the Nanzan website, that is how much of a 'salesman' he is.)

I don't know much about the major scholarly business. If you say Nanzan University is a hotbed for philosophy, then all rightee. I'd never heard of it myself.

As for his Japanese ability, it says on the site that his "books, translations, and edited collections . . . have appeared in 13 languages," so it's not clear who is doing the translations into all these languages. Looking at an article like http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2012..._de_JH.pdf , I'd have to conclude that apparently his Spanish is also as good as can be.

Look, maybe I've got some weird trust issues or something, but for some strange reason, I don't believe stuff without a good bit of evidence. All I'm saying is I met the guy, his story about "I learned Japanese from the children" seemed a bit sheisty, and I saw no evidence of any language ability. Perhaps his Japanese is amazing. But I don't know. Who does? Really. Who.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Look, maybe I've got some weird trust issues or something, but for some strange reason, I don't believe stuff without a good bit of evidence. All I'm saying is I met the guy, his story about "I learned Japanese from the children" seemed a bit sheisty, and I saw no evidence of any language ability. Perhaps his Japanese is amazing. But I don't know. Who does? Really. Who.

All you are saying is that it is ok to make false allegations about someone because you have not actually seen proof to the contrary. I have no proof that you are not a murderer so I'll just go around telling everyone you are a murderer.

Anyway, you need learn how to distinguish between when someone is being merely friendly, chatty and anecdotal, and when someone is trying to sell you something.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:

raharney Wrote:

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:The second impression I got was that he doesn't speak much Japanese, and probably doesn't speak it well. The conference was a mix of Japanese and English speakers, and the entire time he only uttered one word in Japanese. That struck me as strange, since most of us who live here freely mix both languages, so I asked him about it.

He was a nice enough guy, but he seemed like more of a salesman than a scholar.

Apart from the fact that he is a nice guy, everything else you say about him here is completely wrong.
1. Heisig reads and writes in Japanese about Japanese philosophy. His Japanese is as good as can be.
2. Heisig is a major scholar of the Japanese Kyoto School of philosophers. He works at Nanzan University in Nagoya and has no need to be peddling books about kanji-learning. (In fact, some of his scholarly books, essential reading for the growing numbers of English-speakers getting interested in contemporary Japanese philosophy, are available for free on the Nanzan website, that is how much of a 'salesman' he is.)

I don't know much about the major scholarly business. If you say Nanzan University is a hotbed for philosophy, then all rightee. I'd never heard of it myself.

As for his Japanese ability, it says on the site that his "books, translations, and edited collections . . . have appeared in 13 languages," so it's not clear who is doing the translations into all these languages. Looking at an article like http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2012..._de_JH.pdf , I'd have to conclude that apparently his Spanish is also as good as can be.

Look, maybe I've got some weird trust issues or something, but for some strange reason, I don't believe stuff without a good bit of evidence. All I'm saying is I met the guy, his story about "I learned Japanese from the children" seemed a bit sheisty, and I saw no evidence of any language ability. Perhaps his Japanese is amazing. But I don't know. Who does? Really. Who.

It seems his Spanish is actually as good as can be. That's what the guy who translated RTK into Spanish said in this very forum in one of the Spanish-language threads. Heisig himself had a hand in the translation.

I dunno, he's been in Japan for like 40 years as a professor, and his field isn't English. Chances are he probably speaks Japanese quite well?

I sympathise with the skepticism towards "natural" methods, but at least Heisig isn't playing the self-help guru card like for example Katsumoto does. RTK is sold as teaching you the shapes of 2000 kanji in a couple of months and that's what it does - no word on becoming fluent in 2 seconds.

The fact that there aren't any essays by him on the topic of learning Japanese also places him outside the smoke-selling guru category, in my humble opinion.