Heisig says on page 35 "And remember not to clog your memory with useless information (for example, which signal primitives share the pronunciation teki)."

I would have thought that it would be a useful exercise to gather together all the "teki's" and see them as a group, and that this would help you remember which ones are pronounced "teki".

Any thoughts?

Hmm this is pretty interesting. I do not own RTK2 (I use wanikani for learning readings) so I don't know exactly what the context of this quote was. But I think he may mean that learning the pronunciation of radicals/primitives themselves can be quite useless, not so much a system like grouping. The reason being is that most of the time (at least in my experience) radicals/primitives don't generally effect the pronunciation of actual kanji. Albeit they can occasionally match the pronunciation, it just would be worth spending time on memorizing the pronunciation of actual kanji not primitives.

As for using systems like grouping for memorization I think it's great. As they say, "Neurons that fire together, wire together". Grouping can only strengthen memories. For example I have ran into many times where I have forgot a word in Japanese, but I can remember the sentence I learned it from, and then I remember the word. So I think doing a system like grouping kanji pronunciation together would be perfectly okay if that is what you want to do.

I agree with you about grouping.

I don't think I agree with Heisig when he says in the introduction "First, relating one compound to another by means of similarities of sound is to be avoided at any cost. It merely clutters the mind with useless information. The fact that the two syllables sensei can mean teacher (先生) or astrology (占星) or despotism (専制) or oath (宣誓), depending on the kanji assigned to them, may come as such a surprise that you are tempted to make some use of the coincidence. Resist the temptation."

Heisig's method in RTK1 was what everyone thought was so fresh and useful. I think the old Deng Xiaoping line about Mao being "70 percent right, 30 percent wrong" applies to Heisig as well - especially as pertains to RTK2 and the truly baffling inclusions (and exclusions) in RTK3.

If you ever think he's off-base, he probably is. Except when he says 'don't study kanji->keyword" but that's another can of worms around these parts.

I think by that he means to just focus on one thing at a time. Which with RTK1 is just learning how to write the kanji and also attaching a keyword to it. That's all. Possibly to him, to add more would mean cluttering the mind and making RTK1 more difficult than it has to be.

I also think he mentions later somewhere in the book that you can add more on top of what you learn in RTK after doing RTK. Meaning, after going through RTK, learning the individual readings, learning vocab, etc. Which would be building upon RTK. At least that's what I take on it, and it's my personal approach to learning Japanese.

He calls it useless information in the context of RtK1, and the goals it sets out to help its users accomplish.

No information is universally useless, obviously.

john555 Wrote:Heisig says on page 35 "And remember not to clog your memory with useless information (for example, which signal primitives share the pronunciation teki)."

Presumably he's saying not to bother to learn to recite them as a list as it would be a waste of time, though 'clog your memory with useless information' seems like a poor choice of words for someone who claims to be a memory expert. I daresay I'm not the only one who learnt the hard way not to take Heisig's barefaced assertions on faith.

anotherjohn Wrote:claims to be a memory expert

citation needed

A lot of what Heisig says is unfounded or wrong -- remember that he has never had any sort of pedagogical training or teaching experience (as far as I know). RTK came out of a method he devised for his own use, and which he initially just passed around to people he knew. Eventually there was so much support for it that he wrote a book. But even if you find RTK useful, that doesn't necessarily mean you should accept what he says in his introductions. I would trust what people say here about the use of the method more than Heisig himself.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

anotherjohn Wrote:claims to be a memory expert

citation needed

OK, you got me. What I should have said was that Heisig presents himself rather hubristically as some kind authority on memory techniques in his writings, based on nothing more than his recent experience of having learnt to write the kanji under rather exceptional circumstances.

Of course, in the comment you called me out on, I inadvertently made a much stronger claim that went well beyond my own experience. Rather like Heisig in fact

------------------

After writing the above I feared that I may be doing Heisig an injustice, so I had a quick skim through the introduction to RTK1 so see if my impression was at all off the mark, as it's been a while since I cringed through it:

Heisig, Remembering the Kanji 4ed, pp2-3 Wrote:[... blather about trying to memorise a random pattern of light in a kaleidoscope ...]

The kanji are like that. One can sit at one’s desk and drill a half dozen characters for an hour or two, only to discover on the morrow that when something similar is seen, the former memory is erased or hopelessly confused by the new information.

Now the odd thing is not that this occurs, but rather that, instead of openly admitting one’s distrust of purely visual memory, one accuses oneself of a poor memory or lack of discipline and keeps on following the same routine. Thus, by placing the blame on a poor visual memory, one overlooks the possibility of
another form of memory that could handle the task with relative ease: imaginative memory.

By imaginative memory I mean the faculty to recall images created purely in the mind, with no actual or remembered visual stimuli behind them. When we recall our dreams we are using imaginative memory. The fact that we sometimes conflate what happened in waking life with what merely occurred in a dream is an indication of how powerful those imaginative stimuli can be. While dreams may be broken up into familiar component parts, the composite whole is fantastical and yet capable of exerting the same force on perceptual memory as an external stimulus. It is possible to use imagination in this way also in a waking state and harness its powers for assisting a visual memory admittedly ill-adapted for remembering the kanji.

The prosecution rests.

anotherjohn Wrote:The prosecution rests.

The prosecution should probably take the time to identify what's wrong with that quote. Because it makes perfect sense to me.

I don't want to beat up on Heisig/RTK too much because it is after all what got my Japanese study off the ground.

But my initial comment was a reaction against what I perceive as a tendency for certain contributors here to take Heisig's proclamations re learning the kanji for more than what they are, i.e. the speculations of a not particularly well-informed amateur, as I believe the quoted passage amply illustrates.

anotherjohn Wrote:I don't want to beat up on Heisig/RTK too much because it is after all what got my Japanese study off the ground.

But my initial comment was a reaction against what I perceive as a tendency for certain contributors here to take Heisig's proclamations re learning the kanji for more than what they are, i.e. the speculations of a not particularly well-informed amateur, as I believe the quoted passage amply illustrates.

While Heisig does seem to proclaim things in that passage as a seemingly declarative statement as if there aren't any exceptions, he's not entirely off-base. The passage, at least to me, speaks less like an ill-informed amateur and simply more like someone who has experienced what he's talking about and who has been through the education system simply relying on learning methods such as rote memorization, and he got frustrated and tired of it. And that's his rant against the established system.

So in response, Heisig researched different learning methods and came up with one that worked for him, and one that he felt is better than solely relying on rote memorization techniques.

And since it's probably likely that a lot of people who use this forum and RTK have experienced the same thing with rote memorization, they can probably relate to how effective RTK is.

I'd say that Heisig is fairly well-informed in terms of learning methods/memorization techniques, being that he created one that has worked for himself and a lot of other people, when other learning techniques haven't. Although I agree that how he wrote it sounds like "my team is better than your team."

Remembering every kanji that shares an identical onyomi does seem like useless information to me. It seems as pointless to me as learning how to write every jouyou kanji that has "糸" as a radical in order and without keywords. The point of the methods from volumes one and two is to rely on visual and mnemonic cues. Why would you want to relate completely unrelated kanji together based on sound when you could simply learn to recognize their onyomi as they appear in your readings?

By the way, I endorse volume two, but that's another subject.

TurtleBear Wrote:Why would you want to relate completely unrelated kanji together based on sound when you could simply learn to recognize their onyomi as they appear in your readings?

It's for production, not recognition. Why would you want to learn to write kanji when you could simply learn to recognize them by sight?

The best way to learn to produce compounds is through continual use and writing, which is not what john555 is talking about.

But either way, if I think of a word learned in volume two, I can usually jot down the kanji used in the compound because, thanks to volume one, I can distinguish between their forms, and I review constantly.