I ask this because I find it very hard to explain effectively. I can explain how kanji are made up of a mixture of various elements, and if you give all the elements a name then you can make a story with them, but when it comes to giving an example, I struggle to make it sound as good as it is.

How do you guys explain it so your mate in the pub who knows nothing about japan/china can be awed by the great method and inspired?

Particularly, which kanjis do you use to build up an example story for them?

I, at least, don't. The method itself is better described in abstract terms (among other things because it isn't Heisig's method, he just formalized a set of associations for kanji specifically), so unless someone is actively trying to learn kanji (or considering it) I don't really see the point in explaining precisely how RTK works.

I imagine if I were to try I'd probably focus on the "decompose into previously-known chunks, focus on learning which chunks go into the characters" aspect rather than introducing a story. Though it's hard to do that much without having to explain how fast and loose Heisig plays it with his choice of chunks to anyone who's familiar with radicals...

~J

Wizard Wrote:How do you guys explain it so your mate in the pub who knows nothing about japan/china can be awed by the great method and inspired?

Why are you trying to inspire with and explain the method you use to learn kanji to a guy who knows nothing about japan/china in the pub? Do you want to listen to him explain and inspire you with his different methods for achieving proper lift with a kite?

Anyone interesting in learning the kanji understands the method pretty quickly, whether they agree with it or not. For other friends, I don't see a reason to get overly detailed about it. Everyone knows what mnemonics are, so I just say I use mnemonics for the individual components of a character.

I would either use pencil and paper, which makes explaining the method rather trivial, or just not bother trying. Kanji need to be drawn to be understood.

But if you still have problems, I'd pick one primitive and think of several kanji it takes part in. Myself, I would probably choose 里, not for any particular reason other than that I like the way it looks, I like computers, and it can be read "Lee" (my middle name). But you can make a few good kanji with it: 理, 埋, 厘, 黒, 童...

- Kef

When it comes up in conversation I mean. We talk about all random stuff then I would say I'm studying Japanese, and they'd be very interested, and probably ask how you find studying all those squiggly characters.

I'm not talking about walking around randomly telling people. Since I've been in Japan for 3 years now though it often crops up when talking to people though.

Well, if you're talking to people who already understand how kanji work, you could always illustrate using your palm and index finger (a trick that Heisig suggests in the book to practice writing without pencil and paper; I use this method to review my flash cards because pencil and paper is too slow). If you're talking to people who don't understand kanji, they obviously wouldn't be able to follow that, but, again, you'd really need pencil and paper in that case anyway or there's really no point in trying to explain it.

- Kef

i always use 泳 and 語.
The logical ones are the ones that truly bring out the beauty of the characters. The abstract ones show that i really cannot see the (logic if there is any?) behind the characters, rather i have to make up some keyword on a subset of the character in order to understand it.

But that's the essence of the Heisig method... if the characters didn't have all these odd abstractions, we wouldn't need Heisig. So examples like 泳 and 語 may provide easy examples of the beauty and logic of kanji themselves, but they don't really provide a good illustration of how Heisig works.

Myself, I was probably convinced of the beauty of Heisig when I saw how RTK distinguishes 弋, 戈, 戊, 戌, 成 ... kanji like those were very troublesome before I started with Heisig. "Wait, does 式 have that lower diagonal stroke or not? I don't know! Argh!"

- Kef

If I were to try to explain to someone who doesn't know anything about Japan...I'd just use some thing like 休 and say it's a person resting under a tree. 人 and 木 are pretty easy to understand since they look like what they represent. Any kanji course can use such an example, though...hm.

Today I met my friend who disbelieves Heisig's method. She was shocked when I started to quiz myself in front of her. She got really impressed on how I could remember all those kanji in just 3 months. She is also studying japanese by the old method. But anyway, she would still not do Heisig because the readings. In fact she would, but she would do it with the readings.

Well, I think the best way I can help her understand it is to finish RTK and start to study readings the way katz did only then to show her heisigs power! Mhgwhuahahhua.

furrykef Wrote:But that's the essence of the Heisig method... if the characters didn't have all these odd abstractions, we wouldn't need Heisig. So examples like 泳 and 語 may provide easy examples of the beauty and logic of kanji themselves, but they don't really provide a good illustration of how Heisig works.

Myself, I was probably convinced of the beauty of Heisig when I saw how RTK distinguishes 弋, 戈, 戊, 戌, 成 ... kanji like those were very troublesome before I started with Heisig. "Wait, does 式 have that lower diagonal stroke or not? I don't know! Argh!"

- Kef

Sorry i was meaning to reply to the dude who was talking about telling a dude who knew nothing about japanese

I did some parlor tricks to some people that did not knew kanji. They tought I was lying when I told them I could remember ~1300 kanji and planned to remember them "all" (here I meant only the 2042 in heisig) in 2 months more.

if you want your mate to feel awe, don't tell him about heisig. tell him that in X weeks you picked up Y hundred/thousand japanese characters, then proceed to write a bunch on a bar napkin for him. he'll be in awe.

explaining heisig's method would actually reveal the simplicity that underlies any "magic trick."

Yeah plumage, but still I feel really bad for my friends who really want to learn japanese but dont give themselves the trouble to study it. So I try my best to show how kanjis are "learnable", not to show how badass I am. Not that I dont enjoy my badass image.

plumage Wrote:if you want your mate to feel awe, don't tell him about heisig. tell him that in X weeks you picked up Y hundred/thousand japanese characters, then proceed to write a bunch on a bar napkin for him. he'll be in awe.

explaining heisig's method would actually reveal the simplicity that underlies any "magic trick."

Like the poster above it's just a conversation topic, not a chance to show off. Besides if I tell people I learned 1000 kanji in 2 weeks they will probably think, you sad git staying indoors for hours on end writing them all out a hundred times each...

In the Japanese learning community, it's more of a:

Alyks: "I've learned 302 kanji in 8 days"
Japanese learner: "Oh. You're using Heisig's book..."
Alyks: "Uh...no I'm not..."

That happened to me when I went to this Japanese meetup thing. Mostly the people I've encountered who study Japanese consider Heisig's book a bad thing like it'll never workandweshouldallgotoclassandstudygrammarandlearnkanjibyroteandwe'llneverlearn
Japanesewithout20yearsofstudy.

I make a point to say "I learned how to write 30 kanji" a day

Yeah.. It always comes down to what you mean by learning a kanji..
Usually they think that you have learned it when you know all the common readings for it and think Heisig is crap because vol 1 doesn't teach them.
They still fail to see the obvious advantage you get when starting to study the readings with already knowing the roundabout meaning of about 2000 kanji plus being able to write them from memory with no sweat!

I seriously doubt most of the "old school people" can write tha characters from memory nearly as good as an average RTKer..

yeah, I think that the main problem would be that you be limited to compounds contain kanji you have already learned.

Even after you make a lot of progress...say 1000 kanji...you still have to bump against the new kanji wall to learn many compounds for your current target kanji.

Suppose you know the kanji: 会　年

You are learning: 社　 度

but you don't know 忘　軽

So you can learn: 年度　and 会社　for your target kanji. But if you bump up against 忘年会　or 軽度, you have to learn more brand new kanji....instead of just learning the words

plumage Wrote:if you want your mate to feel awe, don't tell him about heisig. tell him that in X weeks you picked up Y hundred/thousand japanese characters, then proceed to write a bunch on a bar napkin for him. he'll be in awe.

explaining heisig's method would actually reveal the simplicity that underlies any "magic trick."

HAHA! Yeah I like this. I do this with Japanese people when they ask me about Kanji. I tell them that I know about 1400 or so and then write some of them. I try for really abstract Kanji like cacoon, or something with lots of strokes like detatch. They usually are like "WOW! You know that!"

But to be on topic I usually just show them the book. I tell them you don't learn the readings till later. If they still don't like it then I leave them be. I stopped trying to persuade people to use the Heisig books a long time ago. In my opinion if they want to struggle then they can.

alantin Wrote:Yeah.. It always comes down to what you mean by learning a kanji..
Usually they think that you have learned it when you know all the common readings for it and think Heisig is crap because vol 1 doesn't teach them.

I seriously doubt most of the "old school people" can write tha characters from memory nearly as good as an average RTKer..

This is completely true. I've really never seen a criticism of RTK1 that wasn't addressed either in the introduction to RTK1 (95% of all criticisms) or by others like 勝元. People have been told by absolutely everyone they know that Kanji is an advanced and painful topic and that Kanji are to be learned one at a time, starting from the most common Kanji, and they are to be memorized by writing them over and over again and also memorizing their readings and stroke counts and common compounds. The result is always failure. Well, not always, but it's like the lottery. Long odds. (Excepting people who move to Japan or for some other reason are under the gun to get good at the language.) People don't get fluent using the traditional techniques, they DEFINITELY don't get literate, but for whatever reason people defend them inexhaustibly. I guess it has ascetic value.

In any case, the results speak for themselves. I don't forget Kanji, I don't confuse Kanji that look similar, and I can write circles around any other student of Japanese who didn't do RTK. People often rationalize this away by saying that the ability to write Kanji by hand is less important in Our Modern Age, what with computers and all, and besides there's always the Kana, and to these people I offer the words of Richard Feynman, taken from his blackboard after his death:

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

Nice post. I find all criticism of RTK is basically, people saying either "This method doesn't work for me, I can do fine writing them out a few times and have no problem memorising them", which are people born without imagination and photographic memory, or are lying........ or, people who say "RTK sucks because it doesn't teach the readings or the vocabulary or anything".

I've seen people get caught into arguments like this, saying sure it doesn't but there's book 2 or whatever...... they need to STOP, and say, your method doesn't either unless you make a point of doing it. The only thing you do is write a kanji down and trying to remember what it means, the first stage in learning kanji regardless of how you do it. Heisig focuses on improving this single stage and this single stage alone. You have to make the non-believers see that and stop going off on irrelevent tangents about usage/readings/etc.

Actually, there's no point in arguing with blockheads. It's not like you can convince them. You know what you can do to prove them wrong? Become literate.

I usually explain kanji in Chinese restaurants: by picking up the menu and explaining how characters are composed and how parts affect their meaning. I rarely bother explaining mnemonics.

Well I think you have to give a shot to this now and then....
Otherwise you don't have any rights to chastise others systems. If you raise an issue you must also offer a solution . After that it's up to the others.
So even I don't have much illusion about the outcome I still endeavor to explain it to anyone expressing difficulties in his kanjis studies.

My favorite kanji for this is the whale character . 鯨
Each radical is pretty easy to explain
bound up
rice field is maybe the simplest kanji ever with mouth
the oven fire is also very obvious . It's visual.
The heisig story for fish is good and what's more basically everyone knows the kanji for sakana . But it gives them a first grasp and most of the time they already knew the link between the fish kanji and whale kanji.
After that it's just the capital kanji : same thing than sakana. the tokyo kanji with the england kanji , the japan kanji and the china kanji is the most famous place kanji. And if it's as obvious as the sakana kanji it's not that intricate either.
It's a piece of cake to explain then that the whale is a capital fish .
Last but not least : the whale kanji has a lot of strokes and is not often used so it is the epitome of the kanji which looks very intricate but can mastered through this awesome technique .
Honestly I tried with other kanjis . There aren't any other one which comes even close for an introduction of the technique .

Nevertheless while everyone finds it astounding none really tries.... Fear of the unkown , not enough time , ....I totally agree with katzu : most of people are sheep , just looking in awe at those who dare to do what they don't . Most of students I have met have been using the japanese crash test method for years without any real achievement. But everyone does it this way so it must be fine..... In a school of more than 300 pupils I've met only 2 other people using the Heisig method....