"Rote learning is a learning technique which avoids understanding of a subject and instead focuses on memorization." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning

We don't need to understand the Japanese language in order to memorize how to write the kanji.

The method described in Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" is an example of rote memorization.

Please discuss.

(This is mainly in response to people claiming that Heisig is better than rote memorization when it itself is actually an example of rote memorization.)

Well, that's true. Mnemonics are just a hack to trick your brain and simulate understanding. Of course, if you consider it rote, what kind of learning would not be rote?

mattyjaddy Wrote:"Rote learning is a learning technique which avoids understanding of a subject and instead focuses on memorization." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning

We don't need to understand the Japanese language in order to memorize how to write the kanji.

Actually, if one completes Heisig, one DOES learn aspects of the Japanese language. The keywords, while being far from perfect, do convey meaning (sometimes accurately, sometimes not so much, but is anyone really arguing that 一 does not have the basic meaning of "one"?). Heisig's radical system is roughly equivalent to the actual radical system used in Japanese. You learn the radicals, you can construct more complex kanji.

Although completing RTK1 does not make one remotely fluent, one DOES obtain more of an understanding of the Japanese language.

As far as Heisig being "rote learning," maybe it is. It's certainly a systematized approach to memorization. I started reading this post with a preconceived assumption about what "rote" meant. I assumed that it meant "Just looking over lists of things and committing them to memory somewhat unsystematically." Like say, taking a list of kanji and just memorizing them as is, by writing them over and over until memorized. Heisig is a systematic way of learning kanji that makes things easier, but, who knows, maybe it is "rote." I was about to argue that "No way, Heisig's not rote! Rote is bad! Arg!" But if it fits the definition of rote, why argue semantics? It either works or it doesn't. Heisig works for me, so whatever you wanna call it, that's fine.

LOL. Rote learning.

Define Heisig.

Otherwise the following is taken to be as true and your claim that Heisig is rote is void.

Quote:Actually, if one completes Heisig, one DOES learn aspects of the Japanese language. The keywords, while being far from perfect, do convey meaning (sometimes accurately, sometimes not so much, but is anyone really arguing that 一 does not have the basic meaning of "one"?). Heisig's radical system is roughly equivalent to the actual radical system used in Japanese. You learn the radicals, you can construct more complex kanji.

kazelee:

I know. It's funny, right?

I did: "the method described in Heisig's 'Remembering the Kanji'". (To be more specific, I'm only referencing the first book as that's the one I'm familiar with.)

Define language (as referenced in material you quoted).

Sure, Heisig's method is rote memorization. When you learn any language you have to learn its alphabet by rote before you can make any progress. You may make up tricks to help it stick, but for the most part, building blocks as basic as that have to be learned by rote.

For instance, when you learn calculus, you learn that ∫ means "integral", ∂ means "partial derivative", and ∑ means "sum". You still have a lot of work to do afterwards to understand what it means to integrate, take a derivative, or do a sum, but at the beginning you learn what the symbols stand for pretty much by rote.

The problem is that the Japanese "alphabet" is a large, amorphously-defined-at-the-edges, complex beast. But it still needs to be mastered. Heisig's strength is in making the rote learning of 3007 basic building blocks separate from understanding them in context a tolerable proposition. And that's fine, because nobody here is going to make it all the way through RTK1 or 3 and then stop and say that they have achieved any deep understanding of Japanese. On the other hand, if deep understanding of Japanese is your goal, you won't get there without learning a bunch of kanji somehow.

But you are learning the kanji components and understanding how they build all the kanji. Rote would be memorizing the kanji, without breaking them down into digestible pieces.
From the perspective of learning the entire language, you aren't 'understanding' the kanji as you learn them, but within the method, I think you are.

By the very definition in the first post, heisig is NOT rote.

"Rote learning is a learning technique which avoids understanding of a subject and instead focuses on memorization."

Rote learning of kanji is to simply look at it over and over until it sticks. There's no understanding at all, just imprinting the image in your brain by force. Heisig takes understanding of radicals and meanings. Instead of simply rote learning it, you understand the kanji and it becomes familiar to you.

This is either:

1) A really, really, bad troll.

2) Someone who doesn't really get Heisig

3) Someone will keep arguing different semantics about rote/the Heisig method and will never give it up.

Tobb is right. I'd also add that after doing Heisig -and- learning lots of Japanese, the concepts learned in Heisig are further instilled by the vocabulary and usage of kanji you encounter when you study.

sutebun Wrote:This is either:

1) A really, really, bad troll.

2) Someone who doesn't really get Heisig

3) Someone will keep arguing different semantics about rote/the Heisig method and will never give it up.

Tobb is right. I'd also add that after doing Heisig -and- learning lots of Japanese, the concepts learned in Heisig are further instilled by the vocabulary and usage of kanji you encounter when you study.

Er, 3 is just a specialized cast of 1, and there's no reason he couldn't be all 3 at once.

However, this is a forum so we can read his/her past posts and figure out exactly which categories fit without guessing.

The Heisig method uses imagination, emotion, and life experience to draw upon memories you already have. It is the same kind of memory used by musicians and artists.

sutebun Wrote:This is either:

1) A really, really, bad troll.

2) Someone who doesn't really get Heisig

3) Someone will keep arguing different semantics about rote/the Heisig method and will never give it up.

4) None of the above

Really tough to judge someone's motivation.

From the Wikipedia definition, I assume the question is about memorization vs computation.

Computation: given an implicit representation of something, obtain the explicit representation by applying a set of rules. Eg: 2 * 3 = ((2 + 2) + 2) = (4 + 2) = 6.

Memorization: given an implicit representation of something, obtain the explicit representation by referring to a giant 'table of results'. Eg: results.find('2*3') => 6

So, of course RTK is memorization, but that's not Heisig's fault - there's simply no set of rules one can use to derive a kanji from a keyword, or from a concept. Blame the Chinese.

Now about the 'rote memorizing' thing, you're wrong.
Rote memorization does not uses mnemonics.

Obviously, Heisig isn't rote. I now have a deep understanding of how to write kanji.

Wrote memorization? Hmmmm.... Is Heisig wrote memorization?

It is rote memorization which aims to access a different part of your brain. However, the part of the brain which it aims to use is not the visual part, instead the 'imaginary' part where primitives connect to each other by words in a concrete fashion. (i don't know any technical terms of the brain/psychology so excuse me here, but i'm pretty sure im on the right track).

Traditional rote learning involves storing the raw image of a kanji in your brain, so when you want to write, 熟, for example you don't think of that as the kids at the cram school burning down their notes as they mellow and ripen up in their life time. Rather, you look at an image of that in your brain and remember that there is fire, a kid, tophat, round etc. You'll find that it's much more efficient relying on this 'verbal' memory which you draw up an image from than a simple image of a character with no associations to it.

The more associations you have to a character, the more neurons there exist attached to that associated memory. Imagining kids burning their school notes or whatever isn't a hard one . Ever seen those idiots in high school taking pictures of them burning their notes and posting it all over the net? [Yes i did the HSC in Australia and this was a popular image each year heh].

So in a sense you can rote learn a story (i admit i have done this for many cahrae that i simply could not draw up an image for) It is still more efficient than rote learning the actual character which has no association with it what soever, except for visual memory which is useless unless one has photographic memory.

I have read no books on memory or read anything which has influenced my opinion above. But it makes enough sense to me

I've felt it first hand, that is; using my visual memory to recall a character vs using a 'story' associated with that character. I can tell you it is much easier to do the latter.


Finally, you said

Quote:"We don't need to understand the Japanese language in order to memorize how to write the kanji. "

I think the keyword here is WRITE. Yes you are correct. You don't really need to understand anything to write a kanji. Nor do you for writing kana, nor do i need to understand anything about English grammar to write the alphabet.
So this statement is useless

I think everything depends on how "rote memorization" is defined.

For me, when I think of "rote memorization", I think of trying to memorizing
things without any kind of context. For example, simply memorizing word lists
is rote memorization. There is no regard to the kanji's form or concept.

Heisig helps to create an association between kanji and a keyword that somewhat approximates one of the main concepts illustrated by that kanji. The context doesn't come from actual sentences, but you create a context that includes the kanji written form and meaning.

So in my book, Heisig isn't rote memorization.

But think of "rote memorization" in a different light and you might come to a different conclusion.

I'd question why this subject is still being humored, but I can't seem to stop laughing. (dadumtsshh)

Wikipedia
"...rote learning is learning by repetition. The idea is that one will be able to quickly recall the meaning of the material the more one repeats it."

I think when people say Heisig is not rote memorization, they mean not using the repeat ad-nauseum method.

Dictoinary definition of: rote
n.
1. A memorizing process using routine or repetition, often without full attention or comprehension.


So even though Heisig doesn't require full comprehension, it is not inclusive in rote. Both rote & Heisig don't require comprehension, but Heisig is not rote.

Of course, in some sense, we can never really fully "understand" anything. I can't really fully understand my mom, because she's actually bidrillions of quantum particles swirling around following the laws of quantum physics, including all sorts of quantum uncertainty and randomness principles. How am I ever gonna understand that?! All I can do is "model" her, approximate her with some simplifying assumptions, and then understand that model...

Poor Heisig, he gets called so many names. I never met the guy, but I don't think he's a "rote".

I always assumed that "rote" meant learning by repetition. I think people have just always associated rote memorization with people cramming dry facts, hence the "...often without full attention or comprehension."

I don't even care, I finished. I know how to learn more if I need to. That's all that matters to me.

Learning kanji by writing them out repeatedly is rote. Using a story to assemble the parts of a kanji is not rote.

This thread is an example of rote learning. ;p

I apologize for the length in advance.

I must admit. I was drunk last night when I wrote the original post. I see it's perhaps not the most useful of topics. But I do think it's good for people to know and think about the terms they are using. It's akin to when laypeople use terms from a specialized field in everyday conversations. The meanings sometimes shift even if just slightly, and it can make it difficult when someone tries to enter a more serious and technical conversation using those slightly modified terms.

I hear the term "rote learning/memorization" often when people discuss those "other methods" and don't always know how to interpret it. It has a generally negative feel to me, the idea of forcing knowledge into the brain. At the same time, I feel that it can be applied to the method described in Heisig's book. (Basically it amounts shoving lots of information [how to write kanji and attach one meaning] into your head.) I definitely enjoyed Heisig's method and successfully finished the first book and know that it has directly resulted in my ability to approach almost any literature. But I still feel that it is a form of rote memorization. (One that can help accelerate deep understanding/acquisition later on.)

liosama - This topic may itself be useless as some have suggested, but assuming it's valid and relevant, the sentence you highlighted forms the crux of my argument. Maybe to make the connections clearer: Rote memorization=learning without understanding -> Heisig's method=learning to write kanji without understanding Japanese -> Heisig's method=a form of rote memorization. I guess you could argue that having one meaning to attach to a character is a form of understanding. But as Heisig explains, we are learning the kanji as if they represented the English language. The keyword itself is more important to the mnemonic device of mental imagery than to the kanji itself as becomes evident when learning how to read the kanji and finding additional meanings for the kanji (some, perhaps, more common than the one used by Heisig). Imagine shifting all the keywords back one. So the keyword for 二 is one, the keyword for 三 is two, the keyword for 四 is three...巳 is one. You can still learn how to write the kanji, but the stories will be vastly different. And of course the transition to reading and learning vocabulary would be difficult since there would be no match up between keyword and the real language. (By the way, liosama, I think that Heisig's method still requires the use of visualization, it's just that you are visualizing the story you create and not the actual individual character. For many radicals, the keyword and the shape of the radical match and so it's not necessary to rely solely on memorizing the shapes of these building blocks. But for some radicals, Heisig does require us to memorize them based almost completely on visual memory [unless we're creative enough to concoct a story to associate with the shape]. This works OK since the radicals get repeated fairly often. You may have noticed a couple sections where the number of kanji using each new radical decreased making the process a bit more difficult.)

bodhisamaya - Thanks. I didn't feel that I was any of those three.

iSoron - I really enjoyed your example of computation vs. memorization. That seems to perfectly demonstrate the difference between knowing and knowing with understanding. I think knowing times tables by rote is good for efficient working of math problems (especially in the future when multiplication is necessary but not the focus of math) but of course being able to show/understand what is behind that memorized answer is necessary for being able to use math appropriately in application. I think learning the writing through Heisig's method is like memorization here. Computation comes later. As far as mnemonics and rote memorization being mutually exclusive, that was something I was uncertain of. I searched some more. I found one site that saying the mnemonics help making rote memorization easier. But it seems that most people set mnemonics in opposition to or as a strategy around rote memorization. Given this, Heisig's method is not an example of "rote memorization".

Your dichotomy got me thinking. Some mnemonics incorporate understanding within the mnemonic. For instance, I learning "My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas". (Of course this must have changed now that Pluto is not a planet.) This helped me memorize all the planets as well as understand their location in the solar system. But "HOMES", only helped me memorize the names of the Great Lakes and not their location in the US and Canada.

McJon01 - Good point. Where do we draw the line of understanding when discussing something as complex as language? Learning through Heisig's book - Can you write a kanji? Yes. Can you write a sentence? No.

nest0r - Don't assume where I got my information. I was drunk and wiki was easy enough to link to. Since when is the definition of "rote learning" basic information? Was there an announcement? I guess most of the people who have responded to this thread so far missed it, too. It seems they all have different ideas of what "rote learning" means.
I don't really think that there were "severe logical fallacies". Just different interpretations for what I wrote and the subject at hand. I say that learning the kanji, even with keywords, doesn't give any true understanding of the actual Japanese language. If I wanted, I could probably go from RtK to studying Chinese and the main problem I would encounter is the fact that RtK doesn't include lots of hanzi that are high frequency in Chinese but not in Japanese. (Caveat - this last statement is said in ignorance of the Chinese language but from knowing that Japanese characters are based on Chinese ones - I think the simplification of Chinese characters would also add a stumbling block - my main point of this statement being that the characters themselves hold no inherent connection to any one natural human language - knowing how to write them gives no understanding for using them - their usage often contradicts intuition [my personal English-influenced intuition] - intuition/understanding only comes from additional study of the language, not through Heisig's method [in the first and third books] - I think exposure is best for developing this intuition.)

joxn_costello - That was exactly my thinking when I posted. It seems other people read a tone into what I wrote, one that didn't exist when I wrote it. I wasn't using "rote memorization" as a derogatory term, the way that some (many?) people from this forum do when describing "other methods". I'm glad you could see what I was trying to say and were able to give a nice, concise analogy to illustrate it.

kazelee - Thanks for always keeping things light. Perhaps this topic doesn't need to be humored any longer. But, perhaps, you'll allow a shift in the discussion:

All this leads me to a different question. Is it appropriate to call the "other" methods for learning kanji 'rote memorization'? Are absolute statements, generalizations, such as this useful?

mattyjaddy Wrote:Maybe to make the connections clearer: Rote memorization=learning without understanding -> Heisig's method=learning to write kanji without understanding Japanese -> Heisig's method=a form of rote memorization.

But what method doesn't involve learning kanji without understanding Japanese? You only understand Japanese when you learn Juko. The very act of learning a single kanji, no one learns anything, even if you learn its onyomi and kunyomi, and its meanings you still aren't understanding Japanese.

Unless you learn it in a context, but that goes with any language?
If i learn the word "Eat" likewise, ”食べる”. I haven't learnt anything in either English or Japanese. But when i use them in a sentence thats when i really begin to 'understand' a language.

I ate bread
Pan wo tabeta.
Im 'understanding' the language now.

mattyjaddy Wrote:(By the way, liosama, I think that Heisig's method still requires the use of visualization, it's just that you are visualizing the story you create and not the actual individual character.

Yes it is visualization, but like i said, it uses a different apart of the brain it involves us using an image we draw up, like a kid burning his lecture notes. Visualising a kanji is almost brainless, you have to physically memorise the placement for everything with nothing behind it.
I'm completely for rote learning all radicals (and kanji which popup so often) like i say in all my posts. It is completely impossible and bullshit to make a story up for a basic building block like water, or mountain, or small. The shapes are so abstract/picture-esque you HAVE to write it out at least 15 times to get it stuck in your fingers. And 100 more times to write it neat and fast. Which is where heisig contradicts himself by saying you shouldn't rote learn anything. When he obviously has (with the radicals).

All that said I do agree with you, Heisig is a form of rote memorisation, but an efficient
one. But I also disagree with you because every way of learning a kanji is 'rote' memorisation. If by rote, you mean 'not understanding the language'.

In conclusion, this is a stray. Strays are fun and all but they are useless and get you no where. What have you learned from this thread? More kanji? have you done reviews that you could have in the time you made me write this long ass post? (even though you got me thinking (albeit a tiny bit ) i feel that these sorts of discussions are a waste of time. Another stray is the scientific study that people quote here on 10000 hours. Who cares?

Its just like the rich guy that buys the latest nike shoe favoured by scientists and tests when he could be training with his normal rebok shoes and outperform the nike guy who was too worried about academic/aesthetic nuances in study methods.

I keep getting reminded of the time Christine tham posted here. I felt that she was raging at the fact she couldnt master heisig, so she decided to call his method useless and urged everyone to go back to the old proper way, by using examples of heisigs flaws by pointing out meaningless-ness of his keywords in traditional phonetically adapted Japanese words like
お風呂 ofuro "wind spine" OMG MEANS NOTHING LIKE BATH
秋葉原 Akihabara "Autumn Leaf Medow"? - OMG NOUNS IN ENGLISH HAVE NO PROPER MEANING EITHER?

Heisig has nothing to do with the language I dont know how hard this concept is to grasp.
It is for LEARNING HOW TO NOT TO FORGET TO WRITE THE CHARACTERS. Full stop.




Cheers~

Thanks, liosama, for taking time away from your studies for a such a long response. Truth be told, I've not done my SRS kanji reviews for almost three weeks. I'm not worried because I trust the method enough to feel that they are still there. It's just that sometimes it takes a second to recall some--I have to resort to the radicals and story to recall the keyword sometimes when I'm reading these days.

I guess I should have started with what you said, but I don't think I would have gotten as many interesting and helpful responses. I guess my point was if the other methods are rote memorization, then Heisig is also a form of rote learning for kanji, and if Heisig isn't rote memorization, then the other methods aren't rote learning either. People often try to spread Heisig and bury other methods by calling the latter "rote learning" but not really explaining what that means. It seems that many people think those "other methods" rely solely on looking at a kanji and then writing it thousands of times to remember it. Period. If that's what they mean when they generalize by saying it's rote learning, then that is inaccurate and not helpful. There is much more to the "other methods" than that. Many of these methods are also supported by valid research.

Besides, writing kanji a thousand times isn't a bad thing (as you mentioned). I don't know about you, but I wrote each kanji everytime I did a flashcard. Occasionally it was with an actual pen, but most often it was with my finger. It has gotten the writing of kanji and especially radicals into the muscle memory of my hand. Something I'm very thankful for.

And perhaps this topic is a stray to learning Japanese, but it's not a stray to linguistics and second language acquisition, which is my primary interest. Japanese happens to be the current medium or topic for my linguistic pursuits since I'm living in Japan. Thanks for taking the time to help me get a better understanding of how people view this particular issue.