Hi there,

My first post so I would like to offer my thanks to Fabrice for setting up this enormous site and maintaining it year in and year out! I would also like to offer my appreciation to all users/members able to maintain a very pleasant atmosphere here. (I haven't been to the page where one cannot mention Heisig and which Fabrice doesn't want us to mention here :-) )

Anyhow.... I've been messing around with Japanese/Kanji for some 8-10 - I really can't remember if I started 1999, 2000 or earlier - and have started Rtk three times and only a year ago or so I managed to finish it. Just to find that 1) I couldn't stand all the SRS terror involved in repeating and 2) that Japanese after all is exactly what the old Portuguese missionaries used to say: The Devil's Language!!! I could be wrong - since I don't know all the languages of the world, but looked and studied quite a few including Sanskrit and other esoteric language - but until other evidence appears I am absolutely convinced that JAPANESE IS THE MOST DIFFICULT LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD TO LEARN (for us westerners), and so by a considerable margin.

So this summer I dumped Japanese onto to shelf labeled - something for your retirement period :-) - and started to learn Mandarin instead. I am very happy to say MANDARIN IS A VERY EASY LANGUAGE TO LEARN. It's such a huge difference in difficulty between the two languages that I am honestly frustrated that nothing/nobody is frank with this. It's not really fair to mention Japanese and Mandarin as Two Very Difficult Languages (perhaps including Arabic, a language I merely can 'read', i.e. transcribe the sounds to their roman equivalents). Japanese embellishes the language in absurdum and Mandarin reduces the overhead, compared with English and other basic Indo-European languages.

Since I have pondered quite a bit over the Heisig method the last year I have decided to set up a web project called The Kanji Hanzi Hub. In essence Heisig is right on the spot on three points:

1) We (more or less adult westerners) can't be expected to learn Japanese/Chinese characters the way school kids in Japan and China do.

2) Character should be reduced to components/primitives/graphemes before actually learned and memorized.

3) The learning process can be accelerated and reinforced by mnemonic tricks like adding stories etc. to the components/characters.

Where he is totally wrong - with the kind of memory and learning capacity I have - is that

1) You should not learn anything but the characters. Period.

2) Do not trust your visual memory at all, but invent stories to even the most basic characters. Period.

Since I have no intention whatsoever to use "Remembering the Hanzi" - apart as a reference book - and I can assure you that FOR ME the process involved learning readings, simplifications, new words/compounds in Mandarin is totally painless.I already consider myself more confident in spoke and written - no matter how basic it still might be - in a matter of months compared with the years messing around with Japanese. The only thing that slows me down is that I find it difficult to keep up with the SRS terror in Anki. (I just don't know how to avoid the cards piling up as soon as you look in the other direction. Simply because I spent most of yesterday writing I now have 460 cards to review!!! My God!!!)

Well, this have to suffice as an introduction now. As funny as life is, the very first full post on my blog became something entirely not planned: A Kanji Lesson 1 for students at JapanesePod.com! Apart from these lessons now and then the focus initially will be on Mandarin and Hanzi. And comparisons between Hanzi/Mandarin and Kanji/Japanese. And reviews of all the Japanese books I have on vacation in my book shelf.

Welcome to the Hub!

The Kanji Hanzi Hub: http://kanjihanzi.blogspot.com/

"(I haven't been to the page where one cannot mention Heisig and which Fabrice doesn't want us to mention here :-) )"

should have been more like

(It's a long time since I visited the page where one cannot mention Heisig and which Fabrice doesn't want us to mention here :-) )

KanjiHanzi Wrote:"(I haven't been to the page where one cannot mention Heisig and which Fabrice doesn't want us to mention here :-) )"

should have been more like

(It's a long time since I visited the page where one cannot mention Heisig and which Fabrice doesn't want us to mention here :-) )

As if I weren't confused enough...


Mayeb I should just click on that link @_@

Confused ... What link? You have to go to the Kanji Hanzi Hub to find a link to the Evil Page where the equally Evil Heisig should be mentioned unless you want to get mobbed out :-)

I'm a bit confused, so let me get this straight.

1) Japanese is too hard
2) You've given up and started learning Mandarin
3) You have no intention of using Heisig's books
4) You believe websites are evil and are possessed by demons

*5) You are using a blog designed around Heisig's books to promote your own blog

Let me know if I missed something :/

>>> Let me know if I missed something

Yes, almost everything, but in particular you

1) Aren't aware of the fact that read to fast and offer too quick judgements based on this insufficient reading

2) Seem to lack a sense of irony and humor.

To reply to your ponts:

1) I didn't say that "Japanese is TOO hard" for anybody else but me right now. It's merely a matter of how I would like to use my time here and now. Japanese takes too much time NOW.

2) That's correct. I am focusing on Mandarin right now.

3) I have no intention using Remembering the Hanzi as Heisig insists it should be used. If you care to go back and re-read my original post you will be able to discover that I have use RtF for many, many years.

4) Irony!! I was merely replicating the kind of response one get on <IRONY!!>The Evil Page</IRONY!!> if you mention Heisig there. One of the moderators literally said the HEISIG IS THE DEVIL!! Yes, sir/madam.

5) This is not a blog. It's a Forum/Message Board.

My own blog is entirely centered around using the Heisig method in a slightly different - and in my opinion more efficient - way. If you consider my post as Promoting My Own Blog, you are entitled to that opinion. I can't possibly add the kind of stuff I post at my blog here (something you can judge for yourself if you care). I suppose some members here might be interested and the only way to satisfy their interest is to direct them to the blog. Very simple.

No, no, I think I got it right the first time around.

And in case you missed my first joke...
you can rock-hard pasty abs washer-board style anyway you'd like.

(also, ever since alanis morissette invented a new definition of irony, people have forgotten how to use it correctly)

Good luck brotha

KanjiHanzi, I wish you the most of luck with your newest project and hope it will become a succes.

(However, I had written down something very sarcastic before writing down this good-luck wish, and it would be a waste not to post it here as well:

"So I was telling my girlfriend: ' yes, as a matter of fact I am also in need of new shoes. You see, the ones I have now still look fine, but when it rains water gets into them fairly easily which is as you will agree upon quite inconvenient."

Sorry, I just had to post something which is equally important to this forum/message board as are KanjiHanzi's posts about his newest project.

However, since I have just re-read your post and do think that your project is of interest, please do not feel offended by my sarcasm.)

oregum Wrote:No, no, I think I got it right the first time around.

...

Good luck brotha

OK, then you expressed your insights in a rather .. ahem ... funny way :-)

Thanks for the luck-wishing

roderik Wrote:please do not feel offended by my sarcasm.)

I am not that easily offended, and in particular not when the offensive sarcasm is not to be found :-) It's a fate I have accepted: whenever I merely opens my mouth some people get offended no matter how benevolent my intentions are. Oh, destiny, why art thou as wicked to nice and friendly me :-)

Thanks, Roderik

Japanese isn't even close to the hardest language to learn. I learned basic conversational fluency in 1 year, I studied latin for 3 years diligently and could hardly create a good sentence.

Japanese is actually a pretty easy language. If it hadn't been for kanji, I doubt people would find it such a big hurdle. The grammar is very different from most western languages but since it's relatively simple you can learn it fast. I'm pretty sure that learning German is MUCH harder for an asian person than learning Japanese is for a westerner.

I don't really understand your points against Heisig.
1) Only learn characters (This is Heisigs technique). Of course you shouldn't just learn characters. You should START by just learning characters since it's MUCH faster than learning meanings AND readings. It's different in Chinese where every hanzi has one pronounciation and one alone, but a kanji has at least 2, usually more. If you want to learn em all for each kanji, you will have to study kanji for ages which means longer until you can learn real vocabulary and read real stuff. Learning just the characters is fast and pretty effortless.

2) Don't trust your visual memory at all (This is NOT Heisigs technique). Radicals should generally be rote memorized but as much as possible, stick to stories since it's easier and more secure. Rote memorization works... it just takes much more effort and time and is much more error prone.

Come on, everyone has a different idea of what makes a language hard, thus the world's "hardest language for westerners" is not well-defined; some people will find grammar hard, some kanji. Somewhere out there there surely exists someone who swears that Chinese is the devil's language, it's much harder than Japanese, ranting about why nobody is frank with this...

I'm glad you went through Heisig, I expected something like "thus I scrapped Heisig on the third lesson and tried my own method"...

So you are attempting to do modified Heisig + readings. Heisig is completable in 3 months for most. Using your method, can you tell us how long it took to go through 2000 hanzi?

Just because Heisig doesn't work for you (or me, actually) doesn't mean it doesn't work. Everyone is different. There's no point in screaming 'It doesn't work!' to a bunch of people it worked for. It's already a proven technique to get a massive jump-start on the Japanese language.

Tobberoth Wrote:Japanese isn't even close to the hardest language to learn. I learned basic conversational fluency in 1 year, I studied latin for 3 years diligently and could hardly create a good sentence.

Obviously you are a lucky guy with a learning technique and memory suited to the Japanese language.

Tobberoth Wrote:Japanese is actually a pretty easy language. If it hadn't been for kanji, I doubt people would find it such a big hurdle. The grammar is very different from most western languages but since it's relatively simple you can learn it fast. I'm pretty sure that learning German is MUCH harder for an asian person than learning Japanese is for a westerner.

I don't think this has any foundation in facts. Where can you say that Japanese is EASY?? It is no accident that entire books are devoted to Japanese particles, adjectives and verbs.

Particles in particular is an extremely foggy area of the Japanese language. If you claim to have gained "basic conversational fluency" - sort of contradiction here, isn't it? fluency is either fluency or no fluency - and not having to ponder various aspects of the language, getting all the verb inflections right, never stumbling on an adverb form etc. etc., then you are indeed a VERY LUCKY GUY!

I have studied German in school and can't see where it would be comparably more difficult that Japanese. Could you enlighten us? Personally I long to the simplicity of German verbs when attempting to memory all the forms of Japanese verbs.

Neither you and I are really experts on Japanese so let's bring in a judge. Janet Ashby, author of but editions of Read Real Japanese (Essays), from the preface:

Ashbury Wrote:Yet Japanese remains a deeply frustrating language to study. So much so that I remember finding it positively ENCOURAGING when my Japanese professor remarked one day that it took seven years to learn the language - I had despaired of ever being able to pick up a Japanese magazine or newspaper and read it more or less easily.

I am still a far way from being able to read any text in Japanese, but stuff like the essays in Read Real Japanese Essays is not beyond what I can manage with a dictionary in my hand. The main problem for me is that I find it awfully time-consuming to learn new vocabulary in Japanese, compared with the ease in Mandarin.

Tobberoth Wrote:I don't really understand your points against Heisig.

Neither do I since I am basically in favor of his approach. I just have found out that the dogma of DON'T READ ANY JAPANESE ETC. ETC. while you learn the kanji was a mistake for me.

Tobberoth Wrote:It's different in Chinese where every hanzi has one pronounciation and one alone,

Well, this isn't true by any measures. Hanzi very frequently have two or more readings ranging from a difference in tone or an entirely alien sound. What IS true is that there usually is ONE reading that is much more commonly used so it's a pretty safe bet to merely learn this.

Tobberoth Wrote:... you will have to study kanji for ages which means longer until you can learn real vocabulary and read real stuff. Learning just the characters is fast and pretty effortless.

Now you are offering a contradiction!! If Japanese is such a piece of cake, why would you then have to study kanji for ages??? My point here is that you can use the Heisig approach WHILE YOU LEARN NEW STUFF like vocabulary and read real stuff. (I think this might have been discussed here before as RtK Light??) I object to the religious attitude where you have to follow every rule set up by Father James or entirely skip his method. Why through out the baby with the dish water ?? :-)

Tobberoth Wrote:.2) Don't trust your visual memory at all (This is NOT Heisigs technique).

Yes, I know, but I beg to differ there too. As I wrote in the post on the Kanji Hanzi Hub I find it merely ridiculous to add convulted stories to kanji/hanz where the visual cues/clues are enough to memorize the character. I am very eager to get my copy of RtH from Amazon to see how Heisig approaches some of the simplified characters.

Tobberoth Wrote:Radicals should generally be rote memorized but as much as possible

And how would this rote memorization take place without using the visual memory?? Isn't that what you use when you so easily remember the moon, sun, and other basic characters/primitives? I never had to invent a story to be able to remember this kind of simple characters.

I find it rather amazing that my encouragement and praise for the Heisig method per se is perceived as merely criticism. Possibly this kind of reaction also explains why there is such a vehement Anti-Heisig opinion everywhere: Kanji/Hanzi studies turned in to religion where there is only black and white and no other possible position.

I am absolutely convinced that I am not alone in wanting an alternative to the strict dogmas preach by Heisig and his most devoted disciples. Japanese is Japanese and there are "only" 2000 kanji to learn in the first book. Toss and turn. Follow the rules or learn one or more readings while learning the characters.

After six months with Mandarin and Hanzi I am absolutely convinced that many people could gain much and save much time by learning to say the characters at the same time as their "meaning", shape and writing is learned. If RtH volume I would have been released when I started out with Mandarin, I could have been tempted to use that to first learn the characters. If that had been the case I bet I would still be sweating with Anki piles without knowing any Real Mandarin at all. Now I have instead made satisfying progress in a REALLY Easy Language to learn :-)

To quote from your blog:

Quote:Heisig has no or very little faith in our ability to memorize SHAPES and insists on adding a mnemonic STORY to each and every Kanji.

Actually he doesn't. EG. for 24 呂 spine

"This character is rather like a picture of two of the vertebrae in the spine linked by a single stroke."

There are some other characters that he does this for as well. He does teach us that sometimes using a picture is easier than a story, but for the vast majority of kanji it is more or less a mess of lines so it's pretty hard to make a memorable picture out of it that ties to the keyword.

The other thing is, that it is very rare that you will completely forget the story of a kanji. Maybe you get confused as to the positioning or you miss some element, but this is solid knowledge that you can make mistakes with and cement further (yay for SRSs). However with a picture I am not so sure.

Plus like others have said, the 2000 kanji is fast and it pays of big time. Yet you seem to agree with this, so why do you say Heisig's way is not optimal?

With your SRS woes, I also had the same thing. Then I read this post: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...part-2-fun and stopped SRSing. I had been focusing way to much on mining and sentences. I wasn't having any fun. So I stopped and started reading more manga, watching more anime and generally doing what I wanted to do with the language. I would chip away at my review pile every now and again, but I wouldn't expect myself to finish it off every day.

But then I would struggle with my book or manga at times and have to look up a whole bunch of words. I then really wanted to add heaps more stuff to my SRS and study it until I knew it. So uh, if you are sick of SRSing then STOP and do stuff you want to do. Keep chipping away at your pile and don't add new stuff, your reviews will reduce down to a managable level eventually.

wccrawford Wrote:Just because Heisig doesn't work for you (or me, actually) doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Where have I written "It doesn't work???" Do not people read simple English anymore?? I have written here that I have gone through the entire set of 2046 kanjis in RtK I and have managed to learn them, and even retain a lot without any tedious repetitions. Could that be interpreted as "It doesn't work???"

What I am saying, though, is that I have re-evaluated the need to keep a Iron Curtain behind the Heisig way of learning Kanji and learning other aspects. In particular I am strongly advising against blindly accepting this dogma when it comes to Hanzi, as in "Remembering the Hanzi". From my own experience with RtK in the backpack there is absolutely no need for RtH if you don't love spending time with 3000 hanzi before being able to read and speak any Mandaring etc.

Again, I don't understand your points at all. I didn't see your whole post as critizism to Heisig, I just argued the points which were critizism since I don't really see the point to discuss what you like about Heisig, we already know that. The point is that your arguments against Heisig are very weak. Your whole idea that the Heisig technique is a dogma is wrong, who ever told you not to study while doing it? Heisig sure didn't.

You can learn vocabulary while doing Heisig, that's not a problem (like I said, I was already fluent in basic Japanese before even starting RtK) the problem is when you try to learn kanji and compounds, readings etc on the same flashcard in the same technique. It takes too long and isn't effective.

Also, rote memorization uses visual memory when studying kanji, so... yeah. You don't have to make stories of radicals, it's just better when you do.

Japanese is easy, kanji is too, it just takes time. How can I call Japanese easy when there's several books on the subject of particles? Let's see, because I learned Japanese and didn't have a problem with particles? These books assume you have an academic interest in particles, that you want to understand every facet of them and be able to explain it to people who don't know Japanese. That isn't my interest at all, I just want to understand it and be able to speak it, for that you don't need to study that hard at all. Just look at Tae Kims Guide to Japanese. It's shorter than a normal textbook and covers ALL vital Japanese grammar. Complete it and you can read a manga. That's how easy Japanese is, no kidding.

German and Latin though? Finnish? Just look at how much grammar one needs to know to read even a basic book! In Japanese, there is no plural, all nouns are written the same way always. In latin, you have to change nouns depending on TONS of factors... genus, wether it's object or subject, plurality.... it's MUCH more advanced. Is Chinese easier than Japanese? Probably. That doesn't make Japanese hard.

Personally, I just think you have too little experience with learning languages, but that's just my assumption, not trying to offend you or anything.

But remembering the Hanzi is split up into 2 books, so you only need learn 1500 before you start using them.

I often read these long posts that argue back and forth, and wonder if people could better spend their time learning the language, rather than writing about the language learning process, and arguing back and forth seemingly without end.

(Then again, I guess I could be studying rather than reading this back-and-forth...)

Tobberoth Wrote:Again, I don't understand your points at all.

And I can't understand what you don't understand! :-)

Basically I think there is a confusion between TECHNIQUE and REQUIREMENTS/SETTINGS for using the technique. As far as I can tell there is really nothing but two parts of the "Heisig TECHNIQUE"

1) Break every Kanji "molecule" down to its smallest possible "atoms".

2) Apply a mnemonic Story to keep track of the atoms/molecules.

Everything else are conditions when and how to apply this excellent technique.

Heisig says start from Kanji 1 and work your way through the book until you reaches Kanji 2042. That's the method I used three (3) times/attempts until I was finished maybe a year ago or so. After one year away from Heisig and RtK I have arrived at the conclusion that it was a serious mistake FOR ME to not also learn readings the last two times.

After I have merely applied the knowledge I have with Kanji when studying Mandarin, I also have come to the conclusion that it is an utter waste of time for many of those who have gone through RtK I to also start with Remembering the Hanzi 1-2. That's roughly my "criticism" of the Heisig technique. If you are tempted to start learning Mandarin, then I think you should seriously consider this opinion/option.

Tobberoth Wrote:The point is that your arguments against Heisig are very weak. Your whole idea that the Heisig technique is a dogma is wrong, who ever told you not to study while doing it? Heisig sure didn't.

The point is rather that you write a lot of unfounded assumptions that I have arguments Against The Heisig Technique, which is absolutely false. I have some arguments against the restrictions he puts up regarding how and when to use his technique, which is an entirely different matter!

I know that it has been a corner stone of Heisig Studies to study the kanji, meaning and writing, without ever looking at anything else in the Japanese language. I have the third edition of RtK and I am absolutely concinced that he says the same somewhere there, but now I don't have time to read all the text there. This quote from the first page of the preface have to be enough:

James W Heisig Wrote:Meantime, remembering the meaning and the writing of the kanji - perhaps the single most difficult barrier to learning Japanese - can be greatly simplified if the two are isolated and studied apart from everything else.

If you insist I can continue to search for more strong statements from Heisg advicing against doing nothing but using his book and THEN start with all the other aspects of Japanese.

Tobberoth Wrote:You can learn vocabulary while doing Heisig, that's not a problem (like I said, I was already fluent in basic Japanese before even starting RtK) the problem is when you try to learn kanji and compounds, readings etc on the same flashcard in the same technique. It takes too long and isn't effective.

It's really nothing but a personal and subjective opinion that it takes too long, just as my opposite view is so. There are SOME people where it works like it did for you and there are SOME people able to appreciate my alternative.

Also, rote memorization uses visual memory when studying kanji, so... yeah. You don't have to make stories of radicals, it's just better when you do.

Tobberoth Wrote:Japanese is easy, kanji is too, it just takes time. How can I call Japanese easy when there's several books on the subject of particles? Let's see, because I learned Japanese and didn't have a problem with particles? These books assume you have an academic interest in particles, that you want to understand every facet of them and be able to explain it to people who don't know Japanese.

To repeat myself: I have not had much problem READING Japanese. I would say it was easy, but since I had no ambition but to be entertained I could spend years on deciphering Japanese texts and eventually learn to read a bit.

It's the other way that is vastly more difficult. For me. And obviously tons of other persons around the world: To express yourself more or less fluently in spoken and written Japanese! And I am not talking about some "basic fluency", as you do, since there is no such thing. "Merely" approaching the kind of language the average (native) Japanese person can produce in sleep.

Tobberoth Wrote:German and Latin though? Finnish? Just look at how much grammar one needs to know to read even a basic book! In Japanese, there is no plural, all nouns are written the same way always. In latin, you have to change nouns depending on TONS of factors... genus, wether it's object or subject, plurality.... it's MUCH more advanced. Is Chinese easier than Japanese? Probably. That doesn't make Japanese hard.

Well, there is much more to say about the difficulty of Japanese and I will return to this topic at some other time. Now my focus was on offering an alternative to a too rigorous approach to Remembering the Hanzi (and to a much lesser extent RtK).

Tobberoth Wrote:Personally, I just think you have too little experience with learning languages, but that's just my assumption, not trying to offend you or anything.

Personally I think you make too many silly assumptions. I could make one myself and assume that you are a fairly young individual. Then I would estimate that my first contact with Japanese 25 years ago (when I borrowed a linguaphone course - RECORDS!! :-) - from my local library) - took place either before you were born or were very young. "Hon desu", "E desu" got stuck forever!

Since then I have studied Sanskrit and another Very Difficult Indian language on university level for a couple of years. Learned how to read and write Farsi (Persian) but without really studying this VERY EASY language at any depth. This also gives a 90% access to being able to convert Arabic script into sounds and roman letters. Learned some Spanish on my own. Picking up books from everywhere across the world giving a key to the script of the language. One could say that I collect writing systems, like other people collect stamps or whatever. I have a really decent library with the various scripts used in India. So if this makes me have "too little experience with learning languages", then I don't know what would satisfy you.

Kanji Hanzi
http://kanjihanzi.blogspot.com/

thermal Wrote:But remembering the Hanzi is split up into 2 books, so you only need learn 1500 before you start using them.

I am still waiting for my copy so I am not really sure what the strategy is. Use the books as RtK I and RtK II. or consider that Hanzi i+II are to be treated as a single volume released at to points of time? I would assume the latter since it's obviously so that you'll need more Hanzi than Kanji to be considered "well-educated".

The entire reason for posting to my blog and here is that I have arrived to the opinion that you do not have to wait AT ALL if you have RtK 1 under the belt. There is absolutely no need at all to go through the entire RtHanzi if you know the 2042 Kanji well enough! I am also more and more convinced that a similar approach can be used for people starting from scratch with Mandarin, but this remains to be proven.

KanjiHanzi Wrote:And I can't understand what you don't understand! :-)

Basically I think there is a confusion between TECHNIQUE and REQUIREMENTS/SETTINGS for using the technique. As far as I can tell there is really nothing but two parts of the "Heisig TECHNIQUE"

1) Break every Kanji "molecule" down to its smallest possible "atoms".

2) Apply a mnemonic Story to keep track of the atoms/molecules.

Everything else are conditions when and how to apply this excellent technique.

Heisig says start from Kanji 1 and work your way through the book until you reaches Kanji 2042. That's the method I used three (3) times/attempts until I was finished maybe a year ago or so. After one year away from Heisig and RtK I have arrived at the conclusion that it was a serious mistake FOR ME to not also learn readings the last two times.

After I have merely applied the knowledge I have with Kanji when studying Mandarin, I also have come to the conclusion that it is an utter waste of time for many of those who have gone through RtK I to also start with Remembering the Hanzi 1-2. That's roughly my "criticism" of the Heisig technique. If you are tempted to start learning Mandarin, then I think you should seriously consider this opinion/option.

The requierments you're talking about doesn't exist. Heisig says you will benefit from knowing all the kanji before starting to learn vocabulary etc and he's 100% correct. That doesn't mean you have to stick to learning the kanji first, he never says it's a bad idea to do it at the same time. You lose the benefits, so what?

You aren't changing the technique, you're just saying people should learn readings at the same time as the kanji in the technique which is a bad idea. You don't have to believe me, but it is, trust it from someone who has tried. Learning readings with a kanji will take longer and you will learn the readings from context when you read anyway. Everytime you learn a word, you learn readings. It's not something you have to actively study, so why do it? It's a complete waste of time. You will also have to fail kanji a LOT more often because you correctly remembered the kanji but not the reading, making the whole SRS bit a WHOLE lot harder.

As for using Remembering the Hanzi, of course you shouldn't, why would you? You already know most of the hanzi from RtK, you already know the technique... why would you need to buy a book for it? I don't see anyone here arguing against that and I really don't see what it has to do with anything. If THAT is the extent of your alternative technique, I wouldn't call it worth making a blog about.

KanjiHanzi Wrote:To repeat myself: I have not had much problem READING Japanese. I would say it was easy, but since I had no ambition but to be entertained I could spend years on deciphering Japanese texts and eventually learn to read a bit.

It's the other way that is vastly more difficult. For me. And obviously tons of other persons around the world: To express yourself more or less fluently in spoken and written Japanese! And I am not talking about some "basic fluency", as you do, since there is no such thing. "Merely" approaching the kind of language the average (native) Japanese person can produce in sleep.

And what makes speaking fluently in Japanese so much harder than ALL OTHER LANGUAGES? It's just a language, like any other. If you can read properly in it and can't speak properly in it, that just means you have no experience speaking. Go to Japan and live there for a year or two then tell me it's hard to express yourself natively in Japanese. It's impossible to speak natively in something you never speak and that's equally true for mandarin and any other language.

There is absolutely something like basic fluency I can talk fluently about what me and my girlfriend are planning to do tomorrow. I can not speak fluently about what issues japanese politicians should focus on in the comming years. I have basic fluency, not native fluency. It will come. All I need is vocabulary. All I need is exposure. Like in every other language in the whole world

KanjiHanzi Wrote:So if this makes me have "too little experience with learning languages", then I don't know what would satisfy you.

You were lucky, you trained a lot of language and for some reason all of them were easy I suppose. Out of the languages I've studied, Japanese has probably been the easiest one, except for Italian. It's much easier than Latin in every single aspect except writing. I don't really get it.. you simply claim Japanese is the hardest language for westerners to learn. Your only argument is: YOU can't speak fluently in it even though you've apparently studied it for a long time AND there are books about grammar points. None of those in any way indicate that Japanese is an unusually hard language to learn. The grammar is more simple than many other languages. Kanji makes learning new vocabulary a breeze... pronounciation is simple and logical. I really don't get it, WHY do you think Japanese is so hard?

Coming straight into this forum and arguing with all of its members isn't a very effective way to sell your website to us.

Your failure with japanese looks like the same I had in the past: Lack of focus (Look at the kanji of my avatar).

You seem to have enough motivation and you will succeed as soon as you stop to write huge posts and put your hands on the job.

Btw, If I were to go back to past and chose another method to study the kanji, I would not do heisig as it is.

I would try the http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com/

I'm using it after RTK and its concepts are very strong. It reuses Heisigs best ideas, other methods best ideas, combine with newer ideas about mnemonics (the locations) and voila: a supper method.

I'm growing fond on chinese lately. It is for the future, but I'll probably study it someday. That time I'll use the movie method, if nothing better comes up.

zodiac Wrote:Come on, everyone has a different idea of what makes a language hard, thus the world's "hardest language for westerners" is not well-defined

Even if I totally agree that the learning ability and process differs a lot from individual to individual, I think it's possible to sort of measure the difficulty of various languages compared with each other. Mandarin is VERY difficult for a couple of months up to several months when you learn pinyin, the rather subtle differences between various sounds and the tones. In this are Japanese shines and is really easy: no complicated sounds and a very good correlation between phonetic script and sounds.

It all boils down to the amount of INFORMATION you need to juggle with before becoming FLUENT. Of course I don't claim to know every language in the world, but I have not heard of anything that could compete with the three top contenders: Japanese, Chinese and Arabic.

I neither know enough of Arabic to have an opinion, but at least I can read the script and this is something that can be learned with easy in weeks. Arabic grammar is said to be rather complicated, but I don't know. What I DO know is that it's not fair to put Japanese and Mandarin the same kind of division. When you have learned the script, the sounds/tones it's a really smooth drive with little grammar points to be memorized. It's actually so easy that some people (wrongly) claim that Mandarin has no grammar at all. It has, but can be comprehensively covered in a volume or two.

But the difficulty of 'Chinese' vs. Japanese was merely a note in the margin here to be treated more in detail in the future.

zodiac Wrote:So you are attempting to do modified Heisig + readings. Heisig is completable in 3 months for most. Using your method, can you tell us how long it took to go through 2000 hanzi?

Well, you don't "go through 2000 hanzi". That's my main point here. You learn any new characters as they come (and with RtK 1 in memory they are few) and learn the reading and as many words, sentences you like. I am not studying HANZI. I am learning how to read, write and speak Mandarin. I am very pleased with what I have managed to learn since August or whenever I started full time studies.

I pick up new characters as they appear in my text books and over at ChinesePod.com. I also add as many characters my poor Anki can swallow from the excellent "Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary" by Yong Ho, based on one of the frequency lists used when compiling the "Remembering the Hanzi" collection of characters. Even if this book "merely" covers the first 500 most frequently used characters it offers a lot of example compounds and sentences with less frequent Hanzi. Really a gold mine for sentence diggers!! I expect to finish that in a few months and will then have a very acceptable vocabulary considering the amount of time spent. (It will easily out-do my Japanese vocabulary acquired in a matter of YEARS, albeit with a much much scattered and less ambitious study pace!)

This is a more peaceful approach to studies where you don't have to constantly ask How Many Characters Have I/You Learned? The Hanzi I encounter slips through with easy and at the same time I manage to use them in Real Mandarin. Great for me.