KanjiHanzi Wrote:

ファブリス Wrote:Ok then, I challenge you to stop posting in these forums until 2010, or make that 2012.

Challenge? Or require? As I have said earlier: You're the boss around here - it's your place - and I am not less civilized than I will do exactly as you prefer. If you can't stand my posts, then I will of course stop posting. Simple as that. But I DO hope you can offer some reason for a comment like the one above :-) But also that is entirely up to you.

My personal opinion is that my first post ever here was an utter waste of time, even if it was an interesting lesson in how a "posse" can materialize from thin air. In the other posts I've done here there has been very interesting and useful exchange of ideas. Constructive. If that is not your opinion, the let it be that way. (In particular I found Rich to be of great help).

Mr. KanjiHanzi, I can't seem to understand you. At this point, certain people would suggest that, perhaps, you want to be banned. I mean no disrespect. It's just, your actions seem self destructive. Not in the sense that you are trying to do direct harm to yourself, but in the sense that you try to understand your relationship with others through conflict.

KanjiHanzi Wrote:I also think it's fairly "new" around here to look at the etymology of the character IN DEPTH. Heisig himself brushes away this too easily, despite the fact that he himself has been entirely dependent upon traditional etymology when making up most of his keywords!! Actually he is pretty good at it, but misses now and then. Even the sun ......

I think etymology study should be something you partake on if you want to. It's not really necessary to, and I don't even think Japanese do (feel free to correct me on this), study the etymology very deeply.

Besides, the point is in the mnemonics to remember them in the first place, not to be etymologically correct. I could care less as long as it works.

Tobberoth Wrote:The problem wasn't what you wanted to discuss, it was how you started the discussion.

That thread is closed. I am under order not to discuss it anymore, so at least have the decency to stop it! You have not yet offered any example for what was wrong with "how I started it" so it's too late. Go back and read your own posts!

Just leave that thread NOW! Can you respect such a tiny request??? From a man probably much older than your own father! :-)

I've checked out that jappost site, it's interesting, and I've bookmarked it. To tell the truth, I don't see why ファブリス would have a problem with it. It was interesting to see their take on Heisig. I thought just about the same way as them a year and half ago. That was, until I forgot most of the kanji I tried to learn using traditional methods.

@KanjiHanzi: this is a friendly forum. You have been told many, many times that people 'attacked' you because of the way say thing, not what you say. Tone it done and relax. This is not a court room, you don't have to quote every little thing, and examine the words under a microscope.

My advise: Ignore posts make you angry. (you did say that they don't bother you)

Communication is what people hear, not what you say. (the speaker is to blame, if the listen doesn't understand)

as always, good luck

Well, Heisig method being used for chinese has been discussed a lot of times here.
There is even a book called Remembering the Hanzi - witch was claimed for a few years already.

Not using etymology is one of the usual critics to Heisig's method. He defends of them himself in his books. It was also commented here a few times.

Alyks commented on some things you might want to try to improve.
Maybe there a few others, like fun, stress, motivation, order, etc.

If you give a good critic of the method, you might help a lot. If you find a specific point where it does not go well, and explain it. It is already something new.

Everyday people come here and contribute with something new.
New stories for kanji, new ways to do mnemonics, new ways to get more motivation, new substitute keywords.

Can you point exactly what is the improvement you gave?
You have done nothing. You are only leaching precious energy.

oregum Wrote:My advise: Ignore posts make you angry.

Yes, that's a good advice. I really didn't get **angry** (apart from ONCE in an entirely different thread where one of the posse tried to move everything over there TOO), I just can't stand when people try to attach mere opinions on me that I never have had. Then I think I both have the right and the duty to correct these misrepresentations of what I have written (since many people don't care to go back and read the very first post).

Fair and balanced is not invented by FOX News! It's common sense.

mentat_kgs Wrote:You have done nothing. You are only leaching precious energy.

This is not always a friendly forum. Me thinks rudeness rules too many minds.

Can you give a description of what I did in my first post? In case you have forgotten I merely offered a brief summary of what I do elsewhere (since I possibly can't turn this forum into a mirror site of a what hopefully will become a comprehensive web site/blog).

You are free to click on the link to the left here and say "Wow, what crap!", but PLEASE stop insinuating that I have done anything else, better or worse, here.

Thank goodness for the Blocksite add-on for Firefox. It even works for threads.

alyks Wrote:Besides, the point is in the mnemonics to remember them in the first place, not to be etymologically correct. I could care less as long as it works.

A perfectly valid point of view. I just happen to also be interested in etymology. I find it utterly fascinating to see how today's Kanji/Hanzi has evolved from rather "primitive" bone carvings and bronze stuff, probably both with a religious significance.

Besides: there ARE individuals where stories (or "your" Movie method) won't work. A more concrete approach using the historical "meaning" could be of use there. Lots of people have learned Kanji/Hanzi THAT way long before the birth of The Heisig Method. Take a look at the work of Karlgren and Wieger to see what I mean. They spent their entire lives to RESEARCH the origin of characters. THAT was NEW and NOVEL. Compared with these legends Heisig isn't.

KanjiHanzi Wrote:...and Wieger ....

Dover has published his "Chinese Characters" from 1915 in a couple of reprints. It's an extremely beautiful book of much use also for students of Kanji. Besides it's really cheap ($16.47) considering how rich it is in content.

http://tinyurl.com/7cgk5k (link to Amazon)

For me it's worth every cent and much more than that!

There were a lot of heated debates about Heisig on TheJapanesePage a while ago. But then people got sick of it and moved on. Now-a-days, the people who were so negative about it before have relaxed. There's even a thread someone started logging his progress with RTK1, and he received no attacks( not that I noticed anyway).

yukamina Wrote:There's even a thread someone started logging his progress with RTK1, and he received no attacks( not that I noticed anyway).

Well, that's called progress. Let's pray that the same thing will happen here :-)

nest0r Wrote:Thank goodness for the Blocksite add-on for Firefox. It even works for threads.

It doesn't seem to work well enough since you are still here. Try again.

These quarrels between those who support the Heisig method, and those who are completely anti-Heisig... Sometimes I get the feeling that we're missing the point.
After spending weeks, months, years of effort, in our daily attempts to know a little bit more about the Japanese language, we all start forgetting the fun of it. Learning Japanese just becomes a competition, and people start arguing about how they can do it faster and better than the others. The objective and the pleasure of learning a new language are easily lost in this context. There are moments when I study Japanese, and they don't give any pleasure at all... And that makes it more frustrating when someone shows up on the net claiming a magical, quick solution, and claim to be progressing much faster than us, supposedly with less effort. I think this stereotypical, narrowed view is what has fostered so much of the hatred towards Heisig. There were newbies that screamed across the net how many characters they knew, and claimed that they had the golden key, and then, quietly, these loudmouths started falling and silently disappearing into oblivion. In the middle of all this, there was a lot of serious people studying the Heisig method with good, concrete results. But they were just doing their thing. Their image was tarnished by the small number of loudmouths that invented a race, and claimed they had a more advanced position in it.

Given this context, I am not surprised that people reacted badly to the Heisig method. This generated a vicious cycle of heated responses from both sides, clouding judgement, and escalating into a minor battle.
It's great to discuss methods of improving Heisig, but I urge the posters to not forget the importance of feeling the joy of mastering the language, and making progress in it.
Or else we might lose our bearings, and forget why are we doing this in the first place.

Much love for the forum posters! Thanks for your support.

Bebio, that was a pretty good post and you're right on the money.

Although it was like 10 times more dramatic than seems reasonable. hahah.. I don't mean that in a mean way, it's just funny is all. In my head, I read that post in Stan from South Park's voice doing a solliloquey like he does at the end of every episode. "You know, I learned something today..." Truly inspirational.

My 2 cents: Heisig is perfect for people who like self-study as it is a fast-track to being more self-sufficient. However, people who prefer classroom learning guided primarily by a teacher probably won't like it.

I'm currently at a language school in Japan and I'm a pretty low level beginner in Japanese (and my Heisig habit has definitely moved me to the bottom of the class in the eyes of my teachers, but I expected that to happen), but I just found the lessons slow and pointless (even though I think that as schools go this one is good). The Heisig - Sentences - Total immersion approach appeals to the obsessive academic in me. But, on the flip-side almost everyone else in the school seems to be incredibly happy with it and likes the taught approach (although I've spoken to some people there who have dabbled with RtK1 and have been impressed by it, but lost momentum quickly).

So my conclusion is that for a certain type of (probably fairly academic person) Heisig is brilliant, but since it is something of a long term game which requires a lot of self discipline then for most people it is perhaps not the best way to learn Japanese.

If you want to spend 2 months studying Japanese and becoming basically functional, then of course doing Heisig is crazy, because if you are lucky, you will just about have finished the book and won't be able to say a thing. So I suppose a really interesting question is "what is the break even point?" I mean how long do you need to (intensively) study Japanese for before Heisig starts to show benefits?

WTF?!?!

Most people on this site love Heisig. Also it's benefits have been discussed ad infinitum. Personally I don't think it is incredibly revolutionary nor do I especially dislike it. In fact people should try it and see if it works for them? If it does great, if not well that's too bad. How many hours have been spent arguing over this damn method. Seriously some people need to get some perspective.

bandwidthjunkie Wrote:If you want to spend 2 months studying Japanese and becoming basically functional, then of course doing Heisig is crazy, because if you are lucky, you will just about have finished the book and won't be able to say a thing. So I suppose a really interesting question is "what is the break even point?" I mean how long do you need to (intensively) study Japanese for before Heisig starts to show benefits?

I can only discuss my own experiences, since I am very much like: a boring "academic type of person" with the possible exception that I am totally incapable when it comes to drills, drills and drills, which I find is the one and only way FOR ME to learn all the information in Japanese: verbs, adjectives and vocabulary.

When I started to dabble with Japanese I had no intention whatsoever to study the language in anything close to depth. I simply thought I might as well do more than "merely" learning the Kanji for my own writing pleasure. As I think I already have written somewhere here, what I did was to buy almost all of the Power Japanese books from Kodansha and approach them in much the same way some people solve crosswords. Just for fun. After a couple of years with this hobby, I actually could READ basic to intermediate Japanese texts. I still can.

Then I decided to REALLY LEARN Japanese. What i did then was to use the AJATT method, apart from putting the emphasis on PRODUCING Japanese, rather than merely being exposed to a zillion of Japanese sentences. Been there. Done that. In my Power Japanese "studies. I added some 4-500 sentences (checked: 412 facts/824 cards) - one at a time! - to Anki from "The Handbook of Japanese verbs", since verbs/adjectives is the area where I have most trouble remembering stuff.

I "merely" required that I should be able to PRODUCE the Japanese sentences from the English translation. I gave up on July 30, 2007 of the one and only reason that I could not stand spending 70-90% of my time reviewing, reviewing and reviewing without being able to add much more new sentences! I seriously thought: "Shit! I am getting too old for this kind of studies!" Depressing.

Then I decided to give Mandarin a try: I am NOT too old! :-) Now it's entirely the other way around: Anki can't keep up with the pace I am learning new stuff!! :-) (Thus my post to the Anki Google group where I got more religious dogmatism: Do as you're told and don't even THINK about messing around with how I/we use Anki. No freezing/stopping when you have a few days off from your studies. Bite the bullet and dig through all the 700+ cards you have in your pile before adding new stuff.)

I'll be honest, I see the same thing in the exercise routine I do called CrossFit. It is pretty "revolutionary", yet it utilizes techniques that's been around for decades if not centuries. Like RTK, what's really revolutionary about CrossFit is the internet. Now people who never would have known about it, and just stuck to more well known (though less effective) methods got access to something that just...worked. For those that don't like to spend hundreds of dollars on equipments (books), trainers (college classes), and can work out in their garage (study off the internet), do in 20 minutes what others take 2 hours to do (do in 3 months what some never do) it just clicks that this is the way to go.

Course, since it worked so well, you'd get guys show up and say "Wow!!!!! I've been doing this for FOUR WEEKS (5 days) and I'm in the best shape ever (I know 100 kanji). This is the BEST THING EVER!!!!" These guys do not help the situation. They lack tact and knowledge of the system to do anything other than stir the pot.

Look, try something out for more than 8 weeks and see how the results are before you post it as the second coming. I've done CrossFit for two years, I've done Heisig over a year ago. I know how good they work and what they offer. By teaching others about it and seeing how they fair, I have a decent idea what type of mindset they apply better to than others. More importantly, I know other have more knowledge and experience than me and I can defer when appropriate.

PS: Who necroposted on that thread that KanjiHanzi linked to. It was dead for almost 18 months.

@kanjihanzi

I think your credibility would go up if you had already achieved something from your "method?" ... From reading your posts, it seems like you are at a basic/intermediate level at the languages that you are still learning (Chinese/Japanese?). Most people who have devised a "method," (Heisig, Wrightak, Alyks, etc.) had already mastered their subject, by using their methods, prior to sharing them! If you can talk the talk, then walk the walk... Not to sound arrogant, but for me to even consider using your method, you would certainly have to be at a higher level than me, keeping in mind that (in your own words) the method is not very revolutionary.

KanjiHanzi Wrote:I can only discuss my own experiences, since I am very much like: a boring "academic type of person" with the possible exception that I am totally incapable when it comes to drills, drills and drills, which I find is the one and only way FOR ME to learn all the information in Japanese: verbs, adjectives and vocabulary.

If you are totally incapable at the only way you know how to learn, maybe it's time for a rethink.

Why all this altruism? If we all like our methods, why don't we just go and use them to actually learn Japanese?

[ファブリス]

oregum Wrote:Communication is what people hear, not what you say. (the speaker is to blame, if the listen doesn't understand)

Amen. Communication is a Science (YouTube)

I remember a time when I got frustrated communicating on forums. Trying to change the way you post will not work. From my experience, gratitude is the easiest, quickest and most practical antidote.

Here's some corny examples, but all valid:

Be grateful that Heisig wrote the RtK Book.

Be grateful that people actually asked him about it, otherwise he wouldn't have written the book in the first place, as he seemed to be content having learned kanji for himeself after 1 month or so.

Be grateful that we have a great community here, and people willing to take the time to anwser you. We are all busy with our lives.

Be grateful that "the internets" allow you to communicate with so many people all around the world, and that you're born in the time period to experience it.

Be grateful to all the people who have shared their knowledge about kanji or whatever else, which you didnt know about before.

Be grateful that you can order those fountain pens over the web ;-)

Be grateful that the Chinese came up with this silly writing system, and that the Japanese "improved" on it. Otherwise how would we be able to enjoy calligraphy huh?

Be grateful that some incredibly smart people out there came up with the computers, the internet protocols, the printing process, etc etc.

Be grateful for all the knowledge you have gained through books, remember people wrote it. Even if you managed to be smart enough to know all that they know, you would never have the time in one life to write down those books.

Etc. Etc. Feel free to add to the list.

Nukemarine Wrote:I'll be honest, I see the same thing in the exercise routine I do called CrossFit.

I read too quickly first and thought it was some kind of study method like Heisig etc. :-) Now I know better. The only fitness exercise I do presently is to take a trip out in the garage to smoke (since it's too bloody cold here now to even stick your nose outdoors!).

Nukemarine Wrote:PS: Who necroposted on that thread that KanjiHanzi linked to. It was dead for almost 18 months.

The guy - Richard VanHouten - who "necroposted" - nice and new word for me :-) - is one of the moderators there. No offense meant if *your* "marine" has a any connections, but this guy is an ex-marine fighting in Vietnam etc. and you can sort of sniff that out in the way he comes across now and then :-)

timcampbell Wrote:If you are totally incapable at the only way you know how to learn, maybe it's time for a rethink.

No. I am very much capable using my old methods. If you care to read a post to the end before hitting the reply button you will notice that I wrote how well it works when studying Mandarin.