Dear Minna-san,

You have been a truly inspirational bunch in many areas of the study and I know many of you have completed RTK1 and went on to apply the knowledge in the daily life. Hence the following question.

What has Heisig done for you? How has it affected your knowledge of Japanese? Your life in general? Have you truly retained all 2042 characters of the first volume and have no trouble recalling them in any context? Do you do a lot of reading of the stuff that previously used to be inaccessible? Where are you going from here? Is RTK2-3 the way? Or are you following a different route?

I initially completed RTK1 on self-made flash cards that were part of my luggage for many months. Weeks if not days after completion I stumbled upon this website which was a great opportunity to refresh the material.

Now, I actually stopped reviewing the cards a long time ago. I guess if I were to run through all 2042 today, I would not be able to remember the English keywords for about 50%. But I have learnt what they mean in the context of my active and passive vocabulary. In fact, when I see characters in context of known words, stories never come to mind. I can also write most of them with little hesitation.

Also, running through the longer chains in RTK2 and tying them to the words I know helped cementing the knowledge of phonetic elements and identifing the main principles. I am now picking up on the rest of the readings as I go along studying new words.

More importantly, Heisig gave me a method, a structure and a great initial base upon which I feel that I can rather effortlessly build my character knowledge. No amount of study before Heisig was able to accomplish this, for reasons I now well understand.

Going forward, I may go back to RTK2 to pick up on more patterns and small things I might be missing. For now I'm concentrating on acquiring new vocabulary which is a rather boring process but will be the next major milestone in my studies (some of the tips on this forum have been truly excellent in this respect).

Although in actual fact, I spent much more time on Chinese these days.

And for this reason I have no intention whatsoever to touch RTK3: Chinese gives such a broad character base from the outset that it makes the Jouyou Kanji look a bit like a joke. If you count traditional and simplified, the task is even more magnificent. Heisig's method works excellently in this field as well, as might be expected. At this stage I find no need to make stories these days, rather concentrating on known (i.e., practically all) elements and how they work together to form a new character... Seems to work.

Now, what has been your experience?

Great question and I'd love to hear people's experiences, too. I will try to formulate an answer soon.

Briefly, Heisig has put the fun back into my learning.

What am I doing that I wasn't doing pre-Heisig? Primarily, I'm looking at JLPT grammar books that I was finding extremely tedious due to the slow pace coz of not being comfortable with the kanji.

Doing more reading, again coz I don't have to stop and look up every second character. Manga and the Miki's audio blog on japanesepod101, spending more time reading the text as opposed to listening.

I'm plugging along with Heisig 2 but using the Heisig blue kanji box, and approaching it very slowly. I use post-its to arrange my review schedule. In addition, I am reading (again very slowly) manga at a local Japanese manga cafe in New York. I was trying to read Shonen Jump magazine which has furigana but the vocabulary was too hard and it was getting discouraging. I'm now reading "Katsu" which has furigana and simpler vocabulary. I take my Canon IDF 3000 electronic dictionary and look up unfamiliar vocabulary. I wasn't doing anything with this unfamiliar vocabulary but the dictionary allows you to store entries (up to a 100). I just finished plugging all the vocab I had stored into flashcardexchange so I could review and hopefully use the vocabulary. The dictionary also gives sample sentences and I plug those in for memorization if the sentences are approachable.

I also have other side projects. I'm finally realizing that I need grammar. I'm not going to get it by osmosis. I bought a JLPT Level 4 book in Japan and am finally beginning to use it. Sometimes it's a relief to see the kanji and sometimes I convert hiragana vocabulary into kanji I already know. 帰ります　instead of かえります, etc. Kanji does make life easier, even though I'm actually not a great Heisig student. (I forget a lot so my mnemonic visualization must have not been so strong.) I bought a Hiragana Times and recently started to put that into flashcard exchange as well. For those of you who don't know this magazine has articles in English and Japanese with furigana over the kanji. むずかしよ　and slow going, too. I do all of this semi-sporadically except for the daily Heisig review so don't feel bad if it seems like I'm doing a lot.

As for the effects, I feel like more is possible and that it can happen no matter how slowly. I have recently taken up guitar and try to practice a little every day and though I'm still a complete amateur I'm a hell of a lot better than I was 1/2 a year ago. A little bit at a time.....not impossible......

Heisig has transformed my life.

I've lived in Japan for a year and a half now. While not a hardcore student, I studied Japanese regularly. I had never studied Japanese before. After a year and a half, I was SORELY disappointed with my Japanese abilities. While spoken/heard Japanese isn't very difficult, my world was an impenetrable wall of scribbles.

Even a few chapters into RTK, things started to change. I'm moving super-fast so it is truly a daily transformation. I can't even describe the excitement of your entire world suddenly revealing itself. Neo in the last sceen of the Matrix is not a hyperbolic analogy. (--they use backwards kana in The Matrix code if you hadn't noticed already!--) I just get plain giddy every time a compound reveals itself to me! I'm surrounded by millions of fun little puzzles now. Not only that, but activities and situations I thought unimaginable before are totally approachable. I may not know what it SAYS, but I sure know what it MEANS.

As synewave said, it makes learning fun! I stay up late at night to study kanji. I have so much fun with it I don't want to go to bed at night. The school year starting again has derailed me from my goal of Feb 1st for finishing RTK 1, but I'm already 3/4 through and expect to finish in a couple weeks.

To your original question, I already know where in life beyond Heisig. I'm going to devour vocab (which I believe is the key to every language). String enough words together and people can fingure out what you mean. But all the grammar in the world is worthless is you don't know the one key word for a concept you're trying to express. I can support this by noting that my grammar is intermediate but is trapped by my limited vocabulary.

I plan to continue taking ~20mins a day to review kanji to retain the less common kanji I won't be using in vocab any time soon.

I do already, but I wish I could preach the gospel of RTK more. It's a sell only for serious students though. It's way too much time and effort for the casual 1 year ALT. But for those serious students, I can't imagine a better way to form the bedrock of your Japanese learning.

Thanks for all your stories!

dingomick Wrote:I've lived in Japan for a year and a half now. While not a hardcore student, I studied Japanese regularly. I had never studied Japanese before. After a year and a half, I was SORELY disappointed with my Japanese abilities. While spoken/heard Japanese isn't very difficult, my world was an impenetrable wall of scribbles.

I've been here more than twice as long as dingomick, does that mean my disappointment was twice as great?

Anyway, pre-Heisig, even though I was apparently at an Intermediate level, I certainly didn't feel that I knew that much Japanese. However getting through Heisig has not only made me able to remember the kanji, Japanese that I had previously studied but hadn't actually learned is now all falling into place.

Another thing I'm doing now is building a monster Mnemosyne file to cater for grammar, kanji (reading + writing), 漢字検定, JLPT with plenty of example sentences.

dingomick Wrote:Heisig has transformed my life.

If not my life, definitely the way I learn Japanese.

I too live in Japan and although I've been pretty slow in my progress of RTK1 (only 600 in 9 months) I do enjoy looking at kanji and finding the odd one that I know. Of course sometimes I find myself staring at a sign because I'm trying to 'work out' a kanji in it, like lots of daily tests!
I've had to train myself not to do it when driving though....