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erlog Wrote:I think that mostly what Heisig is cautioning against is taking on too much at one time in a systematic way. Heisig isn't a method to teach people kanji. It's a method to familiarize people with kanji meaning and writing methods. It's like you're building a wall. Simply being able to recognize general meaning and produce the kanji is the first layer. Once you've got that down pat and all mortared and straightened, you can go ahead and start building more abstract concepts like multiple pronunciations to each of the kanji. But if you try to build one column of the wall 9 stories high before the bricks around it are layed in and steadied then it could topple and end up being pretty worthless.

I quite enjoyed this analogy. Any others out there?

For me, I see Heisig's system as like a ray of 陽 that is helping me to burn through the kanji 霧 that used to stand between me and the language that now seems almost easy. Heisig has helped me see clearly for the first time since arriving in Japan (almost 4 years ago...the shame).

Yeah, I like this. I also liked Heisig's own kaleidoscope analogy. This one is different though in that it compares Heisig to the rest of Japanese learning.

Before I learned Heisig, I did the usual way with a lot of reading practice. Reading simple kanji stuck pretty well (although writing didn't), even if they had a ton of readings. There was so much practice that we did in my program that we got down the different reading in different contexts thing. When kanji became more complicated though, I began to confuse kanji that looked alike. I imagine people like me are a dime a dozen.

Of course, I'm doing RTK now, so that's been changing.