I know there are a few people here that work in Japan at the moment... I just had a hilariously embarassing moment at work and was wondering how other people's co-workers have taken to the RTK strategy.

Basically, I walked away from my desk for about 10 minutes with the frame for 尿 (urine) displayed on my monitor. Apparently a few teachers slowly noticed that, and were all standing around my desk when I got back wanting to know why I needed to know the kanji for piss. I had a good laugh about it, knowing that I'm a moron for leaving that page up and then walking away.

They were all interested in this "learn kanji meanings with stories before you can say the words" idea, with half of the teachers giving me an approving "Sounds like a decent idea for foreigners! Now I understand why you can understand things that are written down even though you don't always understand those words when we say them! Interesting...!" and the other half giving me a slightly disapproving "That's not how *we* learn kanji, so obviously it's wrong." comment (which is pretty strong for Japanese, admittedly).

I showed them a couple of quick kanji that were easy to peice together from their components (亡く+目=盲, and such), which was what won over the approval of the "Way to go" crowd, but the "Gimmicky nonsense" crowd said, well, that it was gimmicky nonsense. I bet their jealous... *grin*

But, seriously, what have people found the reaction of native Japanese speakers towards the RTK method to be? (Or Henshall or whatever, but I assume you're using RTK if you're reading this on this forum...)

One of the secretaries at the international school where I work is a Japanese woman who previously taught Japanese to foreigners. She was amazed that I could remember and write so many kanji so quickly--and with correct stroke order. (She admitted that was her weakest point, but that I seemed to have got it.) She was so thrilled, she agreed to quiz me on new kanji as I learned them. Each morning I would tell here where I left off the day before, and she would write a quiz out for me. All different kinds of questions and puzzles, some of which were quite hard! They greatly helped my learning.

I generally got positive reactions from the teachers in the school where I worked last year. They liked the idea of learning kanji that way, and were impressed with how quickly I was learning. One or two even said they wished there was something like that for Japanese people! If people were critical, it was usually about individual kanji, for example the choice of keyword, or the fact that hiragana was more commonly used for a particular word, so why bother learning that kanji? On the other hand, I would occasionally get comments like, "oh, I never thought of what that kanji meant before - it's only used in compounds".

I did once realise that I was about to walk away from my desk with the kanji for bosom displayed on my screen, so quickly removed it before anyone had the chance to ask...

I've had very good response from Japanese, including teachers. In my encounters, the folks who oppose RTK the most seem to be gaikokujin who have learned kanji using non Heisig methods. And they have very eloquent arguments as to why RTK doesn't work at all. Unfortunately, this probably scares off a lot of newbie potential RTK customers.

At a recent English class, as high school entrance exams had finished, the teacher was happy for us to have a class discussion. Admittedly this wasn't a standard class with 40 odd kids who mostly didn't give a s#%t about learning English but rather an elective class with only 10 students.

So as we were chatting away, I was interested in finding out any techniques they used for learning English. One that I found interesting regards spelling. As Japanese often mix up 'l' and 'r' and 'b' and 'v', some of the students learn the shape of words. So 'rivers' are flat i.e. not 'libers' (or whatever). As a native speaker, this was the first I had ever heard about learning word shapes.

The subject of onomatopoeia came up. So they tested me on some Japanese words. Didn't do all that well. However one of the words that came up was きらきら and one student told me her favourite English word was 'twinkle'. The segued nicely into a demo of my favourite Palm application - Twinkle. Next came the singing of 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'.

Anyway to get back on topic, I had taken RTK1 with me to class. As we were talking about learning styles, it seemed a good idea. The teacher is a big fan of me studying Japanese and likes hearing about my methods. He sometimes comes over to my desk for a test. Not him testing me, me testing him. He loves trying to work out kanji from my stories.

So we tried the same thing in class. I wrote Fabrice's "The laughing panda is in bamboo heaven." on the blackboard. To my amazement, after about a minute, one girl was up at the board writing 笑。

I've had generally good responses. For the most part, they are impressed at the speed I can go. They think it's weird that I don't study the Japanese words that go along with it, of course, but my teacher the other day looked at 拐 kidnap and 拘 arrest, and said "Oh these are very hard kanji. I can't write them." I then showed him again how all the kanji I had studied that day had the "fingers" and that the method is to break the kanji up, simplifying them all. He seems on board with it.

Ive also had good responses. My Japanese wife has even started using some of the stories for kanji that she finds hard to remember. If you make up a story for 薔薇　（ばら）　most Japanese will be pretty impressed as many people cant write it.

From my experience, I've seen more of the "this isn't how we learned Kanji, so it's rubbish" kind of attitude. IMHO, the best way to advertise Heisig is by just being really good at Kanji and then when people ask you how you do it, explain that you use Heisig.

That way, even if they balk at your non-standard learning method, your reading ability will speak for itself.

I've even had to correct native speakers with their Kanji a few times. They would ignore my suggestion and swear that they're right. But as soon as they look it up in their electronic dictionary, they look surprised to see that I knew what I was talking about......it's very gratifying actually....... :-)

I've had mostly positive response with the few doubters questioning the extent of my knowledge, not the method. "Oh, you can't know ALL 2042." or "It's just a gimmick you'll soon forget." kind of thing. I haven't had any frumpiness about the method. Everyone thinks it's quite clever.

There is A LOT of chatter about chosen keywords, or necessity of uncommon kanji. But I think that shows their interest.

Gaijin who learned kanji "traditionally" have been the most negative. Especially when we first start talking about it. They'll ask how to read a kanji and I'll tell them I don't know yet. Their holier-than-thou attitude then clouds the fact that I learned 2042 kanji in 8 weeks, and know many more than they do. Most shutup after looking a little more in depth and I shame them with many they realize they don't know.

Unfortunately, it takes so much longer to explain the method that it does to make a story for a kanji, that it creates the illusion of complexity. So people usually say, "wow, that's a lot of work just to learn one kanji. I just memorize it" Yeah, well, we all know how well that works.

Japanese tend to be fascinated, but then dismissive since I don't know the pronunciations or compounds. So it's more like a fun kanji game.

What surprised me is when I explain an easy one like 好, and they say, "a mother is fond of her child. I had never thought of that." How you could never have thought of that!? Even without the Heisig method, how can you think of anything else?

They get really impressed when you can throw some Kanji town at them.
Tell them one of your nonsensical stories about the town.
Blank stare. Embarassed giggles. The foreigner is completely wacked.
Tell the story again while writing the kanjis.
Hmmm?
Now point out that each kanji has the same onyomi and how it connects to your story.
Eeeeehhhhhhhhhhh!

I find some people wonder about particular kanji.

For example wondering why I was learning 勺 which is apparently not very common. But then I mention that it is in 的　so it's useful to know. Which prompts some "oooooh's".

Apparently many japanese people don't think of kanji in the characters privative bits. Once I wanted to know the reading/meaning of 競　but I couldn't figure out how to write it on my phone to ask about it. So I wrote it like this:

立立
兄兄　

and explained to my friend that it was these four parts, but written all together as one character. I first go a wtf response, but before I could write back with clarification my friend wrote back with "ooooooh 競". So even though she figured it out, I thought it was strange that it wasn't immediately obvious, until I realized many japanese people don't break down the characters like we might when we learn them.

I have a gaijin friend with a Japanese wife and three kids. He didn't use the Heisig method, but did something similar on his own over the years. When their firstborn was struggling with kanji in the first grade of elementary school, he started to try to show the kid how to break it down into parts to make it easier to remember, and his wife yelled at him from the other room, "Don't confuse him by breaking up the kanji. He'll do fine learning the way the rest of the country does!" I've seen similar stories posted on Japanese newsgroups before, too.

Maybe the Heisig method is something that is "good for foreigners, bad for Japanese". I've had situations where things like, say, central heating or insulation for houses has been dismissed with those sorts of reasons... "Great for you, but totally not possible for us" sort of a thing. Denial, methinks.

I totally agree that people here don't think about kanji in components, and I've had so many moments where I've explained it to a Japanese person and they just say, "Whoa! Right! I never thought about the meaning of the kanji like that!", but then on the other hand I've had a few moments where my English teaching co-workers have surprised me with meanings of English words. Mostly, "blah" means "N" in latin, so the English word means "blah". Those situations were surprising to me mostly because I had no idea why my JTEs would bother to learn bits and peices of latin to make English make sense, but maybe it's the same sort of thing.

It seems weird to us, since we learned our language our way, slowly, but for people learning the language as non-native speakers, it can make things easier.

All I can say is, I'm hooked on Heisig and I'm so incredibly glad that I was shown this method before I lost hope. I always see kanji for things I've recently done in Heisig, in restaurants, meeting outlines, signs outside of stores... everywhere... and even though I feel like I'm cheating, it's great to actually understand stuff. That, and the rare but fantastic moments when I see a Heisig keyword and think, "Hey, I bet that is **** in Japanese...<grep my dictionary/> やった！Sweet ass!"

Anyway, enough rambling for me. Back to reviews!