I'd describe myself as a casual dabbler in Japanese, but I started using Heisig and studying kanji when I realized the overwhelming extent to which Japanese words tend to be compound kanji constructions. I wondered if other people had had a similar experience.

Some background: I was born in Japan, and raised there until I moved overseas at age 4. So up until that time, I was a native speaker, and had the normal exposure to the language of a child that age, interacting with friends and family, watching TV, reading elementary level books, and writing in hiragana.

But with the move, I became a heritage speaker, and my language ability did not progress beyond that initial point. This wouldn't have bothered me, except that during the brief periods that I visited Japan, I found that my kindergarten level vocabulary was keeping me from consistently making sense of movies, TV shows, radio, and grown-up conversations.

That was when I discovered subbed anime. It has a manageably low vocabulary load, and is easy to understand, with translations right there if I didn't know a word. A few months of passively watching suddenly pulled me up to about a first grade vocabulary level - even better than when I was last a native Japanese living in Japan. I was apparently starved for an input source. My family was amazed the next time I saw them. I felt encouraged and wanted to improve even more.

But there came a point when I needed to actively look up and jot down new vocabulary so as not to forget them. That's when I saw a pattern, and realized something that's probably so basic to all of you, but came as a big surprise to me - that Japanese words are typically a compound of two, sometimes three kanji characters and their on-readings.

It had never even occurred to me before that the "bou" in bouenkyou (望遠鏡) and kibou (希望) (telescope, and hope) were the same, as are the "kou" in 蛍光灯 and 光線 (fluorescent lamp, light beam). I thought I knew these words, but they'd been holding some secrets from me. It looked increasingly inefficient learning and recalling vocabulary through hiragana alone. Getting these compounds required kanji and their on-yomi. Now, I wanted to better understand these weird blocky things that, as a child, I'd always ignored in favor of the familiar and friendly furigana next to them.

But the sheer number, complexity, and alienness of the kanji - they looked impossible to remember and comprehend. That is, until I found Heisig's clever book. Of course, a major problem was that Heisig's text didn't have any on-yomi or any Japanese at all. But despite this I did like his stories and his mnemonic system.

So the way I typically use Heisig when studying, is I study kanji in order of their most common on-yomi. Then, where I find it necessary to make an extra effort to remember the character, I look up the Heisig frame number, then use his primitives or stories. Although maybe atypical, I like studying similar on-yomi characters together, which helps reinforce that these all sound like "kai", these all sound like "ri", etc.

If you tested me on Heisig alone, I'd probably do terribly - maybe an 80% failure rate. But Heisig has always been the linchpin, and his mnemonics really work for me. Does anyone else study Heisig in a similar way?