sethg wrote:

I've experienced quite a bit of discrimination for using Heisig. Either people don't believe you really know as many kanji as you say you do or, once you explain the system to you, they tell you that it's useless because you don't know the readings for the kanji.

I find it's best to just not care about it. If someone truly wants to learn a language, they'll be open-minded to many different methods. There's nothing wrong with being skeptical, but if they put you down for using a method, it's really just their loss.

I'd have to laugh at anyone who felt that Heisig is a waste of time, or that you haven't accomplished much by absorbing it.  It's a step, is all, but I can tell you that when you are studying the language, the ability to recognize the shapes and to have at least some idea of meaning is no trivial matter.  It's a big assist.  I'm only approaching the 1/2 mark now, but it's fantastic that I see more and more very recognizable objects in my sentences every day, rather than masses of lines.

I can't prove it, but I would strongly suggest that remembering vocabulary is less arduous if you are already familiar with the shapes than it would be if you had to deal with both simultaneously.  In my case, there is simply no doubt about this.

People who dislike Heisig always seem to misunderstand its purpose. They have the impression that it's the diet pill of languages - "learn 2000 kanji in two months or your money back!" - when in fact it's the absolute opposite.

The point of Heisig is to make your life easier when you come to learn readings. This couldn't be clearer and is stated numerous times throughout the introduction. Yet every single negative review mentions either (A) that it doesn't teach you the readings, or (B) that the keywords do not correspond to the exact meaning of each Kanji. Well... uhhh... you don't think we know that already?

Even the great & honourable Tae Kim called Heisig a "douchebag" because his claim to give you the Kanji writing ability of a native doesn't account for readings or compounds. Well... duh, of course it doesn't. Neither does it claim to teach you readings or compounds!

The vast hatred directed towards Heisig, RTK and its users (by people who haven't used it, I might add) is at once hilarious and alarming. It is what is, and it states its purpose clearly, yet so many refuse to accept it. It's bizarre.

theBryan wrote:

Her reply, "umhmmm, thats what most Japanese kids do to make it through high school kanji classes"  She said they make up stories for the harder kanji that they rarely see and probably only will ever have to write during their exams from highschool.

It's not just Japanese, I've known Chinese people to make up stories to write hanzi, too.

Wally wrote:

People who complain about this obviously don't understand that most kanji in fact do *not* have "exact" meanings, but rather encompass a range of meaning or meanings.  These folks are clearly unqualified to pass judgment, then.

To be fair, this is a legitimate point.  It is true that having unique keywords is of higher priority than accurate ones, but Heisig really could have tried harder in some cases..

My own take on it is that Heisig severely limited himself when he decided upon exactly one keyword per kanji.  In making my Heisig deck I looked up each character in the KLD and NJECD and came up with my own keyword(s) that fit as best as possible the full range of meaning of the kanji.  I've found that a bit more than half can be fully represented with a single word.  Another quarter require two or three words, either to clarify the connotation of the keyword or to contrast it with a kanji with similar meaning.  I'm confident that if I had the desire, I could search the OED and find obscure English keywords with exactly the meaning of the kanji.  Only the remaining 20% or so (very rough numbers here) have such disparate and unrelated meanings that multiple English keywords are required.

EDIT: I am by no means a Heisig-hater.  Just feel that the approach could be tweaked a little bit and improved.  I just wanted to point out that the second criticism was not as ridiculous and ignorant as the first.

Last edited by mafried (2009 May 09, 11:10 pm)

It's no problem to go about this: Keep the keyword, add a more detailed description beside it. The keyword helps bring about the story, the detailed description helps remove ambiguity.

Not surprising that this is what some of us do.

There is one blog from a person living in Japan who wrote numerous articles about how Heisig is stupid and pointless, and I even tried to rebut some of his reasons a few times (which of course was useless).  Anyway, I came back to his blog about a year later and suddenly there were all the pro-Heisig articles.  I laughed a triumphant self-righteous laugh.  I don't know what finally convinced him to try it, but he said his reason for not trying it before was that no one ever told him that the keywords eventually drop away.  Now, I'm pretty sure it has been said about a million times that the keywords just drop away, and maybe even Heisig himself says so.  I guess it just goes to show that people only hear what they want to hear (and most people definitely don't want to hear that someone else is learning something faster and easier than they are).

danieldesu wrote:

...he said his reason for not trying it before was that no one ever told him that the keywords eventually drop away.  Now, I'm pretty sure it has been said about a million times that the keywords just drop away, and maybe even Heisig himself says so.  I guess it just goes to show that people only hear what they want to hear...

Every negative review I've come across is from someone who either hasn't read it or who bought it without realising its purpose. Both groups (deliberately?) misinterpret the methodology behind learning meaning & writing in isolation and attempt to present the book's readers as victims of claims which no-one has ever made. This is pretty astonishing considering the fact that Heisig's aims are outlined in the synopsis and the freely downloadable introduction and the title itself! No-one has ever read Heisig and claimed to have native-level knowledge of 2042 kanji, yet the impression given by the naysayers is that everyone who finishes Heisig thinks of himself or herself as fluent in the language. This couldn't further be from the truth and is wonderfully ironic considering that RTK is supposed to be used before you even start learning Japanese. As I said above, the hatred directed towards this book is equally hilarious and bizarre. Is it jealousy or just stupidity I wonder?

A selection from amazon.com...

As soon as I opened the book, I realized its major flaw: there is no Japanese pronunciation! This book is really flawed if you are serious about learning kanji.

The author and most of the reviewers are making false claims. Claiming to have learnt hundreds of kanji in a matter of months is wrong. They haven't learnt the kanji, they have only learnt one aspect of the kanji.

For the introductory student, not knowing how to read the kanji is practically worthless.

Doesn't give the Japanese sounds for the Kanji or any compounds, just a list of mnemonics for individual characters. I.e. you'll learn to recognise the characters for electricity and speech but won't know that the characters are pronounced 'den'+ 'wa' and that 'denwa' means telephone. An astonishingly clueless book.

Just memorizing kanji without knowing how to SAY them is pretty useless.

No pronuciation or readings of the Kanji are given. I remember some of the first kanji introduced were conclave and convex. Why? A total waste of time.

There is no information about the pronounciation of the kanji, so it is not clear how far your new ability to remember kanji will take you.

mafried wrote:

On this forum, when I say "I know 2,000 kanji" it is assumed that I meant was "I know the meaning and writing of 2,000 kanji."
...Outside of our community, these claims are easy to mischaracterize.

I think this a really good point. Inside RTK circles, it's clearly understood that just because you "know" a kanji doesn't mean you have mastered the readings or compounds that the kanji is found in. It simply means that you can go from keyword --> kanji, and from kanji --> keyword.

However outside these circles, when you say "know" kanji, it implies that you know everything about it, multiple words that it can be found in, and all the uses of it. Because of this, the claims do sound pretty steep. Learning 2000 kanji in 3 months? If you use the conventional definition of "know," then yes -- it's a pretty absurd claim. On the other hand, if you're talking about the 'inner circle' definition of "know," then it's a pretty good goal to aim for.

Antimoon method is minority, though many people like to incorporate ideas from it (such as watching news in the native language).

Most people would disagree with in its orthodox method, there are people out there who really think learning a language is impossible without a teacher.

mafried wrote:

We are a very, very small minority.  The people on this site, AJATT, and Antimoon are pretty much the only ones who follow the Antimoon/AJATT sentence method.

That isn't true at all. We are just the only ones using that terminology, it's pure common sense that pretty much everyone agrees with that exposure = ability, it's not something AJATT or Antimoon invented.

Hell, I have a Japanese manga called ダーリンは外国人 where the main foreigner explains how he learns languages. His technique is more or less the exact same. Watch TV and news in the target language. Use it. Stop relying on your native language. Etc.

EDIT: Though, if you're talking specifically about focusing very very much on just learning sentences by SRS, then yes, I agree.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2009 May 10, 1:46 pm)

Yea, sentences via SRS, input before output, and the unimportance of grammar is what I was referring to.

The Assimil stuff is all about learning from natural sentences.  A lot of people use Assimil for other languages and the company has been around for like 80 years.  The only new part of the sentence method is the SRS.

EDIT: And even the SRS isn't totally new because the Assimil books ask you to reread the older conversations and it has questions at the end of each lesson to remind you of earlier things.

Last edited by cracky (2009 May 10, 4:18 pm)