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Who loves gimmicky learning methods?
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Why are you so hung up on having a fair/good review of this site on some random guys blog? We are already here so we know how awesome it is.
If you advertise this as the best site for learning Japanese people will come in numbers, all kinds of people and that will hurt the quality of this community.
I've been on other Japanese forums and most of them consist of anime freaks with no clue about dedicated learning. Threads with questions like: What does 猫 mean? Kawaii this chan that, do we really want to have posts like these? 
thurd wrote:
Why are you so hung up on having a fair/good review of this site on some random guys blog? We are already here so we know how awesome it is.
If you advertise this as the best site for learning Japanese people will come in numbers, all kinds of people and that will hurt the quality of this community.
I've been on other Japanese forums and most of them consist of anime freaks with no clue about dedicated learning. Threads with questions like: What does 猫 mean? Kawaii this chan that, do we really want to have posts like these?
My first comments reflected this feeling as well. Since then, to my surprise, the thread mostly used the review as a premise to discuss other topics. I noticed, however, that Ben enjoyed posting every so often to correct some minor technical point about what he said/didn't say while maintaining his vapid generalizations and then going back to edit/delete comments (presumably pruning them, after the fact, until they resemble as closely as possible a typical entry from the dullest blog in the world), so I figured I'd pop in and respond a couple times. I think most of the people responding are having fun. ;p
Last edited by nest0r (2010 February 23, 1:30 am)
I think this book is not useful for the following reasons:
1) The meaning of the characters in Heisig is often wrong or not useful. Many characters have a meaning that cannot be expressed in one English word. Many of the words he chooses to "explain" a character are bizarre.
Most cases I find his words are perfect, they help with recalling radical components of kanji. THe most recent EXAMPLE I can give is 繕 "Darning". I won't explain this any further because you'd be too stupid to recognise what character that is.
2) He does not give examples of compound use of characters, which is related to criticism 1.
辞書
3) the ordering of the characters in the book is bad, in that the most heavily used characters and the more obscure ones are mixed together. Therefore some of the basic characters only appear at the end of the book, and some virtually useless ones come right at the beginning. Until you have worked from the beginning to the end of the entire book, you will not know some very basic characters.
Again you're doing it wrong. Order is there for a reason, there are been countless posts explaining to idiots why a heisig-esque order is useful. Heisig isn't the only one who pertains to that order either there are other 'less dodgy' books which teach kanji in the exact same manner.
4) I found a lot of his "mnemonics" are not useful at all. I not only had to remember the character, I had to remember the "mnemonic". I personally did not like this system.
A mnemonic device (pronounced /nɨˈmɒnɨk/[1]) is a mind memory and/or learning aid. Commonly, mnemonics are verbal—such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something—but may be visual, kinesthetic or auditory. Mnemonics rely on associations between easy-to-remember constructs which can be related back to the data that is to be remembered. This is based on the principle that the human mind much more easily remembers spatial, personal, surprising, sexual or humorous or otherwise meaningful information than arbitrary sequences.
The word mnemonic is derived from the Ancient Greek word μνημονικός mnemonikos ("of memory") and is related to Mnemosyne ("remembrance"), the name of the goddess of memory in Greek mythology. Both of these words refer back to μνημα mnema ("remembrance").[2] Mnemonics in antiquity were most often considered in the context of what is today known as the Art of Memory.
The major assumption in antiquity was that there are two sorts of memory: the "natural" memory and the "artificial" memory. The former is inborn, and is the one that everyone uses every day. The artificial memory is one that is trained through learning and practicing a variety of mnemonic techniques. The latter can be used to perform feats of memory that are quite extraordinary, impossible to carry out using the natural memory alone.
Thanks wiki for teaching me that a mnemonic is something that one has to remember.
A lot of his mnemonics are actually chosen using some biblical stories. Since I am not a Christian and I have never read the bible, then relating parts of the characters to biblical stories was not useful to me.
Was he pointing a gun to your head making you use his stories?
5) Many characters have their most important role as elements of proper names. In these cases, there is virtually no point learning the "meaning" of the character, since it is clear that you should learn the pronunciation. I have found quite often that Japanese people do not know even the "meaning" of characters which form their own names.
You're doing it wrong. Heisig ain't for meaning it's for writing.
6) the mnemonic system which he claims as his invention occurs in virtually every kanji book that I have seen, including those intended for Japanese children who are learning characters. His claim at the beginning of the book that his system is his original invention is not substantiated.
No, heisig is by far more consistent with his approach to learning how to write characters. Other books use random picto-graphic aids which change with every kanji.
7) Even if you don't believe any of the above points, you should realise that Heisig's book, uniquely among Kanji books, will be absolutely useless to you for any other purpose than learning Heisig's "meaning" of the kanji. You will never be able to use it as a reference for the pronunciation of the kanji, or to find out how the character is actually used in written Japanese. Every other book you can buy will be more useful to you as a reference tool.
You're doing it wrong. Heisig ain't for meaning it's for writing.
The one that I like is
"A guide to remembering Japanese characters" by Kenneth J. Henshall.
This book contains 2000 characters arranged in the order that they are taught to Japanese children (which roughly corresponds to the frequency of usage). It gives the exact historical origin of each character as considered by Kanji historians, a mnemonic for each character, plus the usual information about stroke counts and so forth, and some typical compounds in which the character is used (three for each character), and (most of) the pronunciations of the character. The only omission of this book that annoys me is that it does not give the order in which the strokes of the character should be written (except the general rules).
"Exact" historical origin: Here you are wrong because there is no such thing as an exact historical origin. Most of the entries in the book are phrased along the lines of - "Believed to be derived from [ ] which came from [ ], but others say [ ] ".
So not only have you recommended this book, but you misunderstood the fundamental idea of the book you're recommending for LEARNING kanji. To learn kanji by looking at the etymological foundation is like learning how to chuck a shit by watching porn. That is a bad analogy, and an intentional one to show how bad your recommendation is.
In some cases yes, I have learned characters via their etymology due to the sheer beauty some etymologies have. Funny thing too, you criticize others for learning 漢語 that a Japanese wouldn't know yet you recommend learning kanji by etymology which barely any Japanese would know.
FIND ONE SELF TOGETHER WITH WATER IN POT. Nice, that makes a lot of sense. What great stories. MOUTH CALLS NUMBER OF TWISTING WEED. I doubt anyone knows the origin of the bottom part of the character to be twisting weed.
So you have pretty much contradicted yourself entirely, yet you dare have the audacity to criticize Heisig? There's no shame in failing/dropping Heisig. Many have, there is nothing wrong with that, but there is also nothing wrong with learning through Heisig. In short, Henshall is a great book. It's fantastic I almost read the whole thing cover to cover. It fed my thirst and craving for etymology and from there the foundation to my interest in linguistics, word origin and language development. But, Henshall is not a good book for learning characters. I noticed when I was starting out you quoted Henshall in some of your revtk stories (You were the only one, I starred some of your stories), but you won't disagree with me that using Henshall only creates more complexity.
There is unnecessary hate between both sides. My summary of the Heisig debate is:
1. Idiots who failed Heisigs criticize RTK forums because they'e managed to successfully complete Heisig and never have to worry about writing Kanji ever again.
I call them idiots only because of the fact that they dare call RTK a gimmick or criticize it in any way. I know a few who aren't choosing to do Heisig or have dropped it simply because it didn't work for them. Those people deserve respect. You don't because you have not been critical of yourself. You're the little teenager who blames the teacher and not himself for his misfortunes.
2. Heisig-bible bashers are just as bad too.
All in all your whole argument against Heisig is simply wrong because you assume he aims to teach kanji. There are countless threads here with immense detail on how to reap its true benefits. Also, the only reason I'm being a complete dick right now is because I dislike your general attitude towards others yet as I have shown here you're a hypocrite. Usually I deeply respect members' posts, thoughts, opinions and ideas. But here for me, you've gone past the line. I usually never wave my troll flag, but in this thread and in the other thread you have gone past my Troll indicator.
Last edited by liosama (2010 February 23, 3:00 am)
