Keep it simple. It’s amazing to me how many people learning Japanese do everything within their power to not read anything in Japanese. As though there is this magical point when they have memorized enough Kanji, drilled enough vocab, and crammed enough grammar, reading fluently will spontaneously occur.
Now, to be fair, reading Japanese requires that you learn hiragana, katakana and Kanji. How many you need to learn is irrelevant - if you want to learn Japanese you have to learn Japanese.
But still, there are a lot of Kanji. How do you get them in your head? Some say, use Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji” mnemonic/story techniques. I say no. My objection won’t be as colorful as Tae Kim’s but here we go:
- It’s a form of work - not play
- It’s easy to burn out
- It uses too much English
- Knowing Kanji is part of the fruit of knowing Japanese, not a prerequisite.
My first two objections are easy. Drilling of any kind is soul crushingly boring. While useful and in some ways invaluable, reviewing should be kept to an absolute minimum (I’ll talk more about this later). The idea that anything approaching a majority of my time should be used for recalling stories is repulsive to me.
My third objection has a little more meat. As a native English speaker, I have been and will continue to use English crutches to support my learning. But manufacturing english stories around each and every Kanji character is overkill. Especially, as Tae Kim points out, when you only view those Kanji outside the context of any compounds, phrases or sentences.
My last objection goes the deepest - to the danger of quantifying the unquantifiable - turning becoming fluent in Japanese into having knowledge of Japanese.
If you become fluent you will have lots of knowledge. But having lots of knowledge doesn’t beget becoming fluent.
You can see this quite clearly in the english sentences all over the internet written by people for whom English is a second language. They have tremendous knowledge of the language. Sometimes their knowledge surpasses even that of native speakers, and yet their speaking and writing belies their knowledge.
Fluency in a language is unquantifiable. You cannot reduce it to a number. You can observe people who are fluent and build a description of what they know but you cannot turn that into a prescription that someone else need only acquire to become fluent.
If someone who’s fluent in Japanese knows 2000 Kanji, 20000 vocabulary, and 500 grammar rules (or however many there are - I have no clue what it is for English…), then you have a description of what a fluent speaker has.
Memorizing those Kanji, vocab and rules will not make you fluent and I think Heisig’s technique encourages people to think the opposite.
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I am one who managed to complete RTK Vol 1 and yet I agree with you fully. However, Heisig did something interesting: drilled most of the radicals into me. While the kanji themselves were out of contexts the radicals certainly weren’t. And thanks to that, I can make the component parts of a kanji move around in my head, and the kanji permanently settles down in my visual memory. In other words, visual memory as opposed to imaginative memory. Heisig himself states that the end goal is to get a kanji into your visual memory.
You make an interesting point about the radicals. Seeing them in other kanji is seeing them in context.
Radicals to Kanji to Compounds to Phrases to Sentences. Many levels of context.
I believe that developing a solid foundation for radicals is an extremely crucial step towards complete mastery of the Kanji. Which is why I believe that this is where RTK’s actual strength lies.
It goes in accordance with the point you highlighted in your ‘Stop Studying Japanese!’ post, in that when the radicals are presented to you in an organized manner in the form of graded kanji, you can’t help but learn them. And then when you finally manage to finish the book, you have a whole new perspective on Kanji. Whenever you see a new kanji, you can automatically spot its component radicals and make up your own mnemonics to keep it in your head. However, this is where I beg to differ. Instead of using my imaginative memory to use the aid of images to remember the kanji, I use the radicals themselves as mnemonics. For instance, for the kanji 頃, I have the ‘images’ of the radicals, namely ’spoon’ and ‘head’ etched into my mind. So I simply imagine the head feeding itself with the spoon. This little step and I find it to be much more effective than a mnemonic story.
I assume that you haven’t tried out Heisig, in which case I would recommend that you try out the first 100 kanji from the free version available online :
http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/miscPublications/pdf/RK4/RK%201_sample.pdf
You will find that the first few kanji are really easy to remember. Now I do not believe that this is because they are easy or have a lesser number of strokes but because Heisig makes you get a very accurate visual representation of them. For instance, 田 appears identical to a rice field when viewed from the top. Stretch your imagination a bit further and it appears like a brain (I did this by imagining the four lines closing in, making the ‘boxes’ bulge out). This helped me to permanently etch the kanji into my mind hence eliminating the need for an SRS.
Now this is just my own humble opinion, but I believe most people using Heisig lose track of the actual method after a while. After 200 kanji or so, people start using words as opposed to images to help retain the kanji in the long-term memory and I that this method is ineffective. Rather it’s much better to learn all the radicals, not by rote, but by images using one’s imaginative memory. After that, it’s all a piece of cake, imagining the radicals moving around in your head to remember the kanji (I might add that this is very effective. Till date I have not forgotten even one of the kanji I have learnt using this method).
As for the order of learning the individual kanji themselves, it’s just like you say. Stumble across a new word in a sentence where you don’t know the sentence and then use your little visual gimmick to etch it into your memory….and move on! Makes ’studying’ more fun!
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