Though if you really start with Heisig at the very beginning, I can see why you would wonder just what it did for you. The benefits might not be totally appreciated if you hadn’t tried reading and writing without it, though!

One thing, I don’t agree with, though, is the idea that you should just read as much as you can, even if you don’t understand most of the stuff, and just try to understand the gist of the writing. I don’t see *how* you can get the gist of the writing if you don’t understand 80% of it. To see a couple of words is not to read.

Maybe other people can learn like this, but I found I didn’t learn much at all.

If you *understand* the kanji (why they are written the way the are), visual understanding like Akan said and Phauna implied, you can remember them and therefore really learn what you read.

My opinion, based on trying several approaches, is that it is important to read, but more important to listen in the beginning. Also, it is important to find a method of kanji-learning that *works*, and Heisig is the only one I have found.

I would limit reading to short, basic stuff and focus on listening (input) and kanji (Heisig) more in the beginning.

Obviously, there are people that have hours to devote to this every day, and those people can do more of everything.

But I found after months of studying Japanese, I couldn’t even read a children’s book. My writing still has major mistakes, as I usually discover when reading something similar just after writing and sending something off.

The only way to really learn and understand grammar is to listen, and also (if possible) have conversations with natives or fluent speakers, as much as you can, especially early on.

Reading is great, but doing much of it can wait until you understand grammar patterns “naturally” (upon hearing), and until you know you can remember the vocab because you already know the kanji.

Keep reading at basic stuff in the beginning, if you have to — that will not hurt you at all. Many immigrants learn a language by listening and speaking first, and reading and writing later, and they learn very fast if they do this. While people who don’t have conversations much take forever to learn and are never fluent, even years later. Yes, I’m talking about learning English. This is *not* unique to Japanese.

I’m not saying don’t read, I just think you should spend more time on listening/conversation and kanji than reading, especially listening, at least in the beginning.

So reading and sentence SRSing after Heisig was really, noticeably easier. Kanji would stick, and I could *see* them. They weren’t just an outline with a greater or lesser density of strokes. They were pieces put together. Heisig is massively useful, even if you never review them ever again, you have a framework and the skill to use it.

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!

Radicals to Kanji to Compounds to Phrases to Sentences. Many levels of context.