I have this nagging feeling that most of the users of RevTK haven’t really read about some of the things Heisig says in his book.

“Finally, it seems worthwhile to give some brief thought to any ambitions
one might have about “mastering” the Japanese writing system. The idea arises
from, or at least is supported by, a certain bias about learning that comes from
overexposure to schooling: the notion that language is a cluster of skills that
can be rationally divided, systematically learned, and certi³ed by testing. The
kanji, together with the wider structure of Japanese—and indeed of any language
for that matter—resolutely refuse to be mastered in this fashion. The
rational order brought to the kanji in this book is only intended as an AID TO GET YOU CLOSE ENOUGH to the characters to befriend them, let them surprise you,
inspire you, enlighten you, resist you, and seduce you.”(Emphasis mine)

“Many characters, perhaps the majority of them, can be so remembered on
a first encounter, provided sufficient time is taken to fix the image.”
So much for an SRS.

My stance on this: Heisig’s method is cool. But it is by far not the be-all and end-all of learning Japanese. I say this by having finished RTK1 itself.

Heisig also mentions in this in his book:
“There is no need to make a special effort to memorize them.”(regarding primitives)

Guess why that is? Context, context, context: what Khalid has been harping on for the past god-knows-how-many posts

@Katherine - Don’t you see a contradiction? Imaginative memory is all about fixing images in your head so that you NEVER forget them. Or need to review it after say, after a week and then after a month for complete retention. I believe that an SRS will give you much more than that.

Ultimately we should recognize tools for what they are: tools. Their entire purpose is nullified if they give you feelings of guilt and depression for not staying on track. If they help you, use them. If they don’t, chuck them out of the window.

There’s been plenty of people who have become amazingly fluent in Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, whatever, a long time before the invention of the SRS. And there are still plenty of people who do. Their interest does seem to be the most consistent factor, but interest is subjective! So I don’t understand why people insist on ‘lists’ and so on. Go out and find something!

That’s an incredible example of the person who freaked out on their lack of ability to handwrite characters…when I’m writing Chinese essays, if I ever forget how to write a character, I just type it in on my mobile phone, or electronic dictionary, and then I’ve got it. And the same goes for my Chinese friends. I suppose some people would look down upon this (sacrilege?), but
amazingly, an occasional brain-freeze doesn’t affect our ability to listen, read, or construct sentences…

Just some thoughts.

I think if more of language learning leaned towards exploration, questions like these would be easier to answer. Instead we’re left with more of a bias towards study and burnout survival techniques. You still learn but it’s not as fun and many quit.

And I would most emphatically say that I did NOT fall off the wagon. I’m opposing the notion that you HAVE to use flash cards or an SRS or any study technique every day and if you aren’t you’re somehow doing the “wrong” thing.

I’m arguing that if you feed your interest in Japanese through blogs, TV, visiting Japan or whatever, you will find that interacting with Japanese everyday becomes effortless.

I don’t like looking up stuff in dictionaries. I’ve gone through entire weeks just reading blogs and articles full of kanji and vocab I don’t know, but on topics that interested me, without looking up a single word or grammar item. If I didn’t understand, I read what I could and moved on.

Because they were talking about things that interest me, I was willing to read them no matter what.

And I agree that an SRS is a great tool. I’ve built one on the other half of this site and am continuing to evolve it. But I’m trying to get away from the feelings of guilt, frustration and depression (symptoms of burnout) that have always accompanied this type of study for me and others.

When I get the reading or meaning of a word wrong during review, it’s much more fun to run across it by chance 5 times while reading for pleasure, than to study it.

And when I run across it again in review, all the context from the other places I’ve seen it rush back.

So, I don’t doubt that any tool or technique can help you. But I will say this:

If Spanish language TV, newspapers, sports, and the cultures of Spanish speaking countries were really interesting to you, gaining fluency in Spanish would be inevitable. You wouldn’t be able to keep your hands off that stuff. And an SRS would certainly have helped.

But an SRS alone, unless you really enjoy studying, would lead to burnout.

When we all were children, we never fell off the wagon learning our native languages. We played with friends, we watched cartoons, we read books. School helped to polish our skills, but the meat came from life.

We resisted memorizing stuff for school because it was boring, but we never turned down a chance to talk, listen, read or write about what interested us.

And that is where the lion’s share of the repetition and learning occured.

Where there is interest, learning CANNOT be stopped.

You mentioned learning the roman alphabet. This isn’t the same at all, as that is like learning the kana. It’s really, really easy.

Instead, this is a lot closer to learning new words.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear a new English word and learn the definition, I never forget it. People expect the same of kanji, and it doesn’t work like that… At least until you got a LOT of them down pat.

The SRS is not an end. It’s a means to that end. It’s a very quick means to that end, too. It gives you valuable practice on something that would be very hard to obtain otherwise, but that’s only after the initial kick-start.

If SRSs had existed when I was in highschool, I’d be fluent in Spanish now… And would have been for years.

People don’t suggest other things because they aren’t the best method… It’s not because they are blind, or are jerks. Putting in a lot of hard work now really -is- the easier way to get started in Japanese.

As for falling off the wagon… You seem to be able to climb right back up on with no problem. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. If I miss a day of practice, I’m likely to miss more than 1. I finally halted that by setting up times of the day that I practice (before work, at lunch, optionally after work sometime) and sticking to it. I’ve left option time in there for days I’m bored and feel like really working it, but make sure the mandatory time is kept even when I really don’t feel like it.

It feels like a downer, until I get through the mandatory time and then I feel good about my progress for the rest of the day. That makes it much easier to face it in the evening for optional practice, and again the next day for mandatory. Last time I skipped 2 weeks, I was a whole week getting back up to speed. It was very depressing.

But that repetition also comes for free when you read and watch and converse in Japanese.

But whatever you do, if you don’t enjoy it or worse, it burns you out, you’ll eventually stop.

The goal is fluency. Enjoyment and interest are, in my opinion, better predictors of success than using any particular tool or method.

If you’re the rare type of person who enjoys reviewing flash cards, then I say go for it!

Otherwise, why make learning a chore?

Heisig didn’t exactly invent rocket science when he realized that splitting kanji into its components can be helpful for memorization.

He proposed inventing stories to go along with each character and building the characters from the primitive components also with their own stories. To me, that’s just another type of context and might even be a fun activity. (Though not for me personally)

But unless I’m mistaken, I don’t think even he mentioned flash cards or SRS anywhere in his method, much less a tiresome routine of going through them every day for “review”.

I don’t think this blog’s author ever suggested learning by repetition but rather with context in enjoyable activities. And anyway isn’t SRS all about repetition?

So clearly the way to learn kanji is by repetition, right? Right?

But alphabets are just a way to represent sounds, while kanji embody meaning. At some level, trying to learn significant numbers of kanji by memorization alone is like trying to memorize a (English) dictionary. People forget that all those Japanese children already know how to speak the language, they’re just learning another way to represent it.

Heisig helps–any approach that breaks the characters down into meaningful components would help–but I think the key is creating some of that context that Japanese children already have.

I getting my next post ready now!

Absolutely. The point was not really that he collected sentences, but that he collected them from the stuff he was immersing himself with.

I don’t know about everyone else, when a sentence I took from a textbook, manga, or where ever I tend to remember where I got it from and what I thought about when I first read it, and that seems to help my learning process. That’s why I don’t think it’s useful to import other people’s lists. You learn from building your content yourself.