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.
