So I haven’t written on language learning in a while. That doesn’t mean I’ve been doing nothing. In fact, I’ve been extremely focused. I put a halt on my SRS sentences. I put down the novel I was reading. I took a break from transcribing Fight Club. I stopped studying for the JLPT. I finally decided to buckle down and go through Heisig’s book Remembering the Kanji.

For those who don’t know, Heisig’s book offers a different approach to learning kanji (Chinese characters). The normal way to learn kanji is to learn a few at a time, writing each one over and over, learning the different readings, learning some words that contain those kanjis and drilling those words. This way works for millions of people (I’m including Japanese people since they do it this way in school) but it is slow as hell. And it’s boring. And it’s not terribly efficient, at least not for me, because in my experience I’m just as likely to forget a kanji I learned this way than remember.

So Heisig published a book, in the 70s I think, with a different approach. He says screw the readings and just learn the meanings first. He takes about 2000 kanji and assigns them each a unique English keyword. Then he puts them in the most efficient/brilliant order possible, so that each kanji you learn is built from kanji pieces that you’ve learned in the past. For example:

You won’t learn 張 until you’ve learned 弓 and 長. That way, when you do learn 張 (lengthen), you can use the keywords for 弓 (bow [and arrow]) and 長 (long) to help you construct a story/mnemonic device to help you remember the new kanji. You won’t learn 暫 (temporarily) until after you’ve learned 車 (car), 斤 (axe) and 日(day). But once you do learn car, axe and day, you can make up a little story involving cars, axes and days to relate to the keyword “temporarily”. And so on. It makes so much sense.

When you are done, you can’t read any of the kanji, but you know what they all mean. Kinda like a Chinese person would if they were to start learning Japanese.

Of course, I can read a lot of the kanji. I’ve been studying Japanese for years. That’s actually a reason I was reluctant to start this book in the first place, since it felt like “starting over” when I felt I had so much kanji knowledge under my belt already. That reluctance was completely misplaced, because going through this book was the single best thing I’ve ever done for my Japanese study (except maybe using an SRS).

It took me 3 months to finish the book. Now I can write 2042 kanjis from memory. And I know what they all mean. Couldn’t do that before. And if I had stuck to the old method for those 3 months, there is no way in hell I’d be at the same place I am now. And it’s giving me results. Sentences I used to miss consistently in my SRS I suddenly get right now. Words I’ve never seen before I can suddenly know what they mean by a combination of context plus knowing the Heisig keyword for the kanjis. I can write kanjis now. Before I could recognize many kanjis, but if I had to produce them on the spot, I was SOL. Now I can write them. All of them!

Just as a test, I read for a bit in Lion Boy (the young adult Fantasy novel I’m reading in Japanese) today to see if there was any difference. There was a HUGE difference. Before it would take me half an hour to an hour to trudge through 5 pages. I’d have to look up half the words in the dictionary. Sometimes I’d have to look up the same word twice because by the time I was finished looking up words for a sentence, I had forgotten an earlier word in the sentence. Juggling 5 new words in your head can be tricky if you let your concentration slip. Today, during my test, I read 5 pages in about 5 minutes. There were just as many words I didn’t know as before, but my knowledge of the meaning of the individual kanjis made up the extra distance I needed to know the word in context. Didn’t need the dictionary. That’s results.

Best thing I ever did for Japanese. If you are trying to learn Japanese, drop everything right now and go run through Remembering the Kanji.

When you finish you will have much, much power. You don’t have to do it alone either. There’s an awesome website called Reviewing the Kanji that has a whole community of Heisigers and you can borrow their stories/mnemonic devices. Highly recommended.

So now that I’m done with Heisig, what’s next? Well, the Japanese Language Proficiency Test is this December. I’m aiming for level 2 (the second highest level). I bought a kanji/vocab study book for the JLPT2 (Unicom series if anyone cares) and breezed through it in about a week (thanks Heisig). Now I’m working through the JLPT grammar book (which sadly won’t be as quick). I’m going to put most of my study focus into the JLPT and watch J-Dramas/read Lion Boy part-time.

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