Comments on: Remembering Kanji

By: Andresito君

Andresito君 — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:22:08 +0000

I’m using RTK1 and “reviewing the kanji” website.
storing some Heisig’s sotires, some of my own (or inspired by other users) in there and I print the pages as pdf.
Also working with the SRS.

If you could take 6 months instead of the 3 months you took.. would you? That gives you more time to recover your mind and do less SRS in a given day.

By: thomas

thomas — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:51:16 +0000

@Harvey: Since your Japanese is already at a very high level, I imagine that if you tried Heisig you would breeze through the book quickly. You’d already be familiar with most (actually, with JLPT 1, probably all) of the kanji so associating the English keywords to the kanji won’t take much effort for you. When you finish the book, for sure, 100% you will be able to write all of them from memory.

I think your kanji kentei percentages will probably go up too :).

And Heisig volume 3 has another 1000 or so kanji which you can jump right into easily. I started it right away, although I’ve slowed my pace from 50/day to about 5/day. No rush for these kanjis :) It’s kinda cool to know how to write more obscure kanjis like 犀 (rhinoceros) from memory.

By: Harvey

Harvey — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:56:55 +0000

Great! I have studied Japanese for ages, even passed JLPT 1, but have never done Hesig. It -has- however been on my things to do list forever. I really should get to it. I can read a ton of Kanji, but I am pretty poor at writing them. I have been doing the Kanji Kentei game for the Nintendo DS to keep my Kanji writing decent, but that is more of a system to “test” your knowledge rather than teach you new things. It is not systematic at all in teaching, unlike the Heisig books.

I’ll get to Remembering the Kanji eventually! Great post.

By: Ramses

Ramses — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:25:18 +0000

Yeah, it sucks that Heisig doesn’t have his Hanzi version yet. I’m now stuck with this book without stories and such… Maybe I’ll continue my studies when Heisig publish his book.

By: justin

justin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:59:05 +0000

Damn you, its all your fault! hehe I am pretty much in the same boat, know a good bit of kanji, maybe ~1300, and have always avoided heisig because I had gone this far without using it, so would always plug my ears when people would talk about it, but for some reason after reading this I had a different reaction. Maybe because most people I know that are for it, dont actually know that many kanji, but anyway amazon thanks you for spurring on a purchase

By: doviende

doviende — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:18:41 +0000

I’m already experiencing a big thrill with chinese right now, for much the same reason. I took chinese classes all last year, so i’m great at analyzing chinese grammar but i was really sucky at actually reading and speaking. so a month ago i decided to make mnemonics for characters and put them into Anki (an SRS), and to do this in order of frequency of the characters. I knew a lot of the most common ones, so it went fast at the start. i’m now at about 1100 entered into Anki, about 300 of which i didn’t previously know.

I’m now (slowly) reading some chinese sci-fi that i got from the library, which seemed impossible before. i’m writing down all the characters i don’t know and putting them into Anki as well, which is speeding up the process. It feels *so* good to be reading something real instead of a stupid textbook chapter about 2 boring people having a boring conversation about nothing.

thanks for the encouraging article, i can’t wait til i hit 2000 chars in chinese :)

By: Ramses

Ramses — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:52:24 +0000

Although I never studied Japanese, I’ve experience regarding learning Hanzi. And the thing you did is the best thing you could ever do in your studies (next to massive input).

Are you going to use your SRS again after this? I hope you will :).