Revisiting Heisig OR Don't Knock It Till You Try It

Prompted one again by my new study buddy (Link in the sidebar, yo! It's swiftly becoming a vital one...) Victory Manual, I am taking a fresh look at Heisig.

Or that's what I was going to say except that I never really took a look at Heisig at all. I was aware of his method from the very beginning of studying Japanese because some people love him and some people hate him, but I had dismissed him out of hand because knowing the English meaning of the kanji seemed like a truly dangerous and destructive habit à la romaji. Hearing Alex's tale of a reformed skeptic caused me to think it over, though, and what I realized is...

"Something, anything." My mantra had been right there staring me in the face, but I didn't know it.

Language learning is all about exposure, right? So, actually introducing yourself to all the kanji with their core meanings is probably a BRILLIANT first step, because it puts them firmly into your head by using what you know already, building a great foundation on top of which you can later add word after word of vocab with what I assume now to be very little trouble.

Embarrassingly, I think had some misconceptions about the method that are now totally myth-busted. For instance, I had the idea that he WAS looking at the etymological history of the kanji, but in fact, the "stories" he tells about the characters really do make a lot more sense than that.

Incidentally, part of the reason this works, I think, is not even so much the stories as the way the stories force you to break the kanji down into easy to digest chunks. You know how when you are in a room with a lot of people speaking a language you aren't proficient in and your brain sort of gives up trying to understand? You might even start to get sleepy... It's the same thing with complicated kanji and this is something I have recognized for a long time but was not sure how to combat: when you're looking at a kanji with tons of strokes, you sort of see it without really understanding it, so even when you try to ascribe meaning you are glossing over the parts that you do actually need to remember in order to recognize it later. Forcing yourself to take the kanji apart by following to Heisig's mnemonics is, well, a huge breakthrough. I'm just sad that I am so late to the party. 24 years old...if only I could be 6.

The other thing I didn't know about Heisig's study course was the way it focuses on teaching writing. So it doesn't teach you the 100 "most useful" kanji first and it doesn't teach you them in the order that little kids learn them in Japanese schools—actually at first glance it appears to teach them in quite a confusing order, since it uses the same building blocks to make as many kanji as possible per lesson, which makes a lot of them easily confused. THAT IS, if you didn't have the stories to go along. I can't even think of mistaking "prosperous" for "risk" because I know that "risk" involves looking at the sun with your eyes and prosperity is sunny, so you get two suns.

The best thing, I think, is that I am extremely optimistic about learning kanji. 1,945 used to seem like a lot, and now it doesn't at all. That alone is priceless.