Japanese Language Learning Update

I finally returned Heisig to the library a couple of days ago.

I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that fun for me.

I made it up to 276 frames, and then I returned the book. I could have renewed it one last time, but I decided not to.

Maybe there’s something to this Heisig junk after all.

Well, I put down Heisig and didn’t touch it for a while. Then, yesterday, on a whim, I decided to try reviewing my huge stack of failed cards and seeing how well I did. I remember how to write all of the kanji except 2 (One of them being “only”).

One thing I have to wonder though, is how useful this will be to me. Learning to write kanji from keywords It’s not as though I have a problem breaking apart kanji into shapes and components already.

Actually, I’m looking into “Let’s Learn Kanji” from Kodansha right now, and it seems to have most of the stuff that I want to learn, like names of radicals, radical locations, and how they relate to kanji.

Either way, I don’t think I can go through with Heisig at this point in time. No motivation, and I hate his tone of voice.

Japanese Update

Another Update:

I spent Yesterday going through Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar, and  doing the beginning exercises. I’m starting from the very beginning to make sure I really have a solid foundation. The declarative state and whatnot.

Before, it was hard for me to go through the guide because of all the grammatical terms, and because it quickly became intimidating with the kanji.

Heisig, Why Are Your Stories Such Crap?

I’m not going to sugarcoat it anymore. His stories are not “bland” or “hard to remember”. Some of them are really awful.

How awful?

“Don’t worry about coming up with a story for this character, because you’ll encounter it often enough. For now, just remember this word, okay?”

There’s Something About Heisig…

I’m on Frame 137, but like a bad child, I flipped ahead to see what kind of complex kanji I would learn. It’s a bad habit I have. When I would get a reading assignment in class, I would always flip ahead in the textbook to see how many more pages I had to go (Unless the textbook was full of corny jokes or praising about George Washington’s bald head, in which case I would be thoroughly engaged).

There are some potential problems I see with Heisig leaving you to come up with stories on your own later on.

Japanese Learning Update

Last night, went up to frame 137 in Heisig. Some of the stories really were bland. That, or maybe my imaginative memory is just terrible.

RtK: Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji

There’s debate on Heisig.

If you don’t know what it is, Heisig’s method is a method of mnemonics and stories that aid in remembering the shapes of the kanji, how to write them from memory, and associating a “key word” to each kanji. Heisig’s system also breaks down the kanji into smaller parts, or as he calls it, “primitives”.

I say “key word” instead of “meaning”, since sometimes the meanings or keywords can refer to a pretty obscure meaning of a kanji, or not relate at all.