Bottom Line: It works
Okay, so here's the bottom line. It _works_. It does precisely what it sets out to do. I've been studying the Japanese language since I was 13 years old; it's now been about 20 years of studying the language. It hasn't been entirely consistent; it has often been a few months on (full-bore), a few months off (after burnout). Before I worked through RTK, I was probably familiar with around 300-400 of the most frequently-used kanji. I could never seem to get much past that hump, it always felt very much like an uphill battle, and even though I'd hit the foot of the hill running full-bore, I'd never quite make it to the top before, exhausted, I'd start to slip downhill again.
I'd beat my head against a Japanese Reader (
A Japanese Reader: Graded Lessons for Mastering the Written Language (Tuttle Language Library)) for a while, which, though organized in such a way as to intrudce a few characters at a time, instead of leaving you to deal with whatever characters you may happen to find in other reading materials, still progressed fairly rapidly, and was also fairly outdated. Then I'd beat my head against some "real" reading material for a while. Then I'd try to ramp myself up on gradeschool-level texts, so there'd be fewer kanji to deal with; but this doesn't necessarily help so much, since kanji can often be a key to understanding a compound word's roots, and help a good deal in learning the words from which they're built.
The problem is, every time I came to an unfamiliar kanji, it would put a hard stop to the flow of my reading. I don't know the meaning, I don't know the pronunciation, I probably don't know the next couple of characters after it, and I don't know the word in which it's appearing. I can't continue reading until I've spent a while studying each individual character, how they're pronounced in this context, and what the word means in which they appear.
Since finishing volume one of RTK (about a week ago), reading is dramatically easier for me. I still don't know how to pronounce many of the characters, but since I'm already familiar with the character (which at this point has become like an old friend), it's easier for me to attach a pronunciation to it, since I'm no longer having to learn the pronunciation, _and_ the writing, _and_ the meaning (maybe - sometimes it's necessary to attach new meanings to old friends). Progress moves _much_ more quickly; and often, even if I haven't learned how to _pronounce_ a string of kanji, I can tell right away, from the Heisig keywords, and from surrounding context, what the word's meaning is. The first time I encountered '''''["okotte iru"] in some text after Heisig, I knew instantly what word it was (''''''roughly "is angry"), because I was already familiar with the Japanese word (but not its writing), and the Heisig keyword associated with that character was "anger". Similarly, words like ''["kantan"] (''''simplicity + simple/not complex = easy) and '''["tojiru"] (''', to close) are immediately clear at first encounter, without having to look them up (though doing so to learn the pronunciation is advisable).
Even words whose meanings don't happen to match the particular keywords I learned, such as ''["settei"] (''''establishment + fix (in place) = "preferences/settings" (for computer programs)?), or ["sakujo"]'' (''''plane + exclude = delete/remove?) are easy to remember, and deepen my understanding of the characters' true meanings ('["saku"] = plane, but also "to whittle"). Even learning ["'tama"] as "bullet", and then later discovering its use as ["hiku"] "play (an instrument)", isn't a problem: I already know how to write it, and one of its meanings, so it's easy to add the new meaning. Easier than learning it without context and without familiarity with its primitives ('bow + 'simple), and trying to learn it amidst a sea of other graphically unrelated characters surrounding it. Basically, just having something that takes away about one and a half (how to write + an approximation of the meaning) of the three or four things I usually have to study at once when learning a kanji - how to write it, what the character means, how to pronounce it in this specific context, and the meaning of the whole word or compound in which it appears - eases the process for me tremendously.
I wish I'd found and studied this book years ago, as I'd be much much further along in my understanding of Japanese at this point if I had.
What it does not do
But let's be clear: completing this book (or even this series) is not the end of your journey--not by a long shot. Having completed this book, you can't claim (or at least shouldn't, though many do) to "know" ~2,000 kanji characters. You do not. You _do_ know "how to write" about 2,000 kanji characters, and you know a meaning for each one (not necessarily the only meaning, or even the most usual meaning). You don't know how to pronounce a single one of these newly-learned kanji in a single context, unless you already knew beforehand. (If you proceed to volume 2, you will find a system to organize your learning of the "on'yomi" of the various characters, primarily based on signal primatives that give a strong clue to characters' pronunciation--I've heard many people say you don't need volume 2, and this is true, but I personally find it useful enough to have. Just take what you can use from it, and ditch the rest; don't feel obligated to do it exactly as laid out.)
So you've learned the kanji ' as "life". Good for you. But how about its meanings of "student", or "fresh", or "birth", or "breathe", or "grow"? Is it pronounced '' or ''', or maybe it's '' or '.''' or '.'' or '.''? Well, if you haven't learned what it means and how to say it in each of a variety of contexts (all commonplace), you can hardly claim to "know" it, can you? (If you're panicking at seeing how confusing it can be to know what a single character means and how to pronounce it, please relax: ' is a bit of an extreme example; while there are several characters that have a wide variety of meanings or pronunciations, most have only a couple, and in fact, many "kun'yomi" are shared across multiple kanji--which one should be used depends on the nuance intended, or context.)
Completing RTK vol. 1 is not the end or even the middle of your kanji-learning experience (unless of course, like me, you were already middle-ish in your kanji-learning journey). It is the beginning: it serves as an _excellent_ foundation (but _only_ the foundation) for proceeding to learn _real_ meanings and pronunciations in a variety of contexts, which is something you can only really get by reading plenty of material.
Note: The majority of complaints I've seen about the Heisig system seem to be that it doesn't do various things it's not trying to do in the first place--possibly because some of the people who complete the system claim that it does... "Now I know 2,000 kanji characters!" ...no, you don't. The other common complaint I hear is that no one who finishes this book goes on to gain an intermediate-to-advanced understanding of Japanese. This is silly, as in order for this to be true, the book would actually have to have some property that _prevents_ you from further study. Pssht. In any case, nearly every time this challenge is issued, someone steps forward as a counter-example.
Do not kid yourself that all you have to do is read and visualize each of the kanji in order, and you'll have learned to recognize 2,000 characters at the end of the book, without ever spending any time to review the ones you learned before. A few reviewers have complained that by the time they got to the end of the book, they'd forgotten all the previous characters from the rest of the book. Well, I mean, duh? Heisig not only never said you wouldn't have to do any reviews, but he outlines a specific system for you to use in reviewing them. So, um... review 'em.
Actually, I recommend ignoring his system for creating (and using) flashcards, and using a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) such as Anki, or [...] instead. Anki has several sets of flashcards for RTK that you can download right from within the application, and koohii is geared specifically for RTK. You will not only need to review, you will need to review a lot. You will become frustrated at how quickly you can forget kanji, or at least pieces of kanji, and how certain kanji (fortunately just a handful for me) keep slipping from your memory over and over (tip: if the "story" you're using isn't working, use a new one--however, some keywords may be inherently difficult to make associations for). The point isn't that RTK eliminates the need for repetitive review (he _does_ state that repeated _writing_ of kanji is unnecessary for learning, but that's different; either way, though, take that advice with a grain (or more) of salt), but that it significantly _reduces_ that need (you need to review, but instead of reviewing entire character forms, you're mostly reviewing stories, plus infrequent idiosyncratic changes to primitive forms, or unusual primitive positions).
Things it does poorly
Alright, now for some complaints about the book. Honestly, RTK sucks (it just happens to suck way less than any other method I've tried). The keywords chosen for kanji are frequently very poor choices (IMO). I imagine I'll never have a clue as to why the keyword "junior" was chosen for '. In several cases, the English keywords themselves are obscure, and I have to look them up in a dictionary. "Decameron"? Seriously?
Likewise, not enough effort is made to ensure the student chooses a helpful connotation of the keyword (Okay, the keyword is "mould".
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