Customer Reviews

Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters (v. 1) (English and Japanese Edition)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

My father is Japanese (but I grew up in Oregon) and I grew up continuously struggling with Kanji. Using Heisig's book, I learned more Kanji after two months of using this book --learning at a fairly moderate pace-- than I did by struggling through five years at a Japanese elementary school!

I especially like the way Heisig takes great pains to teach you how to learn new characters on your own, once you have moved beyond the 2,000-odd characters which are treated in this book. In perfectly graduated steps, he weans you off of stroke-order diagrams and his memnonic stories; Before you know it, learning a new Kanji on your own in a matter of seconds will become second-nature to you.

Best of all, if you follow his instructions religiously --especially at first, when you are tempted to stray back to your old "I'll write it a thousand times until I 'recognize' it" method-- you will be amazed at your long-term retention rate. Once, I put the book away for a few months and was able to start right back where I left off, without having to review, or relearn characters!

This book is well-written, concise, and fun to use. No more excuses, buy it and start reading Japanese today!

I have never met anyone who has completed "Remembering the Kanji I" before learning any other aspect of Japanese, but perhaps you can be the first. Let me explain why you most definitely should.

Much has already been said about this extraordinary volume, but there is one very important point which has not been raised, even by Heisig himself. Beginners in Japanese - please take careful note.

Put simply, mastery of "Remembering the Kanji I" (along with the simple hiragana and katakana scripts) is analogous to mastery of the 26 letters of our own English alphabet. These 2000 or so characters - compulsory learning for every child in Japan - are the building blocks for almost any Japanese word you would care to imagine.

Why is this so important? Well, it suggests by far the most efficient way for a beginner to learn Japanese. If the beginner can complete this volume before learning a single word or attending a single class (completion, quite remarkably, takes no more than 3 months full-time), then he or she is at a huge advantage over any other student of Japanese. Why? Because every single time that student learns a new word, he or she can learn it in conjunction with its kanji form if it has one.

This is a vital point. Most people when asked how they became proficient in Japanese will say that hobbled along for several years using mainly hiragana and katakana, and, worst of all, the romanized form - romaji (personally, I spent a whole year learning Japanese using romaji). However, to do that is really shooting yourself in the foot. It is a gross inefficiency for three reasons. Firstly, you will have to learn words twice, or even three times (if you used romaji, then 'upgraded' to hiragana and then kanji). Secondly, your memory won't be able to benefit from being able recognize ALL of the kanji you see around you on a daily basis in Japan. Thirdly (and perhaps most importantly) you will never have any insight into WHY a word sounds like it does. For example, learning the word for post office clerk - "yuubinkyokuin" - in romaji is very difficult because you have no idea whatsoever of the kanji building blocks. However, those sounds are there for a reason, and break down into four kanji which, using Heisig's method, you would have learned as 'mail', 'convenience', 'bureau' and 'employee'. Needless to say, these four sound-units appear in hundreds of other words, and this gives an internal logical to vocabulary learning which simply does not exist otherwise.

I am slowly recovering from post-romaji stress syndrome. Believe me, it is the worst habit you could ever get into. Once I realised the importance of the above, I resolved not to learn a single new piece of Japanese vocabulary until I could write it in kanji too. You should do the same. If you know your 'ABC', you can be confident about learning any Japanese vocabulary you want to with considerable ease.

p.s. I would recommend two more aids in addition. Firstly, as other reviewers have noted, Heisig's 2042 "Kanji study cards" are very handy for learning the 'yomikata' (the pronunciation). And secondly, something that hasn't been mentioned is "Kanjican" by Kanjisoft systems (available on the web). While by no means a perfect program, it is designed to accompany Heisig's series, and allows you to enter both Heisig's and your own stories (to replace the author's quite frankly abominable ones), and then be tested randomly on each kanji. Very useful indeed, since you need a place to record your own stories.

I want to ditto paulbakker@hotmail.com's previous review, and add:

Particularly if you are living in Japan, and don't have full time to study, Heisig's system is frustrating. After Book One, (which at 1 hour a day takes about 1/2 year to get through) you know how to write "gall bladder" but can't read the sign in the local depaato that says "iriguchi". Also, many of the keywords are quite far from the kanji's true nuance (i.e., "nothingness" for "naku naru"). Contrary to Heisig's claim, the original keyword, (like the use of romanji), will forever color your understanding of correct Japanese. I.e., the criticism that kanji must be learned in context is to be taken seriously.

I do recommend buying Heisig's book because the imaginative memory system is brilliant and will inetivably aid your kanji study.

However, most important:

I don't recommend using any single author's system for learning the kanji, no matter how brilliant, fast, or self-contained it may seem. Instead, develop your own system based on your own personal learning style. As for me, that's a flash card system based on imaginative memory, pictographics, historical derevation (via. Henshall), sound associations and an ordering system based on the not-yet mentioned book by Habein & Mathias (The Complete Guide to Everyday Kanji - EXCELLENT), and my daily encounters with the kanji. However, for you, I hope, the system will be different and your very own.

I am a teacher of Japanese who wishes to add my words of praise for Jim Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji Vol. I." I am a European-American who started my formal study of Japanese in 1960 and first taught the language at the high school level in 1968. I hold a Professional Diploma in teaching Japanese from the University of Hawaii and an MA in Asian Studies from a Japanese national university. I was certified as a teacher of Japanese by the State of Oregon, taught Japanese for six years at Oregon high schools, and have lived in Japan for over eleven years.

You would think that someone with my background would know the 2000 Joyo Kanji backwards and forwards. However, I, too, have "plateaued" at the 700-800 kanji level.

In the past 39 years I have yet to meet a single native-speaker teacher of Japanese, whether in Japan or abroad, who: 1) believes that students of non-East-Asian origin can master the writing and reading from memory of the 2000 Joyo Kanji and/or 2) has ever attempted to teach a non-East-Asian student to read and write all 2000 Joyo Kanji from memory. In my experience, the "traditional" method of teaching kanji employed by native Japanese teachers -- repetitive copying, visual memory, learning simultaneously so-called Chinese readings, Japanese readings as well as various English meanings, and compounds composed of two or more kanji -- is a recipe for frustration and extremely limited success.

My suggestion: if you are serious about learning the 2000 Joyo Kanji, buy Jim Heisig's "RTK 1" today. It was written by a foreigner for foreigners. Heisig mastered the kanji using this system and, if one is to believe the testimonies at amazon.com, it has worked for other foreigners. No other product will produce Heisig's results. (A hundred years from now, there might even be a few native-speaker teachers of Japanese as a foreign language who swear by Heisig's "imaginative memory" system.) Thank you, Dr. Heisig, for demystifying both Japanese and Chinese.

When you finish this book, you will not know how to read all of the thousands of words made up of the 2000 general use kanji in Japanese. That is not the point of this book. The point of this book is to lay the foundation for the other book Remembering the Kanji II, where you will become fluent in reading kanji ten times faster than by any other method.

The problems people (read: foreigners to Japan) have with learning kanji are: attaching a meaning to a seemingly meaningless jumble of strokes, keeping similar kanji distinct in one's mind, and not forgetting them. This book is designed as preparation for the actual task of reading the kanji, by addressing these three problems.

By attaching a meaning to the kanji and parts of the kanji, this makes the kanji clearer. It's like the differenence between recognizing a tree shown on your television screen, and remembering the exact pattern of that white noise snow you get when there's no signal. Attaching these meanings also helps make these kanji stand out. A single stroke is easy to miss, but the difference between "arrow" and "fiesta" is very clear. And because the kanji are presented as clear objects that have meaning, you're as likely to forget them as you are to forget that a tree is a tree.

I've been studying Japanese for 8 years, I live in Japan, and I'm married to a Japanese. Yet I was only able to read several hundred kanji, and could write far less than that. I started Remembering the Kanji a month ago, and I can already write 450 by English keyword without making a single mistake.

It will take me a few more months to finish this book, and then surely a few months more reviewing RtK2. But that's nothing compared to the eight years of futility I have already spent. I'm sure that if I had used this book eight years ago, I would have become completely fluent in Japanese a long time ago.

If this book doesn't get you excited about learning kanji, nothing will.

This is not a gimmick book. I'm doing research for my thesis on kanji learning and I am finding a lot of information indicating why this book / method is so effective. It uses mnemonics, which to some already makes it suspect as just another gimmick, but mnemonics used properly are great aides to learning. This has been empirically proven in literature on memory and learning.

Keep an open mind and follow the instructions in the book to the letter. I think the problem with people who've told me that the book didn't work very well for them was because they didn't follow the instructions. It's a different way of learning, but many are not comfortable with trying a way different from those ways that they have been taught to learn since childhood. Thus, they don't use a key element of the method, which is visualization. Most of us can always remember a face but not necessarily a name. This is in a nutshell how the visualization works and a key reason why the Heisig method is so effective. If you want to keep trying to learn kanji the way Japanese children do, DON'T READ THIS BOOK, and set aside 20 years to learn kanji because that's about how many you'll need to master it using the traditional methods.

Someone said that the Henschell Book is better. Although the Henschell book is well written, it is for the serious scholar not those of us who just want to learn kanji for practical and functional use. If you're a struggling kanji learner, I challenge you to try this book and see if you don't get amazing results! Another good book to read, if you just want to read (not write)basic kanji that you will need when in Japan is called "Read Japanese Today!" Good Luck!

The system that James Heisig presents in the "Remembering the Kanji" series is the fastest and most effective way to learn Japanese characters that I have seen. There are a great number of systems that promote learning Kanji by associating them with a visual image, which can be effective, but also has draw backs. A phenomenon common to any serious Japanese learner is the ability to recognize Kanji when seen, but when it comes to writing them... you draw a blank - or make subtle, but important mistakes.

Heisig, on the other hand, uses "imaginative memory" not visual, and this makes all the difference. Often, I found that the opposite of the above scenario was true in the beginning stages - I'd remember how to write a character before I recognized it printed somewhere. And the best thing about this system is that it reduces the amount of time required to become proficient from a matter of years to a matter of months. I whole heartedly recommend this book to any and all Japanese students frustrated with learning Kanji!

This book will not teach you how to read Japanese characters. Don't start with any false expectations. But it is the single most useful kanji learning tool that I have ever owned, and the colossal savings in the time it takes to learn the kanji more than makes up for the rather hefty price.

In the introduction to his book Heisig makes the claim that foreigners approach kanji studies from the wrong direction. They try to learn it the way that Japanese students do, learning to read and write the characters at the same time. This is much more efficient for native Japanese students, who already have the spoken language to build from, than for foreigners who are not yet fluent. So Heisig suggests that foreigners learn to write first, then read. This is in his introduction, and though I admit that the introduction is not the most lucid piece of writing in the world, he does know what he is talking about. Heisig teaches the writing of the kanji using a mnemonic system based on the primitives. Mnemonics may be a trick, but they are often a very useful trick. He has you learn a keyword for each kanji. The keyword is quite often only obscurely related to the major meaning. This is not a mistake. The words are chosen carefully to make the mnemonic system work better. Meaning comes later. Once you have made the - relatively - small investment of time to learn the writing of the characters you then have a rather firm basis to begin learning how to read them. It is possible, after having learned to write the characters, to tackle a reader of some kind with far more efficiency than could otherwise be expected. The transition is not completely painless, but in the end you have shaved years off of your learning time.

I had already studied the characters for a little while before starting with Heisig's system. I knew a couple hundred, and lost many of those if I stopped studying for any length of time.

Using Heisig's system I was able to learn how to write the two thousand basic characters in under two weeks. It would have been one if I hadn't had other things to do while learning the second thousand. I was then able to make much better progress in learning the readings. I learned the meanings and readings far faster than I had been able to before, and I had a framework to stick them to, so I no longer had retention problems.

I did not use the second book, and do not plan to, so I cannot say how while it complements the first. I started with a reader after finishing Heisig's first book. I doubt that this method will work best for everyone. But it will beat endless pencil and paper repetition for anyone.

And don't skip the introduction!

James Heisig makes the bold claim that this book can teach you how to write all 2000 standard characters from memory in a few months, and I found that this was justified (I learned 1300 characters in 4 months, studying in my free time). The method involves decomposing characters into primitive parts and assigning an arbitrary meaning to each, which you combine to form a vivid, often hilarious image. For example, to remember the character for "reed", he divides it into the primitives "flower", "wild dog", and "fire". So I visualize myself luring a pack of ravenous "wild dogs" into a swamp, piling up "reed"s, setting fire to the cat-tail "flower"s on them, then gleefully watching them roast. This image is a lot easier to remember than a bunch of random-looking strokes, so this book's method results in an impressive long-term retention of characters. The author provides stories for the first few hundred characters, but you must invent your own afterwards.

However, this is not the whole story. Learning a kanji the Heisig way means associating a single English "keyword" to it, but remaining incapable of reading or writing any Japanese words. Furthermore, I find that when I see a character learned using "Remembering the Kanji", it can take up to ten seconds to recognize it, because I have to decompose it into parts and wrack my brain for the story I invented to remember it. In other words, this book is a crutch that does not so much teach you the 2000 kanji as familiarize you with them. It puts you on the same footing as a Chinese person: you'll have a rough idea of the meaning of the characters but you still won't know a word of Japanese. After finishing this book, you'll still have to painstakingly re-study every single kanji to really learn them.

The book also suffers from several minor flaws. Heisig's stubborn insistence not to provide the readings for kanji makes the text almost useless as a reference. The English keywords he assigns to each kanji often seem purposely chosen to be difficult to remember: for instance, he chose the keyword "sultry" for the character "atsu(i)", which is usually translated as simply "hot". I found myself regularly running to my English dictionary (with words like "interment", "sagacious", and "catalpa"), something which completely defeats the purpose of memorizing English words instead of Japanese ones. Finally, I found inventing new stories for kanji to be extremely taxing, for what amounts to the creation of mental clutter that you will flush out when you "really" learn the kanji.

Despite all this, I would still recommend this book to many. If you find yourself stuck at a limit of a few hundred kanji, Heisig's original imaginative memory method may be just what you need to break through. But it won't magically make you into a kanji genius; I know many other students who have not used an imaginative memory method to study the kanji, and they are no less proficient at reading and writing than I am. Just make sure you _do_ use a method of some sort, and don't just study ad hoc.

I bought this book after reading the other reviews on this page, and now I'm in a position to add my own to the stack. I gather that Heisig's system hasn't worked for absolutely everyone, but it sure worked for me; I managed to complete the the course in about three and a half months and, while I still have to go back and work out a few ambiguities, I've now got a handle on the kanji that it would have previously seemed foolish to hope for. Every other method I've tried has been a joke by comparison (I'm thinking of cutting my copy of "Kanji Power" into little squares to be set atop the toilet). If you put in the time, go at a reasonable pace, and honestly engage your imagination, you can, with this book, turn the kanji jungle into a well-ordered garden, all the species and sub-species logically grouped and labelled. It's work, but what you're working isn't your hand but your imagination, and that makes the process a lot more fun, not to mention efficient. However hokey it sounds, put your preconceptions aside and give it a try. As far as I'm concerned this is the only foolproof approach in existence. One suggestion: if you can find them, buy Heisig's "Kanji Study Cards" in the box set; they follow the order of the book and saved me a lot of time and hassle once I switched over to them.