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11-15-2007, 06:57 PM
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11-15-2007, 07:47 PM
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11-15-2007, 08:48 PM
I have Genki I and II, would they be a good way to help me progress with kanji? I've done up to a little of chapter 3 but was wary of progressing further since kanji are then introduced in Genki and I thought it might not work well with my efforts in Heisig.
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11-16-2007, 12:39 AM
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11-16-2007, 08:09 AM
I like the Heisig approach. It gives you a system to easily remember and recall a couple thousand kanji with minimal effort. You remove the repetative drilling approach that most kanji learners do over the course of many years and condence it into a system based around using your imagination. It works remarkably well.
That said, it doesn't do you any good to learn Japanese. You just learn the kanji that Japanese people use most frequently. Then as you actually study Japanese, you can apply the kanji (which are now easily distinguishable and rememberable in your own head) to new words that you learn. But the nice thing is, you can look at a pair of kanji, have no idea what the word is, but have a guess as to what it might mean, based on the characters making it up. That's a good skill to have. Once you start learning readings, you can read words you don't know as well. I look at words all the time and think "you read it like this... but I wonder what the actual meaning is". It's kinda cool to have some guessing ability instead of just walking around blind all the time.
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11-16-2007, 08:59 AM
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Like you said, it sounds valuable coupled with another system.
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11-16-2007, 12:47 PM
The problem with the Heisig method isn`t that it`s difficult to remember. It`s that it has you remembering the wrong bits. It applies a story to each kanji, which is fine. If it works as a memory device, good for you.
My complaints come in with the content of these stories, and the meanings they teach. It`s been years since I looked at one of the books so I can`t come up with an actual example... But I do recall enough to explain what I mean. He breaks the kanji down into pieces which are used to form these stories. Sounds good, but he doesn`t break them down according to the actual rules, so you can`t look them up in a normal Japanese dictionary. Those go by the radicals. Why he split them up differently is a total mystery. In the book I read, the kanji was given, along with an abstract story illustrating a specific meaning. However, the meaning was the meaning easiest to come up with a story for, and NOT the most common meaning. There were also no clues on how to actually read the kanji, so even if you could speak Japanese perfectly, the chance that you could connect the spoken words to the kanji you`ve remembered is very low. What you end up with are these isolated kanji which you may be able to derive some sort of meaning from when you see them. Not what they actually mean in words, and definitely not what they mean in context. The ordering is not at all natural, sort of along the lines of learning to spell "encyclopedia" before you can so much as say "book". My recommendation is to follow a more natural order. I don`t have any problems with using the Heisig approach of stories. If it helps you remember, then GREAT! But memorizing in the order he presents these kanji puts you in a position which forces you to memorize ALL of them before you can read the same kanji as a 3rd grader. And that is a recipe for frustration when you actually try to put some of your knowledge to use. Especially when even those you DO know have different meanings than the one you memorized. For a language learner, this sort of problem usually causes them to give up. In Japanese, there are words (and by extension kanji) that you will encounter on a regular basis... And other words/kanji that you`ll hardly if ever encounter. The same goes for English, and any other language. Even a very literate English speaker won`t know *every* English word. And the less often they use a specific word, the weaker that word is in memory. Being fluent in a language isn`t a matter of knowing every word. All you need to achieve fluency is a solid core, with gradually weaker knowledge as you spread out. The Japanese order of learning the kanji is much more natural. It starts with the basics, and advances in order of frequency. As you cover the basics first, you continue to use them as you advance to the next level - and they become even stronger. The least encountered kanji are studied last, and as they really aren`t all that necessary, they can safely fade from memory without causing any trouble. My husband is a native Japanese speaker. But yet there are countless kanji that he only knows the meaning of in specific words. It isn`t necessary to know what that there is some obscure meaning that it is derived from. It means such and such in the only word it is encountered regularly in. He also has forgotten how to write a ton of others - he can read them, but if asked out of the blue doesn`t know how to write them. The Heisig method is something like learning to spell a bunch of words that begin with the same 3 letters, without even telling you how to read them... Regardless of whether you`ll ever encounter them in real life or not. It just doesn`t make sense based on human development, and natural patterns of language acquisition. You don`t teach a baby to spell before they can talk. Sure, they`ll need that knowledge eventually, but isn`t it more important to have a clue what people are saying to them first?
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11-17-2007, 05:37 AM
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I don`t think it would be *too* difficult to use it together with Heisig, so that you will have devices to memorize the kanji as they come up. Good luck!
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11-17-2007, 09:39 AM
I agree with Nyorin's assessment 100%.
I learned Greek and Latin roots when I was...I think 6th or 7th grade. It improved my understanding of English exponentially, and I use those lessons, probably daily. Imagine learning Greek and Latin roots at the age of 5. Not so helpful. That's how I see Heisig method. It has useful things to tell you, but you start putting up wallpaper before you have put in the insulation.
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