Learning Japanese: Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig

Before we begin, let me expound for a bit on learning Japanese.

First off, don't. I'm serious, barring a very good reason, there is no way that the time you spend studying Japanese will ever see anything even remotely comparable to an adaquate payoff. "Ahh, but I have a very good reason.", I hear you cry. Does that reason involve family, locational requirements, or business? If it does, then fine, you may proceed. If it doesn't, you should think long and hard as to why you're making the attempt. If it (your reason) in anyway includes that you wish to better appreciate various aspects of Japanese pop-culture (anime, video games, comics, or any of the number of reasons you might be reading this blog), then for the love of all that you hold good, STOP NOW!

Put simply, thanks to the growing popularity of such things abroad, and a large group of OCD fans, anything (pop culture stuff) that you might ever wish to read or watch in Japanese that is worth reading or watching, will probably be translated for you. There are other people out there who will gleefully do all the work of learning the language and painstakingly translating whatever it is you want. Why should you work when they're willing to do it for you?

Now, it can be argued tha the translations you get, even in products you paid for, is shaky at best. Still given the learning curve of Japanese, I'd take someone elses shaky for free over my own probably even more shaky cost me years of study.

That being said, let's get down to brass tacks. I have studied Japanese for many years, and I am not good at it. In fact, I am very, very bad at it. While expressive this is not perhaps accurate enough, I am so bad at the language that I have achieved a sort of legendary status among those unfortunate enough to have to deal with me in an academic environment.

Among my many woes with the Japanese language, is the small matter of Kanji. I hate Kanji. I hate them with a passion that burns like a thousand fiery suns. My hatred of Kanji is so great that by simple association, I also hate all other pictographic writing systems. Needless to say, my ability to write the blasted things is not particularly good.

So it was much to my surprise that I encountered James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. A random web browsing brought into my possession the free demo pdf that let's the uninitated take his style for a test drive. Intrigued, or at least really bored with doing whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing, I opened the file and started reading.

Heisig makes the claim that circumstances had him arriving late at a language school in Kamakura, so that he was unable to join that semester's classes. Still, everyone recommended that since he had many years of Kanji tedium ahead of him, he might as well start now. On his own, and without real academic guidance, he proceeded to master all 2,000 of the commonly used kanji in a month. It's about this point where any rational person should close the file, delete it, and never think about it again.

However, I was procrastinating, an activity I take rather seriously, so I pressed on. Things don't improve much as Heisig describes his method. He breaks all Kanji down into his own system of primitives; these primitives being unusual in that not all of them are an accepted Kanji radical, or a kanji in and of itself. He then assigns each of these primitives a single english word. Kanji are then built by memorizing a mnemonic story involving these words.

It sounds both terribly silly and incredibly roundabout as a way of doing things. Unfortunately, at least for me, it also seems to work. After 6 lessons in 4 days, totalling over 100 kanji I'm still going strong with almost no difficulty, despite what I said above. It seems, all in all, too good to be true, and for all I know, it may be. It could be that once I reach the higher numbers of kanji covered my brain starts to forget the stories of the earlier ones. I'll tell you when I get there.

Still, for all that I want to sacrifice goats in praise of Mr. Heisig, his method does have it's flaws. For one, no attention whatsoever is paid to the pronunciation of the kanji. His first volume covers solely remembering how to write them, something of perhaps questionable value (although, I must say that I wish I had discovered his book say ... during my freshman year Japanese, where it would have been of incalculable value on those kanji quizzes). While his second volume apparently addresses the pronunciation, I am not privy to that text and so can not adaquately (or arbitrarily) speak as to its effectiveness. Additonally, some of the stories that Mr. Heisig uses seem ... well ...awkward at best. Still, since he apparently stops giving them at some point, leaving you to craft your own, everyone will adjust as need be.

The only real remaining problem is the book's limited print run. As of this date, good luck actually finding a copy of his book from which to study. Amazon.com wants $300 for a single copy. While new prints are apparently on the way, word is that they won't be ready till at least May. Still, at such time as I can order a copy for around $40, I would gladly pay that price. And that's saying something.