Remembering The Kanji by James Heisig - part 1

So I have already explained a bit about this topic, but I'll explain it with a bit more detail now, so you guys know exactly how I've been learning the Japanese writing system.

First a short explanation of this writing system.

Japanese consists of three different sets of 'symbols'.
- Hiragana (ひらがな): Each hiragana symbol represents a certain syllable/sound. There's the vowels a, i, u, e, o. Then there's the consonant/vowel combinations, such as ka, ki, su, te, mo, and all other combinations. Consonants cannot stand on their own, except n. Here is a hiragana table for anyone that is interested in it. Distinguishable from katakana by their 'curvier' forms.
- Katakana (カタカナ): Each katakana symbol also represents a syllable, the same as the hiragana ones and a few extra ones. This is because katakana is mostly used to transcribe words of foreign origin. Most words are changed around so they don't really sound like their original selves, to fit into the 'no loose consonants' rule, but a few sounds not in hiragana symbols (vi, du, etc.) were added to help out a bit. Here is a katakana table. As you can see, the symbols have straighter lines and less curvy bits.
- Kanji (漢字): This is the hardest stuff and what I've spent months and months learning. And what I use the book for that this post is all about. The symbols, taken from Chinese, respresent meanings, rather than just sounds, like hiragana and katakana. A few hundred years ago, Japan had a spoken language, but no writing system. The spoken language wasn't anything like Chinese, but the writing system came over from there (putting it very simply). So they had a problem: They had sounds in Japanese and symbols in Chinese, both meaning the same things. So, seemigly to complicate things even more for us Japanese learners, they decided to give most of the symbols both a Japanese (kunyomi) and a Chinese (onyomi) pronunciation. They did make up some rules of when to use which, but there are lots of exceptions too. Also, some of them have multiple onyomi, so when to use which? An example: So far, I have learnt three different onyomi for this kanji: 納: na, nan and noo. Some are used more than others, but all can be used.
Luckily for us foreigners (and also for the Japanese themselves) the Japanese government decided a while ago to make a list of roughly 2000 kanji (there are over 50,000 in total) that it is strictly necessary to learn, in order to understand newspapers, regular books, etc. These are called Jouyou kanji and these are the ones I've been learning. Kanji that do not appear on this list, and also verb inflections, etc. are written in hiragana in books, newspapers, etc. The exceptions to this are people's names, some contain non-jouyou kanji, but that's not for this topic.

Remembering the Kanji 1
In comes this amazing book (full title: Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters). This guy, James Heisig, went to Japan. He didn't speak or write the language. When he arrived there, he was too late to start the Japanese language course that was already going, and he had to wait a few weeks before a new one would start. So he decided to have a look at the language himself. He created his own system for learning the kanji that allows us to learn them as foreign adults, rather than Japanese children.

Say what, Koos? Well, in universities and Japanese courses all over the world, people are taught the kanji by writing them over and over again (stroke order is very important, and also knowing stroke count, as dictionaries are often sorted by number of strokes), at the same time trying to get all those onyomi and kunyomi (pronunciations) in their heads. Heisig reckons this is like trying to walk to the left with your left leg and at the same time trying to walk to the right with your right leg. It's just very difficult. A common idea among Japanese teachers at universities is that foreigners can never learn the kanji as well as Japanese people can. Heisig also reckons that's crap (and so do I, after working through this method).

In his method, he points out Chinese people learn Japanese much faster than people from other nations. This is because they already know the symbols, their meaning and their stroke order. What he wants to do with his book Remembering the Kanji 1, is get you on that level; learning the stroke order and the meaning of the kanji, while not yet trying to learn the pronunciation as well. He argues that this also goes much faster than trying to learn it all at once, so within a few months you are done and you can move on to learning the pronunciation. And he is right; I finished learning the meaning and stroke order of 2042 kanji in 6 months (while working fulltime!). That's an average of 11 a day, whereas it took me 3 days to learn just the numbers 1-10; stroke order, meaning, onyomi and kunyomi. There were also many days during those 6 months where I didn't learn any, because I was tired or busy, but on my top days I learnt between 60 and 80 in one day!

How does this method work? It's easy. Heisig starts off from the fact that we are not anything like the Japanese schoolchildren, who learn the kanji by writing them over and over again. There are several major differences: we are adults, so we have a different brain. We are capable of abstract thought and imagination better than children. Also; Japanese schoolchildren already know the pronunciation of these words, they just haven't learnt to write them in kanji yet. We, foreigners, do not know the pronunciation yet. Therefore, it would be nonsense to learn them in the way they do.

What he did was show how the kanji are made up of certain elements. To start off, he took the kanji for the numbers 1-10, because most people have learnt them already before finding this method (and if not, they're easy to learn): 一,二,三,四,五,六,七,八,九,十. He also introduced 5 other easy kanji that often come back: mouth 口, day (aka sun) 日, month (aka moon) 月, rice field 田 and eye 目. A lot of kanji can be made up by combining these 15. The trick was: you take the loose elements, take the meaning of the kanji and make a story with a strong mental image to remember it.

An example: the kanji for sun 日 and the kanji for eye 目 make up the kanji for risk 冒. In it, the sun symbol is over the eye symbol. Your story could be: When you look up into the SUN with your EYE, it is a RISK, because you might go blind. That's it; then you know it. There's nothing more to it. Next time you see the word 'risk', you'll know how to write the kanji, because of this story.
(In the book, the stroke order is also given, but it's fairly straightforward and after a while you just know what stroke order a symbol should get, I wrote each kanji twice while learning it, to get a feel for the stroke order.)
Another example. Sun 日 and moon 月 together form the kanji for bright 明. Yeah. Do I really need to make a story for that? XD
After you've learnt a lot of kanji combining those first 15 (and some of them seem really difficult before you start this, like Dr: 博, that's the 47th one you learn) you start learning more new elements and learning kanji with those elements. Each element gets its own meaning that you can use to make your story.
The pieces kanji are built up out of are called radicals. Each radical is an element in Heisig's book, but not each element is a radical. For example, the kanji for bright (seen above) is an element in a kanji that comes back later: alliance 盟, but it is not a radical.

In the beginning, I thought I was doing something wrong, that's how easy it was. I was so proud of myself for doing 10 the first day, I never thought it could be done!

After this, of course, the trick is reviewing and keeping it fresh. If I never again wrote the kanji for risk, I would forget it quite soon. But if I keep reviewing, it stays in my head. For this, I use a Spaced Reviewing System (SRS) on the best site ever: Reviewing the Kanji. SRS makes you review after the amount of days after which you have almost forgotten the kanji again (almost, but not completely). This way, you do not review too much, and have enough time to add more new kanji, but you also don't review too little.

First, you review after 1 day. If you get it right, the kanji comes back 3 days later. Then, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 120 days and finally 240 days. If you fail a kanji, it goes back to square 1 and you start from the front again.

I soon realised that 10 cards a day was very little; that I could do loads more per day. On the forum of Reviewing the Kanji, there are people who say they do 100 a day and I believe them. However, I was working fulltime and usually tired in the evenings, so I didn't always learn new kanji. I finished on January 31st of 2010, though, and now I can proudly say I know the meaning and stroke order of 2042 kanji. :D

And what's even better; if I were to encounter a kanji I've never seen before, I can recognise the elements, make up a story and remember it as easily as the other 2042! So if I wanted to learn all 50,000 kanji (not saying I do, but hypothetically) I could use this method to learn all of them. It's not just for those 2042 I've learnt already, it can be used for any kanji I come across (Chinese characters too, for that matter).

I'm also using Heisig's method to learn the pronunciation (onyomi and kunyomi) but more about that in part 2, as that is my explanation of Remembering the Kanji 2. ^^