It’s over two years since I started learning Japanese, and for a lot of that time I’ve owned a copy of James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji. The first time I went through it I got halfway (~1000 characters) but ran out of steam and consequently took a long break from it. After reading a book on mnemonic techniques I realised that I’d failed to heed the important advice that Heisig gives early on in the book. Reading the first sections again I’m now seeing what I did wrong, and ultimately what led me to become overwhelmed by the number of reviews I was doing (all reviews done on kanji.koohii.com). In the end it took be 10,000 reviews to get halfway, so clearly I was missing something.
One point was the over-reliance on puns and word play rather than concrete mental images. This was how I learned the kana (using Heisig’s other book, Remembering the Kana) and it worked very well. Dropping down to ‘just’ clever word play doesn’t make as good use of imaginitive memory. The image needs to be clearly visualised until it is readily associable with the keyword. The other main point was: attending a Japanese class! I’d forgotten but Heisig warns against mixing this learning method with indiscriminate kanji learning. This may seem counterintuitive at first but given that the point of Heisig’s method is to divide and conquer it makes sense. By attending a class every week and doing the homework I was required to learn kanji in an ad-hoc manner rather than in the principled framework that Heisig outlines. Also doing the exercises, writing the essays and revising vocabulary all take time away from the original activity of kanji learning. Now that the A-level exams are over I am again free to focus on kanji, and this time take care to follow Heisig’s advice. Much of his advice is given without much justification and of course no citations, but as it turns out I have found evidence supporting his assertions in the literature on memory (more on this later) so I am quite happy to follow his guidelines. I’m now on the third day of studying Heisig again and have raced through 140 kanji. This is still well within the region where I was careful to make strong images and so they are all readily memorable. I’m expecting this pace to slow later and this time I’ll be careful to moderate the pace such that there is always time to form concrete images for each new character, and so finish this course finally this year!