If we don’t look up the primitives in the index and check for alternative meanings we may miss an opportunity for a richer or simpler story, both of which could help with remembering the kanji.

Last time I went through Heisig I didn’t use the index once; I think that and an over-reliance on the RvTK site made learning harder.

The aim is to construct images/stories that are vivid to you. To do that, first allow yourself all the meanings of each primitive. Next, don’t look at other’s stories unless you’re stuck; once you read them your imagination may be biased towards their interpretation and you need to form your own.

I think that this limit is very real if an unstructured approach is taken such as simply reminding oneself on a daily basis, “ah, got to do my kanji study!”. If however we build a schedule, commit to a particular time of day for each new habit and protect that time as if it were a meeting with an important client then I think we can pick up the pace a bit.

The best example of when developing a habit has helped me was in completing my PhD. By committing to getting up at 6:20am every single day and getting right into writing it meant I was virtually guaranteed to make a step forward each day. This is the advice I’ve heard echoed in every workshop I’ve been to on academic writing, and that is to write every day, to give yourself a schedule and to stick to it.

In four months I’ll be going to Japan for a year. I don’t want to be stuck inside a poorly air-conditioned room on a hot day studying kanji so I’m aiming to get to the end of the Heisig method by Christmas. I have other goals to achieve before then too, and I think the only way I’m going to get it all done is to treat each like I did my thesis writing: make a schedule and stick to it.

What do you want to do? Are you happy with your daily progress? If you are, then I’d be interested in hearing if it’s something that has become a habit for you. If you’re unhappy with your progress, why not set yourself a schedule right now? Ensure that your schedule is as specific as possible, i.e. 8:00am, at my desk, 1hr kanji study.

Good luck!

In previous Heisig attempts I was careful to always have pencil and paper ready for all kanji reviews I did on the “Reviewing the Kanji” site [1] so I could practise writing them. I would inevitably be unhappy with my first attempt at the character, and would try one or two more times. Today I just traced them on the desk in front of me. The result is I finished the reviews faster, but more importantly at no point did I get hung up on how well I’d written each character.

Heisig cautions against writing out the characters many times when learning or reviewing them, as this only reinforces in your mind (perhaps subconsciously) the old idea that you need to write the characters over and over in order to learn them. By simply tracing you free yourself from worrying about form and in doing so you save time.

Since writing is so important, I’d recommend practising every day but don’t lapse into the habit of repeatedly writing characters; if you learn a character this way then there’s little chance of you being able to use it effectively later on when building stories based on it.

[1] Reviewing the Kanji

Their theory is that when you have little/no knowledge of the subject you can approach it with a child-like sense of naïveté. As you gain further knowledge of the subject you begin to categorise which allows you to consider complicated subject matter in a more structured form but at the cost of losing detail.

“If you categorize a person, you will be less likely to remember individual details about the person.”

This is relevant to kanji study, as here we must balance categorising the kanji by exploiting a structure (Heisig’s ordering based on the primitives) with remembering individual details between characters, e.g. the difference between 待 and 持。

The results of this study suggest an inverse relationship between categorisation performance and recollection of fine detail. Encouragingly, the adults in the study were able to match the ability of children when studying completely made-up material. This lends some support to Heisig’s assertion that learning the etymology of the kanji is likely to be a hindrance rather than a help. It also suggests that categorisation should be used sparingly otherwise we could fall into the trap of simply recognising “characters which contain 寺” instead of distinguishing 待 and 持。

待　持

[1] Too much knowledge can be bad for some types of memory, study finds

My first attempt started on 17th January 2007, just after I’d returned from a 3 month internship in Japan, and the day after I started my PhD. On this account I did 10,153 reviews which got me to kanji 1026.

My second attempt started on 21st June 2009. 1046 reviews later I was on kanji #249.

From memory, the second attempt went better because I re-read the introduction to the book and realised that the reason I had burned out under the sheer weight of pending reviews was because I was relying on word games instead of visual imagination, something Heisig warns against.

While I felt like I was making more progress, something clearly got in the way. PhD work has a way of absorbing all your free time, but this wasn’t the reason why I quit that time. Rather, it seems that while I noticed the advice against using word games, I failed to heed the advice that the images for each character needed to be vivid. Like this guy [1] I had just come up with an image quickly so that I could move on to the next.

Heisig states in his book that at 2 hours a day, 20-25 new kanji each day should be possible. That equates to at most 6 minutes per character. I would wager I spent no longer than 2 minutes on each, with most of the time spent reading the frame in the book and writing the character several times.

The plan this time therefore is to spend much longer on each character, until the image is strong, settled and rich. I will also try to incorporate other senses such as smell and touch; if this were an exercise in meditation then that is what we would do, so I will try applying it here to see if the extra sensory information can help make each image stronger and so help with remembering the kanji.

[1] Imaginative memory is the key

One kind of meditation involves visualisation. Your object of focus can become an imaginary apple, where you are at once sensing the waxiness of its skin, its weight in your hand, the intense taste of the first bite.

Those who are already familiar with the Heisig method of kanji learning may have guessed where I’m going with this. Heisig teaches us to form vivid images for each character to aid memorisation. He provides some guidelines or rules when constructing these images, but doesn’t justify them in the book to avoid distraction; we just take them at face value, trusting his judgement.

I think however that an understanding of meditation, particular meditation through visualisation may help with improving our ability to learn kanji using Heisig’s method. In meditation, we are warned against forming superficial images that we only see; we should also sense them (the waxiness of the apple, its taste). Likewise Heisig insists that we spend time with the images and make them as vivid as possible.

There is something different about the way in which I learned the kana (using Heisig’s book) and the way I learned many of the kanji. As the kanji count approached 1000 I became lazy, relying instead on making images using the words alone, with only shallow imagery. Heisig warns against this at the start of the book in fact. Perhaps much time needs to be invested in the early stages to ensure that we are visualising correctly. At my first exposure to kana I found them extremely difficult to remember, yet putting my faith in Heisig’s method I learned them rather effortlessly.

Herein lies a possible problem, and an insight into why Heisig’s methods has some detractors who appear to practically hate the method: some people cannot visualise on demand.

In visualisation there are two types of meditation, in one you conjure the image, in the other you allow images to surface from the depths of your mind; it turns out some people just get blankness when attempting to conjure up images directly.

With this insight, perhaps there is a way to practise visualisation such that our skill with it can improve; certainly welcome news if it means higher retention rates for kanji. Another interesting thought is that if you are really into your kanji study using Heisig’s method, you may in fact be meditating already!

Just for fun, try and picture something in your mind right now. Imagine an apple for example. Is it red, green? Is the skin waxy or dry? What does it taste like?

If you can’t pictures anything you may be one of the percentage of people who can’t easily visualise like that on demand. You could instead try just keeping ‘apple’ in mind and seeing what comes up.

In doing so I’ve often been surprised  at how different a person’s writing was to their speaking. In fact, the best speakers tended to produce the hardest-to-read essays! This was invariably due to the sentences being unnecessarily long and complex. It seems those who were more skilled with English pushed themselves further with word choice and sentence structure, with the unintended effect of producing tiring, hard-to-read prose.

Sadly the mark your essay will get depends only partly on its content. You will most likely get the best mark if whichever PhD student your lecturer has handed to is in a good mood and not too tired when he sits down to mark it. The best way to understand how they feel is to mark a big pile of essays yourself; you’ll quickly discover what makes them hand out the highest marks!

I’ve compiled below some tips on writing. Follow these and your marks are certain to rise as not only will your essay be easier to read for the marker (you don’t want to tire him out, he’ll just get angry!) and for you: how many times have you returned to one of your essays from months back and literally not been able to understand parts of it?

1. Keep it simple. I cannot repeat this often enough. The single-biggest failure of much writing I see by non-native speakers is that they have made their essay look complex on purpose. The result is that the essay is tiring to read, and this isn’t going to impress. My suggestion? Write it as if you’re saying it. Yes it will sound a bit casual, but at least it is understandable! Give it a go and see what happens.
2. There is nothing worse than long complex sentences that are hard to comprehend. Split long sentences into two!
3. Make your argument complex, but your sentences simple.
   You have an interesting point to make, and you can weave a complex argument using simple sentences. Each sentence providing a bite-sized chunk of your own unique thinking on the topic.
4. What is the ‘story’ of your essay? What is the point?
   Keep asking yourself this question constantly to make sure you’re on track for answering the question. Writing an interesting essay that’s too broad or on another topic can’t get you the marks you want, you’ve got to answer the set question!
5. Have you ever thought about how a marker reads your essay? Here’s how I do it; this is quite common in academia:
   I first check the references as there are always mistakes; if there are many mistakes I may wonder if you were as careless in the rest of the essay.
   Having read the title I then read your conclusions. If this was a paper it would tell me what exciting thing you’re going to teach me; for an essay I get an idea of whether there’s an interesting argument in your essay or not.
   I then read the introduction and move through the essay. If I have a good impression by this point then I’m more likely to forgive mistakes in the middle sections. If your references are poorly done, your conclusion looks like you wrote it at the last minute, and the introduction looks like you wrote it just because everyone does then those same mistakes in the middle sections will stand out and annoy, resulting in a lower mark.
   Bear this writing order in mind, and don’t forget that your marker is human and quite possible overworked!
6. Put it down, leave it alone for 1-3 days then come back to it.
   Can’t recommend this enough. How many times have you been staring at your now-lengthy document, stuck on even where to start redrafting it? You’ve stared at it until you’re sick of it.
   Put it down, go do something else, and don’t even think about it for 3 days if you can manage it. After the 3 days you’ll return to it with energy and enthusiasm, two things you spent all of in the first round of writing.

If you’ve drafted an redrafted a number of times, left it for a few days and returned to it but feel you can’t do more, try doing any/all of the following:

1. Does each sentence have a purpose? Look at each and every sentence and ask yourself honestly, does it need to be in the essay? Sentences which just bump up the word count just waste the marker’s time, and possibly annoy them!
2. Look for long, complex sentences. If a think a sentence might be a bit long or hard to comprehend in one go, split it into two. In a formal setting (i.e. an essay) this is likely to be perfectly acceptable and makes for easier reading and comprehension.

I don’t believe that pace slows; quite the opposite. There’s this milestone which, when reached, allows for an explosion in pace. When you start learning, you’re learning in your own language and memorising words and grammar rules. New words and concepts are explained in your language, with a smattering of the new language. But eventually you’ll get to the level where you can learn in the new language. You’ve achieved what I call momentum; your learning pace explodes because you’re conversing exclusively in the target language and learning new words/concepts directly in that language.

At this stage I wanted to interrupt and challenge what he was saying as he was demoralising this girl for no apparent reason. If you aim high, you have chance of getting there. If you aim low, then you’ll hit the mark but you won’t have done anything extraordinary. Squashing enthusiasm like he was doing seemed wrong. If I wanted to be extra cynical I’d say that perhaps it is something to do with his own performance with other languages. Sadly after this the misinformation continued, which is what inspired me to write about this.

If he’s demoralising students then I’d like to make some small contribution in the other direction. It turns out that this girl is also learning Japanese. This professorial character had learned some Chinese and Japanese. She mentions that she thinks Japanese must be harder for English speakers than Chinese. He immediately disagrees, “It’s the other way round; Japanese doesn’t have tones so it’s easier”. Well, Japanese does have intonation, it just doesn’t have tones as a formal part of the language as Chinese does. I would contend that Japanese is harder for English speakers than Chinese due to there being more similarities in the way Chinese sentences are constructed.

That aside, I wonder how widespread this “Japanese intonation is flat” myth is? We can debunk this in one go: ask a Japanese person to say 親切（しんせつ）and　新設（しんせつ）and listen to the difference. Same kana, different intonation. I am not an expert on either Japanese or Chinese, but what I aim for is that what I do say regarding these languages is based on facts from reliable sources. With that said, if you disagree with anything I say please comment and state your claim! The take home message from this article is, if you’re learning a language, challenge conventions! Don’t be afraid to be skeptical of what people, even teachers, tell you; sometimes they are not the best people to be learning from! For more on why that’s the case, see this article.

These days I study Japanese, and when I started the first thing I did was get a book and CD to prepare for a 3 month stint working in Japan. I also got a book on learning the hiragana and katakana by James Heisig because it happened to be recommended on Amazon.

Talk about aiming low and underestimating the scale of the task! Even if I mastered the content in those two resources I’d still be stuck with virtually no knowledge of kanji (I’d be functionally illiterate) and would be confined to some pretty formulaic set conversations. Not to mention, these textbooks always hide the difficult Japanese from you so as not to scare you when you’re starting out.

The result was that I struggled constantly with learning the language and I learned an important lesson: you need input. You need to listen to hundreds, thousands of hours of spoken language. You need to read as much as possible. Drilling set phrases and words will only get you so far (perhaps about as far as I got, struggling as I did?).

After returning to the UK to start a PhD programme the first things I did was to look for a Japanese class. I quickly found a place that looked good (its sole purpose was teaching Japanese and was affiliated with the University of Manchester) and e-mailed the guy who runs the center. After arriving 30 minutes late he looked at the speeches I’d brought along (from my time in Japan, these were speeches to my colleagues, thanking them for their hospitality etc.) and told me that I couldn’t join the class as it was for beginners and so I’d be ‘disruptive’.

So, point #1 for why language classes don’t work:

1. The class will proceed at the pace of its slowest member. Somehow it doesn’t seem proper to talk about people in a class being slow, but naturally each member of the class has their own pace for whatever reason. If it was a maths class, they’d simply be stuck, need to get a tutor, and maybe do badly in the exam. In a language class however, there’s an in-built “no one left behind” mentality. If you’re sitting in a class and you’re biting your tongue to avoid answering all the questions, and you find yourself sitting waiting for others to answer, then you’re probably in the wrong class. Tip: go for the most advanced class that they’ll let you in to; you’ll thrive there.
2. You’ll spend 90% of the time listening to non-native speakers’ attempts at the language. Who’s talking more, the students or the teacher? In my experience Japanese teachers tend to conduct their classes in English. I’ve taken classes in French, German, Spanish and Russian and right from the first day the teachers were speaking in the target language at least 50% of the time. It throws you at first, and then becomes completely natural. To then do it the other way, where the only time you hear proper spoken Japanese is when the teacher corrects something or reads out a sentence, is quite painful. The end result is that you’re very rarely hearing the language you want to learn spoken as it should be.

Now, I’d say that these two points are the most damning, and any others that come to mind are either not quite as severe or quite closely related. For example take the problems that you’re given. It’s a bit like maths at school, where you’re forced to solve a set of problems from the curriculum, and told frequently that these skills will be helpful in adult life. Of course, very few people are using trigonometry or even the arithmetic of fractions in their daily life and would have been better served by being taught problem solving skills. Analagously then, in language learning we’re typically given a number of disjoint scenarios with questions about a passage maybe. We learn these examples but when faced with an actual conversation we can’t understand what they’re saying. Then when we manage to work out what they’re saying we find we haven’t had a problem quite like this before, and so end up not being able to say much.

That all sounds rather negative, and it is, but I’m yet to meet someone studying Japanese who has only been through classes and can hold a conversation or read even simple texts well. The ones who make good progress are more likely to be those who, in their spare time, watch Japanese TV, listen to podcasts, read manga or simpler books that interest them (this is the crucial part!) and have so taken measures to immerse themselves in the language. In my case I’m abandoning all classes, turning the system on its head and just reading things that I find interesting, and listening to as much spoken Japanese as possible. This is how I learned English and Icelandic, and really there’s no biological reason why this approach can’t work for adults. But, more on that later.

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!