I learned kanji in Japanese class at school through the traditional way of being taught how to write them and then doing it many times until I was able to remember them. I can’t really say I enjoyed it, but it got the job done for me. After I got fairly good at recognizing them, I wanted to know how other people were learning them, and I found out about the Heisig method and other ways of making mnemomics to remember kanji meanings, their readings, and/or how they are written by making some kind of short story that may be funny, dumb, or over the top.
I know it probably doesn’t work well for everyone, but for those that did, what’s your take on it? Did you enjoy learning characters this way?
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Relatively enjoyable, yes.
I had tried to learn the kanji with repetition writing and the kinds of flash cards where you look at the kanji and try to recall all of its ON and KUN readings and all that, which was tedious and ineffective. I was probably learning more kanji by looking them up over and over while trying to read Japanese, which is less tedious, but frustrating because you’re constantly interrupting the story for lookups … and if you are reading where you have furigana or yomi/rikai type plugins then you just lean on those instead of actually reading the character.
Comparatively, then, revisiting the Kanji from the start to get them ‘right’, I thought Heisig’s method was both more enjoyable and more effective. Of course, I was also interested in learning how to write the characters correctly … many people just want to read, and I’m not convinced that ‘reverse-RTK’ is as effective, but it certainly has plenty of advocates.
I would recommend though that anybody looking to do RTK consider using RTK-lite, which is just a list of characters that forms a subset of RTK where you learn the more common characters and the building blocks needed for them. This lets you complete your ‘grade school reading’ level more quickly and makes it less likely to give up halfway … RTK is *more* enjoyable than some styles of drilling, but it can still get pretty grindy, depending on how you’re reviewing.