So thanks to a much slower weekend then usual I’ve had lots of time to catch up and review putting my smart.fm studied count up to 600! Now that I’m done the first 3 steps I’m going to wait a bit before I move on to make sure that I get these items firmly set in my mind they’re not feeling too concretely set in my memory yet. This will also give me time to decide whether or not I’ll move on to just pronunciation in smart.fm after this.
As promised I will also elaborate on some of the impressions that Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji” (RTK) book has made on me and explain how they have changed my ways of thinking about my study.
So some quotes from the introduction:
“In a word it is hard to imagine a less efficient way of learning the reading and writing of the kanji than to study them simultaneously. And yet this is the method that all Japanese textbooks and courses follow. The bias is too deeply ingrained to be rooted out by anything but experience to the contrary.”
“I do not myself know of any teacher of Japanese who has attempted to use this book in a classroom setting. My suspicion is that they would soon abandon the idea. The book is based on the idea that the writing of the kanji can be also based on the idea that the pace of study is different from one individual to another, and for each individual, from one week to the next. Organizing study to the routines of group instruction runs counter to those ideas.”(this quote is seriously making me reconsider whether I want to take language classes while in Japan or not)
“The idea of “mastering” the kanji comes from overexposure to schooling, the notion that a language is a cluster of skills that can be divided and completed. No language can do this…” (this is a fault in thinking I make too often in life. I do it with sports, academics, hobb0ies. Although I think is is a flaw of logic, it can do wonders to provide motivation to meet a goal
“The best order for learning the kanji is by no means the best order for remembering them.” (that is the key aspect of smart.fm vs RTK1. one gives you more useful things right away, but at a cost of more work to remember them. RTK has me needing less reviews than smart.fm)
“Using kanji as primitives allow one to review known characters at the same time as learning new ones.”
“The meaning and writing, the two hardest part of kanji, separated from everything else.” (this seems to make sense to me)
The book also gives a great analogy about memorizing a kaleidoscope. If you just look for a long time and try to remember the image you are using visual memory, but the next time you pick one up and look you encounter a problem. Since it always looks so similar either you replace the previous image in memory or the two get mixed up. The solution the book offers is to use imaginative memory and make a story. you then don't remember the image but the story.
for example given this image:
you could imagine two wizards (one with a hat pointing up, the other with it pointing down) under a sun gazing into a crystal ball with rays coming out...
Now i bet you can remember this part of the image weeks after reading this (please leave comments if this is true).
"You shouldn't ask yourself why you forget some kanji, but instead ask why you remember the others and apply that technique to the others."
"If you are confusing one kanji with another… Take a careful look at the two stories. Perhaps you have made one or the other of them so vivid that it has attracted extraneous elements to itself that make the two kanji-images fuse into one. Or again, it may be that you did not pay sufficient attention to the advice about clarifying a single connotation for the key word."
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