My post last Friday about Remembering the Kanji received a number of excellent comments, so I thought I’d continue the discussion today.
I’m doing Heisig to see how (or if) it improves my handwriting. I don’t have any problems reading Chinese characters far in excess of the number offered by either Remembering the Kanji or Remembering the Hanzi. As I said in this post, I learned to read through a hodgepodge of various techniques, and, while probably not the most efficient way to learn, I’m pretty satisfied with the results. Like everyone, though (and I do mean everyone, native speakers most definitely included), my ability to write characters from memory lags behind my ability to read them. I wanted to try Heisig to see if it would close the gap.
At this point (I passed frame #1500 this morning), I’m not so sure that it will. The issue I’m facing is the mental disconnect between the character as I know it (in context, as part of various compounds, etc.), and the Heisig keyword and story. For instance, the character省 has the Heisig keyword “focus.” The story I made was something about having only a few (少) things in front of your eyes (目) makes it easy to focus. The problem, though, is that that ‘focus’ meaning is only loosely related to one (and the least common, at that) use of the character in Chinese. I could write 省 from memory before Heisig, of course, but its illustrative of the problem.
The key, of course, is whether or not this would have been an issue if I had started with Heisig before learning the characters on my own, and I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect not (because I would have formed my concept of the characters with Heisig as a framework, rather than draping Heisig over my existing framework, but it’s impossible to know). The other question is whether or not the problems I’m having are an artifact of using Remembering the Kanji while still targeting Mandarin. I don’t believe this to be true, but again I don’t know.
One common thing that I read, though, that I take issue with is the idea that RTK or RTH will teach you to read the characters. While I do think that RTK (or any other similar method) does something useful, teaching you to read is simply not one of them, any more than learning the meanings of English words (in your native language) by memorizing letter shapes teaches you to read English (that’s a crappy analogy, but whatever).
What Heisig does is split up the cognitive load of learning to read Chinese (or Japanese, or Korean hanja, or whatever). Just knowing a single possible meaning for a character does not mean that you can read words composed of those characters (i.e., 省城 is not obvious from “focus castle,” nor is 羊水 – though admittedly that’s just not obvious in any sense). What it does mean, though, is that you’re not having to simultaneously learn how to recognize and write the character, how its pronounced, and what it means in the context you find it in. Recognizing and writing the character are rather difficult components of this process, and so getting it out of the way early should pay dividends later on in the form of increased acquisition speed (you’ll also, of course, get some ancillary benefits from having a rough idea of what the character might mean, if for nothing else but constructing mnemonics). Clearly, though, there are other ways of learning the characters, and even if you do as I did, you’ll get the benefits of reduced cognitive load at some point, once you’ve learned enough characters that you don’t encounter many new ones while learning new vocabulary.
Chris asked “would [I] recommend Heisig to a beginner,” and I’m going to tentatively say that yes I would, for a couple of reasons.
- It can be done in the absence of the target language. This seems strange, but I think it’s actually a huge benefit of Heisig over various other approaches to learning characters – that is, you can do it while you still suck. Heisig makes the explicit comparison to Chinese students learning Japanese, and I think it’s a pretty valid comparison – Chinese students of course have a much deeper knowledge of the characters than a Western student who has just completed Heisig, but that Western student will still have a leg up on a Western student that hasn’t done it, in the same direction (if with a different magnitude) as the advantage enjoyed by Chinese students (or, in the reverse, Japanese and Korean students of Chinese).
- It’s relatively fast and painless. If you get it out of the way in the beginning, you get the benefits of that reduced cognitive load throughout your studies. I didn’t get to enjoy that until I reached several thousand characters the long way.
Now, there’s a bigger question of whether you should learn characters at all when you start learning Chinese or Japanese, but assuming that you think you should, then yes, I’d recommend Heisig, or something like it.
Related posts:
- Heisig, SRS, and my experience with learning Chinese characters
- Giving Heisig a shot
- The great debate: simplified v. traditional
- Thoughts on SRS content selection
- AJATT for Chinese
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Being that you’re a big fan of SRS usage, are you not using it for both production and recognition? I would think that if you’re using it for production, that alone would be enough to maintain/improve your handwriting, especially since you surely have a huge deck.
I found that just doing production versions of my recognition cards took forever, and to reduce the time I was having to reduce the recognition cards, which wasn’t doing any great service to my reading.
” clearly though, there are other ways of learning the characters…”
Could you mention some of those ways? Thanks
Julien,
I’ve written a bit about how I did it originally, and I plan to write more in the future, as its the sort of topic that has a lot of different ways that it can be approached.
Thanks for this clarification. Both you and Keith have done some great articles on what Heisig’s method actually gives you, and this has been helpful for me. When i go back to studying chinese again, i’ll keep all of this in mind when i formulate my new approach to it.
John, this follow-up article relates to a comment I left on your previous article (at which stage I hadn’t read this article yet!)
My opinion is based on being someone for whom all my reading (over 1000 hanzi) is built around the Heisig system. I think the risk you face is that if you already know so many characters, are you *really* doing Heisig? Or are you only doing Heisig for some of the characters?
For example, you might want to write the hanzi for yellow (黄), and maybe if you saw it you’d recognise it. But if you didn’t do Heisig properly, then your story won’t be well developed, and you won’t remember what the story is, and therefore what the components of the character are. And then you don’t be able to write the character – not because Heisig doesn’t work, but because it wasn’t really Heisig that you did.
But you acknowledge this (“… draping Heisig over my existing framework”), so this comment is more about my interest in how an advanced reader/writer would use Heisig, rather than with flaws in your approach.
Greg,
I don’t know how I would know if I’m doing Heisig “properly” or not. I think I’m doing it in a way that adds value, and that’s good enough for me.
(the below is also responding to your comment here, I thought I’d just combine them into one).
I can say categorically that it hasn’t helped my reading (not that I thought it would). The only characters I’ve encountered (doing RTK, not one of the RTH flavors) that I don’t just immediately know, readings and all, are either Japanese-specific variants or characters that are really low frequency in Chinese but are still relatively common in Japanese. Even those, in the first 1600 or so characters that I’ve done, are pretty few.
I think in terms of making the stories and visualizing I’m doing a pretty 认真 job of things. I definitely see the value in Heisig here, and I think it’s improving my ability to handwrite. I think for me (and a lot of people at my stage in Chinese learning) the characters are right at the tip of my pen, so to speak, and just takes a tiny push to bring it from reading to writing memory, and for quite a few characters these Heisig stories have been the push.
Heisig was originally designed to give Western students of Japanese the sort of character knowledge that Chinese students of Japanese bring to the table. I think, for the most part, I already had that coming into Heisig, and what it has done is help me make up for the thousands of hours that Chinese kids spend learning to write the characters. That all by itself makes it worthwhile for me.
Heisig is just a way for you to construct kanji with images of primitives mixed together in visual story. Yeah, he uses verbal descriptions, but the idea is create a visual image or even moving picture in your head that puts the kanji together.
Now, for beginners, this is simpler to do with English keywords cause they don’t have pre-existing knowledge of kanji. Heisig starts small and simple then builds. He uses English on the idea it’s faster to learn something new in one’s native language.
For guys like you John, you might be better off creating “Chinese Keywords” then using those to test writing out characters. The trick is getting the Keyword to jumpstart the visual image that creates the kanji. You already know Chinese, and have a good grasp on the meanings of kanji, so taking a step backward via strict RTK seems counter productive.
Anyway, do a search of RevTK forums on “Japanese Keywords” to see the discussion over the last 2 to 3 years over the validity of doing this. I think the consensus is for beginners to use English Keywords, while intermediate and advanced students could start or switch over to Japanese Keywords. Not a stretch for that to become Chinese Keywords, though I don’t think anyone has put together a spreadsheet yet about it.