Focus on the problems you actually have right now

November 17, 2009

A short but sweet “insight” post from the folks at 37Signals:

Nothing gets you more focused on solving a problem than actually having that problem.

I’d like to offer a corollary:

Trying to solve a problem you don’t actually have is a waste of time better spent on the problems you do.

I’ll admit, I’m absolutely wretched at this, though I am getting better. I like problem solving, so I tend to look forward into the future in which a myriad of problems might occur, and think through how to solve them all. In the end, analysis paralysis wins the day.

dilbert

This is a pertinent issue for language learners (especially the sort of learners — like me! — that surf the web reading about learning). There’s this idea that everything has to be planned out in advance, and the planning often overtakes the learning in importance. Coming up with — and endlessly debating — the “right” method starts to spend time that you could be spending learning, when really doing something — anything! — is more important the the method you use.

I know that I’m guilty of over-thinking things out loud here — i.e., the Simplified-Traditional character debate, when the real answer is probably “whichever one you need right now” — but the truth is the only problem that matters is the problem you’re facing right now — everything else can be solved or worked through when the time comes.

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In praise of the single use (dictionary) device

November 17, 2009

Recently Kottke pointed to a piece on Snarkmarket with a back and forth about the value of single use digital devices. The back and forth is interesting, and the conclusions reached — that multi-purpose devices were the trend, but the focus should be on integrated devices, rather than just devices with multiple, distinct functions.

I’m a huge fan of general purpose devices. I don’t own a Kindle (they don’t really work that well in China), but I read a ton of Kindle ebooks … on my iPhone and my netbook. I envision a near future when that iPhone/netbook distinction disappears, and I just hook up a peripheral screen and keyboard to my phone when I have a place to work. It’s something that has gotten me excited for the better part of a decade.

One place, though, where I am totally in love with a clunky, un-networked, thoroughly unsexy single use device is my electronic dictionary. I picked up a Casio EW-V3800H a little more than a year ago at a store near 上海书城 on Fuzhou Lu for somewhere a bit less than RMB 2,000, and I’ve been in love ever since. There are probably better dictionaries (the Canon Wordtanks are just incredible, but also hard to find in China), but I like mine. For a reasonably advanced student of Chinese and neophyte Japanese learner like me, it’s hard to beat.

After reading the above linked article, though, I wondered why exactly I liked it so much, and I think the reason is exactly because it’s fugly and disconnected. When I sit down with my dictionary, there are no distractions. There’s no IM windows popping up, no MP3 collection asking for another play, no piles of work waiting to get done. It’s just me and some of the world’s best Chinese and Japanese dictionaries.

There are some things I wish it did. I would love an easier way to transfer sentences and definitions from the dictionary to my computer (for Anki card creation). A built in e-reader that I could load texts on and then look words up in the dictionary would set my heart a-flutter. These things more than likely exist on other, better dictionaries, or will exist in the nearish future.

For now, though, my and my ugly little Casio are quite happy together, studying, without distractions.

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Feeling overwhelmed? Stop trying so damn hard!

November 16, 2009

overwhelmed

Over at All Japanese All the Time, Khatzumoto has been pushing the importance of small, incremental, accumulated action, rather than big, difficult steps. His post on washing dishes, and the importance of process over results, is particularly good. As usual, he’s put something that I’ve wanted to write about better than I could have myself, but I’m going to add my two cents regardless (as if you could stop me! ;) ).

For the first several years I was learning Chinese, it was no fun at all. It was something I did because I felt like I had to, but it was work with a capital pain in the ass. My pitifully slow progress was a reflection of my general lack of enthusiasm. At some point, and I’m not exactly sure when it was, I just gave up. I decided that my Chinese was good enough (“good enough for a white guy,” or something inane like that) and that I’d be able to get by well enough. Once I made peace with the idea that I’d be spending my free time on other things, I was happier than I’d been in a long, long time.

For a few weeks, I really did ignore Chinese, or at least ignore it as well as one can while living in China. Pretty soon, though, my curiosity got the best of me and I started randomly looking up characters on signs when my bus was stopped in traffic. I bought a couple of comic books. Still, though, I was done with Chinese. Done. I’d tried, and failed. Chinese had won. But, hey, I like to read, and English books were hard to find. And it’s not like I was doing anything else waiting for the bus to move again. It wasn’t long before I’d finished those comic books, and decided to buy a couple more. Pretty soon, all of the signs on the route I took from where I lived to downtown Hangzhou were familiar. Still, though, my and Chinese were finished. Maybe I should learning Spanish, I thought. That’s got to be easier than this stuff. Oh, what do you know, time to go back to the newspaper stand and pick up some more comic books. Geez, I read those pretty fast this time. Hardly seemed like work at all.

You get the idea.

The same thing happened to me when I started with SRS. I knew that using it was good for me — it’s not hard to convince a programmer that a good algorithm and a database can keep track of things better than he can — and I wanted to be 认真 about it, so I set up a pretty harsh regimen of reviews. Several hundred cards a day, at least, plus all the time it took to input enough cards to keep that sort of review schedule going. It was … insane unsustainable. Unsurprisingly, I lasted a couple months before swearing off SRS forever — totally unworkable, I thought.

These days, I maintain a pace pretty similar to the death march I did back then, without any of the anxiety. If I don’t have time to do my cards on a given day, I just don’t. If I get some cards wrong, I just mark them wrong. Failure practice is a good thing. On the vast majority of days I do finish all my repetitions — it’s normally the first thing I do when I wake up, while everyone else is still asleep and the house is, for the briefest of moments, quiet — but I don’t get too worked up if I don’t.

Really, when you think about it, doing something like going from a non-speaker to a totally fluent speaker of a language as an adult (who has all sorts of other responsibilities vying for his or her time) is pretty ridiculous. If you actually stop to think about what you’re trying to do, it doesn’t seem possible at all. C’mon y’all, I barely speak English, now I’m learning Chinese? WTF? It’s that pressure, the consciousness of the enormity of the task that you’re facing, that makes you want to give up. But, the truth is, life is long. You may not feel like you’re making progress, but the tiny stutter steps forward that you’re making every day are going to add up to a massive amount of movement if you just give them time to accumulate.

“I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”

Update: Somehow this post was posted with comments disabled, and I didn’t notice until this morning (I just thought that nobody loved me *sob*). All fixed now. Apologies for the idiocy.

Image by andres.thor

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SRS == failure practice

November 15, 2009

failure_homer

When I first started experimenting with SRS in 2005 with Supermemo, the idea of marking something wrong that I’d already reviewed several times was horrifying. I honestly though I was doing something wrong, and then idea of taking something that had a review interval of perhaps a month and knocking it back down to the beginning just hurt.

After a while, though, I realized that failing an SRS repetition was a tremendously useful thing. Of course not failing is ideal, if you’re going to fail at something, failing while you’re doing SRS repetitions is the place you want to do it.

Most of us are taught that failure is bad, and that we should avoid it. Academically, failure generally comes at times where the stakes are high — on tests, or in front of our peers — and we do our best to either succeed or to hide in such a way that our failure isn’t obvious to everyone around us.

The problem is that you have to fail to become good at anything. Everybody sucks in the beginning. What SRS does is give you an outlet for failure that is totally non-destructive. You fail, and then you review the card more often. Maybe you fail it again at some point, and review it even more. At some point it will stick, and that’s what matters.

We should be aiming to fail at such a rate that, when it matters, there’s absolutely no way we’ll come up short.

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Overcoming shyness and starting conversations with strangers

November 9, 2009

I wrote last week about becoming more of a “people person,” and I got quite a bit of feedback, mostly via e-mail, from people who had either done something similar, or wanted to know what I was doing. I hadn’t expected that, but it was a great opportunity to both connect with my readers (thanks guys and gals!) and put some thought into what I meant when I said it in the first place.

I’m not an unsocial person, and I never have been. Drop me in the middle of a group of people and tell me to talk to them, and I will, at length, with relative ease. I realize now that this is an incredible gift, and that lots of people have a very hard time with talking to strangers, to the point that it affects their lives.

Oddly enough, though, I have a really hard time starting conversations with people. I think it has something to do with a deep-seated desire to not bother other people – I can hear my mom and dad telling me to “leave those nice folks alone.” This was probably the right thing to tell a rambunctious 5-year old, but I’m not sure it’s doing me any favors now. If people talk to me I’m fine, but if they don’t I’m more than likely to just stand by the wall, sipping my drink, enjoying the people-watching opportunity.

As I realized how important networking was in my career, I also realized that being a wallflower was not going to cut it. I decided I would be more proactive in starting conversations with people, and then let my natural ability to continue conversations take over. In The Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss suggests an exercise where you ask attractive members of the opposite sex for their phone numbers, even if you’re married (in which case you, presumably, just toss the number when you’re done), as a way to build up your ability to start conversations. I didn’t quite go that far, but I did come up with a couple of concrete tactics that have made a difference.

Set a quota

When I tell other people this they look at me like I’m insane, but it has really worked for me. When I go to a social event I set a quota – i.e., “tonight I’ll strike up conversations with five people.” Sometimes I’ll set up special challenges – “two of the people must be older than I am” (always hard, especially in professional/formal settings), “one must be the event organizer,” etc. – just to make things more interesting. Like Peter Drucker said, “what’s measured improves.” By setting a concrete goal, I’m able to turn something that is otherwise a bit uncomfortable for me into a game, and then systematically work to improve my performance in that game.

Practice on easy targets

It’s easy to start conversations with people that have some external motivation for wanting to talk to you. I actually discovered this during long, hot, boring Florida summers, when it was too miserable outside to play, but I was too young to drive. As a (somewhat precocious) middle school student, I would spend hours talking with Jehovah’s Witnesses that came around our neighborhood about once a week. My mom wasn’t pleased, and I never was convinced, but my debate and question asking skills got a good workout, and it was more fun than yet another game of Tecmo Super Bowl.

These days there aren’t so many Jehovah’s Witnesses in Shanghai, but there are a lot of bored salespeople. Lots and lots of bored salespeople, in fact. While I wouldn’t encourage you to spend time talking with a busy salesperson if you’re not actually interested in buying something, if they’re just sitting there twiddling their thumbs, then go for it. They’ll probably appreciate the diversion, and you’ll gain more experience in starting conversations.

And this has what to do with language learning?

It’s tangentially related, at least. It’s really easy to sit in your room and do your SRS reps and listen to your audio input and watch your movies, but at the end of the day you’re learning the language to communicate with people. If you’re the sort of person that doesn’t naturally open up to strangers, this can be really hard, and will diminish the effects of the hard work you’re putting in learning a foreign language.

I would love to hear from other shy people who have overcome their shyness and learned to talk to people. Any tips that I’m missing?

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One language or many, take two

November 3, 2009

I wrote a post at the end of August about the choice between totally mastering a single foreign language or getting decent at several. At the time I wrote:

I’ve bounced back and forth on this question, but I’ve finally settled on the “single really sharp knife” approach as being right for me. I live in China, and plumbing the depths of Chinese is going to do me a lot more good than skimming along the surface of a series of languages (even other related languages like Japanese and Korean). There’s no doubt that I’m well past the point of diminishing returns for Chinese, but still the returns are worth the effort put in to obtain them. Until that’s no longer true, I’m going to stick with Chinese.

I no longer feel this way, and I’m going to explain why.

There is no English, there is no Chinese, there is just language

One of the things you learn early in studying a foreign language is that, despite what classes and books try to tell you, there is no single language called Chinese (or English, or Spanish, or whatever). There may well be a standard language — for Chinese, it’s 普通话 / 国语 — that is nominally used by official media, but the language that everyone actually speaks is some variation — subtle or drastic — of that norm. Eventually, when the variation grows too extreme, you end up with different languages (the Romance languages, for instance, or the various “dialects” of Chinese).

It benefits you to learn to at least understand the major dialects of the language you’re studying — i.e., even if you always say 怎么样, you should understand 咋样 when it’s presented to you. I say y’all all the time, but I understand that ‘you’ is also an acceptable second person plural pronoun (I’m from the South, y’all). Dialects are often used for comedic purposes as well, or to cast characters in a show of being a certain type of person (see 赵本山, or the massive volume of 関西弁 on Japanese TV).

What I’ve found (after I started paying attention to what was going on around me) is that this mix exists in speakers of distinct languages, too. I speak English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese (in descending order of ability). If I meet a Cantonese-speaking Japanese person (as happened recently), we can communicate. If I meet an English-speaking person from Hong Kong (of whom there are several million), we can communicate. Do I sound erudite in Japanese? No, I don’t — not even close. But I can communicate, and enjoy the benefits of that communication.

I can do this because I have systems — SRS and a massive listening environment — that keeps me from going backwards even if I slow down (and, if I increase scope I have to either slow down or expend more time studying, and I don’t have more time to expend).

Becoming more of a people person

My change in attitude is, I think, part of my transformation into more of a people person (being more social is a long-term goal that I’ve been working on for years). In many ways my thoughts about language learning are dragging behind my practice — I’ve written before here about how actual communication with other people not being a huge priority, but that’s shifting, and the shift is picking up speed.

I know that, for very social people, the above sounds silly, but for people like me that have always been willing to stand by the wall and sip my beer at parties, it’s a huge transformation, and one that’s dragging other parts of my life, including my language learning, with it.

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The messy in-between

October 26, 2009

Two seemingly unrelated things gave me the inspiration to write this post. First, I’ve needed to, for work, learn a bit about the actual inner workings of various wireless data standards — specifically, China’s 3G TD-SCDMA standard and W-CDMA. Before this, I had never thought about what it actually took to get data from a mobile device, whose location relative to various short-range base stations is constantly changing, and whose ambient electromagnetic environment is constantly in flux, to a server out on the internet somewhere. I’ve coded for both ends — the client software on the mobile and the server software out in the cloud — but I’ve never much considered all of the messiness that sits in-between them.

The second is that I’m reading William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea (Ribbonfarm, where I first saw the book mentioned, has a good review if you’re interested), which is a fascinating look at the chaos that is life on the modern seas. Though picking up a little digital gadget and seeing “Made in China” or some other foreign locale is so commonplace today as to not warrant mention, we seldom think about incredible messiness (and danger, and death) that stretches between a factory in the Pearl River Delta and a Best Buy showcase in Orlando.

In thinking about these two things, I started thinking about other instances where we focus on the clean beginnings and ends and totally ignore (or are simply ignorant to) the messy in-between the must be traversed. Since this is a language learning blog, I’m going to talk about an instance that relates to learning a foreign language.

The beginner – native gap

The two ends of the road to fluency in a foreign language are really easy to visualize. One is embodied by the foreign language student on the first day of his first class, an absolute noob that couldn’t say “where’s the bathroom” in a foreign language if her life depended on it. The other is the suave, sophisticated native speaker that can handle any linguistic demand placed upon her, from socializing in a formal setting to telling dirty jokes at the neighborhood card night. It’s the in-between that’s really hard to visualize, and this is a bad thing because for the majority of your studies that’s right where you’ll be.

This inability to visualize the path between beginner and native fluency is hard for most people to handle. It’s like driving across the country without a map. If you keep following the sun you know you’re headed in the right direction, but you’re never sure where you are, and you’re always worrying that a much faster, more direct route than the route you’re on is out there somewhere, if only you could find it.

The fact is, though, that there are no clean starting points, and no single path from end to end. “Beginners” go into a language with all of their previous linguistic knowledge (which may or may not be useful). Native speakers have an extremely wide range of abilities (for example, the oration skills of Dubya vs. Obama), too. There is no single method that will deliver you from beginner to native speaker in the shortest amount of time — as with anything, methods matter less than persistence.

It’s the inability to visualize one’s place on the path that’s really frustrating for a lot of learners, especially when progress begins to slow down near the end and seems to (but probably never really does) come to a complete stop. I don’t think it’s possible to say with any sort of accuracy that you’re at 73.6% of a native speaker’s abilities, but you can keep track of your own abilities, and watch them progress over time.

Method #1: SRS

One of the less talked about but (for me at least) very enjoyable aspects of SRS is that it brings up old material from time to time (with ever increasing intervals, of course). This is a terrific opportunity to see how much you’ve improved. I constantly have old cards with simple material come up, and each time they do they give me an intense feeling of satisfaction — “that used to be new and unfamiliar, but now I totally own it.” I mark it as known (or, every once in a while, I miss it, especially if it was something obscure when I added it in the first place), and it disappears into the deck for another several months or a year.

Method #2: Learning diary

This isn’t something that I personally do, but I know people that swear by it. Basically, you output in the language they’re learning — either in text, audio, or video — at regular intervals, and save the output. After a while, you’ll have a small library of content that you’ve created and that, so long as you’re studying, is continuing to evolve. I know in my own experience with Chinese that every time I think back to something I’ve done in the past I think, “oh, man, my Chinese sucked back then,” and having a diary like this would provide unassailable proof that you did indeed suck then, and that you suck a lot less now.

How do you keep track of what you’ve done and where you’re going? How do you maintain confidence and motivation while stuck in the messy gap between beginner and native speaker?

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Interview with August Flanagan

October 23, 2009

August Flanagan

August Flanagan

August Flanagan is an American living in Oaxaca, Mexico, learning Spanish and running a Spanish and English language exchange site called Lenguajero.com.

1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I went to school at the University of Washington (Seattle), and graduated in 2007 with a BS in Biochemistry. Upon graduating I was awarded a Bonderman Fellowship for independent exploration. I spent about 9 months in Central America and Asia before heading back to Seattle for a little travel break. In December 2008 my partner Natalie and I decided to pack our bags and head out on the road to follow our dreams of traveling and living in Latin America while learning Spanish.

In April of 2009, while living in Medellin, Colombia, we founded Lenguajero.com, an online Spanish and English language exchange community. We offer a variety of tools to independent learners of these two languages, including online conversation exchanges, a writing club, and an online SRS flashcard program.

2. Why did you start studying foreign languages, and how old were you when you started?

Growing up in Montana I never really had an interest to learn other languages. No one spoke anything other than English, and the idea of learning another language never even crossed my mind. My first experience with a second language was in Ms. Rose’s high school Spanish class. I believe I managed to get through two years of that class by using a newly available tool called an “internet translator” something my 65 year old on-the-verge-of-retirement teacher had never heard of before.

It wasn’t until I was about to graduate from University that the desire to learn a language took hold. I was planning on spending three months in Central America and wanted to start preparing for the trip by learning Spanish.

3. What languages are you studying or have studied? What level of proficiency do you have in those languages now? Why did you choose those languages specifically?

I am currently living in Oaxaca, Mexico and have spent the last year living in various cities throughout Latin America. My sole focus (as far as language learning is concerned) has been to learn Spanish. I’m not really sure how I would rate my proficiency. I’m not fluent, but I speak pretty well. I watch movies in Spanish, go out with friends, and also do a lot of English –> Spanish translational work for Lenguajero. All of this comes pretty naturally these days, but there are still instances when I’ll go to say something and realize I’m missing a necessary word or two from my vocabulary.

I chose Spanish for one simple reason. I have a deep fascination with various Latin American cultures (especially Mexican culture), and had always wanted to be able to travel and live in Latin America for extended periods of time.

4. What are you study goals? Do you plan on reaching a certain level of proficiency and then stopping?

My goal is absolute fluency, but I’m realistic. At 26 years old unless I spend all of my time wrapped in Spanish (and I’m doing this interview in English) I’m not going to acheive absolute fluency. I will settle for continual improvement, and I have every intention of speaking at least some Spanish everyday for the rest of my life.

5. How do you define fluency? What is the minimum level of proficiency you would consider necessary before saying that you “knew” a language?

To be honest I don’t really have any sort of guiding principle on what defines fluency. I would say that if you can spend a couple of hours in “comfortable” conversation without having to ask “how do you say this” every five minutes then you know a language. Also, understanding and using slang correctly is a big requirement.

6. Can you briefly describe your study workflow?

I’m very lucky to have had the opportunity to spend the last year living in Latin America. I spent the first 6 months of this year taking Spanish classes everyday. First at a university, and then private one-on-on instruction. I thought my classes we fantastic and I noticed every week that my comfort level and my overall knowledge of the language were increasing rapidly.

That said, I made a real effort to listen to a lot of podcasts in Spanish, watch a lot of movies, read books in Spanish, and use an SRS flashcard program to study new words and phrases. I think this is what gave me a large vocabulary quickly. As far as speaking is concerned I think that came from just spending time with friends and being comfortable talking.

7. What was the biggest mistake you made or misconception you had when you started studying languages? How did you realize it was a mistake?

My biggest mistake happened right when I began to study Spanish towards the end of university. I thought that listening to a few “learn Spanish” podcasts and having taken one year of Latin would have me speaking pretty decent Spanish in no time. I really thought that I could learn Spanish in about 2 months. I realized my mistake when I arrived in Guatemala unable to understand a thing anyone said to me.

8. If you could pass on only a single piece of advice to other learners, especially learners just starting out, what would it be?

It’s a marathon not a sprint (Is that too cliche?) It takes time and devotion to learn a language. Studying a language isn’t like studying math. You don’t need to cram any complex algorithms into your head, just study the basics and try to do at least one thing everyday to keep it all fresh in your mind even if that’s just relaxing, and watching a movie.

9. What are your future language study plans?

I plan to focus solely on Spanish for at least one more year. I want to really cement everything, and continue to expand my vocabulary as well as my general comfort with speaking and reading at a high level (i.e. professionally). After that I fully intend to dive head first into a new language. At this point I think it’s a tossup between French and Arabic.

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions, August

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Overtaken by events

October 21, 2009

My posting schedule for today has been, as they say in the military, “overtaken by events” (that is, I had an insanely busy today in the middle of an insanely busy week.

In lieu of a proper post, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to an excellent three-post series at All Japanese All the Time about language and society.

  1. How do I learn 500 languages at once?!
  2. Language as an investment
  3. Managing greed: how to deal with your language lust

The series more or less deals with language as a skill, and the value of focusing on one language and getting it to a high degree of proficiency (so that you begin to get real-life ROI from your study) as opposed to splitting your time over lots of languages and not getting particularly good at any of them. It’s something I’ve touched on before (though ironically reading through the comments on his post have almost convinced me that I was and he is mistaken, but that’s a post for another day).

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More thoughts on Heisig

October 19, 2009

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.

  1. 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).
  2. 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.

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