1)  It amazes me how fiercely ppl will guard certain ideas, especially if those ideas aren’t their own.  Heisig is great..but Heisig is also so 1970’s (no offense to him).  Ppl learned kanji before Heisig, and thousands of ppl learn it without him.  Point being, its not “Heisig or nothing,” as some comments are trying to dictate.  Its not SRS or nothing either; to be frank, all you need to do is expose yourself to a language with the *intent* of understanding it.  I’ve known ppl who went to Japan, no Heisig or SRS’s at all, and learned the language within a year.  Yes thats possible.  No its not magic.  Its common sense.  A guy could be wringing his hands and pointing a blazing house behind him, and I wouldnt know a single word he was sa ying; yet, I bet I could *understand* what he was trying to communicate to me (omfg my/that house is on fire HELP!) As you hear/see a language enough, as in get enough exposure, you’ll be able to figure out what all the individual sounds/words mean.  But that comes with exposure, thats all.  Just simple exposure.  You dont need fancy tools or clever intellectual devices for that…you just need to DO it.

2)  Problem with most ppl is that they don’t want to fail.  Because of this, they spend most of their intellectual time inventing “fail-proof” mechanisms.  Of course nothing is fail-proof, so when it fails, they inevitably toss it aside and call it “ineffective,” or “not useful,” or “xyz is better.”  Here’s a hint..you will fail.  Thats just the bottom line.  Get used to failing, because everyone fails during the learning process (especially with something as nuance heavy as language).  Rather than trying as hard as possible to not fail, just accept failing.  Who cares if you can’t recall that kanji for the 5th time…i bet it looks way more familiar than it did before you started.  You know what else?  I bet you’ll remember that kanji better than any other kanji you’ll ever study.  Fact is we learn from our failures, and our failures tend to stick out in our mind better than our successes.  So use whatever method you find easiest to do.  Thats it.  Failure rate is entirely irrelevant, because failure is inevitable.  Just because you failed recall with Hesig 1 time before learning, and the other guy failed it 5 times before learning on a another method, doesn’t make your method better.  After all, 3 months from now, whos to say you’ll remember it better than the guy that failed it 5 times?  Just do whatever is easiest (it doesn’t have to be hard, seriously) and enjoy learning.

This is horrifically long so i’ll hush now.  All of this was to say that there is no debate.  I mean really, you can’t argue something doesn’t work when it, in fact, does work for people.  That is just silly.  Any method works.  I mean it.  Anything works as long as two things are true:

1.  You are actively learning (trying to understand and comprehend)

2.  You are doing it

Its really that simple.  How did you learn your native language? SRS’s? Heisig method? Cramming?  Note cards?  None of that.  You just exposed yourself to the language (not like you had a choice), and your childlike curiosity allowed you to learn.  Learning a 2nd language is no different; it only seems harder because we’re adults now, so things have to be 10000x more complicated because we are *supposedly* more intelligent.  I find that debatable.  Just do something, anything, and try to learn while doing it.  Eventually, you will learn.  Period.  Full stop. End long dissertation.

I agree with everything you said 🙂

ちょっと注目だけをしたかった。といっても、元々カツ正しい。プレイをしなくちゃいけないよ。一杯。

Anyway, two quick points:
1. You’d be absolutely right, IF, we were learning kanji in a vacuum. But, like I pointed out in my initial reply to Khatz, the Lazy Kanji deck is only the 1st place I encounter and use these kanji, not the only place. If one is doing sentences as Khatz reccomend, then one is regularly writing kanji outside of your regular Lazy Kanji reviews. Further, the SRS is certainly not the only place where one see’s, reads, and writes kanji. If one is truly doing All Japanese ALL the Time (and I recognize the irony of that claim in this post, but bear with me) then one is living in an ocean of kanji. And that’s what Khatz is talking about in this post. Learning kanji isn’t something you do once, get a crystalized piece of information that then sits in your brain to be reproduced on demand. No, knowing kanji EXISTS in the ACT of reproduction. Like I said, I’m learning Japanese, Not Heisigese. Lazy Kanji, or RTK, or whatever, is only a starting point, to become familiar with the kanji and comfortable with them, so that when you go to learn words and sentences that use them it isn’t overwhelming and your mind has a little sticky spot or hook on which to connect with the words and phrases and sentences as you learn them. Anything you need to be able to write will eventually be there. If you have to go look it up this time, you put it and some examples and stuff in the SRS to get some extra practice with it and so you make sure that next time you need it, that behavior module is ready to run and you can whip that kanji, that word, that phrase out exactly how you need it.

Anyways, that’s a pretty long “1,” so I’ll leave “2” and “3” for another time (I didn’t even have 2 and 3 in mind when I wrote “1,” so your not missing out on anything. I was just gonna make some more reasons up. lol. yeah, I just lol’ed at myself.)…

It may sound rare now, but it will happen someday, and on that day, you’ll curse out loud and blame me, I’m sure of it 🙂

I can tell Im forming a ‘relationship’ with Japanese because when I spend too long listening to english, I start to miss Japanese. A lot. Which makes it easy to immidiately enter my immersion when I get the chance. Also, according to my computer, Anki is now my most commonly opened program 😀

Do the best with the tools you have. (I knew I was coming back to the power tools at one point). If The power drill works better than an awl or a broom works better than a vacuum cleaner, *use it*.

The only reason I slightly doubt them (stop listening to me) is the same way I slightly doubt pre-made sentences. Pre-made sentences (that you don’t mine yourself) don’t seem to have the same personal connection and seem harder to remember. 何だか… ね。

I’ll humbly go away now.

I agree with your Heisig point #2, but I think #1 — breaking down the kanji and learning them bottom-up — is pretty obvious. If I knew that I needed to know all the kanji, that’s exactly how I’d go about it.

I think the genius concepts from Heisig were recognizing that (a) to be good at Japanese, you need to learn all of the joyo kanji, and (b) if you find a good way to go about it, it’s entirely *possible* for anyone to learn them in a reasonable period of time. I never would have guessed that (b) was true, which means I never would have admitted (a) to myself.

Even today, it seems that almost everybody (even Japanese people and Japanese teachers!) think (a) you don’t really need kanji, or you don’t need *all* the kanji, and (b) if you do want to learn the kanji, it’s a long and painful process that will take you 12 years.

When I took Japanese classes for a couple months once, our teacher (a Japanese woman) wrote hiragana on the blackboard but mentioned that it was awkward to read, and that no Japanese person would write like that, except maybe in books for very young children. I never could quite reconcile to myself having to learn to write something that even Japanese people had trouble reading… Good thing I found AJATT!

Once you’ve gone through Heisig for awhile, the oldskool way (paper and pen if you must), figured out the radicals, made some unforgettable stories and SRS’d them enough time to have your next rep of 日 be 3.4 years from now, then you can start doing lazy kanji-type ideas. Until you get to that point, and 隣 is still only 3 months away, you may want to hold off on going lazy, but you can still evolve and tack on the reading of となり and りんしつ on that card, just to help you along 3 months from now so neighbor doesn’t trip you up with I dunno, 最寄り or something silly.

If you go with lazy kanji from the start, oh fark, it might work, but I doubt it. (same with mono-lingual dics from the get-go and all sorts of other *crazy* ideas 😉 ). But chances are slim.

In any case, uh… (すまん、二つ目の金麦を）basics, don’t avoid the basics to jump to shortcuts which you can’t fully justify or understand yet (unless you have loads of time to waste and it is FUN to waste while doing!, since you don’t, keep reading). The Heisig system is obvious and clearly explained why it is advantageous and (despite school systems) been working fantastically for 30 years+. It also sets a rock solid foundation for learning the Kanji’s writing and meaning. Lazy Kanji is a branch of that, made by Khatz for his own personal evil schemes and may just work amazingly for him (同様に俺は日本のAVだけを見てる) but he had to reach a certain level before making that funky juice work for him. Just like how Cloud can’t Omnislash in FF7 until he’s used all the other limit breaks and gone on some damn quest to find an item to teach him how to use it first. Or something like that.

This applies to everything. Including baked goods.

Especially baked goods （日本には竃はちょっと珍しいでしょう？だから炊飯器でケーキとかを作ったり）

以上

while i didn’t find that specifically, i found an xml file (kanjidic2.xml — the same one that jim breen’s dictionary uses) with a with over 13000 kanji, their english meanings (when applicable), readings, jlpt levels (when applicable), etc. etc.

i got most of the way through writing a script that will parse it into an anki deck (text format — it might be usable with other things, like surusu; i don’t know) when i decided i don’t care to know 13000 kanji and that 3000 will probably be enough (and if it isn’t i can easily learn the special cases when they come up without the rest getting in the way)

that being said, i am close enough to finishing the script that i am willing to finish it this weekend sometime and upload it if anyone else is interested.

so, would anyone like me to finish this and upload the deck?

When I was in school I NEVER studied. Not a bit. I read a ton. I wrote papers. I read the assigned reading, then on top of that I read a bunch of other books, articles, papers, etc about whatever from the assigned reading grabbed my interest and made me want to dig deeper. I asked lots of questions and paid attention during lecture and discussions. But not once, in my four and a half years at university, did I stay up looking at flash cards or pouring over a textbook looking at the passages I had highlighted. I didn’t have time for that. I had two kids, both under four, and a full time job working about 45-50 hours a week. But, I could do tons of reading, because I could find audio versions of damn near most of what I was studying (English and Philosophy major here), load them on my ipod and listen like crazy in the car, while I was working, at night while I wrote papers, took care of the kids, etc. Even most of the science courses I was required to tkae to meet my gen ed. requirements had much of the material available as audio. I graduated with a 3.87.

Similarly, I “learned” the kanji effortlessly, almost like osmosis, in a similar way by just working through my Lazy Kanji + Mod Deck which is publically shared on anki and you can read about here. When I was “done” was I fuzzier on kanji than someone in the same position who worked through RTK the “hard” way. Yes. But, it didn’t matter because as soon as I started doing sentences, working through vocab on smart.fm, and doing some really, really serious reading (I participated in, and placed highly, in the Read More or Die contest), as soon as I did those things, all that fuzzy fluid knowledge began to congeal in all the right places, and continues to do so as I learn more each day. I hope it never becomes some static, dead, inert “object of knowledge,” because as soon as it does I am no longer learning, or using the language, I’m just learning disconnected, meaningless and rather boring “facts.” No thanks, I say, I’d rather go read some manga.

i plan on starting sentences, but i also want to do rtk3 fairly soon (i was thinking when all the rtk1 cards become “mature” in anki, although i might start sooner because why not)

i am wondering, will lazy kanji significantly affect my writing ability? seems like it wouldn’t — once i had hit a certain point in rtk1, i didn’t have a problem writing kanji i hadn’t seen yet within the book, but encountered a lot elsewhere (like 桜 or 円). i am considering lazy kanji (kanji -> keyword flash cards without memorizing someone else’s story, and instead making my own if needed like the guy who responded to ole mentioned) for rtk3 because it seems like it would be quicker now that i have a good basis (and a good intuition for stroke order). also, it seems like there wouldn’t be too many new primitives in rtk3 since many kanji have already been covered in rtk1.

thoughts/ideas/gripes?

as i am thinking about this i like the idea of it more and more. also, if i were to find a nice list of kanji that didn’t appear in rtk and their english meanings (does anyone know of such a resource? it seems kind of far fetched, but it would be nice to have, and i wouldn’t have ever imagined the following rtk has, so maybe it exists?), it seems like i could add those in the deck and continue learning without much trouble/effort, when it would have been more annoying before.

p.s. sorry if this is kind of ramble-y — i was kind of thinking in text as i was writing this i guess haha

Although, Ole, I’d still learn to produce characters from the keyword initially were I starting afresh. Full active recall >>> passive recall, especially when initially learning words.