Remembering the Kanji I

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Book cover

Remembering the Kanji I is the first in the Remembering the Kanji book series by James Heisig. Its full title is Remembering the Kanji (Volume I): A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters. It was published in 1977.

In the book, Heisig presents a method for learning how to associate the meaning and writing of 2042 kanji, including all the jōyō kanji. There is no attention given to the readings of the kanji, as Heisig believes that one should learn the writing and meaning first, before moving on to the readings in Volume II.

[edit] Heisig's method

The method differs markedly from traditional rote-memorization techniques practiced in most courses. The course teaches the student to utilize all the constituent parts of a kanji's written form, and a mnemonic device that Heisig refers to as "imaginative memory".

Each kanji (and each non-kanji component) is assigned a unique keyword, a simple concept with a specific range of meaning. A kanji's written form and its keyword are associated by imagining a scene or story connecting the meaning of the given kanji with the meanings of all the elements used to write that kanji.

The method requires the student to invent their own stories to associate the keyword meaning with the written form. The text presents detailed stories in Part I, proceeding through Part II with less verbose stories, encouraging the student to use the stories as practice for creating their own. After the 508 kanji in Parts I and II, the remainder of the kanji (Part III) have the component keywords but no stories. In cases where the reader may be easily confused or for difficult kanji, Heisig often provides a small story or hint.

All the kanji are analysed by components -- Heisig terms these "primitives" -- which may be traditional radicals, other kanji themselves or a collection of strokes not normally identified as independent entities. The basic primitives are introduced throughout the book, just as they are needed to learn the kanji that use them. This order is designed to introduce the kanji efficiently, from the primitives and kanji already learned, rather than the order of their frequency or the dictates of the jōyō grading.

[edit] Criticisms

This article or section does not cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) This article has been tagged since October 2006.

Heisig's method, and his book, has been criticized on several fronts. First, learning the kanji using this method does not allow the learner to "read," since only a keyword for each kanji is learned initially, and not the pronunciation; also, compound kanji words frequently have meanings that cannot be easily understood from their various parts.

Heisig's choice of keywords has also been criticized. For example, Heisig gives the kanji 召 the keyword "seduce." Though the definition "seduce" is associated with this kanji in character dictionaries, the most common meaning of the kanji is "consume," and the character is not used in compound words for "seduce."

Similarly, Heisig's "primitives" may or may not be radicals, and the meanings he assigns to them may differ from their traditional meanings.