Bicycling. L:a la la .
What do you want?
I recently came across a short essay about kanjiโJapanese logographic charactersโby a certain James W. Heisig. His point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced. And it is a bad idea, claims Heisig, to try learning both at the same time. Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations. Heisig professes simple divide and conquer.
That sounds plausible, but is it really an effective approach? How can you keep so many of those tangled squiggles in your head without even knowing how to say them out loud?
The answer is yes, it works. At least, it worked fantastically well for me. The first thing I did when I began learning the language in 2006 was opening Heisig's famous Remembering the Kanji Volume 1 and going through it, one kanji at a time, using the book's mnemonic techniques to commit to memory the meaning, construction, and stroke order of all 2042 characters in the
