I had a lot of trouble with kanji until I decided to try Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji.” At first I was *very* skeptical about his approach. It just seemed gimmicky. But I downloaded the 125-page chunk of the book he makes availble online. I tried it, and it actually helped me remember a lot of kanji a lot better than I had before. (And believe me, I’ve tried just about everything.) I had a big “Aha!” moment, and stuck with it. I burned through volume 1 in about 2 months.

It’s rather simple in its approach. You break up the learning of kanji into tasks.

Task one is to learn how to write each kanji and attach English keywords to them. (A keyword is sort of a very rough meaning for just the character.) It helps if you pretend that English uses kanji, and you’re just learning the “English Kanji.” It just so happens that English Kanji and Japanese Kanji are written exactly the same way. They just vary a little in their meanings and vary totally in pronunciation. That doesn’t sound lilke much, but actually it’s pretty important in the long-term. It gives you memory hooks and placeholders to hang the on/kun-yomi on later. Over time you won’t need the English keywords anymore– they fade away.

You remember the keywords by creating strong visuals and whacked-out stories. The stronger the visual, the better. So for example: The kanji with the keyword Possess is composed of the primitives “By one’s side” and “Flesh” (or “Moon”). So: To keep from being Possessed by evil sprits, you carry some rotten flesh by your side, because the smell keeps them away.

Not very appetizing, but it does stick in your mind.

Task two is learning on-yomi, which you can do any which way you please. Vol. 2 of RTK has its own way of looking at on-yomi. It works for some, but not all. Other people do things like kanjichains and memory palaces, and all sorts of other things. It doesn’t really matter how you do it, just that you break the tasks up. I haven’t had much of a chance to use vol. 2, but it does go into great detail for on-yomi.

Task three, the hardest, is kun-yomi. There isn’t really a good system of learning kun-yomi– that I’ve found, anyway. Just collect them like Pokemon and use a good SRS like Anki to drill the heck out of them. Volume 3 contains more kanji with keywords and on/kun readings.

I highly recommend http://kanji.koohii.com if you do decide to try RTK. It’s a very well-made site that helps you drill the 2042 kanji in volume 1, all the way to kanji 3007 in vol. 3. There are also forums there you can interact with to see what things people are doing that may/may not work for you.

RTK is not a perfect system. For some reason, volume 1 has 2042 kanji, and volume 3 has the rest of them, leading you to 3007 total. Also, there are some characters from vol. 3 which, if you learned earlier, would make about 40-50 kanji in vol.1 a lot easier to remember. Someone on the reviewing the kanji forums made a list of them.

Heisig picks some odd keywords for some kanji, but be careful if you decide to substitute. And I highly recommend *not* using the canned stories in the book as a crutch. It’s a whole lot better long-term to start creating your own stories to remember kanji as soon as possible.

Also, you should read all of his text *before* you start the book. He puts text in odd places, when he really should have just explained everything up front. Just skim through the book, and you’ll see what I mean. If you get stuck for a story, try the kanji.koohii.com site. There’s a huge database of stories there.

Theoretically, you can do the whole thing without the book (if you’re clever), but I do NOT recommend it. The book has a ton of useful info you won’t find otherwise. Just the stroke order alone is handy.

Heisig’s approach doesn’t suit everyone, and it can cause some confusion if you’re taking Japanese classes in school. (Although someone at the University of Alaska-Anchorage is teaching a class just on RTK as a sort of pre-Japanese class. Heisig himself doesn’t recommend it for classroom use, but it’s an interesting experiment.)

It takes a lot of time, but it lends itself very well to either powering through it in 6-8 weeks, or taking a year to get through it, depending on how much time you have. If you don’t have trouble with Kanji, then great. But if you do, you might want to check it out.

For example, the Kanji 兄 alone means ‘older brother’ - “Ani”. But it also has multiple Chinese (onyomi) readings.

父兄　- Fu.Kei - Guardians (The reading here is ‘Kei’)
兄弟 - Kyou.Dai - Brothers (The reading here is ‘Kyou’)

I believe if you learn one combination for each reading you will be doing well. It will also help you as it is these combinations you see around you in Japan.

Tom: Can you suggest a few books?

MS: I’ve never bothered grouping but when I make my flashcards (in the summer) I will do.

Thanks for the suggestions all :)