Another Journey Through the Heisig 2042

Around a month ago, I began my second attempt at learning the 2042 Kanji for Common Use (常用漢字) using Heisig's method. It's a grueling, daunting, and equally rewarding task that measures dedication, creativity, ingenuity, and sheer memorization skills. While one may be able to become skilled at conversation without learning these characters and their corresponding readings, it is simply impossible to advance beyond elementary school reading without rigorous study of kanji. Despite having taken traditional Japanese classes for three years, I only know how to read around 300 characters strictly from what I learned in my classes. That leaves the vast majority for independent study. While classes are often grammar and vocabulary intensive, they simply do not emphasize kanji, ultimately yielding largely illiterate students.

When I was a second-year Japanese student, I attempted for the first time Heisig's Remembering the Kanji method, which seems to be widely accepted as the standard of independent Japanese students like myself for memorizing the kanji for common use. The physical book is available through online retailers like Amazon for around 20 USD. While the method at its core is timeless, relying on a physical book for kanji practice is obsolete. Through this strategy, I was offered comical anecdotes that were intended to aid in the memorization of combinations of radicals. However, for the sake of reviewing, one has to make either their own physical or digital flashcards. While Anki, a commonly used community-based flashcard program, offers some great decks to begin with, it was unable to keep my interest, and I eventually called it quits around 400.

For a long time, I drifted. I would search up song lyrics from some of my favorite Japanese bands and expand my vocabulary, but my kanji writing skills simply stagnated. For a while, I felt as though just by learning new words I was improving my kanji skills. However, I soon realized that I was misidentifying kanji, because I would only remember certain radicals. While this may allow one to improve reading to a degree, I found that I was constantly mixing up characters, if I could even remember them at all. It was from this period I developed a central theory of my kanji study:

If you cannot write a kanji character, then you cannot properly read it.

So what brought me back to Heisig's method? A goal, several iOS applications, a Google Chrome extension, and a new outlook on the learning process. Stay tuned for how technology can be used to increase learning exponentially, as well as my own personal Japanese learning set up.

頑張れ！