Heisig's kanji books

I used Remembering the Kana by James W. Heisig to learn the entire alphabet in a few hours so I decided to try out his kanji learning books. However, a few lessons into the first volume I'm beginning to have some doubts.

It's not that I'm not learning anything--I am--it's that I'm afraid the book may be outdated. For example, the kanji it teaches for ideas like "I" and "companion" look completely different from the kanji I see in Random House's JP-EN dictionary. What's up with that?

I want to believe it's not teaching me obsolete kanji since this is the 2001 reprinting, but I don't know what else the problem could be. I'd especially love to hear from those who used Heisig's books to learn kanji.

Thanks.

(Just in case you're curious, all I know so far in terms of Japanese is the kana. I plan on using Heisig's books to learn the kanji, and using Rosetta Stone for sentence structure, etc. If you have better recommendations please share!)

They aren't obsolite and the book is quite well up to date!
If I remember correctly, those two you brought up (吾,朋) are 人名用 (jinmeiyou, used in names!)

I have finished the book one and it was a tremendous help to remembering how to write the 2042 characters and linking each one to a concept.
It is still another thing to learn to read them and that isn't covered in the book I and I hear the book II isn't very good for that.

The conflict that you see with the dictionary is a result of the idea behind the RTK. Each individual kanji is linked to a unique key word to aid distinquishing the characters with similar meanings. This sometimes leads to a bit funny keywords but in the end, they aren't supposed to give the whole meaning of a kanji with all it's nuances like a dictionary. They are just something you can hook the character up to until you can encounter it again in real life and get a more detailed understanding of what it means.

I too sometimes had doubts while going through the book but I also saw great benefit!
I was living in Japan for a while when I was still just beginning the book and with only about 500-600 frames in I could already decipher the meaning of many signs around me although I couldn't read them aloud. I also could easily remember names of places that used kanji that I already could write, etc.

Still, the single greatest thing about the method is that once you have completed it, you can start really learning the kanji without mixing them up and constantly forgetting how to write them. You'll be able to remember and learn them much quicker too!
A setback is that you pretty much have to go through most of the book before this starts working.

There are lots of people that for some reason don't like the method (and I feel 99% of those have not relly tried it or didn't bother to do what they were instructed to).
For me it did wonders!


Divide and conquer!

So you're saying the book does teach you 私 eventually, in addition to 吾? I wish the author would've mentioned it's only used in names... Otherwise I'm loving this book so far!

lol!
Yes. It does teach it too in frame 902 when all the needed componens have already been given. The assigned keyword though is "private".
The order is all about the "components" or "primitives" and this results in many 'elementary' characters being introduced quite late in the book.

The book does a good job in teaching you to write the characters but the reading and meaning stuff has to be studied separately.
I think the reason, why Heisig didn't add more stuff about the meanings, is to keep it simple.


Characters refering to "oneself" give a good illustration to this.
Just of the top of my head we have:

私,吾,我,自

I think it is good to at first just learn to write them the Heisig way and soon enough you'll learn the different usages through other sources.

私 is commonly used to mean "me, I",
吾 is a name-kanji nowadays,
我 can be found in words like 我国 (our country) and 我家 (our home), and
自 in context like 自動的 (self-move-like --> automatic)

I think it would get quite inconvenient pretty fast if this kind of info was given for every kanji and you were doing, say, 25-30 a day.. Too much info for this! Hard to remember!
Although I did check a kanji dictionary for further info whenever I was in doubt with a character.

Just do the method without worrying about it and move on! It makes learning the kanji much more fun than the traditional ways! ^^

Still, it is good to dig deeper when ever you get more interested in a particular kanji!


There is a community out there, that you might wanna check out!
I'm not really sure if I could have done it without this site!


Cheers!