Remembering the Kanji. Vol 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters (Paperback)

What Heisig has done is not revolutionary, but he is very consistent and systematic in the way he does it, which makes it a gift if you are willing to follow his book with blind faith.
The irony of Heisigs mnemonic method is, that he breaks with orthodox japanese teaching method (rote memorization) but instead insist on complete orthodoxy in his pupils doing imaginary memorization. You do it the Heisig way or it is the highway with this book. You start by kanji #1 and stop by 2042, and you MUST do it in the order that Heisig dictates. Otherwise you waste your time. And you need to complete it or you will be on crutches in your further studies of japanese.

Also you need a good grasp on english (but now spanish, french and german versions are out). You need to be comfortable with abstract thinking and you need to work hard imagining up stories that makes sense. Not visualising, that doesn't work. The method is described in detail in his foreword, and you can even get a sample PDF download of the first 270 kanjis from James Heisigs home page.

Critics of the book claims that it is useless to learn english kanji with no readings, but I beg to differ. The usefullness comes in that you can remember what *ALL* joyou kanji means and how to draw them. Just like a chinese can read japanese with some effort, and gain the meaning of sentences if not the readings, so can you after you memorzie enough. This alone makes tying readings and real words together much easier later on, once you have a semantic frame to hang the new information on.

Also critics point towards the fact that many Heisig students experience "burn out" at various points in their kanji journey. This probably comes from overexerting yourself. When using the book it is very important to keep reviewing the stuff you thought you *HAD* remembered, but not too frequently. And it is very important to really imagine up stories that fits the elements properly inside your head, or they will never stick.

Do not buy it if you do not plan to learn *ALL* 2042 kanji, because the order he does it in is completely different to the orthodox method with 1-10 grade joyou kanji. And expect to spend an hour per day working with it if you want to make progress. If you do it is a very rewarding experience. I rocketed up to remembering *AND* drawing over 500 kanjis in a month with this book. the pace slows somewhat after the first 500, but the method is sound.

The book stand-alone is too little to do this thing, and that is why Heisig encourages you to draw your own kanji flash cards for reviewing drills. But I found that too much of a hassle. Luckily there are many third party aids available, Leitner-based flash card programs and boxes of paper flash cards ordered after the Heisig indexing etc.

Put simply, mastery of "Remembering the Kanji I" (along with the simple hiragana and katakana scripts) is analogous to mastery of the 26 letters of our own English alphabet. These 2000 or so characters - compulsory learning for every child in Japan - are the building blocks for almost any Japanese word you would care to imagine.

Why is this so important? Well, it suggests by far the most efficient way for a beginner to learn Japanese. If the beginner can complete this volume before learning a single word or attending a single class (completion, quite remarkably, takes no more than 3 months full-time), then he or she is at a huge advantage over any other student of Japanese. Why? Because every single time that student learns a new word, he or she can learn it in conjunction with its kanji form if it has one.

This is a vital point. Most people when asked how they became proficient in Japanese will say that hobbled along for several years using mainly hiragana and katakana, and, worst of all, the romanized form - romaji (personally, I spent a whole year learning Japanese using romaji). However, to do that is really shooting yourself in the foot. It is a gross inefficiency for three reasons. Firstly, you will have to learn words twice, or even three times (if you used romaji, then 'upgraded' to hiragana and then kanji). Secondly, your memory won't be able to benefit from being able recognize ALL of the kanji you see around you on a daily basis in Japan. Thirdly (and perhaps most importantly) you will never have any insight into WHY a word sounds like it does. For example, learning the word for post office clerk - "yuubinkyokuin" - in romaji is very difficult because you have no idea whatsoever of the kanji building blocks. However, those sounds are there for a reason, and break down into four kanji which, using Heisig's method, you would have learned as 'mail', 'convenience', 'bureau' and 'employee'. Needless to say, these four sound-units appear in hundreds of other words, and this gives an internal logical to vocabulary learning which simply does not exist otherwise.

I am slowly recovering from post-romaji stress syndrome. Believe me, it is the worst habit you could ever get into. Once I realised the importance of the above, I resolved not to learn a single new piece of Japanese vocabulary until I could write it in kanji too. You should do the same. If you know your 'ABC', you can be confident about learning any Japanese vocabulary you want to with considerable ease.

p.s. I would recommend two more aids in addition. Firstly, as other reviewers have noted, Heisig's 2042 "Kanji study cards" are very handy for learning the 'yomikata' (the pronunciation). And secondly, something that hasn't been mentioned is "Kanjican" by Kanjisoft systems (available on the web). While by no means a perfect program, it is designed to accompany Heisig's series, and allows you to enter both Heisig's and your own stories (to replace the author's quite frankly abominable ones), and then be tested randomly on each kanji. Very useful indeed, since you need a place to record your own stories.

And I'm taking the other positive reviewer's advice by aiming to learn the Kanji BEFORE I progress further orally (I have a survival vocabulary of about 150 words - thanks to BBC's Talk Japanese). I'm looking forward to Xmas with my Japanese Grandmother-in-law, communicating with hastily made 'flashcards'.