Still Remembering the Kanji

I switched

Yesterday I finally received my new Macbook version 2.0. Core 2 Duo 2 GHz, 2 GB ram and 80 GB harddrive. It is gorgeous. The first thing I did was to get Opera 9.02 of course. I am now running Opera on all my hardware. My mobile phone, my Nintendo DS Lite, my windoze box and my new macbook. Tomorrow I expect to be running Opera on my Nintendo Wii.

I bought Parallels for Mac as well, so I can now run Windows XP as a virtual machine within Mac OS X 10.4.8. It works really well. The Intel Core Duo family has some VT emulation tech that makes running natice x86 code very fast. I use the virtual Windows XP install to run Supermemo 2004. Alas, developement for Mac OS stopped more than a decade ago.

If anyone know of a Mac OS X compatible Supermemo-like program I'd love to hear. Problem is that my 3000+ item database must be imported, which is why I have stuck with Supermemo on Windows.

Japanese on Mac OS 10.4.8
Japanese input is very pleasant on Mac OS X. Unlike Windows I can switch between kana input and native danish input by just pressing Apple+Space. It works very smooth.

You can read more about japanese on Mac OS X over at Chris Bolton's Japanese for your Mac page

I found links to a nice Mac OS X native jedict dictionary. Unfortunately its quite pricey $25, a world of difference compared to the many free tools for XP, such as Wakan. Students can get a discount of $10. I'll give it a test drive and decide whether I want to fork out the moolah for it right now. This macbook set me back quite a lot of money.

Check out the dictionary here.

There are free alternatives as well.

Having a break from Remembering the Kanji 2, a summer break with no studying for the rest of august. However, if you stopped by in search of information on the first volume of James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, check out Dalu's blog
http://my.opera.com/dalu/blog/

There is a test where you are asked to look up 5 different kanji using 4 different look-up methods. Stroke count, SKIP, components and Kansuke. I was familiar with the former three, but kansuke was new to me. Try it.

Remember not to use the back button in your browser. I did once and had to redo the whole test.

The Kansuke way asks you to count horizontal, vertical and "other" strokes. It is quite fast when you are using this test at least. I haven't seen the system in any dictionary, however, so how popular it is I have no idea. Might be Yet Another Kanji Look-Up Method. They appear now and then. In my opinion you never go wrong with having the old component look up. Works with most e-dics and the ole' Nelson.

Kanji test

Students who have sought out information about teaching themselves Kanji the Heisig way with Remembering the Kanji will probably have met one or more objections to the method.

1) You waste time studying dead kanji with silly mnemonics but sounds. You know 2042 stupid stories that you have no use for when you are done.

2) All the repetition you do could have been spent better repeating vocabulary instead.

3) Heisig's order of learning kanji is completely off the charts. You learn difficult ones too fast, and save needed ones for last.

4) The best way to learn japanese kanji is to use them in context. So learn lots of words and they will come to you.

5) You must learn japanese by doing everything at once, focusing on one bit will automatically lead to neglect of the rest. Grammar, conversation, reading, writing, kanji etc. all hangs together.
6) Silly stories in your head is waste of effort in learning japanese.

I was partially agreeing with the first argument for a while. But taking a japanese course in addition to my kanji studies did reveal one benefit. when meeting words, I often knew a bit about what they meant even before I could read them out loud. The more I progressed, the easier it became to tie meaning and sound to the kanji. At this stage you must rely on pure memorization power.

Also, you cannot skip ahead and mix book 1 and book 2. Heisig system is rather orthodox in its unorthodoxy here: Do as you are told, or fail.

Now argument 2, the repetition, actually is a great convenience today. I have a rock solid repetition scheme running in SuperMemo 2004, and adding vocabulary to that is a walk in the park. The useless mnemonics from argument 1 is a boon. They don't stick for ever, you know, they are replaced by mere recognition. And I gained a valuable insight in how my mind works which I use for further studies.

The order of the kanjis can be a problem if you are too slow working through the book. I spent around 7 months from start to finish of this book. Too long by a month or two, but I managed to complete it before I finished my japanese course. I would say you should really strive to complete the book in 3-4 months. Then the order of the kanji will be a small problem. Story sharing is essential to complete the book fast for most people. So do it in context of some online community or with your japanese co students.

Now, Ive been told by many how you learn japanese best. context, do it all and it sticks. It is probably very japanese way of thinking. Do everything a lot of times and you become a master. Notice how everything takes 10 year in Japan? Sushi chefs are educated for 10 years before they are masters. Karate champions toil for 10 years before they are masters. Virtuoso musicians played till they bled for 10 years. Etc. etc. Wax on, wax off - 1000 times, Daniel-san.

Now, in my country we are probably too scared of repetition nowadays. Its hard work and boring, and viewed as an inferior learning method. It has its merits. But trying to repeat all aspects of the language at once leads to disorganization, at least for me. If you are dragged screaming through a rigorious university course or other, you might not notice that. But doing japanese on your own it is an essential way to do it.Because the Heisig method has one super benefit: It slices out one particular, troublesome aspect of the chaotic mess that it is to be learning japanese and puts it into a rigig system. There is a method, a clear chart of the work ahead of you that builds upon the work you previously did.

Not only is it a huge morale boost when you do complete the book, you also can continue with RTK2 and KanjiTown method to make further progress. Your silly little mnemonics and stories are suddenly turning into powerful silver bullets for building stories that ties memorization and places into sound. All this while you dabble in conversation, grammar and reading of canned text. If you thought the idea presented in RTK1 was smart, you have NO idea what wonders lie in wait for you when you begin kanjitown approach with RTK2.

And the really powerful bit is that you know how to draw just about every kanji there is, almost correctly, since you are intimately familiar with the elements and meaning of them without having to write each kanji 1000 times. You are no ワープロ馬鹿 who is unable to get by without IME. But do not expect your hand written kanji to impress anyone. It takes careful calligraphy classes (10 years!) to really be able to write kanji beautifully.


As someone mentioned on the kanji boards, finishing RTK has made him ask himself what other "Impossible things can I can accomplish."

Just as it is important to make good stories for Remembering the Kanji, it is also crucial that one build up a good reviewing schedule.

In Remembering the Kanji, James Heisig suggests that one make a stack of flash cards. But one must remember that Heisig got his idea around 1977, when computers still ran off punch cards and cost you an arm and a leg. Today you are wading in snake oil and learn kanji fast offers in terms of shareware that helps you with computerized flash card.

Perhaps you have heard of the Leitner method, invented by Sebastian Leitner some 30 years ago. Yes, perhaps people were more inclined to think and study how people remember before everyone got lazy with personal computers and PDAs. Anyways, the best way to review the kanjis in your Heisig journey is to use a Leitner-system or one inspired thereof.

I can recommend Reviewing the Kanji for online use. It is free and build exactly to Remembering the Kanji. The system works with 5 stacks of cards. When you review the cards, from keyword to kanji, and not the other way, you must answer faithfully if you remembered or not. If you did, the card will appear less frequent. This way you soon have a stack of "red cards", the ones you always seem to struggle with.

Another very important and uniqe feature of Reviewing the Kanji is the story sharing. Each registered user can write stories and share them with everyone else, as well as read other people's stories. That is invaluable help in the dark hours where you believe this will never work. So for anyone starting on this, I really recommend using this system.

IF you prefer an offline system there are many offers, some free, some will cost you.

I will only mention those I have tried myself.

StackZ works almost like Reviewing the Kanji, and you can import flashcards easily by making a word file or something and pasting it into StackZ. You can also enter vocabulary words in addition to kanji, that will help your japanese studies long term. It uses a system of fixed boxes as well, Leitner inspired.

Supermemo is harder to use than Stackz, and has poorer support for unicode, but it has a very good algorithm for review. The guy who invented it, a polish professor I believe, clearly has spent a lot of thought and skill making it easier to keep a large corpus of itemized knowledge fresh in the mind. He doesn't operate with fixed boxes, but let you grade each card with points. The lower score, the more often you repeat it. When you score a card high many times, you suddenly notices it wont appear for review in another 8 months!

Essentially this makes SuperMemo 2004 better for keeping track of huge amount of knowledge, simply because it generates repetition schedules for you that stretches far into the future. Im on 3000 items now, a mix of kanji and vocabulary, and Im struggling with 100 reps per day that I must do to keep up with the workload. Fortunately I know it will go down at some point if it wasn't because I kept adding new material constantly.

So while I cannot say that SuperMemo is a brilliant program (its an eye sore, it doesn't work well with unicode, the UI is atrociously complicated at first) it does do the job to such a great degree that any person serious about studying japanese should at least try the trial version.

If you are too stingy to pay for software there is also the Mnemosyne Project, an open sauce alternative using an older supermemo algorithm. But it supports unicode seamlessly.