The Heisig Method

Heisig is a powerful mnemonic Kanji learning technique, invented by James W. Heisig in order to expedite the process of “how not to forget the meaning and writing of Japanese characters”. In his seminal book, Remembering the Kanji, Heisig advocates ditching visual memory, and endless rote learning of kanji (the most common and traditional methods for kanji learning) to tackle the huge amount of symbols present in the Japanese language, and to focus on using imaginative memory by starting with kanji radicals and making simple stories to remember them, before using these smaller components and stories and weaving them together into increasingly complex stories in order to remember the more complex kanji. In this manner, the stories stick in our brains much more powerfully and lastingly than if we simply attempt to remember them by rote, visual memorisation.

Heisig also advocates a divide and conquer strategy with learning kanji. Rather than trying to learn one kanji, and all the associated facts, compounds, pronunciations e.t.c. with that one kanji, he recommends learning only one single fact associated with each kanji, one single keyword that most concisely describes the ranges of meaning associated with that kanji. Once one of these is associated and remembered with all the 2042 kanji listed in his book (all of the Juyo kanji, followed by several dozen more kanji that are either common as components of other kanji, or commonly used as name kanji), it should be easier to “bolt-on” extra facts for each of the kanji; the pronunciations, the compounds it is part of and so on needed to use that kanji as part of the whole language.

While on it’s own, this method isn’t going to make you literate in Japanese, what it does provide is an ability to comprehend Japanese text similar to that of a Chinese person reading the language for the first time. That is to say, a general “feeling” and “sense” of the text. It`s well known that L2 learners of Japanese that come from another kanji based language (e.g. Chinese) learn Japanese in a far quicker time-frame than those coming from other, non kanji character-set, so this method should also in theory speed-up the learning process further down the line.

Heisig not only provides the details of his method in his book, but also provides his personal “path” through the method, that is to say, the component breakdown he used to remember all the kanji, as well as the order he used to build up the increasingly complex stories. He also provides his own imaginative mnemonics for the first several hundred kanji in the book, before starting to slowly wean the reader off his own created mnemonics, and thus forcing the reader to start creating their own, personal stories for the kanji.

Heisig is effective for a number of reasons:

1) Confidence building – The Heisig method builds confidence in the ability to tackle kanji. Before Heisig, kanji seems something of an impossibly large and difficult hurdle which is insurmountable. What Heisig does is give some scope to the language, breaking the task down into a system and series of steps for tackling the difficult problem of remembering them all.

2) Word Mnemonics – The Heisig method introduces the kanji at the individual level. While most of the words in the Japanese language, outside of verbs and simple nouns, are made of compounds of 2 or more kanji, in a similar way to building up the stories for the kanji out of components, it is possible to build stories to remember compounds, based on the keywords present in the individual kanji in the compound.

3) Speed Reading – The Heisig method generally helps with the process of moving your eyes over a page of kanji, from quicker recall, to giving an gist of the meaning of words you haven’t seen before.

4) Radical familiarity – Heisig introduces Kanji at the radical level, and builds up stories from kanji components. While the “radicals” used in the kanji mnemonic stories don’t quite match the official radicals in the Japanese language, the method does give you an appreciation as to how complex kanji are built up from more simple components. Also, a familiarity with the kanji at the component level helps the brain with categorising more complex kanji not inside the book as and when you see them.

The missing component in my opinion with Heisig is a “Heisig software look-up” application, something that processes an English keyword into a Heisig kanji. For example, you could type in “exit” and on hitting enter would be presented with “?”

In my opinion, this would further increase the utility of the Heisig method, allowing it to not just act as a method to “not forget the meaning of the kanji”, but also giving it utility as a powerful input method for those who have tackled the book and method. Combining this with the iPhone would be great, allowing the Heisig learner to look-up unknown compounds on the move. So if there’s any budding software developers out there reading this looking for a project to carry out, this would be a good one!

The next post will cover the clever, schedule organising SRSes and their ability to optimise your learning pipeline. Until then, good luck with Heisig!