Students (and would-be) of Japanese from all over the world face one huge nightmare: Kanji. These thousands of random scribbles, each representing a word (or more) each, coupled by many pronunciations, incredibly complex, yet ingrained deeply into the Japanese language, requiring many, many hours of painstaking copying, but leaving the brain the day after, make the majority give up or at least minimise their importance.
Enter James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji 1: A Complete Course on How Not To Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters.
These books exploit a fact that is hidden in plain sight: the 'complicated' Kanji are actually made up of simpler Kanji. Pushing "imaginative memory" (instead of "visual memory"), James Heisig divides around 2.042 kanji into their 'primitive' parts (related to, but not consisting only of, 'radicals' that identify Kanji by their parts), assigns meanings to these 'primitives', then (at least in the beginning) makes silly stories that effectively tie the primitives to their source Kanji.
James Heisig wrote two sequels: Remembering the Kanji 2: A Systematic Guide to Reading Japanese Characters and Remembering the Kanji 3: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency. He also wrote books on how to remember the Kana (the Japanese syllabary) and a couple of books each on traditional and simplified Hanzi
. There is also a website where people share stories on the characters among other stuff regarding Japanese and Chinese.
Examples:
- Artistic License – History: Those who read on the actual etymology of Kanji know that most characters are actually made by combining the meaning of one character with the sound of another character. This trope is justified, though, because the books are partially founded on the idea that the meaning and writing of Kanji not only can be studied separately from their pronunciations but are better done this way. The later books take advantage of this historical fact, though, when teaching the pronunciations.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The first book focuses just on learning the meaning and writing of Kanji. James Heisig discusses this trope in the Introduction, saying that memorising the meaning, pronunciation, and writing at the same time is too much. He eventually gets to the pronunciations in the second book.
- It Will Never Catch On: Just about everyone was against James Heisig's method of learning Kanji at first.
- Pyrrhic Victory: James Heisig's book is all about defying this trope normally associated with learning the Kanji.
