Thu, 03 Jul 2008
Heisig, Remembering the kanji
This is a different approach to most courses in kanji, the Chinese characters used for writing Japanese. Most courses either:
- rely on brute-force memorisation, or
- draw cute little pictures that are supposed to resemble the
character.
The problems is that there are too many characters to memorise that way, and most characters are not pictoral, so little drawings do not work.
Heisig's approach is to break down each character into 'primitives', which are simple 'mini-characters' with about five strokes (these may be characters in their own right, or radicals, or obsolete characters). Fortunately, there are not too many of these, about 300. Then the more-complex characters can be learnt as composed of the simpler primitives, by visualising and memorising simple stories.
The approach is as such nothing new. As Jonathan Spence points out in his The memory palace of Matteo Ricci, Ricci (a missionary to China) used a similar technique to learn classical Chinese in the late 1500s.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any similar text for Chinese (either traditional or simplified).
Heisig, James W.. Remembering the kanji: a complete course. 1977, Japan Publications, Tokyo. paperback. 494 pages.
ISBN 0-87040-739-2.
