Normally I hate blog posts that just links to another blog that links to another blog that links to the primary source, especially when I’m subscribed to both blogs. Just give me the source, I don’t need your one line comment and link!

Nevertheless, I read a blog post about language learning methods and felt an urge to add my two cents. Here’s an excerpt from the post.

The neat thing here - and I’ve counseled this before - is that language learning isn’t about following a method; it’s about getting in sync with and enjoying a language.

In this light, the debates about which method is best are silly. But if they keep people talking about new things that others might not have tried yet, they’re still useful. Ignore the bombast about who’s best, then, and keep reading the forums and blogs. You might just find what you are looking for now in spite of everyone’s best efforts to settle what’s best left unresolved.

Looking at the many comments on the merits and drawbacks of Heisig, I’d have to agree. I’ve learned that what works for some doesn’t work at all for others and most importantly, what didn’t work for me may work for others.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what study method you use as long as it helps you spend more time with the language. Still, I have to argue that you have to do my very simple method at some point for fluency, which as many of you already know, is to practice in a real-world context with real people and primary source materials not just artificial textbooks and dialogs. Ok, I guess it’s more common-sense than “a method” per se.

For completeness, here’s the blog post that is link to by the blog I just linked to (whew!). Amazingly, that blog doesn’t link to the primary source which is a thread in the how-to-learn-any-language.com’s forum. （ﾟ_ﾟ;）

When I wrote that current spaced repetition software all suck, I wasn’t saying that you shouldn’t use them or that the idea of spaced repetition itself sucks. To make an analogy, Linus Torvalds said subversion sucks in a talk about git and while I found his talk interesting I still continue to use subversion. It’s because his philosophy and needs for source control are different from mine. Just like Linus, I think that the current SRS can be so much better based on my needs and philosophy (the difference being he actually built the software while I’m just all talk).

I have a basic and simple philosophy that learning languages should be simple and enjoyable. Current SRS are all based on the idea of study and review. I don’t like “studying” because it sounds like work and flipping through cards is work to me (and boring work at that), especially when I have to make them myself. I’ve learned enough about myself to know that I could never stick with it. But hey, I’m just talking about me personally, so don’t let me discourage you from finding the techniques that work for you. In fact, I encourage you to try out various different methods of study to find what works best for you. I went through the same experience to learn enough about myself to know what works for me.

Personally, I think spaced repetition works naturally if you have reading material with words that are spaced out. I’m talking about graded readers that naturally introduce new words while reusing old ones. You can even throw all the vocab in an SRS as a bonus but the most important part that’s missing in current SRS is the material; you have to find it yourself. The simple reason is because software is made by programmers not writers. That’s why my idea of a great spaced repetition program is not one that flips through words but one that allows use to share and find material that interests us in the language and at the right level of difficulty. Flipping through words based on the material is simply a nice bonus.

I love the concept of spaced repetition and enjoy the effects every time I learn a new word without even realizing it. This may sound counterintuitive but forgetting a word really is the best way to learn it. If you forget a word it means that you’ve already learned it and spaced enough time to forget it again. It’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself but the more times you think, “Oh I can’t believe I forgot this word again!” the faster you end up memorizing it. So you shouldn’t feel discouraged when you forget a word, you should be thinking, “Yes! I forgot it! This is really helping me to remember it for good.”

I just wanted to write a quick post about Lingq, a website I just found about today. It’s so cool that I just had to write something about it right away. It’s a real world implementation of some of my ideas for a better flash card program. Instead of having to create your own index cards, the website has a thing called a store which is a library of content for the language you want to learn. You can create and share your own content by adding text and upload images/audio.

Flash cards are created by selecting text and clicking a little widget at the bottom of the screen. The flash cards show you a phrase with the word instead of just having the reading and definition like most flash card programs/websites.　You can add them if you want, however, as a hint.

This is pretty much exactly what I was talking about. Sharing content and creating flash cards that have meaningful content. Though it doesn’t work for Chinese, Japanese lookups work amazingly well. Now, all they have to add is user ratings to help filter out the most interesting content.

There are also additional features involving tutors and Skype that I haven’t tried out.

I encourage everybody reading this to try it out.

My only minor complaints are that the navigation is hard to get at first and the site seems a bit slow.

Also, my original idea had linking and giving proper credit to the original content. I guess these guys are not too worried about the ethical implications of uploading other peoples’ content directly to their website without providing any kind of credit. Especially since it looks like they are trying to make a buck.

In my first post about Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji (RTK), I invited people to convince me that the book can teach you to “write kanji like a native” as claimed in the book’s introduction. As it turns out, it all depends on how you define, “write kanji like a native” and the introduction needed some reading between the lines. (Only being able to write the kanji without knowing the reading or any words that use the kanji doesn’t count as “writing like a native” to me.) But in the end, my challenge was a bit unfair because no single book can really teach you how to write kanji like a native without turning into a dictionary, and in this age of computers, it’s debatable whether even many natives can write kanji like natives.

Though it’s obvious that the book alone is not enough to truly master kanji, many of you gave excellent comments on how it helped you retain the kanji that you’ve learned and at least got you on the path to mastery. Reading through the comments I think I have a better idea of who the book is for and I’d like to share my thoughts in this last post about RTK.

I stress that my opinion is only one of many and if you are considering buying this book, I recommend reading through the comments to form your own impressions of whether this method will work for you. You can find them here and here and maybe even on this post later on. Thanks to everybody’s comments, I think those posts have become a great source of discussion and information for those considering the Heisig method. Also, there’s no harm in trying out the first half of the book which is available for free.

How I learned Kanji

Before I talk about the book, I think it’s worthwhile to discuss how I learned kanji in order to have an alternative method to compare against. I may have mentioned this before but I never studied kanji; I studied the words that are made from kanji. For instance, I learned 「力」 as 「ちから」 but never as 「リョク」 or 「リキ」. I only learned the other on-yomi when I learned words like 「努力」 and 「怪力」. The key to learning these words is, of course, reading. Therefore, it’s very important to find reading material that is interesting and appropriate for your level, something that is a lot harder than it should be.

The advantage of this method is that you end up creating many associations with real words without having to waste time on individual kanji. The first association is, of course, the context of the text from which the word came from. The second comes gradually as you build up a library of words that share the same kanji. Once you get the hang of kun vs on reading and how the voicing changes based on the sounds preceding it, the readings become really easy to memorize as they are shared across different words.

For example, when I see 「試」, I think of words like 「試験」、「試作品」、「試す」 and even other similar kanji like 「式」 and 「武」. As I learn new kanji, I also reflect back and review not only words that share the same kanji but also other kanji that look similar. In this manner, I noticed that 「剣」、「険」、「験」、and 「検」 all have the same reading. It took a while but I finally remembered that the one with “horse” means “testing” based on words like 「試験」 and 「経験」 while the one with “tree” means to “examine” based on words like 「検査」 or 「検索」. Learning radicals, which are simpler kanji such as 「馬」 and 「木」 is also very important because they form parts of many other kanji. By learning radicals you can start to see little mnemonic patterns such as realizing that 「忘」 consists of a dying heart （心 and 亡）.

There are mainly two ways to strengthen your memory, either by strengthening the path to a memory with repetition or by creating many paths with different associations to the same memory. With the method above, you can create associations with words that share the same kanji or radicals that form the kanji. You can also reinforce the memory with repetition by reviewing them every time you run into a new word that share the same kanji. Also, the benefit of reading is that by seeing the same words used in different contexts, you get both repetition and new associations. Basically, reading does make you smarter just like they always said! (Or at least teach you more vocabulary.)

Why you might need RTK

Now let’s get into problems with my method and how RTK might help.

The first problem I’ve learned from reading your comments is that the method completely fails if your brain isn’t wired to see these connections as you go. For instance, if you learned 「試験」 and later ran into 「経験」 in your studies, the assumption is that you’ll be able to recall 「試験」 and make the connection that they both use 「験」. If this does not happen, you don’t get the association which means you’ll have a really difficult time learning the kanji or the words that use them.

Now, I’ve had times when I couldn’t remember exactly which word I learned used the same kanji, I just knew that it looked awfully familiar. One trick I would do is look up just the kanji in WWWJDIC and scroll through all the words that use the kanji until I recognize the old word I learned before. Even with this trick, if all or most of these associations don’t come naturally to you, RTK might be just the thing to help you.

By systematically going through each kanji and assigning a story (basically a mnemonic), RTK can provide you with the glue to jumpstart your associations. For example, let’s say you’ve gone through the whole book and memorized every story for each kanji. Now suppose you see the word 「省略」. Now you’ll recognize 「省」 as “focus” from story 124 (page 61) as, “…picking up a few things and holding them before one’s eye in order to focus on them better”. So when you learn another word such as 「省電力」, even if you couldn’t make the association with 「省略」, you have the story to serve as the glue to link the kanji together.

Now I would argue that it’s better to think of 「省」 as a combination of 「少ない」 and 「目」 instead. In addition, I think memorizing 「省く」, which means “omit” is a better use of your time than memorizing “focus”. However, all that assumes that you can make those connection on the fly as you are learning these words. RTK creates the associations systematically for you and provides the glue to help you link kanji together by having the single story to link them.

Of course, no one could claim that this “bootstraping” could magically teach you how to write all the vocabulary that contains kanji, which is why I was so critical of the book and it’s claim to teach you to “write kanji like a native”. Nevertheless, my personal dislike for the wording in the introduction has no bearing on the value of this resource. If you need it, RTK can help you start creating associations and get you started in seeing the patterns that are not obvious when you’re just starting out.

Finally, based on your comments, there seems to be a great deal of psychological benefit to tackling a text full of kanji that you at least recognize instead of a page full of crazy Chinese symbols. But that issue stems from a larger problem of the difficulty in finding adequate reading materials.

The root problem

The main problem with my method is that you can’t just start reading a novel to learn kanji without becoming frustrated at every other word containing a completely new kanji. A big part of my method is actually enjoy yourself while comprehending what you’re reading, something you can’t do if you need to look up every kanji for every word. Plus, there’s no way you’re going to be able to create associations when every kanji you see is completely new. It’s like telling a beginner skier to start on an expert slope. The slope will look really scary, you’ll fall every second, you won’t have any fun, and you might even hurt yourself in the process.

Fortunately, one of the first books that I got my hands on was one of those anime/manga based books geared for younger readers. But it was still insanely hard, painful, and frustrating to go through all the unfamiliar kanji. It took about a week to read a single page. Not an enjoyable experience.

The problem with today’s Japanese language education is that most classes never go beyond the textbook and textbook reading material is both boring and laughable in terms of depth and scope. What we need is a guided reading curriculum that can gently get us started in learning vocabulary and kanji without killing ourselves. Remember reading “Hardy Boys”, “Nancy Drew”, “The Chronicles of Narnia”, “Where the red fern grows”, etc. for English class or for fun as a kid? We need the Japanese equivalents to be part of our Japanese language education. You’d think some Association or Committee of Japanese teachers would draw up a recommended reading list of books of different levels adapted for adults. If there is such a list, please send it to me. But in the meantime, RTK might be just the book to help ease you into the exciting world of kanji.

Conclusion

I don’t think RTK is for everybody but I’ve learned that it can be really helpful for certain types of learners. I think it depends greatly on your learning style and personality. For those of us who are comfortable taking shortcuts by jumping straight into the Japanese and creating associations as we go, I would suggest continue what you’re doing. Why take the time to memorize key words and stories in English when you are learning the kanji with real Japanese words? Though I wouldn’t suggest it for beginners, some people on my forum even switched to a Japanese-only dictionary to immerse themselves even further.

However, if you are the type who prefers a more systematic method or if you find yourself having difficulty remembering the kanji and coming up with your own patterns and mnemonics, certainly give RTK a try. It could be the “glue” you need to piece together the kanji to make sense of all this craziness.

Or you could even try a mixture of both: jumping into Japanese and using the stories to help you remember how to write the more difficult kanji. Whatever method you choose, I hope this post and the various comments gave you a good idea on how you want to learn kanji and what approach to take.

For those of you unfamiliar with the ruby tag, it is an html tag that adds tiny readings over kanji. 「ルビ」 traditionally is used in print for archaic kanji or when the author wants to indicate a non-standard reading for the kanji. However, on the net, ruby tags are being abused everywhere I see them. Here’s a simple benchmark (with a neat acronym to make it “official”) for determining whether you’re abusing the ruby tag.

Ruby Abuse Benchmark (RAB)

1. Do you use ruby tags for every kanji?

2. Do you use ruby tags for any kanji that most Japanese people can read?

3. Do you use ruby tags?

If you answered “Yes” to any of the questions above, you are abusing the ruby tag.

This abuse happens most often on sites that are intended for people learning Japanese. For example, this site about the JLPT or Japanese language blogs like the one you’re reading now. I don’t use ruby tags though. Even sites for kids stay away from ruby and just use Hiragana instead. Here’s why you should stay away from them too.

The Technical Reason

Ruby is only included in the XHTML 1.1 specification, which has been around forever and still hasn’t gained much traction. The HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional DTDs are still being used in the majority of website that care about standards. This means that if you want to use a schema that the majority of the web is using, <ruby> won’t validate.

Plus, the markup is terribly hard to read and write. Take a look at these markup examples. Imagine doing that for every kanji. Your Japanese text will be indecipherable and an incredible pain to edit.

The Practical Reason

Because XHTML 1.1 hasn’t gained much traction, a majority of browsers don’t support ruby. The only one I’m aware of that does is IE and in today’s world where up to 30% of your visitors might not be using IE, IE-only is not practical.

People without Ruby support will see this.

田中(たなか)： はい、元気(げんき)です。早坂(はやさか)さんは?

Terrible, just terrible. It’s totally unreadable. Plus, even if you DID have Ruby support, the text is far too small. It’s a lose-lose situation. The correct use of ruby is to show the readings of a few archaic words that the author assumes will not readable by his audience or when he wants to expand on the word. It is NOT intended to be used for every kanji. The print is too small for people who need them and distracting for the people who don’t need them. Also, it can become a crutch allowing people to never actually read and learn the kanji.

So, even if you can install something such as an extension to make ruby tags work, it’s just not a good idea.

Alternatives

1. CSS mouse-over popups: It’s one simple span tag and it works in all major browsers. It’s also more versatile because you can add more information such as English definitions, etc.

Html: <span title=”たべる - to eat” class=”popup”>食べる</span>
Appears as: 食べる

I suggest adding a visual highlight so that the reader can easily see which part of the text applies for the popup or whether there is a popup at all (not supported by some older browsers). You can easily do this by adding some CSS like the following to your stylesheet.

span.popup:hover {
text-decoration:none;
color: rgb(159,20,26);
}

Plus, you can easily see the readings for only the words you need, removing the distracting ruby text and preventing the furigana from becoming a crutch.

Here’s a recent convert and look at all the positive comments he’s gotten.

2. Make a list of the vocabulary at the beginning or end of the page so that the reader has something to refer to.

3. Suggest additional tools such as WWWJDIC, 理解.com, moji, and rikaichan so that people can learn to teach themselves. (You know, the whole teach a man to fish thing.)

Conclusion

I think the first method is good for static resources like my guide to Japanese grammar but when you don’t have the time to add readings and definitions manually all the time (like this blog), you can’t beat the third method. Plus, it helps your readers read any online Japanese text instead of just your own. In the end, whatever method you use, it certainly beats the hell out of writing this for every word that uses kanji.

<ruby>日本語<rp>(</rp><rt>にほんご</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>

Ah!!! My eyes!!

みなさん、日本語で書かれている面白いブログ、ご存知ないですか？英語のブログをたくさん読んでますけど、日本語のブログは全然です。

人気ブログランキングがあるんですが、範囲が広すぎて、面白いブログを探すのがめんどくさいです。有名人のブログも人気あるようですが、個人的にはあまり好きじゃないし、私みたいな凡人よりもっと面白い人生を送っているようで、なんかムカつきます。

ちにまに、私が読んでいるブログは、この日本語教師のブログぐらいです。日本語に興味なくても、なかなか面白いですよ。

コメントで面白いブログをシェアーしましょう！

最後に．．．（もう遅いけど）

あけましておめでとうございます！

今年もよろしくお願いします。これからも、コメントをじゃんじゃん書いてね！

I was taking a look at last year’s admissions test for the Japanese Applied Linguistics Graduate program at Waseda and there are some very interesting and intriguing questions.

Here’s a small sample:
G　JSLの子どもを対象にした日本語学習教材について述べなさい。

B　CLL (Community Language Learning) について説明しなさい。

H　「総合型教科書」 について述べなさい。

You can download the whole file at:
http://www.waseda.jp/gsjal/dat/nyusi_master/07.4-07.9m_kakomon.pdf.

It seems like there’s a lot of research and things going on for teaching Japanese. But I have no idea where I can get information about this stuff. For instance, how do I get these teaching materials for JSL kids? (I’m guessing JSL is Japanese as a Second Language like ESL?) I’m also curious about what a 「総合型教科書」 is and how it could help people learning Japanese. It certainly can’t be worse than the mainstream textbooks here. Or maybe Community Language Learning is the way to go for learning Japanese? I have no idea because unfortunately, real research studies and papers are nowhere to be found on the net. I guess I can try looking in University libraries nearby.

The thing I’m wondering is how does all this research help people learning languages? Biomedical research cure illnesses and technology research (eventually) creates new and innovative products but how does research in applied linguistics help improve the language classes that you and I take? Why are we still stuck with workbooks, flash cards, drills, cheesy dialogues, and crappy textbooks? When is this Applied Linguistics research going to “apply” to us?

I’m curious to hear from anybody studying Applied Linguistics particularly for Japanese or Chinese. What’s the best way for me to catch up on current research and introduce the good stuff to the rest of the world?

Following up from yesterday’s post about index card programs, I stumbled upon Jonathan’s blog and his post about spaced repetition software by following his comment link.

I won’t talk about them here because as we all know, I think they all suck. Why is it that these programs never think about sharing index cards, community ranking by difficulty level, and incorporating richer content than just text? Jonathan, if you want my opinion, you’re wasting your time. Please do let us know how it goes, though.

But it’s only been a few days that I’ve been using this method, so I can’t gauge yet just how effective it is. For now, however, I’m pretty pleased. It certainly beats the pit of near-inactivity that I have been falling in recently.

I certainly can’t argue with that.

Personally, I’ve tried them all and could never stick with it. I ignored the desktop or homepage widget, deleted my kanji email after they piled up, stop going to the websites, and my index cards were collecting dust long before I finally threw them away. I eventually realized it wasn’t a problem of motivation (I had that in spades) but rather a problem stemming from a flawed method. The index cards themselves were as interesting as reading a dictionary because well… that’s essentially what it is.

Have any of you successfully used these programs or index cards to study for a significant period of time? (I know my readership is dismally too small to make a statistical difference but I’m curious anyway.)

Japanese is probably one of the most popular languages to learn for English speakers. As a result, you can find more online and offline resources compared to other languages such as Korean. I’ve seen great online resources pop up on the internet over the years and some that are… not so good. I was ecstatic when I first discovered the WWWJDIC and it has continued to improve; adding example sentences and expanding the edict dictionary. (Some entries, I’m proud to say were submitted by yours truly such as 「夢うつつ」). Then, I discovered 英辞郎, which has an E->J dictionary that is actually useful and Yahoo!辞書, which has TWO awesome J->J dictionaries: 大辞泉 and 大辞林 for free. I’m surprised if people even buy paper dictionaries anymore.

If you think about it, a dictionary is a perfect fit for the internet. It’s accessible from any computer with internet access, searches are instantaneous, and you can copy/paste words without having to know the reading. Any type of instructional written and audio material such as ebooks and podcasts can also benefit from worldwide access and fast search capabilities. I also applaud sites that brings people together to talk, discuss, and ask questions such as forums and social networking sites such as Mixxer.

While these online resources are helping people from all over learn Japanese, it seems that there’s some sort of carnal instinct to create not so helpful index card programs. I’m talking about the numerous kanji/vocabulary sites or applications that you can store kanji/vocab into. Some of them make index cards for you, some might send you emails daily, others even have algorithms to determine how often you should review a word based on how many times you tell the program you’ve learned the word.

All of these sites and programs share the same critical flaw of being based on the index card learning routine. They might have some nice features to dress it up but underneath it’s the same process of writing words down with definitions and testing yourself by going through them one by one.

The reason why these sites never seem to help me is because the index card method has the following problems:
1. It’s boring
2. Lack of meaningful context
3. It requires too much work for little benefit

I mean, sure it might work if you expended enough time and energy but guess what? With enough time and effort, I can memorize the entire dictionary. Sure it’s theoretically possible but is it realistic? I’ve said before that index cards are only good for preparing for tests in the short-term and the tests themselves are only useful for teachers in grading. They don’t actually help you learn or retain the language very well.

My vision

There’s a lot of obvious or meaningless stuff in the whole web 2.0 hype like rounded-corners and larger fonts but the idea of users sharing data online, while obvious in hindsight, is really quite innovative. And yet there is still no site that I know of where we can share our vocabulary and kanji learning beyond the level of stuff you can find in dictionaries anyway. There’s a lot more to a word than: reading, stroke order, and definition. What we need is a site where people can share interesting content on the web like digg but with enhancements for studying Japanese. The key to that idea is an index card truly made for the web: wwwindex cards.

Wwwindex cards

A wwwindex card is kind of like a digg submission but instead of a description of the link, you have an excerpt that pertains to your study. You mark the part that interests you and decide what you want to test yourself on. The submission will include information like the following:

1. Level (beginner to advanced)
2. Type (grammar/kanji/vocabulary)
3. Source (link or title/author or maybe even link to the book)
4. Excerpt to test with specific portions highlighted.
5. Answer

Here’s an example of a card I could make.
1. Intermediate
2. Grammar
3. http://www.alc.co.jp/nj/2007_01/section4_manga_jpn.swf
4. 母親が受験勉強中の子どもに軽食を運んでくると、子どもは勉強をしないでテレビゲームをやっています。
5. Doing one action without doing another.

I can make a vocab version of the same card by highlighting a word like 「勉強」 instead and putting 「べんきょう - study」 in the answer. Or I can test my kanji writing ability by replacing the kanji with hiragana and putting the kanji in the answer. The point is that it’s more than just information you can find in a dictionary because it comes with context and potentially interesting material.

You can even copy short paragraphs from a book or textbook. All the site would have to do is restrict the size of the text to abide with copyright laws. Pretty soon, with enough users, the site should be rich with contextual study materials and links that can be shared for further study. If you add voting and ranking, you can have a site that is fresh with interesting materials to explore everyday. You can find links to interesting websites, video, images, audio, or excerpts from books and textbooks. The excerpts might even help you find and decide on what books to buy. I know I have trouble finding books that are easy enough for beginner to intermediate learners. You can even test yourself with other peoples’ wwwindex cards based on level and type. It solves all the problems of traditional index card sites by making the content interesting, adding context to what you’re studying, and removing the tedium of having to make the cards all by yourself.

Notice also, that there’s nothing in the index card that is specific to Japanese. You can simply add a language field to the wwwindex card to have the site work for any language.

Does this sound interesting to you?

Unfortunately, while I have the skill necessary to make a site like this, I don’t have the time to drive such a large project. So if you’re interested in making this project come to life, feel free to email me at taekim.japanese AT gmail.com and I will setup a new project on http://code.google.com/hosting/. Ibiblio gives me unlimited space for php websites as long as it’s not for profit. Or if you’d rather start your own project, feel free to send me a link to your work.

During my quest to give you ever more informative yet mildly entertaining posts about Japanese, I’ve noticed that the most carefully thought-out posts toiled over for many days and nights often have the least comments. It’s OK. I’m assuming it’s a sign that the post is SO GOOD that nobody has found anything objectionable to comment about. On the other hand, inflammatory posts like calling James Heisig a douche bag, attracts comments like flies to a pile of turd. And because I enjoy comments like a grab bag of Christmas presents, here I am with another flame post.

Actually, I didn’t really call Heisig a douche bag. In fact, though I’ve never met him, I’m sure he’s a very smart and great guy. Furthermore, many people commented that they couldn’t even begin memorizing how to write kanji without the help of his book. That’s great, and I’m glad that the book helped them find a method that works for them. After all, our brains are complex so it’s natural that certain techniques work better for certain people. Even so, after over 50 comments, nobody has stepped forth and met my challenge by saying, “Yes, I can write whole words and sentences like a native using his methods.” So I remain a skeptic about the long-term durability of the method and still don’t give a damn whether or not you can write all the 常用漢字 from memory. Here’s the real test - see if you can write words for a ２級 Kanji test by studying with Heisig’s methods, even just the answers that only use 常用漢字. If so, I’ll buy the books myself and start studying because I could hardly answer most of those questions.

If that’s not enough to incite you into commenting, here some more fodder.

I think it’s better to teach casual Japanese before polite Japanese. It sounds crazy I know, but first of all, it’s how all native speakers started out as kids so it can’t be that bad. Second, it’s much more useful grammatically and socially if you’re in high school or college. Finally, I worked at one of the largest, oldest, and most traditional Japanese companies in Tokyo and “business Japanese” was just putting “desu” and “masu” at the end of every sentence. The rest is knowing phrases like 「いつもお世話になっております」, honorific/humble, and vocabulary that’s too difficult for beginners anyway.

Discuss.

[Update]

I’d like to clarify that I have no issues with Heisig’s book itself but rather how it promises to enable you to gain native proficiency in writing kanji. I mentioned this in the comments as well but I find the following claims a bit far-fetched.

“…the goal of the book is still to attain native proficiency in writing the Japanese characters…”

“Virtually all teachers of Japanese, native and foreign, would agree with me that learning to write the kanji with native proficiency is the greatest single obstacle to the foreign adult approaching Japanese-indeed so great as to be presumed insurmountable. [lines skipped] In fact, as this books seeks to demonstrate, nothing could be further from the truth.”

“…they are not likely ever to have considered reorganizing their pedagogy to take advantage of the older student’s facility with generalized principles. So great is this neglect that I would have to say that I have never met a Japanese teacher who can claim to have taught a foreign adult to write basic general-use kanji that all high-school graduates in Japan know.”

(I infer from this that the book can teach a foreign adult to write like all high school graduates.)

Now, somebody posted a comment saying that Heisig probably meant that you will be able to write individual kanji like a native; namely being able to write all 2000 or so characters. However, if that was what he meant, then what he is saying doesn’t even really make any sense. Native speakers don’t think about each kanji individually, they learn to write them in words. For example, if you were to ask any native speaker who doesn’t speak English, “What is 「接」?” they will say, “Oh, that’s 「接」 from 「接続」 or 「直接」” because 「接」 by itself doesn’t mean anything. Or if there’s a 訓読み for the kanji such as 「動」, they might say, “Oh, that means 「動く」”. So even if you could write all ~2000 characters with the keywords, you still won’t be writing kanji with native proficiency. That means his claims are either misleading or just inaccurate.

Why couldn’t he just write something a bit more modest like this?

By being able to write each individual character, you can use them as building blocks to help you remember how to write words that use those characters as you progress in your studies.

Sure, it doesn’t sound as revolutionary as, “You can write kanji with native proficiency, something I’ve not once seen a Japanese teacher teach successfully” but it sure is more accurate. Oh I don’t know, maybe I should just change the introduction to my grammar guide to say, “The goal of this guide is to gain native proficiency in Japanese grammar. Most people think such a goal is insurmountable but nothing could be further from the truth.”