But my real complaint here is the notion of a "royal road", an ideal path that works best for most students. This goes against 50 years of experience at the US Foreign Service Institute. Let me quote them:

Lesson 3. There is no “one right way” to teach (or learn) languages, nor is there a single “right” syllabus. Students at FSI and in other government language training programs have learned and still do learn languages successfully from syllabi based on audio-lingual practice of grammatical patterns, linguistic functions, social situations, task-based learning, community language learning, the silent way, and combinations of these and other approaches.

Let me back this up with some personal experiences. I currently speak French at a level between CEFRL B1 and B2. In other words, I can carry on a social conversation or follow a science documentary on TV, but I can't watch movies or function as an educated adult.

And I didn't even look at French grammar book until recently. Instead, (1) I overlearned hours of French audio and text with help from English translations, and (2) I spoke with native French speakers. I learned a huge fraction of French grammar from context and occasionally reading a footnote in Assimil New French with Ease.

So when I first read a grammar book that claimed, "French tends to avoid the passive voice," I thought, "Well, yeah, because I can always use an impersonal subject with 'on', or a reflexive thingy like 'il se dit'. After all, it's nicer that way."

So if I were going to learn Chinese, I'd begin by working very hard on tones and pronunciation. But after that, I would try to pick up the basic grammar from context. If Chinese strongly favors stative verbs to copulas, I want to figure that out by reading Chinese, not by reading grammar books.

This isn't to say that the "Beginning Chinese Reader" isn't excellent. I'm sure it works wonderfully for a great many people. But there's a half-dozen good ways to learn any language, and Memrise or LingQ or full-time conversational immersion might work better for somebody else.

I am now 22 and I can understand 95% of the individual words in a Chinese newspaper. I don't claim to be able to read the newspaper, however, because the 5% of the words I can't read are the ones that actually matter. Also, for the phrase "學而時習之 不亦說乎", I know what each individual word means but when it is put together like that, it makes no sense to me. (I know ancient phrases are hard to understand in any language, but it's easier for me to point to this phrase in the parent post than searching for a random chinese multiple word-term that I actually don't know on the internet.) I'll have to sit here for 5 minutes to figure it out. My reading speed is also horribly slow. Imagine if you can only read English words at one word per second. Yes, like that.

Here I am, a Chinese born in China (technically an English colony at the time...), more fluent at my second language English than my native tongue. Sad as it may be, when I speak English I have a slight Chinese accent and when I speak Chinese I have a slight English accent so I don't sound native in either.

I hope that can attest to you how much practice learning Chinese takes.

I've only experience with Remembering the Kana, but it worked, and worked very well, for me -- not because I immediately knew them by intrinsic sight, but because of the silly stories with each one would quickly bring them back into memory.

If you're talking about learning Kana, then my argument would be that some flashcards or computer based drills are going to be a more efficient method of learning, if perhaps less pleasant, than reading a story for each character. And why go through this circuitous thought process of seeing the character, recalling the appropriate story, and then divining the meaning? We don't do that for our letters, and we don't do that for simple arithmetic.

I agree that eventually the stories should be forgotten, but initially, they are significantly better than my normal memory.

In fact I am starting to forget the stories of the kanji that I am exposed to regularly. However, some of the general use characters appear pretty infrequently, and for those the stories are still invaluable. I like Greg's training wheels analogy below.

Another advantage is that the stories provide a check for characters I also know visually. So if I'm writing a character from my visual memory I might be reasonably confident that I'm writing it correctly, but if I can also remember the story then I am sure.

Of course doing RtK doesn't teach you any Japanese, but since I did it I find Japanese vocab acquisition much easier. Maybe it's like learning English when you already know Greek and Latin.

Maybe other people don't or can't learn that way, but these silly picture stories are enough to let me memorize characters I've never seen before so that I can look them up later.

About a year (~2000 kanji). That's casual study though, and I restarted once after an idle period.

> How well can you read?

I can recognize and write just about any of the general use characters. But kanji is not vocabulary. Instead, going through RTK has made studying vocabulary tremendously easier. It's given each character a kind of "identity" in my head. I can also guess the meaning of many compounds by the keywords given in the book, but this is just a bonus, real reading comprehension should be attained with vocab study.

I'm not sure if you've actually read the book, but it's no snake oil. It makes no claims to the amount of time or effort you'll need to finish it. It's simply a method to learning kanji that tries to make the most out of your memorization capabilities. It does this by presenting them in a more convenient order (progressively building up the characters), and throwing etymology (to some extent) out of the window in favor of your own personal mnemonic stories.

I would not be surprised if the parent hasn't read the book or tried it. Most of the complaints with his method seem to come from people who have never tried it.

The point is to just get you familiar with the kanji so they don't look like a foreign language anymore. After that, you learn how to read them in sentences and words.

Also another point is that you don't have to "practice, practice, practice." Some characters I can remember after only writing it a few times because I have the story associated with the character. It sure beats the Asian method of writing out each character hundreds or thousands of times.

The Heisig method is just meant to be the first step.

Etymology is a complex and often convoluted topic, particularly for a language learner who may not be able to understand etymological information in the target language. Do you think there's no value at all in simplified memory aids, such as James Heisig's approach?

Some people argue that the pronunciation part of most characters is seldom 100% accurate, but neither is English spelling, and at least it has some connection to the pronunciation. And like Chinese characters, to really understand spelling you need to know some things about the etymology.

I think the approach in the original link is great for learning Japanese, not Chinese. I use a handful of "story" mnemonics to disambiguate really similar Hanzi, though, when the "built in" mnemonics fail.

But if you want to be proficient, you have to be able to read words as a chunk with associated meaning and pronunciation, without the intermediate mnemonic device. So at best it's something you'd want to forget, and at worst it's something that you wouldn't want to learn in the first place.

There's lots of evidence to show that mnemonics boost recollection by a factor or three or so across a wide range of domains, abilities and time ranges. See e.g. http://www.unforgettablelanguages.com/studies.html

Re the intermediate mnemonic device, here's the way I picture things. The mnemonic provides training wheels for your brain, helping you get the answer right a few times. Then, after enough correct responses, mediated by this (hippocampal) mnemonic representation, you rely less and less on the training wheels, and your cortex has had a chance to form a longer-lasting and more direct semantic link.

Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of Memrise, so it's not too surprising that I think there's merit in this approach :) Drop me a line or reply here, and I can try and follow up in more detail. Maybe I should write a blog post...

Really? By who? Because sure as hell training wheels worked wonders for millions of kids worldwide...

I'd never heard about Grammata Serica Recensa until just now (and only looked it up on Wikipedia), but unless I'm misunderstanding its contents/purpose, I'm pretty sure it's an apples-to-oranges comparison. GSR looks like a reference book, which is _not_ what Remembering the Kanji is. RtK is a guide for teaching oneself the writing and meaning (in English) ONLY of the 2200 (in RtK 1) most useful characters (according to Heisig) in written Japanese.

I have a unique perspective on this issue, as I'm someone who has studied Japanese for a few years in college and is now using RtK. The courses I took focused heavily on spoken Japanese, using the Japanese: The Spoken Language series, which is also from Yale University Press and uses a very similar approach to the Chinese series by DeFrancis you mentioned (and also has the deficiency of being out-of-date). Although it gave me a much stronger handle on grammar and pronunciation than other courses would have, their teaching of the written language left much to be desired, to put things lightly.

While the courses did teach the stylistic aspects of written Japanese well, they didn't teach kanji fast enough, and that turned out to be an enormous problem in Japan. So I started using RtK (in concert with the OSS SRS software Anki) about a month ago and have gotten through 600 kanji so far, and I have to say, it is nothing short of magical.

I don't know anything about linguistics or language pedagogy, but I do know that RtK has produced the results I'm looking for. With an investment of approximately 45 minutes/day, I'm learning 20 kanji/day, and remembering them long term. Now, when I see a word I already knew the meaning of, but didn't know the kanji for until now, I find it much easier to remember - and, of course, I can write it by hand perfectly, something I have seen many native Japanese struggle with with my own two eyes far too often. I struggled with it too before starting to use RtK.

> in Heisig's own words, cautions about using his texts as a comprehensive approach for learning literacy in Japanese.

You're absolutely right. Learning the kanji is only the first step in achieving literacy. After that, you need to learn the readings of the kanji, the meanings and readings of the words they form when used in combination, and of course the stylistic aspects that are peculiar to written (vis-à-vis spoken) Japanese, and none of those things is a cake walk by any stretch of the imagination.

However, as Confucius said, 學而不思則罔 思而不學則殆, so if you approach kanji with the rote memorization method used by the vast majority of foreign learners (often because they, like MikeMacMan below, hold the misguided belief that it is a sine qua non of language learning), you will miss out on a lot and unnecessarily waste time and effort.

(though these inaccuracies should be noted by the end of the lesson.)