>>495
I have seen many, many referrals to Heisig's method over the years. I have given it the once-over, and I agree wholeheartedly with the critics: The biggest problem with RTK is that it is exactly what it says on the tin. You may remember kanji... but that's all time you're not spending learning Japanese. It's time spent reading and thinking in English idiom, which is a surefire way to not learn a new language. So what the hell is the point, then!?

Not going to say that the methodology is all bad, though. Associating stories with things to memorize works really well and all the super-memorizers do it. But the best stories are the ones that fire quickly from your own neurons (dirty stories work really well). Or if (for example) you find ways to associate the metric shitload of kanji pronounced "dai" and associated vocabulary with James Bond in Die Another Day, that's another way of going about it. And there is something to be said for understanding the components that make up kanji; when you understand that comparatively few building blocks make up most of the set, it becomes much less of a deal that there are hundreds of kanji left to learn.

To sum up: for to learn a language, live her as she is spoke.