Thank you for sharing your experience! I’ve heard this from other students , too, and it’s what I would think is the logical result of using such a method, and it would be much worse for Chinese. Like you say, this doesn’t mean that it will never work for any student, but I see little reason in promoting such a method and all the more reason to argue against it, as I do here.

I actually used Heisigs Method in 2010 for Japanese, when I lived there for a year and thought it would be a smart way to learn the language.

So instead of actually communicating with people I spent hours every day building these stories and trying to remembering the characters detached from the actual language. Then I never got to get my language skills high enough to actually make use of them, and not too long afterwards most of the characters were forgotton. (it might also have something to do with me being 17 years old at the time and not 100% focused on studying, but still)

I’m not saying the method can’t work for anyone, but personally I came to the conclusion to take a communication first approach, which is the most direct and intuitive way to interact with the language anyways.

So to anyone who just starts, I think the Outliars Dictionary and Olle’s course on Skritter are what I’d recommend.

I spent two semesters in Hong Kong where I took a course to pick up some Mandarin. While really enjoying the process of learning the spoken language I struggled heavily with the characters at the time. I could remember most of them, but it felt like a great deal of work to memorise all the complicated pictures by brute force. Being a person that tends to get demotivated by such ‘ineffective’ learning I soon gave up and concentrated on speaking.

A few days into corona-lockdown, I figured it would be the perfect time for a refresh and I stumbled upon Heisigs ‘Remembering Simplified Hanzi’ while researching literature for studying. Being intrigued by the promised effectiveness of learning characters, I ordered the first book and started creating Anki-flashcards as soon as it arrived.

Because I didn’t want to study characters separate from their pronunciation for the same reasons as given in this post, I opted to use premade notes from a deck called ‘3000 Most Common Hanzi’ that comes with handy things like audio pronunciation and stroke order animation. In anki, I just add the mnemonic in a separate field and transfer the note to my study-deck which contains flashcards for meaning, character and pronunciation of each note.

So far, my experiences with this method are pretty good. Not being a hardcore learner, I am spending about twenty minutes to half an hour a day to study cards and another five minutes to create new cards. With this pace, I have learned about 300 characters in the last two months which is waaaayyy more than I did in Hong Kong throughout a whole year of coursework. For me, Heisigs way of using mental models to take away most of the redundancy encountered in traditional learning saves a lot of repetition-time and thereby helps my motivation. This is an aspect, I would suggest is also really important. If you want to chew yourself through thousands of characters persistence is key. And therefore, the more obstacles and inefficiencies you can avoid, the better. The combination of Heisigs method and Anki flashcards have provided me with a low-hurdle method of studying, that has become a ritual in my day to day life. And I hope, it will stay that way until I got those 3000 characters in my memory 🙂

Dan thank your for your insight this was really helpful. So after you finished heisig material, did you go back and learn the pronunciation for all those characters? I would love to hear more about your procces.

Hi Dan, is there a special program/method you used to learn the pronunciation? I’m wondering if there’s a Heisig-equivalent that would make remembering the pronunciation much easier.

I’ve started learning Mandarin less than a year ago, so I’m still very much a beginner. But I’m an experienced language learner – Mandaring is my 9th language, and I’m learning it in French, which is my 5th language!

I’ve noticed that I learn easily by listening (I have an “ear” for languages”), but combining hearing and seeing things written down at the same time is a powerful way to enhance my learning. For me, it would make no sense to learn Chinese characters without learning the pronounciation as well; the way things are said is such a big part of a language. It doesn’t take too much extra effort to add that nugget of information to the character, but it does create extra work to learn it separately later. I guess one could compare it to learning French or German nouns without learning the articles for the words: learning them later on is a real hassle!

Of course there are occasions when you learn a word or a character just by hearing or seeing it, but personally, I prefer the complete “package”. For example, when I hear and learn a word, I really want to know how it’s written; without the two elements, something is missing for me. And like you said, often times the parts of the character make no sense if you don’t understand the pronounciation component.