brilliantyears wrote:...
The point is that learning characters separately and without any indication of their pronunciation is just a huge waste of time. I must say that site looks at least a little better since it does address pronunciation/readings, but the original Heisig method doesn't (and therefore, plainly said, it's a terrible method). But even if you do study them with pronunciation/readings, characters are rarely stand-alone and meanings vary depending on the compounds and/or grammatical endings. So you do get a basic idea of the meaning/reading of the kanji, but I still feel like you're doing double work by learning all the kanji separately first before you touch on compounds/actual vocabulary.
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Yes, the point of the Heisig method is to learn the inner logic of the graphic aspect of the characters first, and learn pronunciations and words later. It is double work, but by dividing up a complex task (learning the writing system) into separate smaller tasks it is supposed to become more surmountable. Actually I don't understand how it could be learned efficiently in any other way.
But I admit it is a drawback not to know the pronunciation of the characters, I see that now. The problem is that a character doesn't have only "one" pronunciation.
The paradox of japanese characters is, that if you see one outside of any context, you can't be sure of either the pronunciation or the meaning. That can only be determined from context. So in a way you can not learn a character properly before you already know all of them. Well, not all of them, but they are all connected in a huge web.