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A friend in Japan just sent me a copy of James Heisig’s book on learning kanji, which is what Chinese characters became when they became Japanese.
The technique seems to be a pretty sound one — figuring out the parts of different characters and associating them with little stories in your head.
From Heisig’s introduction:
The basic alphabet of the imaginative world hidden in the kanji we may call, following traditional terminology, primitive elements (or simply primitives). These are not to be confused with the so-called “radicals” which form the basis of etymological studies of sound and meaning, and now are used for the lexical ordering of the characters…. The primitives, then, are the fundamental strokes and combinations of strokes from which all the characters are built up…. A few of these will be given primitive meanings; that is, they will serve as fundamental images. Simple combinations will yield new primitive meanings in turn, and so on as complex characters are built up.
…Here is where fantasy and memory come into play. The aim is to shock the mind’s eye, to disgust it, to enchant it, to tease it, or to entertain it in any way possible so as to brand it with an image intimately associated with the key word. That image in turn, inasmuch as it is composed of primitive meanings, will dictate precisely how the kanji is to be penned—stroke for stroke, jot for jot. Many characters, perhaps the majority of them, can be so remembered on a first encounter, provided sufficient time is taken to fix the image.
I like learning little stories. He actually compares it to dream recall. I think I could learn to read this way. Apparently, it’s been made into software in the past, but I don’t know anything about that. The book seems good enough to me. There’s a sample at the end of this review, if you’d like a closer look.
Of course, it’s not Chinese… not exactly. But it’s close.
