"Rerembering the Kanji" by Heisig is a good way
for adult westerners to start learning Kanji.
A common misconception it that westerners
must learn Japanese in the same manner in which
Japanese children learned, by rote and exposure.
Heisig rebelled against this idea, went off on his
own, and successfuly created an alternative system
which relies on mnemonics.
Some people like Heisig's method, others declare it worthless.
In my own case, I spent a year with vol 1 of Rerembering the Kanji,
studying for about 30-40 minutes a day, 3 to 4 times a week.
I took longer than average in order to practice drawing
the characters properly.
I learned how to draw them, and learned the radicals and basic
components of the more complicated Kanji. Heisig gives very
specific instructions on how they are to be learned and in what
order. He avoids burdening one's memory by putting off learning
the reading(s) of the Kanji until vol. 2 of his 3 volume series.
You don't become fluent in Japanese or fluent in reading or any
such thing after finishing Heisig book 1, but it does put you in a
position
where the additional knowledge you need in order to get to higher
levels
of capability now becomes much easier to acquire.
Heisig also wrote a couple of short books on using mnemonic techniqes
to
learn the katakana and hiragana but I used my own mnemonic technique
to learn the
katakana by making odd (and somewhat stretched) analogies with their
equivalent
English letters - for example, flip the Katakana symbol for "A" about
a vertical
axis and you end up with a rough approximation of the English letter
"A".
Another example, almost a freebie, the Katakana for N almost looks
like a written English letter "n" with the leading stroke perhaps a
bit too long.
In volume ll of Heisig's Rerembering the Kanji, he goes into the
derivations
of the Hiragana too, but long before I read that, I had invented
another set of
observational mnemonics to help me there too - but each person should
invent these themselves since relationals that have meaning for one
person often are nonsense to another.
Likewise, though it does'nt jive with Heisig and I think he warns
somewhere against overdoing the practice, you can spot visual things
in the Kanji - I think he himself does this in a few cases. In my
case, I used to have trouble, at first, in rerembering how to draw the
Kanji for the numbers 4 and 5 until I looked closely and realized that
both numerals where embedded in their respective Kanji! For example
in the Kanji for "4" are 2 misshapen numeral "4"'s, the right one a
mirror image of the left.
Number 7, of course is retained instantly since it looks like an
arabic numeral 7 upside down with a line drawn thru it.
Hope this helps.
Jim
Mathieu Blondel <matt@enlevemoica.ffworld.com> wrote in message news:<41658cfd$0$10254$636a15ce@news.free.fr>...
···
> My project for next year is to learn Japanese well enough to skim
> through for keywords in the mailing lists (if not more) and to be able
> to speak basically to my family in Japan 
I've been learning japanese for two years.
If you learn to be able to read, I would personnally advice you to learn
full japanese or nothing. You should not think of "saving time" by
learning some writing systems and not others.
I have experienced it is finally a waste of time.
There are basically four writing systems :
roman
hiragana
katakana
kanji (chinese characters)
The first three ones are not very difficult to learn. But, for
foreigners, the big thing is "kanjis". (The book "Remembering the
kanjis" may help you to rembember the meaning of thoses caracters)
I also think it is much easier to read sentences with kanjis. They allow
you to recognize the structure of sentences. Without them, it would just
be as though you were deciphering an english text written phonetically
only...(good orthograph allows to figure out sentences faster).
And as the time goes on, you'll be able to associate vocabulary and kanjis.
