(continued)
Winter vacation just ended, which was a period of a lot of time spent alone and a lot of time playing video games and watching anime. Although those things were never my most important motivation for studying Japanese, I guess hearing so much of it in a short period made me realize, "Maybe I should try harder!", as if the characters themselves were telling me, "がんばって！べんきょうして下さい！！" Plus, since I didn't have to worry about all of my schoolwork, a lot of the pressure was off, and I became a lot more enthusiastic for learning -- not only in Japanese, but in my other classes as well.
So if kanji was the largest obstacle to learning Japanese, then surely if I learned kanji then I'd be much more enthusiastic for Japanese if I already knew kanji, right? A bit of Googling led me to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824831659/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199535536&sr=8-1">Remembering the Kanji: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters by James W. Helsig</a>. Since many of the reviews glowed about how easy and fun the book was to use and how quickly they learned all 2000+ kanji in the book, I immediately "<a href="http:?/www.isohunt.com">obtained</a>" a copy of the book.
The introduction to the book, however, warns against using the book to accompany anything other than self-study. It's designed to be taken at one's own pace, and being part of a regular Japanese course could disrupt learning kanji from the book, since it uses its own specialized system. A lot of the reviews also recommend against using the book as part of a course.
Has anyone else had any experience with the book? It's apparently very popular among Japanese students, so I figured I'd come here with this question. The book (which teaches the kanji) and the follow-up (which teaches the readings of the kanji) are supposed to take around six months, meaning I would finish before I began my fourth year of Japanese. Since year four is really when the study of kanji begins to pick up, would it be an issue? By the end of the third year, according to the curriculum the class follows, we're supposed to know about fifty kanji. Days of the week, numbers, the ones I've used in this post, and thirty or forty others. That's it. Would having to study those few, in addition to learning from Remembering the Kanji, be a huge problem? I'd prefer to get an answer to this question before starting to use Remembering the Kanji, only to find out nine chapters in that it's not going to work out.
For those Japanese students who did not use Remember the Kanji: How did you learn them? How long did it take? How comfortable are you using them? Are you able to recall all/most of them? If you used some other book/method, how did it go for you? Perhaps this thread could become a compendium of kanji-learning tools and books.