A given character usually has at least two pronunciations, and a few have quite a few more than that. Often, the same basic Japanese word (usually verbs or adjectives) can be written using one of several entirely different kanji, depending on the specific use (see my “Miru” and friends article.

But I think Heisig works so well precisely because the first volume completely ignores pronunciation, and focuses on meaning (or at any rate, a caricature of one of its meanings) and writing, which gives you a more manageable chunk of information to learn. Its chief downside is probably that you have to learn all ~2,000 characters before you can proceed to actually start using the information you learned; but the upside is that learning kanji is actually pretty fun, and empowering.

You can absolutely learn the kanji using Heisig, without even knowing any other Japanese first; the website All Japanese All The Time actually recommends it as the first step in learning Japanese, before even learning kana. I disagree with that particular point, and recommend learning the kana first. The creator of that site seems to be under the mistaken impression that the Heisig “Remembering the Kana” book assumes knowledge of the kanji, but this is not my experience at all (by the way, that book too is excellent, and I started using it to teach my eleven-year-old daughter the kana).

I think the kana is the most crucial component, as you can immediately jump into Japanese (kids’ material, especially – or, say, the Hiragana Times) without anything more. But following it immediately after with kanji, rather than waiting until after a year or two of grammar, does seem like an excellent idea – I certainly wish I’d done Heisig a decade ago.

Heisig is by no means perfect, and I can think of several ways it could be dramatically improved (in my opinion). Nonetheless, it is by far the best kanji-learning system I’ve seen, and I recommend it very highly.

An important point, though: once you work through Heisig, do not hesitate to begin applying it. In my experience, after I finished learning the characters, I quickly stopped drilling on them. This has resulted in my forgetting some of the characters, however I still retain most of them, because I’m actually using them in my Japanese reading. I recommend finding Japanese reading material immediately after you’ve learned both the kana and the kanji; even if you don’t understand the grammar yet, you can begin to get exposure to the language. Ideally, you should choose straightforward material, such as manuals (those are also relatively easy to find for free in product manufacturers’ “support” sections), that avoid colorful and idiomatic expressions; try to find material that includes furigana (pronunciation information written above all the kanji), so you can begin to learn common pronunciations through “osmosis”, to the kanji that you by now already know thanks to Heisig; and try to find material that includes an English translation in parallel, so that even before you have any grammar training, you can begin to piece together how the words fit together to form the sentences. One source I can recommend is the book “Reading Japanese with a Smile” (see my article Resources That Gave Me a Leg Up in Japanese); there are several other resources of a similar nature, but this one is small, cheap, accessible, and divided neatly into relatively easily conquerable 2-page packets.

I also can’t recommend highly enough, once you get into reading real Japanese that doesn’t have furigana, that you get yourself a Nintendo DS and the kanji-lookup dictionary software that I recommend in that same “Resources That Gave Me…” article. I could not imagine trying to study Japanese without that.

Between the different editions of volume 1, there are mostly the addition of a few characters, and some changes to what some of the mnemonic keywords are. As for the difference between the different volumes, you can get that from any online description of the individual books, but roughly: volume 1 associates English mnemonic keywords with kanji, focusing on developing the ability to write and recognize the characters, but not to read or interpret them. Volume 2 teaches the “on” (Chinese-origin) readings for the kanji that you memorized in volume 1, with special attention to learning groups of characters that share a common “signal” component that belies a common pronunciation. Volume 3 is the same as volumes 1 and 2, but on a new set of an additional thousand characters (or thereabouts), not covered in volume 1.

For hardcopy, I’ve been relying on Nintendo’s helpful dictionary for the DS; though it’s Japanese-Japanese (and English-Japanese), and the interface is Japanese, so a certain amount of understanding is required. Even if you can’t read the definitions, though, you’ll at least get the kana (syllabic pronunciation) corresponding to kanji words, so you can then look it up much more quickly in your Japanese-English dictionary. The Japanese definitions leave something to be desired, anyway; they tend to be quite terse, and not always entirely accurate. The handwriting recognition, however, is quite excellent.