>>14
I think you're expecting too much from a book entitled Remembering the Kanji: A complete course on how not to forget the MEANING and WRITING of Japanese Characters.
I'm not expecting anything from that book, quit putting words in my mouth. I've downloaded it from teh internets so here, too, I know what the hell I'm talking about.
If you actually bothered to click one of those links in my last post you would've known that you can't do jack shit with only knowing the artificial English meaning of the kanji and the correct way of writing it. Sure, you know the meaning, but as it was illustrated in that thread, it won't help you at all in deciphering the meaning of words with two or more kanji in them.
Chinese and Korean both have the Hanzi and Hanzul which are exact carbon copies of the Kanji, however they can't use that to read Japanese. A familiarization and meaning to these arbitrary shapes gave them the edge over Westerners that were trying to learn Japanese and quickly sped up their progress.
Koreans call it
hanja, not hanzul. As for the latter I think you meant hangul, which is the native Korean writing system, akin to hiragana and katakana in its usage, since Korean and Japanese cannot be properly written with just kanji/hanzi.
Also, the Chinese, Japanese and Korean systems are not "exact carbon copies" of each other, they differ very much actually. Kanji has some characters that are native to Japan, such as 駅. You can't expect Chinese and Korean people to know what that means just because they otherwise happen to use the "same" writing system. Plus, at school Koreans are taught fewer characters than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts, so Korean people don't necessarily know what some of the more advanced and rarer characters might mean. Similarly you can't expect the Japanese and Korean people to know the meaning of 书, since it doesn't exist in kanji or hanja.
but I also know that I memorized the stroke order and English meaning to over 2000 kanji. I can now use that knowledge I already have to attach as many readings and meanings to it like I do with English, easily. Add a method to internalize any more I come across with and Heisig comes out on top for me. Divide and conquer.
Learning first to write the kanji and then to read them, you're still going to end up using the exact same amount of time you would with the "old-fashined" rote memorization.
And lastly, Pimsleur is free via internet lulz. But still rather shitty to learn a language.
Yeah, I know, since Demonoid is where I got my version of Pimsleur Cantonese. Shit still sux, and there are plenty of people who have paid the said $300 for it.