I sent Mee a totally factual email.

Along with some pictures of the cherry blossoms, I added one of a tree with a face tacked onto it, and this helpful explanation:

Did you know? American trees have faces. The trees talk a lot in the spring. (They sleep during the winter.)

Most trees only talk about weather and bugs, so they're boring. There are also trees who know the future, but they're rare. Those trees have bad attitudes, though, so I think that's fine.

Trees' eyes can see ghosts, but in America, autumn is the ghosts' season. The trees can't meet the ghosts yet.

I'm expecting to get a message back that just says "LIES." Also included was a lovely stick-figure illustration I made, but it has her real name in it so I can't post it.

( The Japanese text. (Probably wrong in many places!) )

Remembering the Kanji, by James Heisig

It is not, in general, my practice to praise educational materials - I mean, I'm not a good teacher. I can recognize something that's clearly awful, but I have trouble distinguishing the gradations between mediocre and good.

That said, Remembering the Kanji is incredible. I studied Japanese for five years using other books, and in the four months I've been using RtK regularly, I've doubled the number of kanji I know. It's utter madness.

And I'm spending way less time studying this way, too. People who have used mnemonic techniques before will not be surprised by this, but I was! I had a really bad teacher in elementary school who explained them to us, and after that I associated them with her for years and so decided they must suck. So this whole thing may seem obvious to some people, but it was a revelation to me.

I'm honestly a little angry with my college Japanese department and with Yamasa for never discussing this as a possible study method for kanji. Because the traditional Japanese method is Copy Over And Over And Over, that's what we were taught - but that's a method intended for little kids, not for adults. For most adults it plainly doesn't work well.

For me, it doesn't work at all. To say that I'm bad at spatial stuff is a substantial understatement - I have no visual memory. (I will spare you the anecdotes, but if you are familiar with Ranma 1/2, you may safely imagine me as Hibiki Ryouga.) Several times I seriously considered giving up on Japanese, because I just thought that I was never going to be able to learn kanji. I never did give up, but I went on with the assumption that I'd always be at a serious handicap reading-wise.

Basically, if I'd known about this technique in college, I think I would have passed the JLPT 2 in December. I might even have passed it two years ago. That thought annoys me.