[Nyororin]

The problem with the Heisig method isn`t that it`s difficult to remember. It`s that it has you remembering the wrong bits. It applies a story to each kanji, which is fine. If it works as a memory device, good for you.

My complaints come in with the content of these stories, and the meanings they teach. It`s been years since I looked at one of the books so I can`t come up with an actual example... But I do recall enough to explain what I mean.
He breaks the kanji down into pieces which are used to form these stories. Sounds good, but he doesn`t break them down according to the actual rules, so you can`t look them up in a normal Japanese dictionary. Those go by the radicals. Why he split them up differently is a total mystery.
In the book I read, the kanji was given, along with an abstract story illustrating a specific meaning. However, the meaning was the meaning easiest to come up with a story for, and NOT the most common meaning. There were also no clues on how to actually read the kanji, so even if you could speak Japanese perfectly, the chance that you could connect the spoken words to the kanji you`ve remembered is very low.

What you end up with are these isolated kanji which you may be able to derive some sort of meaning from when you see them. Not what they actually mean in words, and definitely not what they mean in context. The ordering is not at all natural, sort of along the lines of learning to spell "encyclopedia" before you can so much as say "book".

My recommendation is to follow a more natural order. I don`t have any problems with using the Heisig approach of stories. If it helps you remember, then GREAT! But memorizing in the order he presents these kanji puts you in a position which forces you to memorize ALL of them before you can read the same kanji as a 3rd grader. And that is a recipe for frustration when you actually try to put some of your knowledge to use. Especially when even those you DO know have different meanings than the one you memorized. For a language learner, this sort of problem usually causes them to give up.

In Japanese, there are words (and by extension kanji) that you will encounter on a regular basis... And other words/kanji that you`ll hardly if ever encounter. The same goes for English, and any other language. Even a very literate English speaker won`t know *every* English word. And the less often they use a specific word, the weaker that word is in memory. Being fluent in a language isn`t a matter of knowing every word.
All you need to achieve fluency is a solid core, with gradually weaker knowledge as you spread out. The Japanese order of learning the kanji is much more natural. It starts with the basics, and advances in order of frequency. As you cover the basics first, you continue to use them as you advance to the next level - and they become even stronger. The least encountered kanji are studied last, and as they really aren`t all that necessary, they can safely fade from memory without causing any trouble.

My husband is a native Japanese speaker. But yet there are countless kanji that he only knows the meaning of in specific words. It isn`t necessary to know what that there is some obscure meaning that it is derived from. It means such and such in the only word it is encountered regularly in. He also has forgotten how to write a ton of others - he can read them, but if asked out of the blue doesn`t know how to write them.

The Heisig method is something like learning to spell a bunch of words that begin with the same 3 letters, without even telling you how to read them... Regardless of whether you`ll ever encounter them in real life or not. It just doesn`t make sense based on human development, and natural patterns of language acquisition. You don`t teach a baby to spell before they can talk. Sure, they`ll need that knowledge eventually, but isn`t it more important to have a clue what people are saying to them first?