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> with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning

Damn, that's precisely the opposite of how you should learn them.

My Japanese ability pretty much exploded after I set aside two months to study the kanji divorced from their readings with James Heisig's method. Totally worth it. The readings come with time.

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Indeed. It's my understanding that the success of kanji in China was exactly that some lord on the borderlands could write with kanji what he wanted to convey, and then, at the heart of the empire someone could read it back in mandarin. While the border Lord might only speak some local language.

The parallel is to teach everyone Latin language and how to read and write Latin letters, rather than just teach everyone how to read and write kanji.

Who is James Heisig, and what is his method? I'd like my Japanese ability to explode too!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_kanji

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