3000 kanji in just 2 months!

[Cyborg Ninja]

Don't worry, I'm not trying to sell you anything. Someone online told me that he learned 3000+ kanji in just over two months, through the Heisig method. Then he translated 「信じていません」 as "I no belief."

[becki_kanou]

Sounds like a problem with English rather than Japanese.

[keatonatron]

Maybe he's Chinese and just used Heisig to attach the Japanese readings to kanji he already knew?

[yukamina]

He just learnt the meanings and writings, though, right? Definitely doable.

[furrykef]

Definitely doable, definitely hard, and definitely impressive (assuming that the person in question can actually remember most of it). And hey, 信じていません does kinda mean "I no belief" (although it's a baffling way of putting it), so it's not completely wrong.

Of course, nobody except total morons (and Dan Brown... but I repeat myself) claimed that you can learn Japanese just by learning kanji.

- Kef

[Cyborg Ninja]

Maybe I should elaborate. I myself said 「信じていません」, and he laughed at me as if my Japanese made no sense, and then translated it as "I no belief." Three thousand kanji in two months is absurd. One hundred kanji a day is absurd. I feel sorry for anyone who feels the need to lie like that.

[jcdietz03]

I studied Heisig for 8 hours in one day and did 120 kanji that day. Who really has 8 hours a day to study though?
The lesson that introduces "person" is a super easy lesson and has 70+ kanji in it. That's probably why.

If you did 120 kanji a day, it would take you 17 days to finish the course. It would take 25 days to do 3000 kanji.
Will you remember 3000 kanji studying them so quickly? Perhaps not. It is still good to study 3000 kanji and forget half of them or even more than half.

[furrykef]

Oh, well, then yes, that's entirely different!

What you do here is you pick a few random kanji from RTK3 (RTK1 would make it too easy) and quiz him on them. If you're doing this in person, give him the English keyword and ask him to write the answer on a piece of paper. If you only know this guy over the internet, it may be better to do it the other way around: copy/paste the kanji and ask for the meaning. If you're quizzing him on writing the kanji, he should get around 70-80% of them right, or else his studying method is not very good. If you're quizzing him on reading the kanji, the threshold might be a little lower, since Heisig focuses on writing only. And, of course, if he's a liar, he'll get 0% of them right. (And if he gets 100% of them right, he's cheating...)

Even if you're sure he's lying, I say quiz him anyway to make sure his ego gets busted.

Three thousand kanji in two months is absurd. One hundred kanji a day is absurd.

I'm not clear on whether you're saying it's absurd in general, or if it's just absurd for a guy who thinks "shinjiteimasen" means "I no belief". Both are entirely possible, although of course very few can accomplish the first (and they would have to do pretty much nothing else during that time), and the second is even less likely than that. It's still possible, though, that he's not lying and just has a really, really tenuous grasp of Japanese grammar and thinks he knows more than he does. I can kinda see how one might think that it's grammatically incorrect if one isn't already aware of the -te iru form of the verb; it wouldn't break down word for word as "I no belief", obviously, but it would appear to be similar nonsense.

If you did 120 kanji a day, it would take you 17 days to finish the course. It would take 25 days to do 3000 kanji.
Will you remember 3000 kanji studying them so quickly? Perhaps not. It is still good to study 3000 kanji and forget half of them or even more than half.

If you're doing an SRS, which I would highly recommend with Heisig (in particular, the one at kanji.koohii.com -- it's not as good at being an SRS as Anki, but it's much better at Heisig in general), then forgetting half of the kanji isn't that relevant, because over the long term you will gradually get better and better until you can reliably remember the kanji around 90% of the time. It can definitely be frustrating, though.

- Kef