I'm tackling Japanese, but from a reading and writing perspective: http://macaronics.com/
It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).
It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).
Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.
As for learning kanji by writing by hand, that's actually my own m.o. when dealing with an assignment (i.e., I write all the words out longhand before looking up those I don't know).
But digital input methods have become so much of a crutch, that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how.
It's called "character amnesia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
Sure, such an absolute statement is an exaggeration, and yeah, it's "debatable," but Japanese themselves seem pretty firmly convinced it's the case.
Practice is necessary to maintain a complex detail-oriented skill, and when many people are doing most of their major writing using keyboards of various sorts, and only writing by hand in very casual and formulaic contexts, there's going to be some fallout.
I think this is rather different from spelling mistakes because spelling mistakes occur regardless of the input method used (computer text entry of western languages is much more "literal" than computer text entry in Japanese). If you write in English at all, regardless of input method, you're going to exercise your spelling ability (even if using a computer lets you spell check, there's still a feedback loop). Japanese text entry using a computer, on the other hand, is completely different than writing by hand; they exercise very different abilities.
This problem is often reported on the news in Japan, and the problem is that people are forgetting things such as: 1) the correct stroke order for difficult kanji 2) the exact radicals in rarely used complex kanji. For example, 薄 and 簿 look similar, but the top radical is different. Confusing these rarely results in someone being unable to understand the desired meaning, but will elicit eye-rolling and chuckles.
It's absolutely not the case that Japanese people can't write by hand anymore.
A better analogy would be cursive writing. Most young Americans can no longer write in cursive. Their handwriting has become simple, inelegant, and they probably don't follow the "correct" way of writing their letters. But they can still write. Just as Japanese can still write.
However, many Japanese people are indeed firmly convinced that Japanese—and particularly young Japanese—have non-trivial problems writing by hand, and that it's because of computer usage. I know this because I hear them say it constantly...
English speakers make more spelling mistakes when typing into a spell-checked document because they know they no longer need to spell correctly.
(A personal anecdote: I used this book one summer to learn and remember about 1500, substantially more than I could use after 6 years of studying Japanese and drilling kanji the usual way.)
If this sounds too good to be true, it's partially because it is. You won't learn much actual Japanese by studying the characters; you'll just learn to associate them with English words. This might be frustrating initially, but if you're committed to becoming proficient in Japanese this will speed up the path substantially. If you've ever seen how quickly native Chinese speakers pick up Japanese, you'll understand why: the Chinese and Japanese languages have about as much relation as Japanese and English. The advantage of the Chinese speakers is that they already know all the Kanji in their native tongue.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Ch...
Heisig seems to be best as a way just to get all the kanji into your mind as opaque artifacts, just a visual familiarity primarily. Which can be a huge help when you actually start learning Japanese.
For the advanced student looking to master kanji, then a method like Heisig's seems best. However, for those interested in the Heisig method, I recommend this book: Kanji ABC [1]. It is similar to Heisig's but organizes the kanji so that you learn similar kanji together. Also, while Heisig spends much time trying to get you to memorize convoluted association sentences, Kanji ABC simply gives you the radicals (similar to Heisig's 'primitives') and you build your own association sentences.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Kanji-ABC-Systematic-Approach-Characte...