[wibr]

I've also learned the first 1500 characters using this book, not in one month though.

The method works but has some problems. Maybe the biggest problem is that it completely ignores pronunciation. It does not help you remember the pronunciation and it does not make use of the sound components of the characters. Most characters are composed of one component which hints at the meaning and another which hints at the sound, e.g. 青 is the sound component in 情清輕請, all of those are pronounced qing (with different tones). Usually it's not that obvious, this is just a good example. The left component in those characters would hint at the meaning.

The Heisig method instead creates a mapping between a keyword, which is derived from a single meaning of the character or invented for components which don't have a meaning, to the written form of the character using mnemonics. This works well in the beginning but once you reach a more advanced stage where you know how to say something in Chinese but maybe forgot how to write the characters this doesn't help you much since the pronunciation is not incorporated into the mnemonics.

When you are just starting out and learning all those characters seems like an unmanagable task, the Heisig method can provide a good structure to quickly "learn" many characters (keyword<>writing). It's also fun to come up with stories and images. But in the end it can only provide a basic scaffold for learning more meanings, pronunciation, words etc.

I even made a small game once using those character decompositions: http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/

[prewett]

Heisig's method is for kanji, which have different pronunciation depending on which word they are in, since Japan imported the meaning but not always the pronunciation. Note that the book is called "A Complete Course in How Not to Forget the Kanji", not "How to Read". All he's doing is endowing the character with an image that conveys a commonly used meaning and how it is written, so that you can remember it. Actually reading or pronouncing a text is out of scope.

If you're learning hanzi you can take advantage of the pronunciation hints. Plus the fact that modern hanzi generally have only one pronunciation per [traditional] character, and only one syllable per, too. The characters made so much more sense learning Chinese.