The contents of that garbled paragraph may be an urban legend. The fact that you can actually read it is not.
Just in case anyone is wondering, I mentioned this garbled paragraph in an old post here, where I quoted a little piece written by Kevin Larson. He indicates clearly that the contents of the paragraph is an urban myth.
Some texts work much better than others – which is to say that some scrambled texts are not particularly easy to decode and thus assertions based on this notion are usually flawed at best. As Matt Davis (who really is at Cambridge, in the Speech and Language Group of the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit) said, “the meme has some elements of truth in it, but is false in its entirety.”
In the material quoted in the 2007 post, Larson concludes: “Sadly, the scrambled paragraph has now entered the realm of urban myth and continues to circulate online. Should anyone send it your way in the future, you can confidently reply that its conclusions are just as scrambled as the text.”
I quite agree with that.
i ordered it but they had to get it from overseas so will be a couple weeks. I guess i can let you know how im going if anyones interested.
Sure, Acute – definitely let us know how it works out, and whether you think we’ve been too harsh on it. 
Please do.
I started working through RTK the beginning of this month and have gotten through over 1000 kanji already. My situation is a bit unusual though, since I can already speak and read a fair amount. I know beyond doubt that this method is doing wonders for me, but it would be nice to hear from others.
Debating whether mnemonics are an effective use of time in general is controversial, but I doubt many will argue that they can help with particularly stubborn characters
Well, I finished RTK a week or so ago. It took me a total of about 7 weeks, and I spent about 38 minutes per day on it, according to my study program.
I did have a substantial head start. I’ve been living in Taiwan for more than 5 years and I studied Japanese fairly intensively for 2 years back in college. However, I could only correctly write about three or four hundred of the characters in the book before studying it.
Furthermore, I was I was extremely lenient about my pre-study self-assessment. Since I didn’t have familiarity with Heisig’s keywords, I counted any correctly written character with a similar meaning as correct. Similarly, I counted traditional forms of the character as correct. I still couldn’t write most of them and when I failed, it was often due to drawing a total blank or else mixing up somewhat similar looking components within a character, such as the abbreviated forms of 示 and 衣 when they appear on the left.
Now, I get well over 90% right on the first try. I haven’t drawn a complete blank on any characters for over a week. The problem of mixing up similar radicals is gone. The characters I do get wrong are often just a case of writing a different character with a similar meaning. When I’m doing something useful, such as writing a note to my secretary or filing out a form at the bank, I don’t have that problem.
No, I haven’t picked up the myriad of Japanese readings or compounds associated with the 2000 jōyō Kanji and no those 2000 characters don’t even come close to cutting it when it comes to my Chinese reading needs. It’s still the most return on the time I’ve invested of any Kanji/Hanzi study I’ve done. And that’s a really good feeling.
In fact, I’d love to hear what sort of testing Dragon Bones was talking about on page one of this thread. If Taiwan has anything like Japan’s Kanji Kanten, I’ll take it.
Xiaoma, I’m curious, what similar radicals did you have trouble with that the book was able to help but you weren’t able to do yourself with some self-made mnemonics?
I hadn’t ever tried mnemonics systematically before. As I said, I had read Ideogram and been pre-disposed against the idea, much as a lot of people on this forum are. I always wanted to be able to write, but I made it a relatively low priority and never worked on the problem methodically.
soo
bit of grave digging here, but I asked the question in how to learn the first 3000 characters and I think I’m in a similar situation to Xiaoma - been here over three years, but never had the time to dedicate to mandarin study but it has start to become very important for me to improve my language skills, principally reading
therefore, anyone have any more comments on this? I am doing the online demo and am on lesson 3 and it seems to make sense, it took longer to read this thread than to learn the first 45 characters (that I pretty much already know mind)
Xiaoma, where is that report on your progress? did it end up retarding the learning of 3001-5000 characters?