> It takes about 10 seconds or so to set an image in your mind of the scene for a character, then a handful of reviews over the following weeks. Then you never forget it.

As someone with experience using the Heisig method, I would strongly disagree. Yes, it is a helpful system to ease the burden of memorization, but it does not permanently embed this knowledge into your memory after "a handful of reviews over the following weeks". If this were true, there would be many, many more people who have memorized 4000+ Chinese characters, required for fluency.

For me the Heisig method was a great help for learning the first few hundred kanji. Knowing those made it way easier to learn to read words containing said kanji, because the meaning of the kanji more often than not helped remembering what the word meant, and, importantly, recognizing the word.

But after a few hundred kanji the system starts to get so complicated, with more and more elaborate and contrived mnemonics, that IMO it isn't worth continuing that approach. But that's fine, at that point you're already on board and can learn the rest from reading real texts.

(The negative of abandoning Heisig after the first few hundred kanji is that you also stop writing kanji at that point.. which adds to my difficulty of hand-writing Japanese)

Well, "it worked for me." Similar reports for many people who have done fast-track Heisig speed runs, such as Heisig himself. It takes about 10 seconds of initial study to fix a story in mind (which is actually quite long--seriously count out 10 seconds slowly and imagine that time spent fully focused on the character at hand), and a review sequence that gets it in your long-term memory.

There are in fact many people who have learned 4000+ Chinese characters, using this or other methods.

I mean to say that my current method mostly omits hand writing. I can use a keyboard or phone to write and I can recognize characters fine. But on top of just learning a language, is Heisig so effective that I will be able to also memorize handwriting each character? Or do people measure how useful it is by being able to memorize the strokes for many characters, yet fail to become fluent in the language otherwise?

Heisig will have you learn handwriting, yes. Because that is explicitly all you practice in that method.

Aside: Do you learn simplified or traditional? I learned traditional. I would have anyway because my wife is Taiwanese, but I advocate others to do the same because it is arguably the same difficulty if not easier. And going traditional -> simplified is tractable whereas the reverse is not.

Learning the Heisig method is similar: learning from a perspective of handwriting is easier, and you get the ability to read “for free.” It’s a better approach, even if you never need to write by hand.

Also traditional, and I agree it’s easier to remember them than simplified characters even if they are more complicated to write.

So you have a reference point for this. When you learn a character by the Heisig method, you go from meaning -> writing. You don’t bother practicing reading -> meaning. It turns out that it’s very easy to go from writing to reading, much like going from traditional to simplified, but the reverse not so much.

I'm using something similar to Heisig, and I can already tell that while I can list all of the radicals and components in a character, I have no memory of their relative positions. I'm also not trying to learn them and I only using a pinyin input method, but I can't imagine really needing to be able to write by hand ever.

If you're not actually writing out the characters, you're not using Heisig. You wouldn't have that issue if you were actually writing them out. And it's not the wrote practice, it's the fact that you intrinsically must write one primitive at a time, which solidifies the order in the story. Most Heisig students end up developing slightly different primitive meanings for different placements, or an aspect of the story which controls the layout, for that reason.