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+--- Thread: Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? (/thread-5697.html)
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - kapalama - 2010-05-24
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate?
Maybe because all my other Japanese stuff is made in Japan, and is much higher quality, but my RTK 1 and 3 seem to be wearing out way way too quickly. (Don't use RTK2 so it is still OK).
Mine is University of Hawaii imprint. The pages are falling out of the glue binding on RTK3, and RTK1's cover has essentially disappeared.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - Javizy - 2010-05-24
My RTK (5th edition) looked like shite after about five minutes. The cover is absolutely terrible. I suppose it's Hawaii's way of preventing people selling them on. It's hard to believe something that bad could be an accident. Good book though, good book.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - ta12121 - 2010-05-24
Serious? I have RTK1 and 3 and they are in good condition, nothing is ripped/marked.(I've hard them for like 12 months, basically a year
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - Nukemarine - 2010-05-24
There was a batch of books with production defects for the early 3rd edition run. I think if you contact UoH Press they'll send you a new copy in exchange for your old one.
There's a thread somewhere on here about this very subject which might help also.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - kapalama - 2010-05-24
Javizy Wrote:My RTK (5th edition).Yep mines the fifth edition. I have marked it up so much it would not be worth sending it back.
Is there a harcover version of the books, or better yet a Japanese printing of the books?
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - stehr - 2010-05-25
Get a super small diameter drill bit, some heavy string, a tutorial on google, and just re-bind your books. I re-bound a heavily used dictionary of mine and it has exceeded my expectations; 4+ years of wear and tear and no more lost pages or damage to the cover. I recommend doing a test run though, maybe on a phone book or the like.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - kapalama - 2010-05-26
Nukemarine Wrote:There was a batch of books with production defects for the early 3rd edition run. I think if you contact UoH Press they'll send you a new copy in exchange for your old one.My search skills get me nowhere. Do you know where that topic is?
There's a thread somewhere on here about this very subject which might help also.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - Nukemarine - 2010-05-26
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=980
I remembered "hawaii" being in the thread title so that's how I found it. Sorry about that.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - slivir - 2010-05-26
If your book is trashed then it's a sign that it's money well spent. Books are there to be manhandled!
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - Tobberoth - 2010-05-26
Question is why you would care, you finish RTK in a few months and there's seriously no reason to ever look in the books again after that point.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - Nukemarine - 2010-05-26
How can you loan or give away a book in horrible condition? Plus, I sometimes used to re-read the chapter articles as Heisig had some useful info that often quoted about here.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - kapalama - 2010-05-28
BTW I gave in and bought a third copy of RTK3. I bought the paperback, the digital version, and now I bought another paperback because the copy of RTK3 I have now is useless to me. It has now separated into a hundred loose sheets, and then the rest of the book.
Tobberoth Wrote:Question is why you would care, you finish RTK in a few months and there's seriously no reason to ever look in the books again after that point.I am having trouble with that logic. By that logic, it seems no one on the site should be here after a couple of months either. (Or worse yet, the site owner should no longer be interested in maintaining the site. God, I hope that never happens.) What am I missing?
Here's my (no doubt mistaken) take on things:
**Feel free to point out where I am wrong in my approach or way of thinking.**
I have trouble imagining that anyone can learn all of RTK 1,2, and 3 in a few months. I spoke Japanese and could even read characters in context before I ever opened these books, and even with that huge head start I cannot see ever being 'done' with these books, anymore than I would be done with a dictionary. Granted, I am not trying to just memorize English keywords like some might do (I am making sure to attach Kanji to the vocabulary I already have, and almost incidentally memorizing Hesig's keywords so I can use Anki.), But then again, putting RTK 2 into play is specifically not just memorizing English keywords, it is assigning readings to characters which is not a several months task, its more a lifetime task. Educated Japanese people have trouble with readings of characters likely because they have no idea of how to organize the readings．Even of common characters. Especially no longer extant place names that only have meaning to people from a specific area.
I know there is a specifically Buddhist cast to Heisig's keyword choices: (薩摩 as a Buddhist term? Really? Isn't Satsuma kind of important historically? Isn't a Satsuma-Imo a staple of the culture in Kyushu? That word has even gone to England as the name of a fruit, for God's sake. Granted most Japanese cannot write the place name, but they can read it, and use that word daily, in grocery stores and bars, and probably would have trouble identifying the character as Buddhist. EDICT makes the same mistake as RTK here, but for a Japanese person 薩摩 means potatoes and Shochu) But Japanese people cannot see the 産業 in Satsuma. I know because I am routinely stunned by the fact that I can walk them through writing the character, and even though they see it, it does not stick. There is no RTK 'click' that lets them own the character, because they all learned 音 before 日 and 立つ. Native English speakers don't see the word 'King Lear' in the word 'learn' either.
Another granted fact: I am approaching the RTK system as framework to learn Kanji in general rather than a list of 3000 Kanji rather arbitrarily chosen, and have written as many entries for characters outside the RTK list as inside it. Because if you only learn RTK 1+3 one cannot even read TV, which regularly feature 贅沢, and 完璧, and 儚い, without furigana, not to mention the hundreds of Name Kanji (and the hilariously varied readings) which are not treated by RTK 1, 2, 3. (All time favorite Japanese TV line: "My name is 鈴木太郎, pronounced クリームチーズ. Yoroshiku.").
So I would like to have the physical RTK books to turn to when I am trying to slot something like 儚い into what I have already learned. If I just start brute forcing memorizing, then I have used the RTK system to remember 3000 Kanji, not as a way to learn future kanji. For me, being able to write 儚い in my physical copy right after 夢 means that I ever discover a character with Te-hen or Kozato-hen or 氵attached to 夢, I will actually have a filing space for it.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - bizarrojosh - 2010-05-28
tl;dr
But seriously, I think tobberoth's point was that once you have the stories memorized do you really need your book anymore? I mean, you should be able to easily recognize the primitives and you should be able to remember your story based on those primitives. Soo....the book loses its daily value once you encoutered the kanji in order. Yes you can add more in there but that takes like 10 seconds and that probably doesn't happen all the time. Then your brain, this site (or anki) and your willpower does the rest.
Anyone else wearing out the books at an alarming rate? - meredithcat - 2010-07-19
My copy of RTK1 isn't quite falling apart yet, but it's getting close. It's been manhandled quite a bit over the last six months - I carry it everywhere.
For me personally, RTK probably won't have much use after I finish. It's the method that's important, not the kanji themselves. I can see, though, that it could have some usefulness for some people as a reference guide, or for a quick review. To each their own?