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.
