About Heisig and the website.
I'm working through the new sixth edition of the book (I actually started with a PDF of the 4th ed. but felt guilty so I purchased the real thing off of B&N). My shoddy attention span has caused some pauses in learning but I've gotten a bit past the 500 mark in about three weeks. Ended up getting distracted by a book for a while there but yeah. Ideally I would be finished with Volume 1 by late September / Mid-November.
So the sixth edition was published just this year but after I finish Vol.1 I would like to move on to 2 and 3. My first question is, should I purchase older editions of the books (if they aren't out yet) once I've finished Vol.1, or would it be prudent to wait until they are published and updated to move on?
My second question is about Learning the Kana... I'm planning on purchasing this book relatively soon and learning it as I go with Vol.1. Does RevTK have the Kana in its database, so I can add them into my rotation to help keep them memorized?
Thank you and I'm sorry if this information is posted somewhere I missed >.>
Koos83
Member
From: The Netherlands
Registered: 2009-08-26
Posts: 318
About your other question, to do with the RTK2 and 3 books:
I started RTK2 myself (never finished it) and though the words in there do refer to the kanji in RTK1, you don't necessarily need to use that reference. You don't need RTK1 to do RTK2 at all. Exactly what is different in the 6th edition compared to the 4th one (or older)? Sometimes the title of the kanji differs (hence you see different words for the same kanji on this site, like masculine/male for 雄). Sometimes he might have made small corrections in the story. I'm sure some more Jouyou have been added to meet the new standards, but they wouldn't have been added in between (right? Otherwise you wouldn't be able to review them on this site). All of these things are not needed for RTK2, so you'll be fine getting an older version of that book.
As for RTK3, I'd get a newer one, because it's basically an extension of RTK1, working in the same way, just learning more kanji. However, decide first if you really need to know more than the 2000~ kanji Heisig has put in RTK1. You don't need RTK3 if you want to read Japanese books/newspapers/regular documents. So decide for yourself: why do I want to learn Japanese? Do I want to do something there that's difficult (university, difficult job) or is it ok to learn enough kanji to get by in daily life and then move on to vocabulary/grammar to get by even better in daily life?
