Anna B wrote:

It's available from Amazon resellers for about $60 new, and under $30 used.

It's not available new. It's out of print. It might be NOS but it has been out of print for over ten years. And given the fact it is bound in the US, that means the spine will crack with heavy use.(mine all have) Japanese 10 year old dictionaries might last, but US bindings are cheap and break.

All the copies I have used have suffered from the same defect, in that the spine was glued to the fold (and they are old stock and have suffered decay with time).

Still worth it, but it's most definitely not 'new'. Maybe unused, but not new.

Last edited by kapalama (2010 October 03, 9:43 pm)

Regarding broken book spines...

If you like doing DIY, it's possible to repair most book spines.

I use shoe glue: just cut a piece of card to the required shape (usually a long thin strip, say 1 cm wide and length about the same as the book's height), cover one side with the glue and apply to the crack.

Practice on some non-precious books first to hone your skills, and it's possible to make the repairs near-invisible.
Hardbacks are easy because the back is usually not attached to the spine: just slip the glued strip between the two and put a strip of plastic (e.g. cut from a plastic shopping bag) behind it while it dries. The book can then be closed while the glue is drying.
Softbacks are a bit harder to fix. The front, back and back cover are usually all one piece of card, and it's mostly easiest to cut the whole thing off first, then apply the glued strip, then reattach the cover.

I use shoe repair glue, and after experimenting with a few brands my favourite is "セメダイン　シューズドクター". I repaired a dozen or so books (including NJECD) about five years ago and they've held up perfectly.

Don't learn kanji by Heisig order. If you really want to learn words systematically by kanji then get yourself the beginner set of White Rabbit flashcards, which has the ~300 most common kanji and a handful of vocab words for each.

For quick kanji lookups, download Rikaichan for Firefox.

I meant if you are going to learn by kanji rather by something like frequency, don't learn by Heisig order, as in don't go through learning the readings/vocab associated with kanji like 旭, 胃, 呂 and so on before you learn the readings/vocab associated with kanji like 長.

harhol wrote:

I meant if you are going to learn by kanji rather by something like frequency, don't learn by Heisig order, as in don't go through learning the readings/vocab associated with kanji like 旭, 胃, 呂 and so on before you learn the readings/vocab associated with kanji like 長.

kanji lite is really good for frequency(common 1000 kanji). I still prefer heisig, as they are the kanji you will pretty much see in 95% of japanese text, probably a higher percentage for 3007+

If anyone needs a copy of RTK 1 to 3, contact me, I might be able to help out.

Most of the stories eventually fall off! That's what they're supposed to do, Heisig explains that later in the book (lesson 31 if you're eager). Eventually you just remember the characters and their primitives.

After you've got better at reading Japanese, while reading the kanji for which you know readings very well, you won't even have their keywords come to mind. You've had their readings been repeated so many times, you're just gonna see the character and think of a reading.

When I read 員, I only think "in", because I'm used to reading that character, and イン is the only reading it uses. The word "employee" doesn't come to mind, because in practice, the real meaning of the character is more close to "member" (or something in between those) anyway, a lot of words that use that character will have something to do with members. And I only really recall the image with the clams on the mouths if I stop reading to think twice about the character. When I normally read a word that contains 員, none of those things come to mind, and I just read the word (if I know it) and move on.

That's the end goal. I know even Heisig himself has said that all the characters are "just Japanese" to him today.

Last edited by TwoMoreCharacters (2011 September 17, 11:13 am)

Ashton wrote:

This is a great system. Is there an easy way to look up the Japanese words after you learn the symbols? Or is it better to just study Japanese and just recognize the kanji from that?

http://jisho.org/ Just enter the kanji and it gives you a list of the words.