Chucking more Japanese books

I threw out my old Essential Kanji book back in January. I'm about to throw out a bunch more, but I feel this inexplicable need to justify the decision. Let's start with my Fall 1995 Japanese textbook.

This was the textbook I used at the University of Hawai`i-Hilo for Japanese 101. It was a good book to have while I was a waiter working in Waikiki because it prioritized serice industry-type vocabularies and structures.

However, it was all in romaji (ローマ字) -- Roman characters -- so it was really only good for beginners. Once a student learns hiragana (平仮名, Japanese pronunciation characters), using romaji is like continuing to use training wheels on a bicyle. It becomes a kind of handicap. Now that I'm pretty much 100% guaranteed not to return to a service industry job that uses Japanese, it's time for this to go.
I got this dictionary soon after I moved to Oahu in 1996, when I started my Japanese 102 class at the University of Hawai`i-Mānoa. It was a good dictionary for beginners because it used romaji, yet it provided the kanji (漢字, the imported Chinese characters).

In that sense, the English to Japanese side was really useful. However, that same characteristic represented a limitation for the Japanese to English side. Beause there's no reliable way to read a kanji, it wasn't useful for looking up Japanese words by their romaji pronunciations. It would have been OK for looking up words you hear, but you'd still needed a kanji dictionary.

Now that cell phones have optical character translation, and I have a Japanese dictionary app on my smartphone, this decidedly non-portable dictionary is a relic.

When Making Sense of Japanese came out in 1998, I thought it was a good book to invest in. I had hoped that wnen I graduated with my International Business degree in 1999, I would get a job in Japan or something, and it would be helpful in understanding the things that my textbooks -- which (understandably) focused on students -- didn't really explain.

I think it was similar with Essential Japanese (the 1992 reprint), which I got when I was considering an English teaching in Japan.

However, now that I'm actually working in Japan, I find that I'm pretty well off without these books. Instead of romaji making things easier, it actually makes things harder because I have to "reverse transliterate" the text. I actually have a hard time understanding what the author is talking about.

I don't have the time or patience for that anymore, and I've found I'm doing just fine with the Japanese skills I already have. So while I appreciate these books for what I did learn from them, it's time to let those twenty year-old fantasies of professional Japanese fluency go.