(2016-06-17, 8:39 pm)FlameseeK Wrote:(2016-06-17, 4:34 pm)yogert909 Wrote: Absolutely. If I had made my own decks targeted towards the vocabulary and kanji that I expected to encounter in the next few weeks, I absolutely believe I would be much better off than I am now after years of studying core and RTK. The problem with core and rtk is that there are a lot of words and kanji that didn't encounter for a long time or haven't encountered and probably won't encounter for months or maybe years. On the other hand, there are kanji and vocabulary that I encounter all the time that didn't appear in core or rtk.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
I think I can clearly see where we differ in our approaches now. While you've been studying for years and mostly working on "technical" stuff like kanji and whatnot for a long time, I've only been studying for only 9 months. Despite the short time studying the language, I've been working at an abnormal pace. I'm one of those people who'd think it's normal to make a thread asking whether it's possible to pass N2-N1 in a single year (from 0). And based on my experience so far, I think N2 is definitely doable if you're able to study like a machine with that goal in mind. But I digress.
From the start, my goal was to get most of the "basics" out of the way asap and expand my comfort zone so that native material becomes more enjoyable. This is important to me, because I have very little tolerance towards ambiguity. I have this urge to look up everything I don't know and even double check a lot of the stuff I know just in case.
The thing is, I feel there's a huge difference between getting started with native material after "some" cramming in less than a year, and slowly making your way through the same sort of "technical", yet lifeless material without getting much more input anytime soon. The sooner you reinforce all this knowledge you've acquired, the more useful I feel it's going to be. Otherwise, it's as if you were merely acquiring potential knowledge, because it's not natural to cement it with Anki alone. That's why I feel ramping up the amount of input you get when it feels comfortable is an important step as well.
Hmm, interesting. I took the third approach - I went through a basic Japanese text, and went straight into native materials (manga, all with furigana because i didn't have enough kanji for anything else). I plodded on for years with that with verrrry slow progress and various conventional forms of learning (paper flashcards, writing kanji as they appear in O'Neil's, etc.) before I finally discovered Anki and RTK.
Coming back around to getting a solid core (so to speak) crammed in, I only did Core3k... I recall looking at Core10k and just seeing a lot of totally unfamiliar and not particularly useful looking words. With the amount of manga I had stumbled through with a dictionary I figured even that shouldn't be the case. (There's a difference between a word you've seen but don't 'know' and a totally unfamiliar word, after all.) On that personal basis as well as other's reports I've never really seen the merit in pre-loading all of Core10k.
I mean, it's fine if you're motivated and enjoying it, those words will come in handy -someday-. It's just that after the first few thousand, you can't really say anything is 'Core'. It depends on the material you intend to approach. I far preferred to start adding words from the wild to my study regimen after just a few thousand 'core' words.
I feel like Kanji are another case. The only Kanji in RTK that are really 'unnecessary' are the tree types (I happen to like trees and knowing their names so I don't mind personally). The rest of the 'obscure' kanji that I've seldom seen in the wild are building blocks for other characters so fit in a kind of 'might as well' slot ...and those end up even being in RTK Lite for the reason of being building blocks! (I'm going through RTK Lite at an incredibly slow pace as I convert my RTK deck from English keywords to Japanese keywords. I just can't review with English keywords anymore, I keep confusing synonyms and generally getting into a muddle mixing up English glosses for various Japanese words with keywords. Percentage-wise it's not 'really' a problem, but motivation-wise I can't do it. Well, that was a major digression in these parentheses.)
TL,DR: Moderation is important in all things, even Japanese learning strategies.