Hi,
I was just wondering what others are doing for their Japanese immediately after finishing RTK1. What text books, movies, games manga, novels, other study paths, did you/are you currently doing? I think it would be nice to see what other members are doing and what interesting resources they are using.

For me, after I finished RTK1, I moved over to Anki and started the sentence path. Specifically, I have been using the Kanji Odessy books I mentioned here:
(BROKEN LINK) http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=918
I think there are awesome. I am only half way thru book one and I have noticed my reading has really gone up, and I also REALLY understand the news on tv.

On the side, I am playing a couple of old Nintendo/Famicon "sound novel" games, such as Kamaitachi no yoru. It's like a Chooses your own adventure book, all text with different choices. Its pretty fun and and I learn a lot of descriptive language.

I also am reading "The winds of Gath" a SF novel that Sheetz posted a link to the audio files under LIST OF FREE AUDIO BOOKS threads. It is a pretty high level, but it has been interesting to try to read along while someone reads at a very natural speed.

I am also have some graded readers, which I pick up and read for fun. I recommend them as well.

I haven't really gotten into too much manga, thou I would like to at some point. I just haven't found any that I think is interesting (although I do like Lone Wolf-I plan to attempt to read that down the road, but I think that is a different level).

I also browse thru A DICTIONARY OF INTERMEDIATE JAPANESE, to learn new grammar. I haven't got around to putting it into anki yet, but will after I finish the K.O. books

I am also slowly adding RTK3 to ANKi.

I haven't' done anything with Kanji chains or RTK2. Sentences via K.O. seems to work fine. I am pretty excited to try out the next level of this site though.

Well, I hope this info is helpful to some. I would like to hear from other recent RTK1 Grads to hear what they are doing, and as well as those who have been finished with it for a while.

After RTK I've mostly been using the Assimil course and putting it into anki. I should of been done doing that awhile ago, but I stop adding stuff when I get a backlog of stuff I can't recall really easily. I've also been reading some manga: Dragonball, Naruto, Junk - Record of Last Hero. After I finish adding all the Assimil lessons, I plan to add new words I come across by looking them up in Kenkyusha and grabbing an example sentence with it I like.

Immediately after finishing RtK1, I tried out the second book. I gained nothing save frustration, however, probably because I couldn't think of an interesting way to approach it. It is back on the shelf now, to be used as a reference or something once I figure out how. The pure groups should come in handy at some point, at the very least, but I'll probably combine them with some other method.

At present, I'm grinding through Pimsleur to brush up my pronunciation and fill in some blanks in my grammar and vocabulary. (I've been at this for years, and never heard "いかがですか" before. What the heck?) To reinforce this method, and to avoid letting my RtK1 effort go to waste, I enter example sentences from each Pimsleur lesson into Anki, complete with kanji and the occasional note about grammar.

I am also rushing through RtK3 using the "quick and dirty" method, not really worrying about my recall rate (or trying not to; 50% failed kanji can be a bit painful) and just trying to pick up whichever characters immediately stick, such as the ones used as primitives in the first book, or those I have encountered in manga/anime/games/whatever (Such as 柊, thanks to らき☆すた). By the end of the third book, I expect to remember about 2-300 characters, this time around. I plan to pick up the rest as I stumble upon them in context.

When I got serious about RTK, I was through book 1 of minna no nihongo, so when I finished I went though a lot of the second book as well.

I have gone through the Anki sample decks for JLPT3+4 and JLPT2. I've also added the first 200 entries from RTK 2. In addition, I've added vocab and sentences that I've run across. As was all most of the vocab from the minna no nihongo books.

As for manga, I've read the first 2 books in the Detective Conan series, which I find to be at a good level. And much more interesting than some of the other manga I started but didn't get into (pokemon, doraemon, and some baseball one)

The other day, I bought the kanzen master's JLPT 2 grammar book, so I've started entering sentences from that into Anki.

I watched the Death Note anime, which was good.

And I've been listening to Pimsleur, I'm up to Part 3, lesson 24. (so almost done with that) It's generally to easy, but in my case I need all the speaking practice I can get, since in my case I feel like I have a fairly large gap between what I know and what I can comfortably use in conversation.

And I bought a Japanese kiddie dictionary

http://www.benesse.co.jp/s/dictionary/koku/

which I'm going to try to use more instead of Rikaichan and, in general, try to incorporate more J-->J studying.

I'm reading, travel books, guides, short stories, blogs (not a manga fan, sorry), listening to news & chat podcasts, and watching TV shows from d-addicts. I'm trying to get away from textbooks, though I have the Unicom levels 2 & 1 grammar books for reference. I find it help to use the Heisig stories to try to figure stuff out by context, and skimming has gotten a lot easier.

I have an Anki sentence file too, though I only input words I don't know, and usually only short phrases, not long sentences. (I've been kind of waiting for Trinity before putting a lot of time into this...)

I also make up RTK3 stories as I encounter new kanji. I have maybe 40 or 50 scattered through the 900-odd RTK3 kanji, and am filling in the gaps (at 2064 now, oo!).

I'm rewarding myself by getting away from textbooks-- after I had a J-foundation, I used them as a safety net when I should have been out making mistakes in the real world. Spent a lot of time & money and hindered my own progress. Just spending more time with material aimed at natives and I can see I'm making my faster progress, getting more fluid with reading. Studying the language feels good for the first time in a while...

I've found post-RTK1 life a hard adjustment. With a finite number of kanji, and the excellent review system on this website, I found it easy to set daily goals and thereby keep my level of motivation high. Since finishing a few months ago, I've at a bit of a loss. I've started a sentence file on Anki, but the question is what to put into it? I Early on, I was using a book called スーパー合格日本語能力試験1・2級語彙対策　(Advanced Vocabulary for Levels 1 and 2), published by 秀和システム(Shuwa System). It's quite good, and unlike some other vocab books I've come across, it approaches words not by onyoumi order, but rather by theme, such as "Idioms involving parts of the body", or compound verbs that take the same stem such as 引き受ける、引き取る and so on. This means there more of a thematic connection that those books that start with kanji with an onyoumi of あ then move on to い and so on.

Alas, I've found sticking to a single book rather tedious, hence I presently have a mishmash of material gleaned from manga, the news, terebi dorama, and variety shows. Unfortunately I reckon I'm spreading myself too thin here. Anyone with any ideas, especially for someone who's stalled somewhere around the lower reaches of 2kyuu proficiency.

billyclyde, you mention having a J-foundation. How would you classify your abilities prior to weaning yourself off textbooks and onto, for lack of a better term, real world materials, and how rapid has your progress been since?

I'm not quite finished (frame 1320) but should be finished by the end of February, my plan for after RTK1 is as follows...although my presumption is the trinity area of the site will be up by then

>Start the 10,000 sentences method
>Start Kanji Chains to learn the Onyomi
>Re-Read Genki 1 + 2 for the purpose of review plus sentence mining
>Start on RTK3 right away, I can't see any harm in learning them, although I will not be learning their onyomi I'll pick this up as I encounter the characters altering my RTK1 chains if necessary
>Re-Listen to Pimsleur 2-3, again for review and for stealing sentences for 10,000 goal
>Start Entering the JLPT2 vocabulary and Grammar point examples into an SRS (or trinity)
>Enter every sentence in "Breaking into Japanese lit." into an SRS, or again trinity if its online

I'm ~JLPT3 level of proficiency right now so my overall goal after RTK is to reach 2kyuu level within a year, its more than possible with an SRS.

I've been going through JFE, and I also started on the Kanji Odessy books, and I'm practicing reading with some progressive readers and 'Breaking into Japanese Lit.'

I've been putting sentences into Anki, but my biggest problem is deciding on the best way to formulate my flashcards... because I'm always thinking "What if this is not so good. What if there's a better way and I'm wasting time?", but at the same time I want to use an SRS because its really helped me with RTK (I've got about 98% of RTK1 at 4th stack level already).

When I saw Fabrice's work on Trinity I just though its great, so it kind of added to my procrastination on adding new sentences to Anki. I'm counting on you Fabrice !

In the mean time I found something else that is surprisingly useful... which is JapanesePod101. I went in not expecting too much... and I thought Peter was a bit annoying in the first 20 or so lessons and his pronunciation is not very accurate, but after the lesson dialogues started getting more interesting (Beginner lesson 35+), and the roles mostly played by Japanese natives, I found that it was actually quite effective. I'm picking up new vocab, and clarrifying some grammar points nicely. I think the fact that you get background explanation on a lot of stuff helps to learn quite well. And... its so effortless to just listen to the podcast, and take a few notes.

So I am quite hooked on jpod101, but I want to start doing more sentences too because just listening to jpod101 doesn't use my RTK knowledge.

Curently:

Listening to a looped/random audio of: Jpop, Dubbed US movies, Japanese Drama, Podcasts, News.

Inputting in Anki:

Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar (suggested by AJATT)
Dictionary of Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns (same author that did "All About the Particles").

Due to an insightful AJATT post yesterday, I'll be doing a Kana Pronunciation to Kanji sentence review (given the Kana pronunciation, can I correctly write out the kanji sentence). Idea being if you can get the kanji sentence from the pronunciation, you can read the kanji sentence. Also improves your aural skills (since Kanji gives context that you won't get when listening).

For RTK1:

Doing about 50 scheduled reviews a day now (1800 cards in stack 4 and above). I also am using Anki to begin Kanji to Keyword reviews to see if there's a benefit. Reason for that is I was noticing that I was not recognizing Kanji even though I could go keyword to kanji.

@Django

Sounds like we're in a pretty similar spot. I've been to Japan twice, once working eikaiwa (ugh), once doing a semester of schooling, and I sat the 2Kyuu last month. Could've gone either way, though I know I aced the kanji/vocab thanks to RevTK.

Before, I was like a sieve, constantly relearning things. I had studied 1300-1400 kanji in Kanji in Context, but could only be relied on to recall 7-800 on a good day (based on the Meguro online kanji check test). Probably less. I would slap my head when seeing common words I knew I had studied time & again. My grammar was already good enough to read passages, figure stuff out by context if I don't know the precise point.

My progress has been good-- I use dictionaries less & less. I'm not reading Mishima, though.

But, my intention has been to set progress aside and get good habits instead. I have been overwhelmed too much by having stacks of books I "should" know, and making the language a chore when it should be a place, or a flow. So I'm just building an "immersion environment," as Khatzumoto would say, and enjoying it. I took JLPT, but don't care as it won't help with job/etc. Many people use the tests for motivation, but I have been de-motivated by such things by feeling overwhelmed.

So I've been pleasantly suprised as how, well, pleasant it can be reading (not studying) now, though I haven't been hit by any linguistic lightning bolts. Maybe someday...

One of the things I want to try with the JPod101.com materials is using Foxit to OCR their PDF files so I can use anything good and put it into my Anki pile. It's on my giant pile of "Things to do." For those of you who don't know, Foxit is a PDF reader. It's small, fast, free, and not Adobe. If you get the deluxe version, which is ~$30, you also get a neat little feature that will OCR the text in a PDF file. It will also do Asian languages wit the right plugin, but I haven't tried it yet.

For now, I'm using the JPod101.com podcasts as something to listen to while I'm working out. (I work out for about an hour a day, so it works for me.) I'm slowly building an immersion environment. Actually, it's more of a Japanese wading pool than an immersion environment, but any progress > none. Eventually, I want to find some Japanese newscasts to listen to as well. When I was studying German, Deutsche Welle had a great feature-- they had the news read in German, but slowly, so you could try to figure out what they were saying. I wish some of the JP news outlets did that... *sigh*

I'm still plowing through RTK1. I set myself back a few months by not reviewing while I was in Japan, so now I'm paying for it. On the other hand, I find that I've retained a surprising number of kanji, and that it only takes a few study reviews to nail them back down again. (I was at ~1400 or so when i stopped, now I'm at ~600.) And yes, I'm always trying to get as close to 100% as I can.

While I'm doing that, I'm also (slowly) adding sentences to my Anki deck, mostly from Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar, in order to strengthen my grammar foundations. The scanner pen has helped me add about 120 cards to my deck in the last week or so. I can't always hit my daily goal in that because I'm prioritizing RTK1, but any sentence input is better than none IMO.

I'm also reading manga and light novels, usually at bedtime, and I'm not trying for 100% comprehension. I'm just trying to get better at recognizing things I should already know. Adding more Japanese noise to my brain, if you will.

For a while I was inputting sentences from Oxford Beginners Dictionary of Japanese and then that got to be a chore. I'm listening to a lot of Japanese music and enjoying bands like Guitar Wolf, Shaka Labbits, and Puffy. I just got a new computer and an Ipod and have been listening to Jpod101 and getting news podcasts from Yomiuri online. I like Jpod and even subscribed to the premium subscription for a while. The premium has line by line transcriptions of the dialogues that make it easy to cut and paste and put into my SRS. I have been doing intermediate lessons but they are a little advanced for me. It's nice to print out the PDF and mark it up. I use the back to write out sentences from my SRS.

An interesting side-project has been Death Note. I have English and Japanese versions and when I have time, I type a page into my SRS. These are some of the hardest sentences I have come across, but it's an interesting story and it keeps me going. I've also subscribed to TV Japan (NHK). I especially like a program called こどもニュス、which breaks down the week's news for kids. I'm also catching up with my kanji reviews, since I rushed to end and I have 900 failed kanji now. What's been great is to come across kanji in my reviews and have it connect with kanji I have studied and use the stories to help me remember readings. I have Pimsleur on my ipod but it is boooring.　　Watching the Death Note anime has been great. The Conan detective series is on TV Japan but it is annoying. I intend to re-watch Azumanga Daioh---this time without the subtitles. What was I thinking?

taijuando Wrote:An interesting side-project has been Death Note. I have English and Japanese versions and when I have time, I type a page into my SRS. These are some of the hardest sentences I have come across, but it's an interesting story and it keeps me going.

I'm just getting started with RTK1 but I'm looking for ideas on what to do when I'm finished. I really want to use sentences from anime but I'm not sure what the best method is for copying them into an SRS. How have you been doing it with deathnote? I saw an article on AJATT about getting sentences from movies, but I haven't read it yet and I just figured I'd see how other people are doing it.

When I read manga/books etc, whenever I see a sentence that I might want to learn, I put a little sticky flag thingy on the page that points to or covers the sentence/s and just keep going. When I'm done (after a chapter or two) I go back through the book and input the sentences.
For me, separating the tasks is more efficient and lets me get into the groove better for both tasks.

I used Mnemosyne and paper flashed cards to increase my vocab for a while(I already knew basic Japanese). But I got soooo sick of flashcards, I can't use them very much at all anymore >_< Even if I use sentences instead of isolated words.

So now I just read stuff(mostly fiction, I just finished Alice in wonderland), and write down the words I don't know. Before I was worried about whether I'd ever actually need the words I was learning, but this way I know I'm learning useful words. When I go over the word lists, I can still remember the context they were used in. I don't mine sentences, partly because it's so context dependent, I'd be better off(and less bored) to just reread the material.

I also watch anime. I just got the idea to start listening to anime dramas, so I can improve my listening skills away from the screen/house. We'll see how that goes ^_^

@brett,

I watch short jdorama series (from d-addicts) with subtitles, but then I watch each episode again w/o looking at subs, and write down phrases I don't know. I jot these down on paper & put them in an SRS the next day while checking readings, kanji etc.

I plan to rewatch the series after SRS reps. I also listen to the soundtrack as background noise. I prefer everyday life dramas, like "Eesu wo Nerae" or "Densha Otoko" b/c the vocab is more grounded than scifi/fantasy stuff.

After learning the pure groups in RTK2 I switched to learning sentences/ memorizing words as was suggested to me by a member of this forum earlier, where afterwards I just attach the kanji to whatever word I memorized.

I really hate using textbooks so I am currently going through the 5分間トレーニング (漢字) books which are aimed at students grades 1-6, introducing and drilling kanji through a variety of sample sentences. Each page contains 5-10 sentences to drill kanji (1st grade) and an increasing number of sentences in the later grades. The books come in sets of two, ex: 一年生(上)や 一年生(下), I am currently at the grade 3 book 1 and have found that each book contains about 300 unique sentences. I am also entering sentences from the manga 金田一 少年の事件簿 (きんだいち しょねんのじけんぼ) murder/mystery.

In addition to that I am also learning the antiquated Vietnamese/Chinese readings using "Tự Học Chữ H?n" which more often than not match the Japanese readings or belong to the same groups which really helps me to organize things mentally

ex: *(note that the markings above the vowels denote their tone)
th?nh - 成 誠 - to turn into (trở th?nh), to be truthful (th?nh thật)
thanh - 青 清 - blue (thanh h?- blue river), pure (thanh bạch)
th?nh - 聖 -put before names of saints/ saintly
**of course the on readings for all of these is in Japanese simply "せい"
imo because the Japanese do not use tones**

This has helped me greatly understand more clearly both the Vietnamese and Japanese language a great deal better, and will hopefully help my eventual jump to Chinese.

@yukamina:

The other method I use for speed learning, which I have never seen mentioned on this forum, is a trick that I learned from a person I met in Vietnam who had amazingly good English. I asked him how he had learned it so well, so much better than anyone else that I had met and without so much as taking classes. He told me that he spent his free time buying American magazines and translating them from English to Vietnamese. Then, using his Vietnamese script he translated them back into English and corrected his mistakes against the original magazine copy. If he made less than 90% he would repeat the process again. He was the best English speaker I had met in Vietnam (who was not Việt Kiều), even better than the several English professors that I had met. Anyways, I now use this method and it does give incredible results, both in short and long-term retention of vocab and grammar. Good alternative for those who hate flashcards.

stehr Wrote:The other method I use for speed learning, which I have never seen mentioned on this forum, is a trick that I learned from a person I met in Vietnam who had amazingly good English. (...) He told me that he spent his free time buying American magazines and translating them from English to Vietnamese. Then, using his Vietnamese script he translated them back into English and corrected his mistakes against the original magazine copy. If he made less than 90% he would repeat the process again.

I think this is very interesting but have some questions about this technique. My experience learning foreign languages has been that expressing certain thoughts requires a different mindset or different patterns/idioms depending on the language used. In other words, isn't it true that some things can't be translated 1-for-1? As an example, consider translating the following into Japanese, then back into English:

Quote:I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Translating this from English->Japanese->English seems like it would be difficult to maintain a 90% rate, particularly in light of English-specific constructs that lend character and style to the original (not/nor, neither yet/nor yet).

The technique does sound interesting; just trying to figure out how it works.

rtkrtk Wrote:

stehr Wrote:The other method I use for speed learning, which I have never seen mentioned on this forum, is a trick that I learned from a person I met in Vietnam who had amazingly good English. (...) He told me that he spent his free time buying American magazines and translating them from English to Vietnamese. Then, using his Vietnamese script he translated them back into English and corrected his mistakes against the original magazine copy. If he made less than 90% he would repeat the process again.

I think this is very interesting but have some questions about this technique. My experience learning foreign languages has been that expressing certain thoughts requires a different mindset or different patterns/idioms depending on the language used. In other words, isn't it true that some things can't be translated 1-for-1? As an example, consider translating the following into Japanese, then back into English:

Quote:I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Translating this from English->Japanese->English seems like it would be difficult to maintain a 90% rate, particularly in light of English-specific constructs that lend character and style to the original (not/nor, neither yet/nor yet).

The technique does sound interesting; just trying to figure out how it works.

I think this technique would work for languages in the same subset for example Germanic languages, translating English->German->English would yield far less errors than English->Japanese->English.

I'm a big fan of retranslation and try to encourage my students to have a go. Probably don't do enough of it myself though

From what I've read about the technique. Short, complete texts are regarded as best.

The idea is not to translate word for word but to produce a text in L1 that sounds as natural and idiomatic as possible.

Thanks for the explanation and the keyword of "retranslation". A web search turned up this article with some more information on the technique: http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/goodprac...urceid=427

synewave Wrote:I'm a big fan of retranslation and try to encourage my students to have a go. Probably don't do enough of it myself though

From what I've read about the technique. Short, complete texts are regarded as best.

The idea is not to translate word for word but to produce a text in L1 that sounds as natural and idiomatic as possible.

This is exactly the method used. Whatever was translated into english does not have to be 100% grammaticly accurate, as long as the contents of the text are fully comprehended. But when translating back to Japanese you have to shoot for 100% accuracy, then you grade yourself using original document.

meolox Wrote:I think this technique would work for languages in the same subset for example Germanic languages, translating English->German->English would yield far less errors than English->Japanese->English.

This works just as well for Japanese, I have used it for years with the Vietnamese language and had incredible results. Again, the main focus should be on the accuracy and errors of the "re-translated (Japanese)" portion of the text, not on the accuracy of the translated (English) portion. In other words, the english can be sloppy as long as the re-translated Japanese is true to the text. Of course practice makes perfect so I will often translate and re-translate up to 3 times on a really hard text (that's 6 total translations), until I get above 90% accuracy. On a side note, it still works even if you do not memorize all of the words before translating and just translate off a list of definitions. (I used to memorize the words then translate from memory, then I got lazy).

The main problem with Japanese re-translation is, again: "The Kanji"

Good luck!

rtkrtk Wrote:Translating this from English->Japanese->English seems like it would be difficult to maintain a 90% rate...

no no never.. re-translation is always done :

Japanese->English->Japanese

or

Vietnamese->English->Vietnamese

The idea is to try to formulate your grammar and sentences the same way as the naitive writer does it, you would never translate using an English text as your base (that would be for the Japanese to do!). Sorry it's a bit complicated, hope this helps.

Speaking of "retranslation", do you know Nipponia?

If you don't, I think you will like it. They have their articles in Japanese, English, Spanish, Russian and a few more languages. I.e. you can find lots of parallel texts there.

Indeed so, I think most people have misunderstood the direction the traslations would go in. My native language is English, so I would find a piece of authentic Japanese literature. I would then traslate it into English as well as I could. I would then hide away the origonal Japanese text and look at the English version. The next step is to translate into Japanese from my English text. Then make a comparison of the origonal Japanese text and my text. If I have over 90 percent correct then i've completed the task. Is that right?