WARNING: Long! (But helpful I think)

During a long car ride I was thinking about Japanese stuff, as usual, and about RTK and AJATT in particular. I realized something interesting... they are opposite philosophies!

First, RTK says that we should abstract away the kanji and learn it first, in order to make learning and functioning in Japanese much easier. There is no context learned with the kanji, but THAT'S OK, we get the context later. Sure enough, as many people here will attest to, this method works! In fact, separating the kanji study into one unit, and using memory techniques to get them all in your brain does in fact work and does in fact speed up the process of learning Japanese!

Then comes AJATT. Sure, he says to use RTK, so he is on the right track. But then he says: forget about learning words, just learn sentences! Seems brilliant... no need to dwell on grammar, lots of valuable input, lots of context to fill in the gaps, etc. But this is how AJATT is different from RTK: katsumoto proposes to just start reading real stuff without ever bothering with vocab, so we are left looking up words in dictionaries ALL THE TIME (hence AJATT?). It seems like an endless process of stumbling across words you don't know and looking them up. If we did the same thing with kanji, imagine how difficult life would be. In fact, just imagine back to how hard Japanese was before RTK!

Here is what I have been thinking of, and it was inspired by Stuart Jay Raj, who some of you may have heard about. He is a polyglot (hyperglot maybe) who speaks about 15-25 languages and he is probably in his thirties. He detailed his first few days of learning a language (the whole process of which takes about 4-8 weeks for him), and he basically said that he learns about 1500-3000 words in the first few days/weeks. Imagine how much easier that would make input, if you already knew most of the words before you began!

My thought would be this:
* Use RTK
* Afterwards (or during, if you have lots of time), learn as many words as you can as quickly as possible
* Read about grammar and think about how people formulate thoughts in Japanese while you continue to learn words
* FINALLY, get as much input as possible: AJATT it up!

Now, the problem becomes how to learn so many words. Well, I thought about that as well. Clearly I do not need to emphasize the usefulness of memory techniques, as we all have seen how well RTK works. So here are some suggested memory techniques to learn words:

* If the word is a cognate in another language (Japanese -> Chinese could give you lots of help ryouri -> liawli (or something, they sound very similar, and thus easily remembered))
* If the word sounds like a different word in another language (冷凍：reitou sounds kind of like Ray's toe or something, this is just off of the top of my head)
* Using stories: obviously too slow for one word, but you could use it to learn groups of words together (月、火、水、木、金、土、日, make a story that takes place each day of the week using the words GETS, CUT, SWEET, MOCHA, KING, D'OH, NICHE... not too hard to do) (一、二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、十, = Itchy, Knee, Son, She (or Yo!), Go, Rock, Nana, Hatch, Cue, Jew?) Coming up with these words took about 30 seconds, a story probably another 2 minutes.
* This one is a little out there, but with practice it may work. Here is the explanation: Stuart Jay Raj sees colors for different sounds. This may be a type of synaesthesia which aids him in his amazing memory, but I think ordinary people may be able to use it with practice. If you could assign colors to each sound you hear, you may be able to create a color pattern for each word. This would basically be a way to really make sure the word is going into your memory in the first place and really strengthen any other association you may be making for that word.

From an interview Stuart Jay Raj did, he mentioned that for each word he learns, he thinks of all the associations in his head, and so can remember a huge number of words in very short period of time. I believe we can all train our memories to work this well with practice.

IN SUMMARY: Forget that AJATT said not to learn words. You should learn as many as possible as soon as possible! Use memory techniques to learn them, and get context later (I promise context will come). I believe the context is what really seats the language into your brain and so anything you can do to make inputting those real sentences with real context is great.

What do you guys think? I am definitely going to focus on vocab much more now, and may try a speed learning session of another language some day.

Color association does not work unless you have said condition. That's just random association. Aside from that, the associations, are just basic mnemonics. Very easy to learn, and most people would use it already.

I would say no, AJATT and RTK are not opposite ideas. Kanji are far harder than vocab, and the point of RTK is to get in the shapes. Kanji are very difficult to remember, vocab is very easy. Sentences work because you are learning vocab. Context is just added on top with no extra effort. Sitting there memorizing vocab lists is just dumb when it's easy enough to memorize them with the language.

Compare with Stuart Jay Raj with Barry Farber. Getting a language in your head is about the amount of time and effort you put it. This different method is only a different way, not a better way.

I am not going to try and convince anyone that my idea is the best way, but from what I gather it seems like a logical progression of the idea behind RTK.

Sure, vocab are easy to remember. Great! In fact the examples I put above give you 17 words in about 5 minutes. So why not go ahead and learn the words? It will take you much less time than RTK (like I said, a few days to a few weeks if your memory is honed), and then you don't need to spend countless hours NOT enjoying your input and instead looking up stuff in the dictionary repeatedly.

I think that memory techniques are efficient, especially when applied broadly like I suggested and even if words are easy to learn one at a time, they are even easier to learn if you think about them in a systematic way. I think we all have stuff to learn from the people who really master their field, not that we may ever achieve what they have, but why not follow their lead?

Because I can either learn those 15 words in isolation, or learn 15 words in a couple sentences. Both take about the same amount of time.

Have you heard of people using kanji odyssey? That gives you your vocab with sentence context.

After three months of Heisig, I would absolutely lose my mind if I tried to keep learning things in isolation. With Heisig, the only thing that kept me going until the end was a vague sense that the payoff would come later, and a large -- very large -- amount of spite. I couldn't let it win, you see.

Now that I'm to the learning with sentences part, it finally feels like I'm making some sort of progress in Japanese, since every single word and grammar point that I pick up is accompanied by a satisfying "Hey, I can read that!" moment. It's very soothing on my tattered nerves, and it makes learning new material enjoyable.

First things first, since this is my first post, I'd like to introduce myself. I am Garland from Czech republic (it's in Europe, and no, Europe is NOT a country, for some), curently on frame 1586, which means that this post may also be my last, since I hope I'll be done soon. I have been reading posts here for some time and I think you've all grown into quite an intelligent community, so congrats.

Now for the post. When I was about 9 years old, I had almost no english vocabulary (just the basic words and phrases, they teach every kid, like socks, rains or Mr. Robinsons is from the Great Britain. I don't understand. Could you spell it please?"), no grammar foundations to build on and no teacher or class to learn from. I did hovewer have Final fantasy VIII. Even though it uses written text, it was like watching a movie with the sound turned off- I understood almost nothing, 90 % of the words were unknown- at first, the context offered about as much info as "Kill that soldier" or "if you don't escape from that big meteor falling at you, you're probably gonna die"- but it was enough. Over time (time, in which I also bought FF IX, FF X, FF VII, FF....), the words in sentences sort of started to make sense, even without my seeing them before- the context was so powerful that they sort of got in my head themself. Without making any effort at all (expect the effort put in catching the chocobos), without having learned any words beforehand, I found I was surpassing my classmates by miles, and perhaps even more (the comprehension was really intuitive- I for example found myself at situations where I couldn't translate the word into czech, although I understood its essence very well).

I wouldn't thus place so much emphasis on learning the single words, because for one, it is honestly an extremely boring thing to do, and for two, it's easier to learn them from context anyways (although having some vocabulary base is probably neceassary ).

When I speak of context, I mean real context though- things you can touch, you can feel, things you can see- not just plain sentences that mean nothing by themself and lack the presence of any environment.

Because japanese is written in a different script, it is probably not that bad to jot the words down along the way, but how can you use a word whilst not having seen how is it used before ?

Also, may I ask for the native speakers to correct my english should some serious mistake appear?

If you can learn the words in context just as fast then of course, go with context. I, however, propose that if your memory is honed, that learning words alone is much faster because you can easily apply memory techniques (much like RTK). Furthermore, I think if you already know the words, the context is much easier to learn as well. I don't know how many times I have come across a sentence with a single word that I didn't understand, and the whole sentence became incomprehensible.

I am actually using kanji odyssey right now. I think it is great! One reason is that it hardly introduces a sentence with yet-to-be-studied words in it. Real life input is not like that in my opinion.

Mcjon01,
I agree and empathize with what you are saying. However, I spent a year without RTK and AJATT trying to learn Japanese only to be frustrated with how little progress I was making. If I had known what a huge payoff RTK would have been, I definitely would have started with it, and if I had known how having a large vocabulary would have helped my studies in a similar way, I would have gladly gone right into that as well! To think of trying to understand a language without knowing the words just doesn't make any sense, as well as trying to read a sentence full of kanji that you don't know!

I think I could be in the same place I am now (two years of study) in just 4-5 months time by following my outline, time I would gladly have given up to know that the next 1 1/2 years would be much more comprehensible input.

Are there any people at all who see benefit in what I am talking about?

I see the problem that you have with the AJATT method, and I agree with it. However I do not agree with your solution. Learning words without context wont really get you very far, in my humble opinion. The problem is just diving right into difficult stuff. You have to learn to walk before you can run, after all.
I have been working my way through graded readers ( http://www.thejapanshop.com/home.php?cat=344 ) and they have been phenomenal for me. They use a limited vocabulary and grammatical structures, so they aren't too difficult for the beginner. By starting out with easy stuff like this, I think you can learn faster since it's not so difficult to try and take everything in all at once, and you also have a sense of accomplishment, since you can read and understand a story. I'm mining a ton of great sentences from them too.
Another option i might suggest is a textbook such as Genki. It introduces you to basic grammatical structures and vocabulary in each lesson. So while you may not learn more than about 100 words in the first lesson, you can still be sure that none of the content in that lesson will be using words that you aren't familiar with. I think genki is a great textbook, but about half of the content is just exercises, which are pretty useless outside of a classroom.

I think you should take a detour by this site: how-to-learn-any-language.com.
Check out the forums. Contests regularly take place to see just how much can be done in a time frame of X.

Try what you proposed, you might find the results quite surprising ! Just for fun I did one month of german speed-learning. That month was spent entirely reading literature and a dictionary (admittedly, I did go through assimil the first two weeks or so). I can now read wikipedia articles for fun and get the gist of most articles.

But regarding Ajatt, I believe khatz's advice is to get in contact with real texts. I'm pretty certain he used the *HECK* out of that wordtank dictionary. If that's not learning words, I don't what is. I don't know.. Khat's advice of going with texts is good because at some point something /will/ pick your curiosity and make you look up a few words. Also, my experience with german and english have made me realize knowing words is not *that* important. Seriously, how many times have you seen a foreigner string up a sentence with all the correct words but that people just can't get any ounce of meaning from ?

In any case, many words just do not make much sense in isolation so khat's advice is not totally unfounded. So yeah -- a good way to go I believe is to do both concurently.
Generally, knowing 4 out of 5 words in a syntactic group is enough to get the meaning of the fifth, so no need to rush.

Hope that made sense


Edit: Holly freaking yellow mutant frog! This thread had no replies when I started typing

Garland,
Thank you for your reply, and your English is very good!

I would never propose to use a word without having seen how it is used. I just think an added step of building up a base vocabulary quickly would hasten the process of learning the language. I don't think vocabulary or kanji by themselves are language. Indeed it is the communication of meaning through sentences. But wouldn't the input be much more enjoyable and helpful if you could not only get the context around the sentence, but essentially understand the sentence from the get-go?

I am impressed by your ability to pick up English in that way, and in fact you have succeeded in mastering English from my perspective. How long did it take? I am trying to get people to think in a different way. As in, realize that it is possible to learn a language to a reasonable degree in 4-8 weeks.

Granted, I have not tested this myself, so I am discussing this based on my conclusions from what I have experienced (being frustrated that the input was not helping), and what I have read about others.

That reminds me, discussions about TPRS (teaching proficiency through reading and storytelling/total physical response storytelling) say that people learn the most when input is 100% comprehensible.

Zarxrax,
I agree, using sources that have all known vocab is a great idea, and I have used those exact same graded readers successfully. So what do you propose after that? How do you find sources where all the vocab is easy to understand? Why not get a lot of vocab in your head in the first place, and open up the rest of literature to within reach?

I am gathering that NO ONE thinks learning words is a good idea. Out of all the people who have successfully applied RTK, no one thinks that this idea could be extended? Also, I think not knowing just one word is enough to make you start to lose interest in something. What about manga, where often there is one hard word and the rest is stuff like "da to omou n desu kedo...".

What about if someone laid out a list for you and gave you mnemonics and methods to memorize them. Would you use it?

Thank you very much for your appreciation, although I know I still have a long way to go as far as some advanced vocabulary is concerned. I am 17 and have been stagnating in english for about three years (mostly improving only my passive comprehension of the language), so there

As for the vocabulary, I do not, by any means, deny the fact that it is better and easier to know the words already, but I believe the time spent learning the seperate words can be more efficiently put into having fun with the language and basically make the words find their way themselves

The thing also is that if you learn some words without getting the feel of the context AND grammar in which they are used, you're basically unable to move to higher levels of the language anyways- you learn the language to use it in context, and so learning from context right away seems like a very reasonable thing to do.

Edit, to make myself clear: Learning seperate things and grammar IS IMHO a fine thing to do (I do so myself in the initial stages of learning languages), but only if you have a lot of free time- otherwise, moving on to the real language seems more time saving to me

Also, as for the 4-6 for learning a language, I really do not believe it is possible, even you managed to learn the words, the feel still needs a lot of time to grow, doesn't it?

Another thought: having learned a kanji previously makes it familiar when you see it in the future. It may be easy to learn a word while you are reading a sentence, but what if you already knew the word for "philosophy" for example. When you see it in a sentence, you may be able to learn the word from scratch, but if you knew it already, then you are already familiar with it and you can say "oh, so that is how you use the word 'philosophy'" instead of "ok, here is this new word 'philosophy', and I am seeing it is used in this way." I think the former will be much more comfortable seeing and using that word in the future.

Hi Garland,
I see what you are saying. If you are able to have fun with the language then indeed I think you will learn even more.

In my personal opinion, and having gotten further in Japanese than any other language I have ever studied, I feel like I could have had a lot more fun if I could understand it better and sooner. RTK gave me that feeling because I really felt like I was learning loads of information every day. Now I am finally getting to the point where I can watch tv shows with enough comprehension to really enjoy it (maybe I am being unreasonable, but I think at least 90% comprehension is the lower limit for me).

I think if I can successfully build up my vocab (especially for words that you just don't get that much context for) then much more will become enjoyable for me. Learning is enjoyable as you input, but also having to learn too much as you go can be painful and frustrating and above all else, slow.

danieldesu Wrote:Zarxrax,
I agree, using sources that have all known vocab is a great idea, and I have used those exact same graded readers successfully. So what do you propose after that?

Have you tried "Read Real Japanese Fiction"? ( http://www.amazon.com/Read-Real-Japanese...4770030584 ) I've had this sitting on my desk for a few weeks now, and am planning to start into it next week when I go on vacation. From what I've looked at so far, it looks great. You have Japanese text on one page, and notes explaining it on the opposite page. There is also a dictionary in the back containing the words that the stories use, so you probably don't have to keep an electronic dictionary handy.

In any case, you sound like you might even be farther along in your studies than I am, so hey, do it however you think would work best for you! Everyone learns a little differently, and maybe your idea would be good for you (though i personally can't really see the benefit).

@danieldesu: If you're at such a high level already, than learning new words seperately doesn't look like a bad idea- I am thinking of doing the same with english-, as, as you said, the context doesn't help and learning them before is faster in this case. My idea, now that I think of it is:

1) Beggining-> Basic Words, Grammar and...RTK
2) Context
3) Context
4) ...guess
5) Finis- Now that you have gotten the feel for language, are flawless in grammar, and Japanese start to mistake you for a Japanese, you can return to the beggining again- by learning words that you missed on your jorney

How long have you been learning Japanese, by the way, and what other languages have you studied?

danieldesu Wrote:I am gathering that NO ONE thinks learning words is a good idea. Out of all the people who have successfully applied RTK, no one thinks that this idea could be extended? Also, I think not knowing just one word is enough to make you start to lose interest in something. What about manga, where often there is one hard word and the rest is stuff like "da to omou n desu kedo...".

Actually I agree with you, and I do a similar thing. I keep a separate spreadsheet with J/E word pair lists, using mnemonics extensively I add about 50 new words a day easily. Most of these words come from sentences, but some just come from word lists eg. today I added a list of linguistics terms to help with reading the dictionary and Japanese grammar explanations.

I pretty much consider these pairs like Heisig keywords. Hooks to get the real meaning later. I also keep a sentence anki deck, and words with corresponding sentences are marked. Ideally, %90+ will eventually be marked. It's effective for me because when I get into a word learning zone I can create hooks for new words very very fast. It's effortless, practically. On the other hand, stopping constantly while reading manga is annoying and slow.

For what it's worth, I wish I had been doing this from the start. Of course I didn't have the intensive boot camp training in mnemonics that Heisig gives you then.

shakkun!
I am happy to hear some positive feedback! I think that our brains have multiple ways to acquire things. As a baby, everything is context. Indeed this works as an adult too, but on the other hand, our adult brains are much more efficient, and if we learn how to use them, we can learn and memorize things much more quickly.

I think if we devoted a larger portion of our time earlier on to vocabulary, our studies would go much faster. I think a person without an extraordinary memory can learn 200 words a day (and by learn, I mean much like we learn kanji with RTK... create hooks). If we did this for only two weeks already we are at 2800 words. Doesn't that sound appealing? And if we are learning a language like Spanish (where the kanji barrier is not there), we could be well on our way to reading complex literature in only a few weeks, or reading internet posts, etc, and learning how people really speak.

danieldesu Wrote:shakkun!
I think a person without an extraordinary memory can learn 200 words a day (and by learn, I mean much like we learn kanji with RTK... create hooks). If we did this for only two weeks already we are at 2800 words. Doesn't that sound appealing?

It's not how many words you can learn in a day, but rather keeping up on reviews. They pile up incredibly fast for words when you add that many.

But yes, I am all for learning words first then learning the usage details later from context. But, I'll admit I haven't given the sentence method a fair try.

I heard that after you get to a certain point in reading a book in a foreign language, a lot of vocabulary repeats and you don't have to look things up so much.

danieldesu--

I see what you're getting at. I agree with those who said, "Give it a shot and see what happens," then report back with results.

One suggestion I do have though-- instead of creating a whole deck full of vocab, why not just do RTK2? That's full of about 2,300 real Japanese words, tied to kanji!

I'm actually (slooowly) working on a modified RTK2 deck that I'm going to use to eventually replace this site for my RTK1 reviews. I'm also going to replace some of the ... okay, no better way to say it... awful example words used in RTK2 with ones I might actually use someday.

Only downside to RTK2 is the lack of kun-yomi, but that can be gotten around later on. Just add them in as you need them.

Good luck with it and report back to us.

danieldesu Wrote:I think a person without an extraordinary memory can learn 200 words a day (and by learn, I mean much like we learn kanji with RTK... create hooks). If we did this for only two weeks already we are at 2800 words. Doesn't that sound appealing? And if we are learning a language like Spanish (where the kanji barrier is not there), we could be well on our way to reading complex literature in only a few weeks, or reading internet posts, etc, and learning how people really speak.

I agree but haven't tried that myself yet. It might be interesting to see how much ground could be covered daily if I temporarily put aside sentences and grammar, maybe using some JLPT lists or something. One thing that could be fun (for me......) is learning say, common one syllable words, then two syllable words, then three syllable words etc. At the moment my linkword mnemonics are half Japanese/ half English most of the time. Eg. 退屈 (たいくつ） = bored of eating Thai food out of a 靴 every night. Doing that would potentially give more material to work with.

I agree that it's a "try it yourself" kind of thing. This could easily bore some people out of their minds. For me it's fun, because I like learning how my memory works best and because it's efficient.

radical_tyro Wrote:But yes, I am all for learning words first then learning the usage details later from context. But, I'll admit I haven't given the sentence method a fair try.

I do both. It works well. Sentences have an emphasis on interesting grammar though.

Funny thing, I just read Ray Jay's article where he mentioned that he had studied 1500 Vietnamese words in the first five days.

I did AJATT for awhile before I burnt out. My fault, I should have chosen more interesting and shorter sentences. Nevertheless, I changed my approach because of that. Kind of a mix between AJATT and your idea.
I mix sentences with single vocabulary items (a more detailed description of what I learn can be read on my language log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...PN=1&TPN=2 )

I actually got some idead from Kato Lomb, a polyglot who taught herself 16 languages. She recommends learning from context (in her case novels), but she did mention that she looked up words to get a feeling for a language in the beginning. And she mentioned that there are unambiguous words like the names of cities and countries, chemical elements, a lot of scientific words, etc.
Do you need a context to learn Japanese names or cities? No, that why I add the names of a few cities and prefectures or celebrities into Anki everyday. And there are a lot of words that you can learn without context. Table, Electricity,telephone,telegram, train, car, train, bicycle, parking lot, student, elementary school, junior highschool, highschool, university, university student,...
And besides the word table, the other words are connected by similar kanji, which makes memorizing easier. I learnt most of these words from context, but I can see the advantage of learning these words in the beginning. If someone could provide a list of 1000-1500 unambiguous Japanese words in a good order with mnemonics, one could easily learn this list in one to two weeks. And think that this could really accelarate the process of learning Japanese. I have acquired my current Japanese level mainly by context, so I won't say that it works. I just want to say that I see definite merits in your approach. Go for it and give it a try.

I might try it with another language in the near future. Stuart Ray Jay has inspired me to try this.

Hi watashimo,
You make some very good points! Many words can be learned without context, especially ones where the meaning is the same among many languages (i.e. concrete nouns, days of the week, colors, numbers). In fact, the words you really can't learn out of context are probably the most commonly used ones like particles, "desu", and things like that.

As shakkun said above with his taikutsu example, I used this method haphazardly before on a few words here and there using similar sounding words from either English or Japanese. It didn't take me very long and I really remembered those words long term, so I think a more systematic approach would be even better.

I guess my thoughts are not quite "a brilliant observation" as the title of the post states, but more a culmination of patterns that I have noticed that work among many people. I feel like I have tried so many methods to learn Japanese, and now that I finally am reaching a comfortable point, I am just looking back on what worked and what didn't, and thinking about methods that are tried and true. When I learn another language, I want to learn from my mistakes, and if I can, help others achieve their goals as well.

rich_f,
I will take another look at RTK2 to see how close it is to the image of my ideal vocab-learning method. I looked at it a while back and didn't really get the sense that it was very systematic, as the "system" changed for each group of kanji.

Yeah, the system in RTK2 is far from perfect, but some of the pure/semi-pure/not-too-pure groupings have their uses, I think. For the rest, it's a matter of brute-forcing, but that's what it sounds like you want to do anyway, so I don't see a problem with it. At least for some of them, you'll have a thin thread of sorts to make picking up the readings a little faster. And in the end, you'll have a firm grasp of on-yomi, you'll be done with English RTK1 keywords, and you'll have a springboard of sorts to work with. (Says the person who needs to stop posting on message boards and get his butt in gear. )

What I *wish* existed was a real frequency dictionary of Japanese. I've seen them for German, but never a proper one for Japanese. (Yes, I'm aware of the file that has frequency data for 5 years' worth of Japanese newspapers, but a proper frequency dictionary wouldn't just consider newspapers... it would cover a mix of media, both written and spoken, to get a better overall grasp of what words come up the most.)

The people who put out KO claim that they use some sort of frequency theory behind their vocab progression, but it's a claim without anything they've actually shown to back it up, so it's hard to guess how they picked these words as being some of the most frequent.