I just want an idea of the mastery, and how a person who has finished the first 2 books of KO2001 (or is almost finished with them) feels like!? I want to know how comfortable do you feel with Japanese at that point?(Disregard the grammar aspects and things, I understand that KO doesn't go over that much), but I mean can you open up basic books/manga and just enjoy yourself, I know it says that you will have 90% mastery after those 2 books, but what does 90% feel like?

Basically:
Does KO2001 make you feel like you pretty much understand what is going on, and is it obvious that if you take the time and do the last 1000 Kanji plus that this whole Japanese learning thing would be history(as far as you would have achieved basic literacy, I know another 1000 more kanji after that would do nicely for academic and literature)
OR
Does KO2001 make you feel like you're still missing something? and that it wasn't all it was talked up to be?

***When does someone start to feel and see that they actually can recall everything they learned in their SRS from outside sources? I mean sometimes I tend not to recall readings for words that I know I learned and of course that happens, but when does one start to feel really solid about knowing all the readings for the vast majority of the information in their SRS?

Thanks guys, I really want an idea of what i can expect at the end of the KO treck. So far I am really enjoying the road! except learning Chinese and Japanese makes my head bleed inside, but even so! as of right now I can see the progress and remain with a smile on my face!ｱﾋｬﾋｬﾋｬﾋｬ ﾍ(ﾟ∀ﾟﾍ)(ﾉﾟ∀ﾟ)ﾉ ﾋｬﾋｬﾋｬﾋｬ

Although I did not finish KO2001, I did finish Japanese Core 2000 from Smart.FM which offers similar results. You can enjoy many manga without a dictionary. You can read and understand various websites. You find watching TV shows with Japanese subtitles bring better understanding. It's as if an entire new way of appreciating the world has been opened up to you (because it has).

Then comes the realization, you still have quite a ways to go. Not every word you come across do you know. Not every word that you know is being used in a way that's familiar to you. You're not going at a pace that would be considered fluid. You are kind of deciphering parts of words. But that is great, you're realizing that you know enough to know you don't know a lot in the larger picture. Even what you do know, is not fully cemented.

By the way, the above comes at about 100 kanji into KO 2001. You don't have to finish it to get that realization or benefit. Watching movies and reading manga .

Word of caution: This benefit you notice can be so strong that you may be tempted to keep doing KO2001 or Smart.FM or KIC for all the words. While it'll build your literary ability, you are doing a trade off of cementing your knowledge. It's hard to explain, but there's an intangible benefit to sentence mining of actual literary and televised works.

Just as you noticed the benefit of RTK, there's a benefit to KO2001 and even grammar sources such as Tae Kim or UBJG. You notice these benefits when you experience real sources. Sentence mining real sources is yet another benefit. So be wary of concentrating only on vocabulary, as it's but one important part of the whole.

Well as someone who has memorized(not just the Kanji, Literally thousands of verbs adjectives, adverbs, that have no everday kanji's connected to them) all the JLPT Vocab, and gone through all the JLPT grammar.

I can tell you I still feel like I have a long long way to go, Sure I can open up a self-help book geared towards the general public and be able to read just about everything. Generally can pick up any novel and get the gist of it.

But I still find myself even in Light novels having to look up two or three words a page. and there are some authors(I can link you to some fun online articles at professional websites) Where the amount of words(practically every 3rd one) I don't know just overwhelms me and I have to quit.

It would help if I didn't have ocd about having to look up every word(this is why I basically just decided to spend a few months memorizing the JLPT vocab list through SRS)

I suppose yes, my ratio of words I already know when reading would be in the 80~90% range though, if you aren't ocd that's probably good enough.

koyota Wrote:Well as someone who has memorized(not just the Kanji, Literally thousands of verbs adjectives, adverbs, that have no everday kanji's connected to them) all the JLPT Vocab, and gone through all the JLPT grammar.

I can tell you I still feel like I have a long long way to go, Sure I can open up a self-help book geared towards the general public and be able to read just about everything. Generally can pick up any novel and get the gist of it.

But I still find myself even in Light novels having to look up two or three words a page. and there are some authors(I can link you to some fun online articles at professional websites) Where the amount of words(practically every 3rd one) I don't know just overwhelms me and I have to quit.

It would help if I didn't have ocd about having to look up every word(this is why I basically just decided to spend a few months memorizing the JLPT vocab list through SRS)

I suppose yes, my ratio of words I already know when reading would be in the 80~90% range though, if you aren't ocd that's probably good enough.

Oh but that is just great though! 3 words per page is a dream, Try being at 80 (probably more haha) words per page, again and I am sure you will be happy !

But hey as far as NukeMarine said, yeah I have like 3 years to learn Japanese before I attempt dare I say, Todai, haha. But yeah I have enough time to relax and enjoy plus I have my woman I call her the automatic dictionary 4000!, haha. But yeah keep the responses coming it is good to hear from you guys who are further along.

i'm about to the end of the 1st 2 books.. almost completed 810 kanji... i can understand a lot right now but i know i defiantly have a long way to go in the big scope of things... knowing 4000 words or so that i learned so far helps a lot but there are 10s of thousands of words i still need to cover... my plan so far is to cover all 2001 kanji in KO just to get the big headache of the 常用kanji out of the way....

My philosophy is: Don't expect too much and you won't be disappointed.

KO2001 will teach you many things but no, it won't guarantee that you can understand that manga that you want to read so badly or anything. It's an important step but the road is still long.

also note that there are plenty of words that don't involve kanji at all... like the mimetic and katakana words etc.

Codexus Wrote:My philosophy is: Don't expect too much and you won't be disappointed.

KO2001 will teach you many things but no, it won't guarantee that you can understand that manga that you want to read so badly or anything. It's an important step but the road is still long.

The sad thing is I am not really a huge fan of manga, I do love nonfiction books....and I can only imagine what "A Brief History of Time", "The God Delusion", "The Elegant Universe"... I also love history... the most verbose type of reading in english tend to be my favorite... so I can only imagine and wait and study in anticipation of reading some great books in Chinese and Japanese! haha, only 2 or 3 years off at the most though, so it's not all bad, I'd prefer to spend my time doing something rewarding rather than the days of high school and excessive procrastination!

A lot of people seem to have the idea that once they finish KO2001, they won't have to worry about compounds using jouyou kanji anymore. Beware, that is most certainly not the case. Most common kanji has over a hundred compounds, many have over 30 common-use compounds. KO2001 teaches you the most frequent and basic ones, but one shouldn't assume that they are in any way finished once completed.

when i was referring to not worrying about the jouyou anymore i meant the actual kanji themselves... i realize there are quite a lot of compounds behind them that still need to be learned also...

Tobberoth Wrote:A lot of people seem to have the idea that once they finish KO2001, they won't have to worry about compounds using jouyou kanji anymore. Beware, that is most certainly not the case. Most common kanji has over a hundred compounds, many have over 30 common-use compounds. KO2001 teaches you the most frequent and basic ones, but one shouldn't assume that they are in any way finished once completed.

Who ever said or implied that? I don't think we are that dumb and ignorant here though. We know it's a long haul either way, I only was asking if it gives you a good basis, somewhere you can leap and grab fluency from haha, maybe more like you can keep poring little spoonfuls of dirt until the damn hill is finally enough to grab the forbidden fluency fruit.

i did, but he read it the wrong way

How does it feel?

You know how sometimes you go to a public toilet and sit down, and unexpectedly the seat is warm, and you feel weirded out? It feels nothing like that at all.

Hashiriya Wrote:i did, but he read it the wrong way

WELL!! WHat are you thinking to say something like that! You know people will jump down your throat for that kind of thing!haha

It's not just Hashiriya, there's a lot more people on this forum who has implied the same thing before (just not in this thread).

thermal Wrote:How does it feel?

You know how sometimes you go to a public toilet and sit down, and unexpectedly the seat is warm, and you feel weirded out? It feels nothing like that at all.

Well thats...comforting...to know. Thanks for sharing

Tobberoth Wrote:It's not just Hashiriya, there's a lot more people on this forum who has implied the same thing before (just not in this thread).

When　 I say "We" I can only refer to my peers, so those people who have said/implied that, we're never included in my statement to begin with, since I am no peer of the arses! and can't share in their ignorance!(not including Hashi chan! since that was just a miss-und.


haha
But you know what!
I like them, for once people trying to make Japanese seem easy!, I'm tired of all the impossible speak~! It's obviously not impossible and if people saying it's easy can get us to an opinion of "doable" then I fully approve!

About 800 words into smart.fm's courses, I switched to 2001ko. At that point, I was already reading -easy- mangas without a dictionary. Yes, there were words I didn't know, but I could guess the meaning of some, and the rest... Well, I could still understand what was going on almost every time.

I'm quite a ways into 2001ko now, and that same experience now goes for all easy manga and many shonen mangas. If it has furigana, I can read most of it.

So yeah, it will feel pretty good by the time you get to that point. You'll have a lot of knowledge and be able to do fun things, instead of just study.

wccrawford Wrote:About 800 words into smart.fm's courses, I switched to 2001ko. At that point, I was already reading -easy- mangas without a dictionary. Yes, there were words I didn't know, but I could guess the meaning of some, and the rest... Well, I could still understand what was going on almost every time.

I'm quite a ways into 2001ko now, and that same experience now goes for all easy manga and many shonen mangas. If it has furigana, I can read most of it.

So yeah, it will feel pretty good by the time you get to that point. You'll have a lot of knowledge and be able to do fun things, instead of just study.

What if I miss studying 12 hours a day?

Tobberoth Wrote:A lot of people seem to have the idea that once they finish KO2001, they won't have to worry about compounds using jouyou kanji anymore. Beware, that is most certainly not the case. Most common kanji has over a hundred compounds, many have over 30 common-use compounds. KO2001 teaches you the most frequent and basic ones, but one shouldn't assume that they are in any way finished once completed.

Eh, I had a feeling there was some degree of over-exaggeration

*is glad he decided to do it the "natural" way* ^^

Has anyone tried doing KO2001 without doing any preparation (such as Heisig) first? I wonder if with an SRS whether or not learning tedious keywords and stories are necessary?

MeNoSavvy Wrote:Has anyone tried doing KO2001 without doing any preparation (such as Heisig) first? I wonder if with an SRS whether or not learning tedious keywords and stories are necessary?

I am currently doing something a little similar as I am doing the Mastering CHinese Characters from Smat.fm, and I am also doing the Hanzi included from there, but the problem is the sentences don't stick to the Hanzi order and often times I'll see new Hanzi, and what I will immediately do is make keywords for them and make sure they are in my Hanzi deck, It seems like not knowing keywords for character would make the process much much more difficult, as it is even frustrating to run into one hanzi that I dont have a keyword for... I could not imagive looking at an entire sentence and studying in a way where I would never come to know anysort of keyword for each character, I think it is useful to have a single identifying word for each Hanzi and once you become comfortable with them add other words just so you have a better understanding of the ways that character could be used, I am doing that for heisig now, and even though some characters have multiple meanings I just know the other meaning(i dont put it in my cards) but can actively recall any kanji based on keyword.

I would like to know if someone will try that though, it should be entertaining because, It would be like sending Joe Jack to China and showing him them "littal symbos" and then telling him this is how you say them aloud, this is what that phrase means, he'd be like what!, aww hell nah this aint ner damn doable, na way, i quittin this darn what ya call it ching chong stuff.

Or maybe the racist undertone wouldn't be involved from a passionate student, but with the frustration it would build d*&n I might even be like what's this ching chong shi&#!

MeNoSavvy Wrote:Has anyone tried doing KO2001 without doing any preparation (such as Heisig) first? I wonder if with an SRS whether or not learning tedious keywords and stories are necessary?

The stories and keywords might be tedious but they're a hell of a lot less tedious than rote memorization

Someone doing KO2001 without Heisig first would have to rote learn each kanji as they went, and it would be a lot more difficult.

On the other hand, for someone who has completed Heisig (like me), I occasionally encounter non-Heisig kanji in KO and it takes me all of 10 seconds to make a story and add it to my SRS. The RtK process continues to be useful once you've finished the book.

I finished the first half. Now I also finished half of Reibun de Manaubu. Making progress on these books translates into very noticeable gains, but at the same time they cover only about half of the Jouyou kanji, and KO only a few compounds for each kanji - so when you finish KO in terms of literacy you're still not half way to the half way mark, or so . But you can make a good attempt at reading a lot of stuff.

vosmiura Wrote:I finished the first half. Now I also finished half of Reibun de Manaubu. Making progress on these books translates into very noticeable gains, but at the same time they cover only about half of the Jouyou kanji, and KO only a few compounds for each kanji - so when you finish KO in terms of literacy you're still not half way to the half way mark, or so . But you can make a good attempt at reading a lot of stuff.

I agree. I finished both books and it helped me a lot. I was about level 3 when I started and my vocabulary more than doubled(maybe about 3x). It's worth doing and I don't regret it, but it's not a miracle book. After you finish you can't pick up any book and understand it, or even understand 90%(well if it's easy you can). However, it let's you understand enough, so that you can get through things and not have to use a dictionary on all the words. Remember that even if KO covers 95% of the kanji used(in news papers and business documents I'm guessing), that still leaves you with tons of kanji you don't know. I just picked up a random book and the 1st sentence had 19 kanji in it. That means, statistically I would not know one kanji in it and have to use a dictionary(I'm not even counting compounds where you know the kanji, but not the word).
In my experience, I don't have to look up a word every sentence, but there are things I can't read at all. Some things have multiple words I've never seen before in one sentence. Anyway, to answer your question, you feel like a child trying to read adult books. Take that however you want to. Some people will be disappointed, but I look at it as a big step up from illiterate foreigner.