Just curious what people's experience with IAIJ has been. I have a good background in Japanese, but I've always been frustrated that I can't really understand native materials. I can carry on a basic one-on-one conversation, but my sentence structure is repetitive, vocabulary needs work, and the speed just overwhelms. I'm working my way through Core2k, but I find it quite boring. Helpful with vocabulary, but I don't find it helps my sentence structure, speed, natural flow, etc. Already did RTK1. My writing is generally better than my speaking or listening - probably because of speed.

Anyways, I've started going through a more structured approach with IAIJ. I'm just not sure if it's the right level as I'm jumping in without doing the Genki books. I can understand most of the dialogs after listening three or four times and reading - usually there's just three or four words I don't know. The sentence structure is sometimes a bit cloudy (ようになっている、ーるになっている、etc), but I mostly understand it. I can also just look up individual grammar points if they're not covered. When I try to shadow it, though, it's pretty awful. I need to listen about 10 times and read it 10 times before I can keep up with half of it. Will my speed just improve as I go through, or do people usually repeat one lesson until they've mastered it?

Since I *can* understand the general dialogs after a few listens, is this a good place to start? Any other strong recommendations for books? I've tried occasionally to pick up a novel, but anything I'm interested in reading is far, far beyond me (火車 by Miyuki Miyabe, for instance).

Sounds like you're in almost exactly the same position I'm in. I'm working through IAIJ as well, and I feel it's exactly the right book for me right now. I've done RTK1, also started on Core2K and found it a bit too...well, maybe not boring, just not the right thing. One important difference is that I have worked my way through Minna no Nihongo I and II, which I guess roughly corresponds to Genki I and II.

As for the dialogues, I haven't tried listening to the CDs yet, but I find I can read the dialogues no problem, so I expect the audio will not be a problem either. If you find your speaking is slow, that's probably because (as you said) your speaking isn't as good as your reading and writing - and that's perfectly normal if you haven't practiced speaking much. I'd encourage you to keep up with the shadowing just for the practice saying things in Japanese, if nothing else.

Novels are still above my grade too, but I feel like I'm making progress since I can read most of the essays in IAIJ (except for the occasional new or specialized vocabulary). My recommendation for reading would be to have a look at the Genki books you haven't looked at yet - they may help to fill in precisely the gaps that are slowing you down. And if you do that, you'll probably find that your kanji studies make going through those books easier - I certainly noticed that when I revisited my MnN books.

Thanks for the feedback. I just started on chapter one of IAIJ, but I can read the dialogs without too much trouble. Sometimes I may not understand something exactly (日付変更線 wasn't a word I knew, but I kinda understood what they were talking about). Maybe it's exactly the right book for me as well - since there's always some stuff I don't understand in the dialogs on the page, and it takes three or four times listening to the CD before I'm getting 90% of the meaning. I'm just hoping my speaking speed catches up - I hate feeling like I'm stumbling along - or that I need five minutes to come up with the sentence structure of 連れていってもらった。 I understand each individual word and the overall meaning - but I've never uttered that sentence despite having occasion to do so. Hopefully that will sink in and I'll "make it my own" so to speak.

How do you guys do it? I'm having real trouble studying from textbooks, learning anything from them, really. I've had the book for a while, and just looking through it now, it seems fine. Like you guys, I can look at it and understand most of it, but applying it in a conversation? Different story. I need to get into it.
Do you guys do a chapter a week? What do you do for the roleplays, or SRSing?

Not sure on the textbook, but I think I learn *more* from them. I was trying to just watch movies with no subtitles, listen to some audiobooks, etc - but I found I learned very little. Maybe just too far above my current level. I'll know after I've spent more time with IAIJ, but I think shadowing that and working through the grammar points should be helpful even without roleplay, pair work, etc.

I think I'm just too perfectionist in my approach and it bothers me if I can't tell whether they said ことありません or ことがありません or whatever. That's why I also was curious how long people were spending on each chapter before moving on - and what level of mastery they needed to achieve. I'm also working through Pimsleur for French (total beginner) and I like that you can pretty easily tell if you're ready to go to the next lesson. Don't know if it will be really helpful, but a very easy program to follow. Unfortunately I think the most advanced Pimsleur Japanese would still be pretty useless for me.

You can skip around in the book. The book doesn't present concepts that build upon each other. So you can start with lesson 12, finish it, and continue with lesson 7. When I was working with the book, I was listening to the dialogues an reading sections at least twice, and in some cases three or four times. At first I also had difficulty with shadowing the text, because they were talking too fast for me to follow, but I got used to it.

My advice is that you shouldn't waste time and move on if something is too difficult.

Mennon Wrote:Like you guys, I can look at it and understand most of it, but applying it in a conversation? Different story. I need to get into it. Do you guys do a chapter a week? What do you do for the roleplays, or SRSing?

I haven't been working with it for the last few weeks, but I was reading a chapter every couple of days or so (long commute to work). Note: that's not the same thing as mastering the material, since I wasn't spending much time on reviews, but at least it gave me some reading practice in a different context from SRS. I'm planning to start over from the beginning, now that I've had some chance to absorb things a bit. I'm going to look for an Anki vocab deck that matches the book, create my own if I need to, and try to get all of the vocabulary for a lesson memorized before starting on that lesson again. I've also got the workbook and will work through the exercises there, then have a Japanese friend of mine correct them for me. Not sure if I'll do much with the roleplays, although I might just try using the new constructs in a conversation and see how that goes.