Hello everyone,

Sorry for not being so clear in my title. The limited space doesn't really allow clarity.

Anyway, I'm going to be spending 3-5 months working at Pearl Harbor and living in a hotel in Oahu starting in late March. I would love to use this time to have some Japanese conversation with locals and Japanese natives.

My problem is, I haven't been following through with study too much. When I was (in the past), it was always RTK with a hodge-podge of random things I wanted to do. Though possibly in effective, my listening ability is actually pretty could although it could still use improvements for conversation with native speakers. I think my vocabulary and any "non-basic" grammar is still sorely lacking.

For this trip, I have roughly two months. The kanji will have to be put on hold for now, inevitably. What do you fellas think I should do to maximize conversational learning and minimizing the temporarily less important aspects? Optimized kore deck with example sentences? Pimsleur (which I can do during my work day)?

I have textbooks for sentence mining (most notably Genki and Japanese Grammar Dictionaries (all three) as well as native material. Can give subs2srs a download. I have a nexus tablet and droid phone so I can Anki on my break.

This is something important to me that I will be hopefully starting on tomorrow or the next day. I have about two months and will continue studying while down there, although markedly less for obvious reasons.


Thank you so much for your time and input.

How far along are you with RtK? (as in, how many Kanji do you recognize?). If you know enough, then you can try Sub2SRS-ing media and learning the text with Anki (and cheating with the kanji you don't know, by adding the Kana), while at the same time ripping the audio and listening to it at work.

If not, you're gonna have to limit yourself to watching media enough times to understand what's going on and then ripping the audio and listening to it.

As for Pimsleur, I listened to about 25 lessons. I haven't found it effective enough to be worth the utter boredom and outright dread it induces. Doing Core sentences AJATT style (as opposed to Core vocab) is also very effective, but, again, depends on how many Kanji you know. Doing the Kana sentences to English version, without the Kanji, works to some extent, too. I have done a few without Kanji a while back (less than 100). When I re-did them, this time with Kanji, they were really easy, because I already knew the readings. So you wouldn't be wasting your time, even if you did them without Kanji.

Also, I was a little torn on whether I should point out that the most efficient way to learn Japanese is Kanji first (because, if you already made up your mind to go without, that doesn't help you), but I figure full disclosure is always best. For instance, if you don't know enough Kanji to follow Tae Kim's examples, you might as well just forget about grammar. I can't imagine trying to understand Japanese grammar without Kanji.