Retranslation sounds like an odd technique in my opinion, because translation is a very specific skill which has surprisingly little to do with ones ability in a language. Most people who can speak a language to a really high level can't translate it well at all, one way or both ways.

THAT WAS AN EPIC DERAIL.

To get this thread back on track, I second (nth?) Naoko Chino's "Dictionary of Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns". I am finding it much more readable than TaeKim's guide. (I will probably go back to TaeKim from time to time, though.) Eventually I'll get all Chino's books.

Besides that, I'm spending a lot of time with JapanesePod101. Peter's so tiresome, though, I stopped listening to the lessons and only listen to the dialogues as I study the PDF guides, printed out. I read aloud along with the dialogues after I drill vocabulary and add sentences to Anki.

The graded readers are really helpful, and so is talking to people. Living in Japan, however, it's been surprisingly hard to find a formal language tutor/exchange pa. Any suggestions?

DO RTK3, every page I read pretty much in novels I see three or more Kanji I wouldn't know without it.

vrtgo Wrote:The graded readers are really helpful, and so is talking to people. Living in Japan, however, it's been surprisingly hard to find a formal language tutor/exchange pa. Any suggestions?

I checked them out at the library here. They are nice, but they are WAY too easy. I'd place even the Level 4 books in beginner territory, not even intermediate. The sentence patterns in all of the levels (I read 0-4) are very unnatural (but still grammatical) to make them easier to understand. Don't get conned into thinking it's actual Japanese reading material selected by difficulty. Everything has been rewritten for foreigner-consumption.