zurisu Wrote:Log in you lazy goofs =P I'm trying to procrastinate here, and nobody's helping!

Reporting for duty.

As for all this talk about being slow, I think its pretty normal, especially for people who don't have any great urgency to learn the language and are just doing it as a hobby (me). It seems like most people in that group seem to have had at least one or more false starts where they just get discouraged and give it up for a while. Of course its not true in all cases, but its definitely true for my case.

If you're motivated by other people's inefficiency, all I can say is look no further. When I joined minus ~3 months is pretty much when I started. So yep, its been 5 years. Of course, I haven't been studying all that time. I think I put in a decent effort for around 2 years, then gave it up for a while. I came back a year and a bit ago, after realizing how much of an astronomical failure my first attempt was. When I think back on that time... shame is all I feel... It's not like I wasn't trying, either. I was just putting effort in, just in all the wrong ways. Like, I did RTK quickly (success!) and then immediately dropped reviews (fail). I used anki (good), but only when I felt like it (aka like once a week - fail). I got motivated by AJATT to go get some practical experience and tackle native media early (great!), then went after regular news articles where I'd have to look up literally every word per sentence and got burnt out (fail). I went after RTK2 (err.. neutral), and it proceeded to occupy all of my time and distract me from learning anything practical (mega fail). Just in general, I only got anything done in sporadic bursts, and I had horrible work ethic with regards to anki. I used to purge old cards after they got like 1 month old because I thought they were 'holding me down'.. as if all I needed was to get that weight off my back and I'd just spread my wings and take flight like some sort of retarded butterfly... fat chance, lol.

But now, everything's great of course. I've got over 9000 vocabulary in my deck and as you can probably guess, my power level is just through the roof. I'm reading at a decent level. Life is good. Where makin this hapen, man. But I do wonder sometimes how far I would be now if I had more of a steady pace from the start, rather than failing for 4 years and then randomly deciding to put myself through boot camp..

As for the actual topic of this thread.... I think I very well could be one of the guests too. I pop in usually after my daily reps and this place seems to keep track of people for a long time. I sometimes log in and close the tab, then come back in a few hours and I'm still logged in. So the large number of guests could just be all the people who opened the site at one point within the last hour or so.

quark Wrote:Another tortoise here. I'm been learning Japanese for 3 1/2 years, am currently reworking my way through KO2001 (I'm around the 950 mark), ...

...And if a method doesn't work, don't be afraid to try something else (I've finally made peace with the fact that Anki isn't the method for me).

A bit off topic, but may I ask how you are working your way through KO2001 sans anki? I also am not sure how keen I am about anki after RTK...so would love to hear how you are doing it.

ashman63 Wrote:

quark Wrote:Another tortoise here. I'm been learning Japanese for 3 1/2 years, am currently reworking my way through KO2001 (I'm around the 950 mark), ...

...And if a method doesn't work, don't be afraid to try something else (I've finally made peace with the fact that Anki isn't the method for me).

A bit off topic, but may I ask how you are working your way through KO2001 sans anki? I also am not sure how keen I am about anki after RTK...so would love to hear how you are doing it.

It's not a popular method, I know, but I'm going the 'traditional' route - ie; writing everything down in a notebook. There is some organization involved - only compounds that use kanji that have previously been studied will get written down, so that way I don't have words written in my notebook more than once.
The online KO2001 is much more useful for me than the books, as the website has full audio on the sentences and workbooks, which I intend to work through once I'm done. I also try to read at least a few pages of a manga or novel every day.
As for Anki, for whatever reason, my mind constantly blanks out I use it. Maybe I feel like I'm under pressure to get them right on the first go so that I don't have to see them again, or I might just really need context. I found I was failing words in Anki that I was able to read without a problem when I saw them in native material, and it was discouraging.
There are some other users on here who also don't use Anki, or use it sparingly. JALUP actually had a pretty good article on studying without Anki. http://japaneselevelup.com/how-to-learn-...hout-anki/

I investigated myself. Turns out that I am a former lurker, probably for the reasons Haych suggested. Registered in June 2011, and didn't post until December that year.
I think I was overwhelmed by all the information, but also spent a lot of time learning how not to learn before I could accept the truth. I began RTK in earnest about the time of my first post, so it was about a year after I had started fumbling around trying to figure out how to approach learning this language. I think most people would say that if they could do it again they'd change some things, but then you wouldn't have internalized those painful lessons of realizing you were inefficient.

tashippy Wrote:I investigated myself. Turns out that I am a former lurker, probably for the reasons Haych suggested. Registered in June 2011, and didn't post until December that year.
I think I was overwhelmed by all the information, but also spent a lot of time learning how not to learn before I could accept the truth. I began RTK in earnest about the time of my first post, so it was about a year after I had started fumbling around trying to figure out how to approach learning this language. I think most people would say that if they could do it again they'd change some things, but then you wouldn't have internalized those painful lessons of realizing you were inefficient.

That's better than me...after I read this I looked at my post history. Turns out I didn't post in the "I finished RTK1" thread at all (maybe I just read it a lot or something)...I registered in January 2007 (I'm guessing around when I finished RTK1), didn't post until March 2008. It looks like I had 2 posts in 2008, 1 in 2009, around 40 in 2010, and in 2011 I got hooked. XD

tashippy Wrote:Get drunk with strangers! That is a good plan. I reckon Japaneseruleof7 and DrDunlap will concur.

I do indeed concur. I don't know how much it improves your Japanese, but it's a pretty good hobby otherwise.

BTW, I've been studying Japanese for 10 years, 1-2 hours a day, in addition to living in the country and speaking it 24x7. So I guess I fall into that slow-and-steady category.

Well, I didn't post til I had finished RTK1. Mainly because I didn't feel like I could really answer anyone's questions, or contribute usefully til then. Since then, I'd like to think I've been fairly active, lol.