phybron Wrote:Then considering that knowing the RTK keyword is only very slightly useful for comprehending written Japanese, and also having no clue what the reading is, means RTK reviews seem a bit futile.

Precisely.

In your shoes, I would stop doing RTK reviews, full stop, and greatly reduce listening to any Japanese that you don't understand at least 65%. (You can still watch subtitled movies and listen to music if that's fun for you -- but listening to a podcast where you can only pick out a word here and there? Nope.)

One of the things that AJATT people rarely talk about is that Khatz got some of his ideas from Stephen Krashen (whom he credits), but Krashen never says that any old input is a good idea. COMPREHENSIBLE input is a good idea. That means reading material you can understand (whether that's children's books, graded readers, textbooks, manga...) and listening material you can understand. (This is harder if you're self-studying because listening material for native speakers is FAST, but podcasts for people learning Japanese are good, and songs can be good -- find ballads with clear slow singing, read through the lyrics a couple of times, and listen while reading. There's also CDs that come with textbooks and graded readers...)

Focus on whole words rather than individual kanji, words in context rather than words out of context.

I like a mix of extensive reading (where you rely on context, rarely stopping to look words up) and intensive reading (where you look up just about every word you don't know), but the right mix will depend on your level and the book you're reading -- there's no point in doing extensive reading unless you can find a book that you can understand at least 85% without a dictionary.

phybron Wrote:As I was concerned with my lack of recognition of the kanjis when reading Japanese text I switched the whole deck round the other way and started writing the kanji down and then trying to recall the keyword, or at least something similar to it.

Recognizing kanji in isolation is actually pretty hard (and I say this having done RTK1, most of RTK3 and 200+ other kanji recognition-only). You already "know" the kanji to an extent, you should be learning words - it'll be both easier and more useful.

Quote:I mean, cumulatively I've probably done an extensive amount of grammar and vocabulary study, but I don't have any benchmarks or tests to confirm it.

So the only thing you've been SRSing is RTK? (because if you'd SRS'd vocab and grammar, you'd have benchmarks)

I can't believe no one has mentioned Core6k yet. I can't be the one to recommend it because I learned most of my vocab the hard way (through a 5-digit number of dictionary lookups), without SRS until I already had a decent working vocabulary. Still, I can at least state that the vast majority of Core2k (and a significant percentage of the rest of Core6k) is absolutely must-know.

Reading VNs with a furiganizer, looking up every word (and every grammar pattern I could identify), doing my best to decode the sentences, is what worked for me.

Yeah but... you're not supposed to be able to read Japanese after finishing RTK, it even says so in the introduction? It's something you do in half a year to be able to tell kanjis apart from each other. Even keywords are something that is just a temporal placeholder until you go and learn the readings.

Like... I need to ask, what did you expect to be able to do after finishing RTK?

My expectation after doing RTK was exactly what it said in the book. I didn't expect to be able to read or understand written Japanese text. That's fine. But I also didn't quite know how to bridge the gap between post-RTK kanji familiarity and reading comprehension in context.

So I just faithfully did my reps everyday, which is what you're supposed to do. I guess the stopping point is when all the kanjis coming up are familiar, even if you don't know what the keywords are. I only realise this now. Once you've done RTK you forget how utterly incomprehensible they were beforehand.

AJATT cites Krashen frequently, but it wasn't until I saw a lecture that he gave (I think linked by Khatz) on comprehensible input that I began to wonder how the AJATT immersion/saturation method would actually work, because it is not comprehensible. Then of course I just thought that's how I learned English, but it's not really. You don't learn your L1 as a child by through incomprehensible input. It's actually highly contextual and situationally appropriate. Jumping into a Japanese manzai video and expecting to understand anything as daft, when you think about it that way, as sitting an 18-month year old in front of Monty Python and expecting them to understand what they're hearing.

On the flip side, when I do go looking for comprehensible input it's not easy either. Children's books are not interesting when you're not a child any more. Hence the quandary.

Anyway I think I'm getting some good ideas from this thread about how to proceed. I'm going to pause, if not stop, the RTK reviews, hit the grammar and textbooks and mine them for sentences. Repping those did actually seem to be working and Khatz's surusu.com is actually a great way to rep them, better than Anki, because it breaks the whole sentence up so you see different versions of it more often.

Vempele: I have not been SRS'ing vocab and grammar. I have Core2k in my Anki, but I haven't done it for a while. It just seemed too dry, especially when you're in AJATT-mode. I'll give it another go. I think there's a Tae Kim deck as well isn't there?

Thanks again everyone.

P.S. Maybe I just have a learning disability. I did hit my head pretty hard when I was about four, which could explain my general lack of academic achievement.

phybron Wrote:On the flip side, when I do go looking for comprehensible input it's not easy either. Children's books are not interesting when you're not a child any more. Hence the quandary.

I think it's a waste of time for adult learners outside of a controlled classroom setting to search for completely "comprehensible" or N+1 input. My own approach has been bootstrapping. I find content I wanted to listen to. (I started with the 昔話 site we all know and love - http://hukumusume.com/douwa/.)　I put all of that vocab into an SRS program like Skritter or Anki, and I study the related grammar. I then work on understanding the story (both text and audio) until it becomes comprehensible. When I get bored, I move on to another story or text. If I find a given text completely incomprehensible, I move on to something else, and save the harder piece for a later date.

YMMV, but that got me from nothing to over 2,000 characters and N2-N1 reading ability (on top of working full time, kids, etc.) in about a year and eight months.

But ditto what Aspiring said - experiment, find what works for you, and do a lot of it. If sentence mining + grammar study does the trick, that's awesome.

I believe AJATT bridged the gap with doing sentence cards. I know you say you didn't do vocab cards, but did you do sentence cards?

blackbrich Wrote:I believe AJATT bridged the gap with doing sentence cards. I know you say you didn't do vocab cards, but did you do sentence cards?

Yes, sentence cards and I think they were actually working, but then I was mixing monolingual passage cards in there way too soon and I find those impossible. I'm definitely going to delete them and revert to just bilingual sentence cards. And then actually do them more consistently.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:(I started with the 昔話 site we all know and love - http://hukumusume.com/douwa/.)

I haven't seen that site before. I'll have a look. Thanks.

Quote:On the flip side, when I do go looking for comprehensible input it's not easy either. Children's books are not interesting when you're not a child any more.

Why do you think this? Have you tried reading children's books?

'Children's books' is a pretty wide and varied category. If you can't find something interesting there, it's probably because you haven't looked.

phybron Wrote:P.S. Maybe I just have a learning disability. I did hit my head pretty hard when I was about four, which could explain my general lack of academic achievement.

Hee, I did, too - fell out of a supermarket trolley. Going to blame it on that next time I forget a kanji.

I do emphasise, not just with the early head injury, but with the frustration you're feeling at having trouble progressing. It sounds like you just didn't really take the next step after RTK? As far as keywords go, I just see them as a tag to help remember the kanji, and one that's occasionally useful (ie. since Frame 224, cat, 猫, indeed means, well, cat), rather than really trying to use them to comprehend unfamiliar passages of written Japanese.

I'd suggest going through Tae Kim. As you start adding sentences, you'll be able to essentially replace those English keywords with Japanese words (ie. not 'cat', but ねこ).

With AJATT, yeah, you don't want to just sit there and let waves of incomprehensible Japanese wash over you, that's not really gonna help. You need to engage with it more actively - keep hearing a word? Ok, look it up. Right, that's one word you understand, find another. Obviously some idea of grammar can help, and some words will be more complicated, but I think most of the first Japanese words I learned were from J-pop songs - the same words tend to come up a fair bit.

AJATT also suggests looking for material you already love and are familiar with in English, in Japanese. For instance, today I watched a scene from one of my favourite games in Japanese. Did I understand all the words, no, did I need to, also no, because I know the English script pretty much off by heart anyway, I know from past experience that they wouldn't have changed too much in translation, I know what they're saying. So it's dead easy to pick up Japanese words that way, especially when the kanji are shown too.

I'm not trying to mean, but this thread is really scary. I think it's crazy that you can "study" for 5 years and get the same amount as a person who is doing something more efficient could in 6 months or less. It's a horror story that probably puts people off of learning languages to begin with, but I always thought it was just that, a story, but this is the real thing.

Going by ajatt time and the results it's probably more like 5 years passed since he started rather than he studied for 5 years... I personally can't say I've studied for 6 years which is the number of years since I started.. Probably more like 3.

egoplant Wrote:I'm not trying to mean, but this thread is really scary. I think it's crazy that you can "study" for 5 years and get the same amount as a person who is doing something more efficient could in 6 months or less. It's a horror story that probably puts people off of learning languages to begin with, but I always thought it was just that, a story, but this is the real thing.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Going by ajatt time and the results it's probably more like 5 years passed since he started rather than he studied for 5 years... I personally can't say I've studied for 6 years which is the number of years since I started.. Probably more like 3.

Yes not quite as bad as it sounds. I haven't been studying full time for five years. I just started RTK1 at the end of 2008. I got through that reasonably quickly. RTK3 took much longer. And as I said at the top, I started AJATT Silverspoon in May last year. Before that I was following it's advice as best I could, mainly watching and listening to Japanese around everything else in life.

Silverspoon has definitely ramped up the amount of exposure, but I'm just getting tired of incomprehensible immersion now. I've waited for it it click, but realistically it's time for a change up. I mean, I say I'm following AJATT, but am I really doing it to the letter? I don't know. There's a big difference between passive and active immersion for example.

Anyway I'm making a new plan. I've read all the replies here and it's been very helpful.

TheVinster Wrote:Start reading actual books.

This.

Struggle through reading books. Plenty of light novels have English translations on the web. You can get parallel bilingual books like Read Real Japanese or Breaking into Japanese Literature. Pick up some graded readers with audio. Plenty of good starting points. You should do both intensive and extensive reading.

Aikynaro Wrote:

Quote:On the flip side, when I do go looking for comprehensible input it's not easy either. Children's books are not interesting when you're not a child any more.

Why do you think this? Have you tried reading children's books?

'Children's books' is a pretty wide and varied category. If you can't find something interesting there, it's probably because you haven't looked.

I have tried reading some children's books. Not enough I guess, but they were incredibly basic and I still didn't understand them really. Also it's hard to know what you're looking for when you can't understand the content. But I know what you're saying.

Daichi Wrote:

TheVinster Wrote:Start reading actual books.

This.

Struggle through reading books. Plenty of light novels have English translations on the web. You can get parallel bilingual books like Read Real Japanese or Breaking into Japanese Literature. Pick up some graded readers with audio. Plenty of good starting points. You should do both intensive and extensive reading.

I have both Read Real Japanese books. I'll give them another go too.

As another thought, something I've tried before with some success. You can get some Japanese subs and do some intensive reading with those subs as you watch the show. (Pause and look up what you don't know.)

phybron Wrote:

Aikynaro Wrote:

Quote:On the flip side, when I do go looking for comprehensible input it's not easy either. Children's books are not interesting when you're not a child any more.

Why do you think this? Have you tried reading children's books?

'Children's books' is a pretty wide and varied category. If you can't find something interesting there, it's probably because you haven't looked.

I have tried reading some children's books. Not enough I guess, but they were incredibly basic and I still didn't understand them really. Also it's hard to know what you're looking for when you can't understand the content. But I know what you're saying.

Have you tried manga? It's much easier to read than novels, since you have the drawings to help clue you in to what's being said. There are manga in every genre about almost any subject you can think of.
Aoi Tori Bunko and Tsubasa Bunko books are good too. They're more interesting than picture books, and they're aimed at elementary school students. They'd work really well for intensive reading, since they have furigana on all the kanji.
I also like the above suggestion to read the subtitle scripts for a TV show, look up the unknown words, and then watch the show.

To throw a suggestion out there - FFXIV has been an excellent source of native material for me. Bitesized dialogue, casual internet/gaming slang, and entertaining video game to boot.

Not to say the vocabulary is easy, nope. If the English version is of any comparison, they're using words my english-english dictionary doesn't even know. Usually I end up parsing quest lines with rikaisama, but that's okay imo. They're so short that I usually understand most of it, and make an anki card out of the more common vocab.

Still, native material is for the natives, and you gotta start somewhere. Personally I am pleased with FFXIV for learning Japanese.

EDIT: Hell, even my English vocab is getting a massive boost by doing all the quests in the game. Win/win/win.

phybron Wrote:I mean, I say I'm following AJATT, but am I really doing it to the letter? I don't know. There's a big difference between passive and active immersion for example.

Yeah, I think maybe you didn't quite get the hang of the idea of AJATT, really (don't feel bad, though, you're on your way to getting back on track now! : ) ). While more passive, 'background noise' Japanese is part of it, I think what that mainly does is reinforce the words you've learnt, since it means you keep on hearing and seeing them, it reinforces grammar patterns and makes sure you keep hearing and seeing correct ones, and also reminds you 'oh yeah, I'm meant to be studying Japanese'. Means you can't get away from it, basically! XD So, that's important, but for learning, you still need to engage more actively with the material, with a small part of that being the sentence mining component.

So, as I said, one of the things I like to do, is watch scenes from games I've played in English, in Japanese (I'd play them in Japanese, but have found that's just more hassle at my level, less efficient), paying careful attention, listening and repeating dialogue, looking up words that stand out (if there's only one word in a sentence you don't know, that word is an obvious one to look up), and using my knowledge of the English script to make connections. That kinda thing. Some of the sentences (a relatively small proportion) then get added as Anki cards, here's a really simple one I made ages ago:
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g148/A...c0c96c.png

Sentence in kanji on the front, and on the back, any readings and definitions I might forget. And a picture if possible, because for me that really helps make reviews more interesting. XD You want to try not to add sentences that have too much new stuff at once +1 really is a pretty good guideline. So, you can do that with games, books, TV shows if you have Japanese subs, song lyrics, any native material.

quark Wrote:Have you tried manga? It's much easier to read than novels, since you have the drawings to help clue you in to what's being said. There are manga in every genre about almost any subject you can think of.
Aoi Tori Bunko and Tsubasa Bunko books are good too. They're more interesting than picture books, and they're aimed at elementary school students. They'd work really well for intensive reading, since they have furigana on all the kanji.
I also like the above suggestion to read the subtitle scripts for a TV show, look up the unknown words, and then watch the show.

Yep I've got Bakuman up to book 8, I've got four Crayon Shin-chan books, Naruto book 1, a couple of other things. I'm pretty good at accumulating media, I just suck at making a dent in it.

I haven't heard of Aoi Tori Bunko or Tsubasa Bunko though, so I'll look them up.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:To throw a suggestion out there - FFXIV has been an excellent source of native material for me.

I haven't tried that. I'm pretty allergic to MMORPG's after playing Warcraft for a few months a long time ago. What a timesink. Clearly more useful if you're learning an L2 at the same time though, so I'll think about it. Right now I'd just be worried about not having the slightest idea what to do.

I bought a few games on Steam today that have full Japanese support and I have another bunch on PS3 that I've bought, tried and got annoyed with because I don't understand anything.

Really I'm up to my eyeballs in media. It just doesn't make any sense. I'm going to clear everything out for a while and just do some Genki, Tae Kim, vocab and stuff like that. Comprehensible stuff for a little while. Then come back to all this other stuff. I clearly need to backtrack to lay some groundwork.

It may even be more interesting coming at it now, because it'll probably explain a whole bunch of stuff that I've got used to seeing and not understanding.

phybron Wrote:I haven't tried that. I'm pretty allergic to MMORPG's after playing Warcraft for a few months a long time ago. What a timesink. Clearly more useful if you're learning an L2 at the same time though, so I'll think about it. Right now I'd just be worried about not having the slightest idea what to do.

It can be a timesink but so far it works like a basic JRPG... I wouldn't be surprised if 50-100 hours gets you to the end of the game.

Plus, at least I get tired quite fast with parsing the text in the game. Once you notice yourself skipping over dialogue extensively it's time to take a break. An hour is plenty for me... and results in at least 20 new vocab cards.

I learned English to the level I am at now by playing FFXI back when I was 13. It works wonders.

phybron Wrote:I'm going to clear everything out for a while and just do some Genki, Tae Kim, vocab and stuff like that. Comprehensible stuff for a little while. Then come back to all this other stuff. I clearly need to backtrack to lay some groundwork.

I think that's the best plan. I recommend Erin's Challenge as a supplement to the grammar books; having the A/V is helpful for building listening comprehension and providing pretty comprehensible input. https://www.erin.ne.jp/

phybron Wrote:

Aikynaro Wrote:

Quote:On the flip side, when I do go looking for comprehensible input it's not easy either. Children's books are not interesting when you're not a child any more.

Why do you think this? Have you tried reading children's books?

'Children's books' is a pretty wide and varied category. If you can't find something interesting there, it's probably because you haven't looked.

I have tried reading some children's books. Not enough I guess, but they were incredibly basic and I still didn't understand them really. Also it's hard to know what you're looking for when you can't understand the content. But I know what you're saying.

Mm, fair enough. I guess I have the advantage of wandering down to the bookstore and being able to browse until I find something I can understand.
Personally, I'd recommend Four Bunko (フォア文庫) over Aoi Tori because it has things categorised into levels. Level A is the easiest and aimed at lower primary school children.
I can't promise that they're all interesting, mind you - but I do really like the ふたごの魔法つかい series.
here's their catalogue.

If you think sentences are a good way to go for vocabulary, consider using subs2srs. The vocabulary you need to understand a lot of the interesting children's stuff is probably less likely to show up in formal resources than in anime or movies. Plus at the same time you get listening practice.

In my opinion the best thing to do would just be to go through all of Tae Kim and make your own personal notes about everything you learned, then just start reading and add every word you don't know to a deck on Anki and review every day. I feel like people over think methods and learn too much about how to learn instead of actually just learning, when really it's not very complicated. If you just aim for 10-20k vocab per year and 3+ hours of reading per day you will be "fluent" in a little over a year, in reading at least. Anki should take about an hour a day, but regardless of what the people in this thread believe, it is actually one of the most efficient ways to remember things. If you added them from reading you shouldn't have a problem hitting 3 on most of them every time. I mostly just hit 3 and 1. A lot of that transfers over to listening, so you can still do that if you want too.

EDIT: I should also mention that you should read for comprehension in my opinion, as in try to comprehend every single sentence. Every character is put there for a reason, they are not random, and they all have meaning (unless it is someone screaming or something). I think for me at least that was one of the things that made the biggest impact on my reading. Everything has meaning. Don't just skip a sentence because you get the gist of it because you know a couple nouns, try and actually fully comprehend all of the grammar being used. It takes a while at first, but it will help in the long run instead of just ignoring it. You can use the example sentence search on jisho and alc to search for similar grammar patterns with English translations if you get stuck.