I'm currently going through RTK1, and a friend told me that it would be a good idea to flip (lazily) through Genki 1 along with it... which is a good idea, since it doesn't take me very long to do my daily reviews.

I decided as an added bonus that I would collect all of the sentences I come across in the in the book so that I can review them in Anki. The problem is that my vocabulary is basically nonexistent, and it's making any kind of translation impossible. The result is that I'm memorizing the sentence as a whole, and not really getting anything out of it as far as grammar and vocabulary go. For example, I know that すみません。 いま なんじですあ。 means something along the lines of "Excuse me. What time is it now?" But that's all I know. It's only because of general landmarks (like periods, commas, ect.) that I know the first part says "Excuse me." I couldn't identify which words are what though.

My question is how I should go about getting the most out of this situation. Am I being too ambitious? Should I be focusing on vocabulary in isolation (highly frowned upon ) until i+1 are less difficult to find?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: It's possible that sentence mining at this stage isn't a *complete* waste of time, as with enough exposure, the words will stick much easier when I "learn them for real" in the future... but I'm still not sure it's appropriate.

I would probably focus your study time on getting finished with RTK1 as quick as possible, then moving on to grammer/vocab. That way when you start learning vocab you will get the full benefit of having done RTK.

In the mean time I think SRSing kana (if you don't know it already) would be a good way to get your mind off RTK reviews, but starting reviews for full words and sentences I think is a waste right now.

If you're relying on periods and commas to differentiate words, your cards possibly don't have enough kanji. With kanji (even if you don't recognise them now) it's vastly easier to tell where the word breaks are. Just have furigana/hiragana on the back of the card.

Also have a look at the Mighty Morphin Morphology thread, which exists to solve the n+1 problem.

If you can manage to have audio on your cards (e.g. with subs2srs) that makes things hugely easier too.

Edit: and I disagree in the strongest possible terms with the post above.

I recommend studying every single word in the genki chapter you are currently on before you add any sentences. Words from the dialog, example sentences, and of course the vocabulary list they give you.

It's not a complete waste of time imho. Continue with your genki1, if you're very comfortable on your rtk retention rate try increasing the new cards/day a little; test it gradually until you find your nice spot. Also try adding a supplement, I recommend japanese the manga way (I think this one is really useful) & Dictionary of the basic japanese grammar as another reference.

Something like:
10-30 rtk kanji/day or depending on your limit
10-20 vocabs/day (there're some genki vocab decks floating around)
1-2 lesson/s/day
//add sentence deck if you've learnt a nice amount from your vocab deck
//others depending on your free time.

It will then be easier to switch to core later on after you've finished RTK+a good amount of vocab, grammar on your belt

BlackIce Wrote:It's not a complete waste of time imho.

Of course it's not. It's just an inefficient way to do things. Beginners should start at the beginning. In the case of languages which use a new, unknown character set, the first step is to learn that character set.

But, in this case, the impatience is understandable, because that character set is so vast.

So, OP, if you insist: Anki can display furigana ( Ruby characters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character). You should make sure any sentence you study is written in furigana rather than Kana alone.

It will make it soooooo much easier to understand what is what in a sentence. Not just where words start and end, but also which words are nouns, which are verbs, where the particles are, etc. I know of at least one deck on AnkiWeb that has furigana: optimized Core6K. But that's a little too advanced for you. You should check if maybe there are others. I bet there are. And there are plenty of books and websites that use furigana, you can mine sentences from them.

All this assumes that you at least know the Kana well enough. If not, learn it. There's no way around that.

Thank you all for the excellent advice. I think I'm going to stick with the original plan, as Stansfield123 pointed out, and keep focused on the basics of literacy for now.

After that I'll probably find simple sentences (with furigana) until such time as I'm not as limited with candidate sentences.

I didn't feel competent to make my own cards or even use cards without native audio before finishing Core6k & thoroughly maturing it.

I just couldn't trust myself not to screw up the pronunciation etc. Even now I still mix up あ and お on occasion. So annoying.

anotherjohn Wrote:I just couldn't trust myself not to screw up the pronunciation etc. Even now I still mix up あ and お on occasion. So annoying.

On a related note, the あ at the end of OP's example should be か.