This may seem silly but others can benefit from your past mistakes.
I'd say "Don't buy those kanji books!"

It's mostly involving Anki, not Japanese, but: make the Anki cards you add easier, and focus on reviewing fast rather than keeping your fail rate low. It's better to fail a card in 7 seconds than spend 20-30 seconds trying to remember and eventually passing it.

Also: learning how to read is easier than you think. I over-estimated how hard it would be, and let it lag behind my listening comprehension for quite a while.

I'd say focus on memorising massive amounts of vocab as early as possible (10k or more) rather than moving onto more advanced grammar.

Do RtK as fast as you can, instead of spending three months with perfect stories which will fade away after three months, and don't be too meticulous with keywords, add hints and other things to make the work easy. At the end of RtK you'll have eventually gained the confidence necessary in recognize kanji anyway, but in half or third the time. When you start vocabulary acquisition the kanji will be attached to the word itself so it has no meaning to do RtK like a sort of bible to know and follow perfectly. Maybe don't even bother with Anki reviews, just do the book and review it at random a couple of time and be satisfied when you are able to distinguish a kanji from another, altough if you might not recal the precise keyword. Do kanji to meaning, at the end of the day it does not make so much difference if you take care just to copy the kanji when you review. Don't do RtK Lite + all the other kanji not contained in it but present in Genki, but do directly only the kanji contained in Genki I and II and ignore all the other. In other words do whathever will make RtK as fast as possible, to start real japanese as early as you can. (this obviously doesn't work if you want to be able to write kanji earlier but as you still don't know any japanese maybe it's best to postpone this goal).

Nyanda Wrote:I'd say focus on memorising massive amounts of vocab as early as possible (10k or more) rather than moving onto more advanced grammar.

This, fortunately I get it in time and your suggestion just make my convinction stronger. I've finished Genki II and instead of continuing with an hard-core study on grammar as I was planning, I'll go slow on AIATIJ and I'll concentrate more on vocabulary.

Hope this helps others!

I actually really still like my approach to learning: Basic Vocab & Grammar, then just Read + Anki. The only real regrets I have are about being lazy.

EDIT: I actually thought of a major one: listening. Listen more, even though it doesn't seem like you're making progress because it's less measurable then reading, you are so keep going.

I'd make the revelation to myself that reading Japanese will be much easier than listening when it comes to me personally and how my brain works. Therefore my past self should emphasize listening heavily over reading, before all the low-level listening-stuff becomes too boring and I can't force myself to use them anymore. Then I would have better listening skills today, probably would be better at speaking as well and not only have the ability to read... >_<

[Zgarbas]

Take it slow, don't give up on your first try, don't go so intense on your last.

Stansfield123 Wrote:focus on reviewing fast rather than keeping your fail rate low. It's better to fail a card in 7 seconds than spend 20-30 seconds trying to remember and eventually passing it.

Please explain.

cophnia61 Wrote:Maybe don't even bother with Anki reviews, just do the book and review it at random a couple of time and be satisfied when you are able to distinguish a kanji from another, altough if you might not recal the precise keyword.

Extremely attractive suggestion (even in light of Stansfield123's remarks above), but can you explain operationally what it means "when you are able to distinguish a kanji from another"? I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what kind of test one should apply to oneself if one goes this route. Do you mean tell 買 vs 貧 apart, e.g.? How would you know you could tell them apart?

(@murtada, great question: extremely concise and inviting to sempai )

.

aldebrn Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:focus on reviewing fast rather than keeping your fail rate low. It's better to fail a card in 7 seconds than spend 20-30 seconds trying to remember and eventually passing it.

Please explain.

I'm not Stansfield, but I believe in the sentiment.

ANKI is a tool that's supposed to be used as a memory aid, and if you to struggle for 30 seconds to recall what the kanji or word being tested means, then you didn't really remember it at all.

In that 30 seconds you could have got through another handful of reviews leaving you more time for other stuff. It may not sound like much, but it all adds up, and the longer you spend staring at ANKI rather than doing something more interesting the more likely you are to get fed up and give up.

Woodgar Wrote:

aldebrn Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:focus on reviewing fast rather than keeping your fail rate low. It's better to fail a card in 7 seconds than spend 20-30 seconds trying to remember and eventually passing it.

Please explain.

I'm not Stansfield, but I believe in the sentiment.

ANKI is a tool that's supposed to be used as a memory aid, and if you to struggle for 30 seconds to recall what the kanji or word being tested means, then you didn't really remember it at all.

In that 30 seconds you could have got through another handful of reviews leaving you more time for other stuff. It may not sound like much, but it all adds up, and the longer you spend staring at ANKI rather than doing something more interesting the more likely you are to get fed up and give up.

I would actually argue against this. When I first started out SRSing, I went about as fast as I could. If I couldn't immediately answer the card - Fail it. After about 6 months, I started experimenting with allowing myself longer and longer to answer. While I don't have any concrete information whether I got more accomplished this way, it certainly 'feels' a lot better. Of course, what works for me, may not work for others, but there's actually some compelling research that the effort put forward in trying to recall a fact results in enhanced recall of the fact.

I'm not suggesting that you should pass a card that it takes 30 seconds to recall - I am suggesting taking the 30 seconds and then probably fail it anyway and you'll remember it better next time it comes aroud.

* Fill up on vocab.
* Keep you SRS cards as simple as possible to avoid SRS burnout.
* Study vocab before you add it to your SRS program (again, to avoid SRS burnout due to overwork and high failure rates).
* Start working with an affordable tutor from Day 1; transition to Japanese-only lessons as soon as possible.
* Keep reminding yourself that it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Stansfield123 Wrote:It's better to fail a card in 7 seconds than spend 20-30 seconds trying to remember and eventually passing it.

For me, searching my mental landscape looking for something is the best way of finding somewhere to put it where I can more easily find it again.

As for the OP, I think my only advice to my earlier self would be to do RTK reviews kanji -> keyword from the outset. Starting with the RTK lite deck would have allowed starting core6k sooner, which is where the real learning starts.

On the other hand, nothing I did back then was a *total* waste of time, and I do tend to work best when focusing on one thing at a time, especially new things, so ... meh.

1. There are no shortcuts.
2. Start reading as soon a possible.
3. Add extra anki learning steps to keep accuracy at a decent level starting day from day 1.
4. Work everything in parallel instead of focusing solely on kanji, vocab, or grammar in isolation.
5. Suspend those leeches!
6. Don't get to comfortable - challenge yourself.
7. Don't start with the full RTK - do RTK lite first.

I would build on yogert's 4 by saying:

* Work on reading, writing, speaking and listening. They are related, but separate.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:I would build on yogert's 4 by saying:

* Work on reading, writing, speaking and listening. They are related, but separate.

Maybe I should explain why I wrote that. When I first started out learning vocabulary, I studied ONLY vocabulary for 6 months straight. Then, I started adding core sentences and my VOCABULARY got a lot better. So, my advice to my former self would be that skills reinforce each other. They should be built up in tandem - a little from the grammar pile, a little bit from the vocab pile, and so on instead of trying to finish the vocab pile before moving onto the grammar pile.

anotherjohn Wrote:For me, searching my mental landscape looking for something is the best way of finding somewhere to put it where I can more easily find it again.

I think my suggestion is counter-intuitive for analytical types. But it is right nonetheless. You shouldn't learn a language the way you learn math or programming.

Natural languages are not very complex. The systems some people use to analyze and describe natural languages can be very complex, sure, but the languages themselves, as far as regular speakers are concerned, are not. Speaking and understanding consists, for the most part, of remembering and repeating tens of thousands of individual words and thousands of speech patterns. Not of remembering a few dozen basic building blocks, and creating vastly complex algorithms or rules out of them, the way you do in math and programming.

There are connections between words (especially in agglutinative languages like Japanese), but they are only worth exploring when they are simple enough that you can make them quickly. Etymology is no doubt interesting, but exploring the etymology (or worse, guessing the etymology) of thousands of words is a waste of effort when it comes to language learning.

Relying on complex connections to try and read and speak (be it complex grammar or Kanji related connections) is the intuitive, but wrong way to go about trying to create that mental landscape you mentioned. Yes, it is possible to keep making those complex connections until eventually they are easy to make, the way you would do with math or a programming language, but it's not worth it.

It's far easier to learn a language the way the vast majority of its speakers learn it: by being exposed to it continuously, by seeing and hearing words and patterns over and over again until they are memorized without being analyzed.

P.S. I am such an analytical type, which is why, despite knowing, in theory, how I was supposed to go about it, I often allowed myself to go down that rabbit hole of being far too analytical about Kanji readings and vocab writing. Making an effort to speed up my reviews has recently allowed me to stop doing that.

* RTK is awesome, do it, but don't dwell
* Don't use an SRS app, it may be awesome but you will burn out.
* Focus on vocab earlier
* Converse and read more

EDIT:

I also think RTK lite might be better; lite being the first 1000 from KO2001.

Don't spend more time searching for methods than actually studying Japanese. Don't brag that you know 15 hiragna to everyone *shudders*

Maybe I should ask this in a new thread. Would taking dictation be a good way to practice 'listening', beyond just passive listening?

aldebrn Wrote:Maybe I should ask this in a new thread. Would taking dictation be a good way to practice 'listening', beyond just passive listening?

Just a few options for active listening:
(1) Jpod101 (yes Peter is annoying, but the voice actors are quite good)
(2) The book "Read real Japanese" comes with really high quality audio at natural speed
(3) News/weather on Coscom's site http://www.coscom.co.jp/
(4) Harry potter books 1+2 audio
(5) Last wave radio (search this forum for info)

Format SRS cards with love. I find that rushed/badly formatted cards are a lot more likely to become leeches and not transition into long term memory.

brianobush Wrote:

aldebrn Wrote:Maybe I should ask this in a new thread. Would taking dictation be a good way to practice 'listening', beyond just passive listening?

Just a few options for active listening:
(1) Jpod101 (yes Peter is annoying, but the voice actors are quite good)
(2) The book "Read real Japanese" comes with really high quality audio at natural speed
(3) News/weather on Coscom's site http://www.coscom.co.jp/
(4) Harry potter books 1+2 audio
(5) Last wave radio (search this forum for info)

Do you know where I can find the harry potter audios?

- Less meta, more studying
- Listen, a lot (my listening is still sorta awful...)
- Don't take online learning advice for Gospel: ajatt, Japaneselevelup, Nuke's thread, etc. may have a lot of useful info, but that doesn't mean you have to follow everything they say. If it doesn't work out for you, modify the method or simply try something else.
- Don't make Anki'ing as complicated: keep to the same number of cards every day, no matter if you've got 15 or 50 unstudied cards. I'm studying Spanish now, and using Anki is much more comfortable this way: No altering the settings, checking the number of new cards, etc. Simply press 's' twice and begin.