Hi guys, I am looking for some advice on how to plan my study schedule for the next 3 months.

I have recently secured a eikaiwa job in downtown Osaka which begins early May. I know the opportunities/amount of free time available will make it very difficult to continue anki at a fast pace. My aim is to complete RTK by the end of Feb (currently on 650, adding ~60 each day) and hopefully complete Core 10k recognition (currently on 2300, adding ~85 each day). My reasoning for going at such a high pace is, once I arrive in Japan I won't have to worry about adding new vocab/kanji cards (one of the more time consuming activities), thus I can spend more time reading, and balancing out my other skills.

Clearly the things I've focused on are mainly recognition, leaving a big hole in my output skills, I have almost no listening/speaking practice - I will be booking some italki lessons soon to try and combat that (too little too late?).

I was hoping that once I can read things easily, my output would improve naturally, is this the case? Would I be better off aiming for 6k words, and looking at the core production deck and dedicating more time to grammar?


p.s. Is it possible to make the cards in RTK different colours based on JLPT level, i.e. JLPT 1 (red) JLPT 2 (orange) etc..

Congrats on the job in Osaka! I really like Osaka - it was one of my favorite cities in Japan, and I think that you'll have a great time.

I think that you have a very aggressive anki-based study plan, and it will improve your language knowledge a lot.

I would just point out that language knowledge is one thing, but using that knowledge in the four main language skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) is another. I encourage you to incorporate the use of those skills into your study plan.

For writing practice, you can use lang-8. You could set a goal of writing one journal entry a week (or day), whatever. An easy place to start is simple autobiographical information. You can then move onto what you did recently, your opinions, hopes, dreams, etc. Native speakers will correct your entries on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I think that this is a great way to practice writing.

I recommend getting regular speaking and listening practice in. You mentioned italki. It gets good reviews, but I haven't used it myself. I use The Japanese Online Institute. Their introductory set is $9 for 3 one-hour lessons. I take the N3 Grammar classes and like them. Additionally, if you are a member you can join their free bi-monthly conversation groups. If you don't have access to native speakers to practice talking with, I recommend that. They also have an essay correction service they call "tensaku". Basically, each month they assign a question, and you can write up to 400 characters on the answer and then they correct it for you. The quality of correction, I've found, is very high (much higher than lang-8).

Basically, I am a hardcore anki user as well, spending a few hours a day with it. My only concern with Anki is that it's easy to focus on reviews to the exclusion of actual language usage. I think that you will be stronger with actual language usage on day 1 of your trip to Japan if you incorporate more actual language usage (i.e. reading, writing, speaking, listening) into your study schedule. Using either the services I recommend or other ones.

That being said, you sound like a very motivated student and I think that you will have a great time living in Osaka!

Satom Wrote:I was hoping that once I can read things easily, my output would improve naturally, is this the case?

Just a follow up, because after posting I saw this specific question. I do not belive that this is the case at all.

As an example, when I was in grad school we had a large number of international students who had extremely high scores on the verbal portion of the GRE but were essentially unable to have basic conversations. These are separate skills.

I recommend spending some time with the IRL language scale, which I wrote about here: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid216942

Satom Wrote:p.s. Is it possible to make the cards in RTK different colours based on JLPT level, i.e. JLPT 1 (red) JLPT 2 (orange) etc..

If you have them tagged already, this should be easy to do without a script. Just create a model for each level that is a clone of your current model. Name each model something like 'RTK_N5', 'RTK_N4', etc. Then, open your card browser, filter by tag, select all and change the model type to the appropriate level. Then edit each model's background color to be whatever you want (this should be in '.card' I think.)

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Satom Wrote:Clearly the things I've focused on are mainly recognition, leaving a big hole in my output skills, I have almost no listening/speaking practice - I will be booking some italki lessons soon to try and combat that (too little too late?).

It's never too late. Any practice you get now will help.

Satom Wrote:I was hoping that once I can read things easily, my output would improve naturally, is this the case? Would I be better off aiming for 6k words, and looking at the core production deck and dedicating more time to grammar?

For me, output practice was the best way to improve my output. Like you I went onto iTalki after learning via recognition without talking to natives before. My speaking was slow (needing time to think out the next part of a sentence, e.g. 僕は月曜日に。。。大学で。。。いきました。) this improved after about 5-10 hours of practice.

Until you get on iTalki, Skype, etc. I would ensure you read the Core sentences out loud when you review or shadow the audio. I didn't do this and found I could 'say' sentences and words in my mind, but struggled to actually say them out loud.

Satom Wrote:p.s. Is it possible to make the cards in RTK different colours based on JLPT level, i.e. JLPT 1 (red) JLPT 2 (orange) etc..

I assume this could be done via template amendment if you have the JLPT info in the deck.

ariariari Wrote:As an example, when I was in grad school we had a large number of international students who had extremely high scores on the verbal portion of the GRE but were essentially unable to have basic conversations. These are separate skills.

There have been numerous arguments about that here. I also believe (due to my own experience), that this does not work; however, I believe that your speaking ability will progress rapidly after extensive reading (similar to doing RTK and learning vocab after).