sholum Wrote:@Zarxrax
You don't find any enjoyment in studying at all? That's awfully depressing to think about, voluntarily spending that much time on something you dislike... I guess it's paid off for you by now, though.

I don't think Zarxrax saying it's *not* enjoyable. The way I read it (and obviously Zarxrax can speak for Zarxrax) is that the pursuit of pure enjoyment in learning obscures the fact that a lot of work is required to get to the level where you can simply kick back and absorb a good book or movie without putting in some level of effort.

I enjoy the studying I do. Not all of it is strictly "fun" or entertainment-oriented, though. My 2,000-sentence (and growing) N2/N1 sentence deck is probably not most people's idea of a wild Friday night. But I see the benefit in drilling it every day, and can see the positive effect it's had on my comprehension, so I remain engaged with it. It's satisfying when I encounter an N1 grammar pattern in something I'm reading online, or stumble across a previously unknown word, and I realize, "Hey - I know that because I've been studying it!"

That said, there are some techniques that will just grind you down depending on what type of learner you are, and you should be savvy enough to switch up if you realize you dread studying Japanese every day. The same is true if you're studying material that's well beyond your current level; you run the risk that you'll get so frustrated by what you're trying to comprehend that you'll say "Frack it" and give up entirely.

When you're exercising, a small amount of pain ("burn") indicates that you're breaking down tissue that will become stronger after healing, while a larger degree (or the wrong kind) of pain is a sign you're about to injure yourself. Learning is the same, I think: you have to find just the right amount of pain.

I don't find studying Japanese fun. What drives me is the thought of one day being able to be able to utilize the language, to speak with people, to read things, and to watch and listen to things. The journey there is no fun at all. I don't *want* to sit down and look up words I don't know, add things into an srs to study, listen to it over and over, and suffer from a half-assed understanding of something that I would really like to fully understand. But I put up with it, because I know that's how I will get to where I need to go.

It's no different than pretty much every other thing in one's life. You know what's fun and enjoyable? Eating delicious stuff like burritos and pizza and burgers and ice cream and pecan pie. But I choose to diet and frequently give up those foods because the benefits of doing so outweigh the fleeting enjoyment that can be had.
I absolutely hate exercising. But I do it anyways, because I would rather not die of a heart attack before I'm 50.
I hate going to work, but I want money.

Of course its natural to want to make things as pleasant as possible. But in the end, sometimes you just gotta suck it up and do it.

Everyone has their own study (or absorption) methods. I can be a bit vehement about mine at times (でしょう？）But people learn in different ways and find different things work for them/are comfortable for them. If I am vehement it is only because I am enthusiastic. And I really do believe in immersion and constant usage.

But really, there is nothing for us to argue about. AJATT works for some people. Other immersion methods work for other people (myself included). By-the-book-study is best for some people. A lot depends on who you are, how you work and what your goals are. Not everyone *wants* massive immersion (I don't in any language but Japanese).

I don't think anyone here would really say otherwise. I certainly wouldn't.

@Zarxrax I'm sorry you feel that way. That must make it a bit hard. There is grinding involved, I know, but I absolutely love growing in Japanese. I am not waiting for some future but enjoying my Japanese life right now. I have been ever since after the first month or so when I had gotten kana and the most basic grammar done. And in the very beginning it was a novelty, so I guess I've always enjoyed it.

Zarxrax Wrote:The journey there is no fun at all.

[...]

Of course its natural to want to make things as pleasant as possible. But in the end, sometimes you just gotta suck it up and do it.

This is something that always gets left out of all of the motivational blogs. People come away with this idea that Japanese learning can be completely passive: do some Anki reps, listen to some anime, and bam fluency! However there must be an intensive part of your studying where you learn the vocabulary and grammar before you put it into and Anki, focus on understanding that anime, and actually concentrate on how natives construct sentences and share information. Intensive study is required and the more productive hours of it that you have the faster you will progress.

You don't necessary have to hate intensive study but there should be more recognition given to the fact that it is the part that requires effort and focus. It is also very much required to get to the fun part.

tokyostyle Wrote:

Zarxrax Wrote:The journey there is no fun at all.

[...]

Of course its natural to want to make things as pleasant as possible. But in the end, sometimes you just gotta suck it up and do it.

This is something that always gets left out of all of the motivational blogs. People come away with this idea that Japanese learning can be completely passive: do some Anki reps, listen to some anime, and bam fluency! However there must be an intensive part of your studying where you learn the vocabulary and grammar before you put it into and Anki, focus on understanding that anime, and actually concentrate on how natives construct sentences and share information. Intensive study is required and the more productive hours of it that you have the faster you will progress.

You don't necessary have to hate intensive study but there should be more recognition given to the fact that it is the part that requires effort and focus. It is also very much required to get to the fun part.

I've always wondered where this idea comes from that "It should be fun" = "You don't have to do anything that resembles study" , but I think these two posts clarified that for me. To me learning is an inherently rewarding activity, and making it enjoyable is just a matter of balancing effort vs reward, so it never really occurred to me that others might rely entirely upon extrinsic motivators. At least amongst those who chose to learn Japanese as a hobby.

I advocate learning Japanese through anime (Japanese-subtitled anime at the core of the approach) and it is fun. But it is work. In fact it is probably harder than doing it the conventional way. It is also faster and deeper in my opinion. And more fun.

But I have never pretended it wasn't work and hard work, and anyone who does is really - well, glossing over the truth. I think some people have a sense of disappointment that they can't get fluent with no work. And I can see why, because certain writers seem to promise that, at least some of the time.

But it can be fun, provided you are in love with Japanese and happy to struggle through anime (especially in the early stages) because you love it and the language so much. If you aren't in love with Japanese it may not be fun. I don't know. I've never tried it.

I'd like to quote my own introduction to the approach:

"This is not a get-fluent-with-no-work scheme. Everything about those schemes is wonderful except that not working doesn’t – uh – work."

...

"Hard work and discipline are not the opposite of enjoyment (and if you think they are you need to learn the full cultural meaning of the word 頑張る ganbaru). You can do both at once — enjoy watching, enjoy working, and really learn Japanese through anime."

Zarxrax Wrote:I don't find studying Japanese fun. What drives me is the thought of one day being able to be able to utilize the language, to speak with people, to read things, and to watch and listen to things. The journey there is no fun at all. I don't *want* to sit down and look up words I don't know, add things into an srs to study, listen to it over and over, and suffer from a half-assed understanding of something that I would really like to fully understand. But I put up with it, because I know that's how I will get to where I need to go.

[snip]

Of course its natural to want to make things as pleasant as possible. But in the end, sometimes you just gotta suck it up and do it.

Wanted to add as an aside that almost all of these methods advocate a ton of scaffolding work that sounds like a lot less of a pain than it actually is. I gotta go find/buy Japanese shows and movies that have Japanese subtitles, then hope that they're actually accurate and not simplified versions of the spoken dialogue as is often the case, then go through, stopping while watching so I can cut out all the scenes I like, then go into Anki and manually add each scene to its own card... All before studying that sentence even once.

The sheer amount of grunt work involved in making a custom deck is pretty much the first hurdle to learning Japanese I ever hit. That's one of the main reasons why I liked Anki; I was able to download shared decks and customize the card's layout to my liking pretty much as a one-time set it and forget it move. The only work I had to do was cutting and pasting my preferred RevTK stories into the Story field to streamline the review process, but that's about it. Though, seeing as how Japanese the Manga Way doesn't seem to have a public Anki deck available, if I wanna benefit from using an SRS, I'll have to go through that grind. I'll just take my time, I suppose.

Also, apparently, that crappy Jalup Beginner deck has apparently been proofread, so I might give that a second chance.

Anyway, to actually contribute more to the discussion, I think learning is rewarding in and of itself, but only if that learning is, to some extent, able to be put to use in and of itself. How I plan on going about learning now is to focus on grammar and vocabulary, in that order. I don't need to be a kanji expert, although all these years of RTK have pretty much made me unafraid of it.

RTK is not useful to a total beginner in Japanese. It is useful to someone who already has a decent grasp of vocabulary and grammar, and is looking at kanji as the last wall to climb on their path to fluency. And even then, I would recommend that style of kana keywords as opposed to Heisig's. That way, you never waste time learning anything that you ultimately have to throw out in order to make room for legitimately helpful information.

Edit: Zarxrax, I just checked out your site, and saw your JPod101 reviews, and more importantly, the recommended path. I had ran into a lot of the problems you mentioned previously, and had given up on it (after lots and lots of listening -_-), but I'll give it another shot now. JPod101 newbie season 4 might just be the perfect thing to listen to while I build Gunpla! Though I might put it off until after I catch up on the news...

vgambit Wrote:RTK is not useful to a total beginner in Japanese. It is useful to someone who already has a decent grasp of vocabulary and grammar, and is looking at kanji as the last wall to climb on their path to fluency. And even then, I would recommend that style of kana keywords as opposed to Heisig's. That way, you never waste time learning anything that you ultimately have to throw out in order to make room for legitimately helpful information.

RTK works amazing well for total beginners. Not only did you never finish it, but you've never actually studied Japanese. On what basis can you say it doesn't work for the language?

You seem bitter at it because you quit over and over and ultimately never made any progress, but that doesn't mean it's not useful for a total beginner. Difficult, yes, but extremely effective and useful if completed.

vgambit Wrote:The sheer amount of grunt work involved in making a custom deck is pretty much the first hurdle to learning Japanese I ever hit.

I used to hate this too, eventually it gets easier when you have less things that you need to tackle. Now I mostly just add words from digital things and take a screenshot of the sentence whenever it has a single word or grammar point I don't get. Emulators, ps3(with cfw), and manga on my tablet makes it all pretty easy to do.

The picture makes it easy to remember usually and I just cloze delete the actual word/phrase in photoshop real quick and put a reminder definition with the picture. The actual word and reading is on the answer side, and that's pretty much it.

PS: When it comes to RTK, I'm very glad I did it early on and it makes it so I don't even have to think about kanji anymore.

EDIT: subs2srs is good too like helena4 mentions below, totally forgot to mention that.

@vgambit

Dude did you read what I said about subs2srs? You don't have to do any of that rubbish manually. You think someone as lazy as me has time for that? (I guess you don't know me so you wouldn't know). Let me break it down:

1) Download the programming subs2srs

3) Get a drama and get Japaneses sub's. English sub's almost always suck.

4) Feed them into subs2srs. This will create cards with a picture, the audio and the Japanese sentence written on the front, with nothing on the back apart from the reading. Since both the audio and the sub's are on the front, you should be able to tell if the sub's are summarising. If the unknown is actually used in the speech then it doesn't really matter.

5) Install the anki add on morphman to sort your deck so that only 1 unknown comes up at a time.

6) Open the folder the add-on is stored in and edit the config file for morphman (I use Komodo Edit, free). Here, check that the card types for the decks you want to be sorted are set as enabled under the title "model_overrides". Check the morph field had the same name as the field holding the Japanese sentence in your deck (YouTube videos can be found showing this more clearly). If you want to sort another deck too, make sure their sentence fields all have the same name.

7)Run the add on from the tools menu when you open anki. Go through decks you've disabled and in the browser, highlight all the cards and add to known database from the drop down menu just in case. Can't remember whether it creates the field " focusMorph" in your cards or not, but create one if doesn't. You do need to add it to your card formatting. Add it to the front side under the sentence in a different colour or something.

8) Now if you go to review your new cards in the suns2srs deck, they should have one unknown in them. If they have 0 unknowns, press k to hide them. This gives them the tag "alreadyKnown" so you can go to the browser and delete them. Then when a correct one comes along, paste the focus morph word into jisho.org and quickly enter the reading and meaning into the back of the card. This takes less than a minute, and since it is part of the review process and there is only one word to look up, rather than it being bulk mining at the beginning, it's much less tiring.

9) Now you have that system set up, the process will be automatic in the future with minimal effort required.

This takes a lot of time for first set up because morphman is such a technical set up but afterwards it means you have well sorted fun s quickly and easily.

Also thanks to those people who said I am giving half decent advice.

vgambit Wrote:Though, seeing as how Japanese the Manga Way doesn't seem to have a public Anki deck available, if I wanna benefit from using an SRS, I'll have to go through that grind.

There's a 'Japanese the Manga Way' deck created by a former user of this forum, uisukii, in his MediaFire folder (uploaded on 2015-01-06, 12.07 MB). It has 578 recognition cards, with images. I don't know if it's allowed to share it here, but there you go.

@Helena4 thanks for the tips. Honestly, because it seemed like too much work, I wrote off subs2srs long ago, but I might actually give it a shot one of these days. The only thing that puts me off slightly is that I can't "press k" on a phone, which is where I do the bulk of my studying/reviews.

@gdaxeman Thank you so much.

I think sharing the deck here would be okay, since it's only useful for review if you already have the book to explain each panel of the manga.

@vgambit

That's okay. Yeah I totally wrote it off too, until I had the idea to combine it with morphman (which I had also written off as being too complicated) and realised it worked well.

I recommend to do your reviews on your phone and new cards on the computer if you can. Otherwise, you can edit the cards on the phone, so you can add the alreadyKnown tag manually. But I'm sure you can find some time to sit at the computer.

Splatted Wrote:To me learning is an inherently rewarding activity, and making it enjoyable is just a matter of balancing effort vs reward, so it never really occurred to me that others might rely entirely upon extrinsic motivators. At least amongst those who chose to learn Japanese as a hobby.

I might be in the minority, especially on these forums, but in the end my big motivator was learning Japanese for social reasons. After I moved here I really wanted to be able to converse with and hang out with the guys and girls in my circle and that is what motivated me to study. While it would have been great to force them to teach me everything without studying that wasn't reasonable. So being along at home studying hard wasn't exactly fun in of itself, but the rewards of participating in conversations during trips and parties was extremely motivating. I wouldn't go so far to say that I hated studying itself, but I wouldn't not have kept up with it if it weren't for that constant motivation. I also targeted all of my studying to be directed towards peer conversations and thus ditched textbook methods for dramas and drama scripts.

In fact I kind of laugh when vgambit craps all over literacy because literacy is the one thing that helped me rapidly improve my speaking. (I had brute-forced about 500 kanji before switching to RTK and pretty much brute forced the rest of that. I doubt I can recall a single story from it.)

Helena4 Wrote:Dude did you read what I said about subs2srs? You don't have to do any of that rubbish manually. You think someone as lazy as me has time for that? (I guess you don't know me so you wouldn't know). Let me break it down:

Just curious from your experience, exactly how frequently do you want to do an episode of something in subs2srs, and you get it set up with almost no effort like that?
From my personal experience, I have attempted like 10 different shows, and I gave up on getting started with the majority of them because the amount of effort I would have had to put in up front was completely unreasonable to me. I've not found a single one so far that I was able to simply toss straight into subs2srs.

The biggest issue I have is, when I manage to find something I want to use, that also happens to have Japanese subtitles available, I won't be able to obtain the specific episodes that the subtitles are timed to. The subtitles might usually be from tv captures, and the only torrents might be dvd-rips. So I would have to go in and shift timings on them all (not just at the beginning, but usually around the middle too).

Any advice on that?

It's nothing very original, but my 2c is this: stay motivated. This is much more important than anything else on the long run. No matter how good your study method is or how completely immersed you are, if you get sick and tired of it after a month, then it wasn't as good as something you would have done for years. This is why I'd personally keep away from anyone's study plan or restrictive advice (eg. "do at least this!" or "never watch anime with subtitles" and so on). Think about why you want to learn Japanese and what you want to learn. Make your own plans if you want, or don't if you're not a routine person. Do nothing but stuff you want to do and forget about other people's opinion. When I read that you can "carve out" 30-60 minutes per day or that you want to "stick with the program", I feel like you're planning to actually work hard. Again, just my opinion, but I wouldn't approach language learning like this as if there was some prize at the fluency finish line. Make sure you enjoy what you're doing at all time, because there is no fluency finish line ;P

A bit related to the post above:

What Is The End Game of Learning A Language?
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...o-about-it

Quote:Anyway, so, here’s what’s really deep and interesting about learning — getting used to — languages: the process and lifestyle of “getting there” is fundamentally the same as the process and lifestyle once you’re “there” — assuming, that is, that you want to stay there, in Idontsuckistan.

“Learning” a language — in a fun, successful way, at least — looks and works and basically is virtually the exact same as maintaining it. And it never ends. If you think about it, native speakers have all made this peace. They’re not going anywhere. They’re not in this for show. They’re not here to get a trophy and then “move on” to “other challenges”. They’re not passing through. They’re in this one forever. And they play every day. They wake up playin’; they play all day and then they go to sleep and play some more in their dreams. And they’re cool with that because they’re having fun; they’re not showing off; they’ve got no point to prove; they’re just living.

The language you’re living is the language you’re learning, not the language(s) you’re “learning”: those are just painful motions you’re going through — motions that you’ll soon forget. The language that you thoughtlessly, effortlessly, relentlessly have around you is the language you’re “learning”; it’s the language of your pillow, your car, your toilet, your web browser history, your smartphone…not of your study desk or your precious “projects list”.

There is no end game. It’s all mid-game. And if you’re not enjoying yourself now, there’s nothing on the other side for you. I’m not kidding. There’s no…understanding more things and getting more jokes isn’t going to make you happy; it’s just going to make you…better informed.

Zarxrax Wrote:

Helena4 Wrote:Dude did you read what I said about subs2srs? You don't have to do any of that rubbish manually. You think someone as lazy as me has time for that? (I guess you don't know me so you wouldn't know). Let me break it down:

Just curious from your experience, exactly how frequently do you want to do an episode of something in subs2srs, and you get it set up with almost no effort like that?
From my personal experience, I have attempted like 10 different shows, and I gave up on getting started with the majority of them because the amount of effort I would have had to put in up front was completely unreasonable to me. I've not found a single one so far that I was able to simply toss straight into subs2srs.

The biggest issue I have is, when I manage to find something I want to use, that also happens to have Japanese subtitles available, I won't be able to obtain the specific episodes that the subtitles are timed to. The subtitles might usually be from tv captures, and the only torrents might be dvd-rips. So I would have to go in and shift timings on them all (not just at the beginning, but usually around the middle too).

Any advice on that?

I didn't use subs2srs before because I thought it would be way too annoying (I mined from drama transcripts instead), but this has worked out decently with about 4 dramas. A few cards are usually slightly out of sync but most of them are fine. Surely if the subs are so out of sync, you shouldn't even be able to watch the show with them? And I don't use torrents. I have never understood them and why they take so frickin long to download. I get dramas from here: http://doramax264.com/ and subs from here: http://www.d-addicts.com/forums/page/subtitles#Japanese

Possibly I've just been lucky so far...

@comeauch

Agreed. Plans suck, don't plan a perfect method and force yourself to follow it. Goals don't suck though, goals tell you what sort of thing you want to be doing. And the key word is want. If your goal is something you want, and the activity to get there is something you more or less want to do, you should keep a decent level of motivation. If your goal is some definition of fluency someone else has given to you, e.g. pass the N1 or read newspapers or even have perfect conversations in Japanese, but which you have not decided yourself as something you want, then motivation is very very hard. You'll be asking yourself, "why am I doing this?" while doing activities that you were bound to never enjoy and I'll be asking you the same thing. If you don't want it, don't do it.

Also, short term goals are more important than long term goals. My long term goal may be the vast ambiguity of fluency yes, but this year I want to get better at reading and speaking. And in the next 2 months and a bit I will train my speaking with stuff I think will help me: shadowing real practical useful phrases, online voice chat and trying to learn some Kansai-ben (you'll see why that's relevant). In the next two months and a bit I'm also going to read all the stories in this section of hukumusume: http://hukumusume.com/douwa/book/ because they have pictures and I WANT to read with pictures, because I know how I myself get overwhelmed by reading lots of text because of my low reading level. I WANT to do these things because I plan on going to Japan and specifically to the Kansai region in the summer and want to be able to converse and I plan to buy a lot of books.

Those are my short term goals. They are improving specific skills, they last less than 3 months and I have a reason. Once I've acheived the goals, I may not want to do anything like those activities above any more. And if my trip to Japan is cancelled, I might not want to bother with speaking. Short term goals can fluctuate to always be what you want them to be. This is very different from a plan. Plans focus on a long term goal that is ambiguous. Like "do 2,000 kanji and 10,000 sentences and you'll be fluent". 1) What does fluent even mean? 3) It's incredibly rigid if you take it verbatim. 3) There are no milestones. Unless you delight in ticking off numbers and your milestone is "Hooray I've done 5,000 sentences!", that doesn't help. You can do 2,000 kanji and 10,000 sentences to effect if you want to, but you have to create milestones for your self. It's not gratifying if you don't experience those qualitative achievements.

(P.S. As comeauch says, your not obliged to follow anyone's specific plan. I gave examples of my goals, but I was suggesting anyone should take them on too, that was to illustrate the importance of personalised goals)

Zarxrax Wrote:The biggest issue I have is, when I manage to find something I want to use, that also happens to have Japanese subtitles available, I won't be able to obtain the specific episodes that the subtitles are timed to. The subtitles might usually be from tv captures, and the only torrents might be dvd-rips. So I would have to go in and shift timings on them all (not just at the beginning, but usually around the middle too).

Any advice on that?

For anime you could try downloading chinese fansubs that do japanese subtitle tracks like Kamigami or FLsnow directly from nyaa, some of their releases are hard-subbed but in my experience most aren't.

Drama I don't watch much so no idea on those.

Zarxrax Wrote:

Helena4 Wrote:Dude did you read what I said about subs2srs? You don't have to do any of that rubbish manually. You think someone as lazy as me has time for that? (I guess you don't know me so you wouldn't know). Let me break it down:

Just curious from your experience, exactly how frequently do you want to do an episode of something in subs2srs, and you get it set up with almost no effort like that?
From my personal experience, I have attempted like 10 different shows, and I gave up on getting started with the majority of them because the amount of effort I would have had to put in up front was completely unreasonable to me. I've not found a single one so far that I was able to simply toss straight into subs2srs.

The biggest issue I have is, when I manage to find something I want to use, that also happens to have Japanese subtitles available, I won't be able to obtain the specific episodes that the subtitles are timed to. The subtitles might usually be from tv captures, and the only torrents might be dvd-rips. So I would have to go in and shift timings on them all (not just at the beginning, but usually around the middle too).

Any advice on that?

Look for things subbed by the group Kamigami. They usually have Japanese subs that are already timed.
Alternatively, look for movies. If you have to retime the subs it's usually only once, and then you get a lot of cards for your work.

Though when you get into the rhythm of retiming things it's not so bad. Bit of a waste of time, but if you're getting enough useful cards out of it it's worth it, so long as the retiming isn't ridiculous. I stopped retiming shows/using subs2srs when it started to give diminishing returns on useful cards with new vocabulary vs time spent retiming though, so if you already have several thousand words down it might not be worth getting into unless you just want it for listening practice.

tokyostyle Wrote:In fact I kind of laugh when vgambit craps all over literacy because literacy is the one thing that helped me rapidly improve my speaking. (I had brute-forced about 500 kanji before switching to RTK and pretty much brute forced the rest of that. I doubt I can recall a single story from it.)

I don't. I crap on the idea of RTK and nothing else as the first step to Japanese fluency, which is one of AJATT's core tenets. If you want to become fluent in 2 years, the only way is if you learn the stroke orders of 2000 kanji first. It sucks, it's a long, difficult grind, and you have nothing to show for all the progress you make as you go, unlike literally every other means of study.

I crap on people telling me that because I never finished RTK, that I have never actually studied Japanese. As if James Heisig was the first foreigner to ever learn Japanese.

vgambit Wrote:I crap on the idea of RTK and nothing else as the first step to Japanese fluency, which is one of AJATT's core tenets. If you want to become fluent in 2 years, the only way is if you learn the stroke orders of 2000 kanji first. It sucks, it's a long, difficult grind, and you have nothing to show for all the progress you make as you go, unlike literally every other means of study.

I crap on people telling me that because I never finished RTK, that I have never actually studied Japanese. As if James Heisig was the first foreigner to ever learn Japanese.

Depends on what you are calling progress. As I am going through RTK, I recognize more and more characters in credits, instead of seeing gibberish only. People say that this fact helps you accelerate learning vocabulary and other stuff once you are done. I believe it, though I have no proof.

[RawToast]

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:That said, there are some techniques that will just grind you down depending on what type of learner you are, and you should be savvy enough to switch up if you realize you dread studying Japanese every day. The same is true if you're studying material that's well beyond your current level; you run the risk that you'll get so frustrated by what you're trying to comprehend that you'll say "Frack it" and give up entirely.

When you're exercising, a small amount of pain ("burn") indicates that you're breaking down tissue that will become stronger after healing, while a larger degree (or the wrong kind) of pain is a sign you're about to injure yourself. Learning is the same, I think: you have to find just the right amount of pain.

I've had that before. When I first branched out beyond Core6k and Genki, I found the sentence structure used by 'harder' materials to be baffling (relative clauses, etc). I ended up dreading new cards and after a few weeks I suspended all those cards.

Quote:Drama I don't watch much so no idea on those.

YouTube can sometimes be good. For example, "Kekkon dekinai otoko" is on Youtube with good subtitles in both English and Japanese (how you get those subtitles into Subs2SRS I don't know).

vgambit Wrote:

tokyostyle Wrote:In fact I kind of laugh when vgambit craps all over literacy because literacy is the one thing that helped me rapidly improve my speaking. (I had brute-forced about 500 kanji before switching to RTK and pretty much brute forced the rest of that. I doubt I can recall a single story from it.)

I don't. I crap on the idea of RTK and nothing else as the first step to Japanese fluency, which is one of AJATT's core tenets. If you want to become fluent in 2 years, the only way is if you learn the stroke orders of 2000 kanji first. It sucks, it's a long, difficult grind, and you have nothing to show for all the progress you make as you go, unlike literally every other means of study.

I crap on people telling me that because I never finished RTK, that I have never actually studied Japanese. As if James Heisig was the first foreigner to ever learn Japanese.

You're still speaking out of bitter ignorance. RTK is difficult, but if done it works amazing well and is very useful as a first step in that with kanji comprehension and the formerly "insurmountable kanji wall" out of the way further Japanese language acquisition becomes a very smooth and intuitive process compared to without that knowledge. Frankly the only thing that sucks is your attitude. You spent 9 years with zero progress, and the issue here is definitely not the tools inherently not being effective. RTK may not be for everyone (too difficult, just don't like it), but it does work and is very efficient at what it does.

I personally advocate RTK-lite and then filling in extra kanji as you go along so you have a faster jump into tasting the language, but neither option as a first decision sucks.

ryuudou Wrote:You're still speaking out of bitter ignorance. RTK is difficult, but if done it works amazing well and is very useful as a first step in that with kanji comprehension and the formerly "insurmountable kanji wall" out of the way further Japanese language acquisition becomes a very smooth and intuitive process compared to without that knowledge.

What knowledge is that exactly. While this site and forum is built around RTK, I feel like people treat RTK like its something that will aid them in every sector of their Japanese learning. RTK at its core is meant for recall/production of kanji which seems like a fairly useless skill for people trying to get into Japanese. If you are living in Japan and need to write the kanji, then that's a different story. But after you realize that kanji can be built up from other characters and you start to recognize, or learn, what those other characters are; is there any point to the RTK? Unless you've been also studying kanji->keyword while doing keyword->kanji, RTK provides little in the way of helping you read that you might have just easily gained through flat out studying words/compounds.

(All of this coming from someone that never got past 400 in RTK and missed the N2 by 3 points a few years ago.)