Hi! A newbie here, ready to begin this long journey.

So I've decided to finally take the first step and start studying Japanese for real. I'll be stuck in the military for a year and since there's not really much to do on your free time besides sports and gaming I thought "why not". Even after gym/whatever I'll still have a couple hours spare all week. I've mastered kana and my RtK1 came yesterday so I'm good to go. Here's some background to help you guys review my plan.

For several weeks I've read about the language, its attributes and how it differs from my other languages (Swedish, French, Russian) and different methods people have used to get themselves to where they are now. From experience I can say I tend to intuitively pick up grammar quite fast and have a tendency to learn the language as it is and not via translation as I pick up patterns. As a result I tend to have a good reading comprehension even with few clues to go with. If what I've read is anything to go by I should be quite successful with Japanese as its grammar is really something else and arguably favors me. There's a flipside to my learning habits though. I survive with so little that acquiring vocabulary becomes tedious as I don't necessarily even notice foreign words when I read text with context. In short, by the time I can effortlessly read simple literature like Roald Dahl I can't produce anything (except grammar). That's why this time I have decided to imbue myself with vocabulary while going through the normal recommended material.

I also want to shift to J-J as quickly as possible since I feel like only going by RtK and Tae Kim won't suit me as without knowledge on kanji readings I'm forced to use both English keywords and Japanese when encountering text. As I said, I'm used to process languages as their own entities. I might also get lazy after reaching a level of vague understanding and will never learn to read aloud. This is why I want to learn at least one reading of each kanji as I learn to write it. It doesn't really matter if I only learn one at this point. As long as I can read a kanji in any way I don't need to leave my reading blank when I see one. It doesn't matter if the reading in question isn't the right one for the situation either since everyone makes these errors while learning and you learn the most by making such errors, right?

So here's my plan:

I'll be using

Standard RtK with the Anki deck w/ user-chosen stories
Wrightak's RtK deck for the Japanese keywords
Tae Kim's guide for general study
Core 2000 Anki decks for extra vocab practice
JfBP1 for extra reference and general material

I'll study about 20 kanjis daily from the RtK and review the due kanjis. At a different time of the day I'll study the readings of these newly learned kanjis from the Wrightak's deck and review the due readings for that deck. I want to use both decks separately and not just include a Japanese key word to the RtK cards so that I can fully focus on the RtK method with every new kanji. This will, of course, double the amount of kanjis to review but extra reviewing shouldn't be a bad thing. Right? The Core 2k is also a daily thing. I wish to shift to J-J after the core 2k to get rid of unnecessary English but if you guys feel like it isn't optimal or realistic I can go for 6k instead. For the actual language study I'll follow Tae Kim from three to four times a week (I need some time for the other languages as well ya'know). I'll look at the JfBP whenever I have time. I also plan to utilize native media and apps like HelloTalk as I gain some vocabulary.


What do you guys think? Am I in for a steep hill with all the work or does it sound sensible? I'm not yet sure how much of a pain reviewing becomes in a long run and whether I should create another deck or two combining all the different aspects (vocab, grammar, sentences, kanji, maybe listening ex.) that I fill up as I go and learn.


As an interesting side note. I'll be doing all the writing (in Japanese only) with my left hand. One of the motives to learn Japanese and not just improve on my other languages was to perform a human subject research on myself about how learning and using a language with your non-dominant hand differs from normally acquired language if at all. That's why the language had to have a new set of characters and system. I'll be setting up a blog for keeping a log on my progress and such shortly.

E: Sorry if this should be in another section instead. I thought neither this or the Japanese language area quite fit so I just went for it.

Doing RtK with English and Japanese keywords at the same time sounds like a lot of work, but if you've got the time go for it. Your plan sounds very time-intensive, though.
I've never actually looked at Japanese for Busy People but I'm under the impression most people aren't fans of it. As far as elementary textbooks go, I found Genki to be very accessible and clear, and more complete than others, but it's got its detractors too.
If what you're looking for is grammar reference, though, the classics are the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series. There are also J-J grammar dictionaries aimed at students, if you're interested in that later on.

I wouldn't mess with Japanese keyword for RTK as a first-time learner. It's a great approach for the intermediate learner picking up RTK late in the game, but for the first time learner what I would recommend is to study RTK with English (or whatever your native language might be) keywords; spend the rest of your time studying Japanese with audio and/or kana resources until you finish RTK. Then you have some interesting times ahead integrating your kanji knowledge and your language knowledge - I'd make a point of ensuring at this point that your vocab deck includes at least one word using every kanji in RTK.

There's nothing exactly wrong with your plan as written, but if you're on any timeline at all, you want to avoid redundant study. I'm also not a big fan of the 'transition to J-J as soon as possible' theory... honestly, 'dictionaryese' is it's own special subset of the language that requires a fair bit of effort to learn. Surely it's worth consulting J-J dictionaries first once you can comfortably read your average textbook in Japanese, but I'm not convinced it's worth your while to learn to read a J-J dictionary as a beginner. I consult J-J dictionaries quite a lot and even as an advanced student (I passed JLPT N1 last December), I still find that once I comprehend a definition thoroughly I still internally translate what I've read to the best approximate English term I can think of. When learning a new word it's very natural to find a native-language parallel. IMO, the way to integrate a word is to read it in context a lot, not to worry about whether you read its definition in L1 or L2.

Speaking of which, I don't see any real reading in your plan. There are graded readers (which I never used, but if I had more money or knew about them sooner, I probably would have), and there's also the 'Read Real Japanese' pair of books. I found that 'Read Real Japanese (fiction)' really advanced my ability to read, well, fiction. I hear the non-fiction volume is equally effective for reading non-fiction.

Don't miss out on audio practice either. Erin's Challenge https://www.erin.ne.jp/en/ is a great supplement to any written course of learning. If you use Genki or such, you might have a companion CD, but if you use Tae Kim there's very little audio (only the kana pronunciations and maybe a few vocab in the kana pages). Learning the real sound of the language early on is critical - it's easy to form an idealized notion of Japanese pronunciation based on listening to individual kana pronunciations, but the real language is quite a bit more complex. The sooner you learn how the written and the spoken actually relate when used in whole words and whole sentences, the easier your life will be. (You can look up devoiced consonants and pitch accent with a few searches if you want to learn the details on why individual kana pronunciations and actual usage don't line up quite precisely.)

Good luck on your quest!

A few points:

1. Core2K and Tae Kim both use Kanji in a different order than RtK. So, early on, most of the Kanji you come across will be new to you.

Studying words with Kanji that you haven't yet studied with RtK kinda defeats the purpose of using RtK. RtK is meant to familiarize you with Kanji before your encounter them in vocabulary.

That's why the optimal way to do RtK is up front: finish it before you do anything else. This is also the recommendation of the method's creator, James Heisig.

2. Most people (myself included) regard isolated vocabulary reviews as less effective than sentence reviews. From your post, it seems like you're an experienced language learner, and that you have not done individual vocab drills in the past. Imo, you shouldn't start now. Use sentences instead.

3. The Core2K deck is meant to contain the most common 2000 words used in Japanese. However, from what I could ascertain, it was put together over three decades ago, and it used Japanese newspapers as the statistical sample. So it doesn't really contain the most common 2000 words of today's everyday Japanese. A better deck is Nayr's 5000 sentence deck. It has the most common 5000 words...in today's Japanese.

4. As for Wrightak's deck, the 2000 words you'll be learning by doing that weren't selected by how common they are. Fact is, a lot of the Kanji in RtK don't show up in the most common Japanese words. So, by doing Wrightak's deck, you'll be learning as many as 1000 words that aren't very common, and you'll be learning them in isolation, without any context except the English translation (which is just an approximation of the meaning; words, especially less common words, rarely correspond to each other exactly between languages - as I'm sure you know this).

In my experience, language learning is best done in incremental steps (common Kanji, vocab, grammar points first, then a little less common, etc. etc.). RtK violates that principle by making you learn 2000 Kanji up front, many of them pretty uncommon, but there are reasons for doing RtK anyway. I've done RtK too. However, I don't see a reason for also tacking on a vocab deck, with a bunch of rare words in it. If you want to do Wrightak's deck, at least pick and choose which cards you study, suspend the ones that aren't common, and the ones where the meaning and the usage of the word isn't perfectly clear from the English translation alone (since that's all you have to go by with that deck).

5. Imo, an even better idea would be to not bother with Wrightak's deck, just skip right to Nayr's 5000 deck (after finishing RtK). The way to get that deck is to search for its dedicated thread, here on forum.koohii. The thread also contains a bunch of stats on how many individual Kanji there are in it, how common the words in it are, etc. You seem like a guy who likes to do his research, so you'll probably find that stuff illuminating. I think once you do go through those stats, it'll also back up some of the stuff I posted here, with hard data.

[ファブリス]

Tuutti Wrote:Standard RtK with the Anki deck w/ user-chosen stories

If it's any of the decks I've seen those stories are stolen from Kanji Koohii. Just in case you don't know about the website already, there are plenty of alternative stories shared in the Study section.

I think you're trying to do too many very challenging things all at the same time:

1. Learning to write kanji with your left hand, if you've never used it for writing before and if you've never written kanji before, will be very difficult. Kanji stroke order is designed for right-handed writing, and is used even by left-handers, which means that it's even more awkward than writing English left-handed. If you don't follow the correct stroke order you'll have trouble getting the balance right. If you're not fairly ambidextrous to begin with, your left-handed writing will probably never look good, and if you try to switch to writing Japanese with your right hand later, you may well become extremely confused. This sounds like a terrible idea
2. Memorizing the meanings and how to write 2200 kanji is not a simple task; it can be done quickly with Heisig, but the foundation of his approach is to do those two things in isolation, before moving on to learning to read
3. The problem of learning the reading for each kanji as you go is that each kanji usually has at least 3 readings (some have a lot more), and how you read it changes depending on a variety of factors. The very first kanji you'll learn is "one" 一, which has the following readings: ichi, itsu, hito, hitotsu, kazu, i, itt, iru, katsu, kadzu, hajime, ten, hi, makoto. None of this will help you to read anything

If your desire is to learn to read, write, speak, produce, and be able to communicate in Japanese, then I would suggest the following approach:

1. Learn the kana--done
2. Do RTK 1. You should be able to do get it done in a couple of months moving at a reasonable pace. You'll have to maintain what you've learned by continuing to do flashcards for the kanji while you move on to:
3. Study grammar, start reading as much as you can, and practice listening and speaking as much as possible
4. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Small note: the plural of kanji is kanji.