Assuming Vocab is already Ankied and not counted.
I know their webpage says 9 class hours, which I assume doesn't count homework time.
OTOH the vocab thing about and from what I hear classroom time in Language courses are about as sloggish and time inefficient as in most other types of courses.

I've read a thread here that discussed it in days, but that is pretty useless without knowing how long these days are.

So based on experiences how many ours did you put into doing a typical Genki chapter plus workbook not counting vocab in terms of self study

However long it takes you to do the workbook exercices without having to think about it. You could spend one week on one lesson and then quiz yourself the week after as if you were taking an exam.

About 20 hours, following the typical university course's structure of 4 hours of class time, plus homework, plus self-study time, at one chapter every 2 weeks.

I study a lot every day, so I can easily do a chapter in 3-4 days. That's 1-2 days for vocabulary, grammar, and textbooks activities, then 1 day for the workbook activities, and one last day to study the kanji from the reading section, do the reading, and reviewing.

Honestly, I don't think about it terms of hours, so it's kind of hard to say how many it takes. I just sit down and do these things I mentioned. I do skip some of the more boring textbook and workbook exercises, reading and listening questions, as well as the writing task at the end of the reading section.

If I focus 100% of your attention, it probably doesn't take more than 10 hours to actually DO the activities. But if you take into account the time I spend working on the vocabulary, reading grammar, and adding kanji, I don't really know exactly. It may still take about 10 hours or less if you don't take into account the time I spend adding kanji.

That being said, I think it's a good idea to review some of the textbook exercises for 2-3 days in a row if you can help it. They become incredibly easy to do once you've done them once. It takes like 30 minutes, maybe a little more but not much.


One thing I forgot to mention is that I drill the textbook exercises that come with audio tracks a whole bunch of times in a row until it feels somewhat comfortable. Since I don't have a practice partner, I try to focus a little more on drills. I think making your own sentences is a nice alternative though and might hellp with some of the vocabulary. So yeah, consider that part of the routine I mentioned above.

Keep in mind that I'm not to worried about production at this point. I just want to have a reasonable grasp of the grammar topics and vocabulary to be able to watch anime and read visual novels. My real goal is to get to that n3-n2 level in order to really get used to the languange and learn a lot through massive amounts of input. I want to develop this instinct that we have for what sounds right or wrong without having to think about grammar rules for the most part, so I probably won't work much on production before that. I think trying to work on production by myself too early might even be counter productive... I know I won't be able to say most of the things I want to right now, so I'd rather write and speak when I can actually do that in a more meaningful way.

(2015-11-29, 9:51 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: I study a lot every day, so I can easily do a chapter in 3-4 days. That's 1-2 days for vocabulary, grammar, and textbooks activities, then 1 day for the workbook activities, and one last day to study the kanji from the reading section, do the reading, and reviewing.
...

If I focus 100% of your attention, it probably doesn't take more than 10 hours to actually DO the activities. But if you take into account the time I spend working on the vocabulary, reading grammar, and adding kanji, I don't really know exactly. It may still take about 10 hours or less if you don't take into account the time I spend adding kanji.

10 hours including vocab? Any idea of how much of that is actually vocab. It seems to be about 80 per chapter and as you are not focused on production I am guessing 3 or 4 hours?

In my "study plan" I separate out vocab from text and other work. I might get the vocab from the books but I figure I'll be learning them via Anki.

I had assumed about 12 hour per chapter not counting vocab.
I figured If I Anki the vocab and I got the RTK production done, I can assume the same 6 hours of D&G and 3 for R&W that they assume for class. That what I save from having vocab done beforehand and not having to sit by and watch classmates derp would make up for not counting homework. Toss in another 3 hours for review. Granted that doesn't include the workbook. Perhaps another 3. Which would make a easy to plan 3 hours a day for 5 days.

Based on the above estimates, perhaps I've overestimated things. I've read of some people who knock off a chapter a day, I assume they are putting in full time hours though.

(2015-11-30, 3:35 am)Dudeist Wrote: I've read of some people who knock off a chapter a day, I assume they are putting in full time hours though.

I know of universities that offer intensive courses that cover a chapter every 2 days, but again that assumes full-time study and works out to about 18 hours of study and review per chapter.  If you're starting at zero and studying grammar, kanji, vocabulary and writing, you can't rush.  A chapter a day doesn't seem feasible unless you're just filling in holes in your grammar knowledge.

At my university, Japanese 101 did 1-2 chapters of Genki per week, classes were 50min 3x/week

(2015-11-30, 3:35 am)Dudeist Wrote: 10 hours including vocab? Any idea of how much of that is actually vocab. It seems to be about 80 per chapter and as you are not focused on production I am guessing 3 or 4 hours?

In my "study plan" I separate out vocab from text and other work. I might get the vocab from the books but I figure I'll be learning them via Anki.

I had assumed about 12 hour per chapter not counting vocab.
I figured If I Anki the vocab and I got the RTK production done, I can assume the same 6 hours of D&G and 3 for R&W that they assume for class. That what I save from having vocab done beforehand and not having to sit by and watch classmates derp would make up for not counting homework. Toss in another 3 hours for review. Granted that doesn't include the workbook. Perhaps another 3. Which would make a easy to plan 3 hours a day for 5 days.

Based on the above estimates, perhaps I've overestimated things. I've read of some people who knock off a chapter a day, I assume they are putting in full time hours though.

I think it's about 50 words per chapter, not 80. And honestly, I don't think Anki has helped me that much with Genki vocabulary at all. I feel repeating the words to myself and perhaps coming up with mnemonics to remember at least parts of some words (not all of them) is actually more efficient.

That's just to get started with the unit and help it stick a little bit... but there's only so much you can learn from vocab lists. You need to do the exercises and get some contextual practice and real examples to help it stick. There's a lot of seemingly random vocab in there that you may or may not remember, especially at the end of the chapter (which may be slightly helpful in the classroom, but is horrible for self study). If you don't remember it, that's fine - you'll often stumble upon some of these words again in the following chapters, so that helps.

If something doesn't stick, you can't blame yourself. It's probably just lack of exposure because it's only used once or twice in the chapter. You can make a little more effort for certain words, but I wouldn't do that for all words. And by the way, a lot of the vocabulary may turn out to be stuff that you already know or loan words, so that makes things easier (i.e. it's not actually 50 words).

I honestly wouldn't worry about how many hours it takes though. This varies from person to person and whether you skip certain activities. 3 hours a day is great, so I don't think it matters how long it takes to finish the chapter because you'll be doing really well with this much dedication and eventually learn all you need to. Unless you want to finish it super fast, in which case you can put in as much time as needed.

You can easily finish a chapter in one day if you concentrate. The only problem is that you still need to review it later for at least 2-3 days so that you don't lose much of what you've learned in the long run. It's like adding 100-200 kanji in a sitting with RTK, it becomes kind of difficult to review everything and keep up the pace. As long as you actually review what you've learned though, I think how fast you finish the chapter doesn't really matter. You just need exposure for a couple of days in a row to help some of that stick - the rest will come with time, i.e. more and more input.

I would recommend at least 2 days per chapter though, then you can just quickly review it for 2 more days as you do the following chapter. This way, you won't have to review more than a single chapter as a part of your schedule. You can review previous chapters, but that'll be mostly extra practice.

The nice thing about moving on is that some things take a little while to learn. The -te form is a great example - I was doing okay at first, but it's a real pain in the ass. But then you get to see other forms that require you to use it, such as -te + "whatever" or the casual past form which is identical except you say -ta instead. So moving on in Genki 1 actually helped me. It hasn't helped me that much in Genki 2, but that's okay.

I thought a chapter a day was a bit much also to be honest. Just reporting what other people have said.

As for the 80 words, 1700 [their numbers] divided by 23... OK it's about 75 but still.

I am not so much asking in terms of rushing it. I am just a but OCDish when it comes to planning things out and I like to know how long things will take. If it takes 30 hours, it takes 30 hours, if it takes 10 it takes 10.

Granted I am still RTKing but I love ANKI. I think I am going to marry it. With Kanji at least it is almost magical how even more difficult ones and ones that make no sense seem to fall into place. Granted I have to mark even a mature card wrong once in a while but still.

You're probably taking into account the vocabulary at the end of the chapters which can be VERY hard to remember. They're rarely used and you have to go out of your way to do so, so it's no better than learning this sort of stuff as you see it in context later on. Recalling train related vocabulary when you don't even take a train daly is not easy at all.

Also, they throw a whole bunch of new  words at you in the reading section that you only see there. They also teach you new kanji for words you don't even know sometimes. Honestly, I don't think worrying about this sort of stuff is a good idea. What you need is more proper exposure to that language and if possible more remarkable as well. Learning how to use a word is very different from memorizing it and having no clue how it's used.

Extensive reading takes care of a lot of stuff in language learning, but that's not easy to do when you're a basic level learner of Japanese. You'll learn a lot of words almost effortlessly once you start reading a lot. I remember someone on reddit mentioned that he/she couldn't recall certain words in Genki no matter how much they crammed.  But it turns out this person could easily remember it later on as they moved on  in the learning process.

(2015-11-30, 6:55 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: You're probably taking into account the vocabulary at the end of the chapters which can be VERY hard to remember. They're rarely used and you have to go out of your way to do so, so it's no better than learning this sort of stuff as you see it in context later on. Recalling train related vocabulary when you don't even take a train daly is not easy at all.

Also, they throw a whole bunch of new  words at you in the reading section that you only see there. They also teach you new kanji for words you don't even know sometimes. Honestly, I don't think worrying about this sort of stuff is a good idea. What you need is more proper exposure to that language and if possible more remarkable as well. Learning how to use a word is very different from memorizing it and having no clue how it's used.

Extensive reading takes care of a lot of stuff in language learning, but that's not easy to do when you're a basic level learner of Japanese. You'll learn a lot of words almost effortlessly once you start reading a lot. I remember someone on reddit mentioned that he/she couldn't recall certain words in Genki no matter how much they crammed.  But it turns out this person could easily remember it later on as they moved on  in the learning process.

How can I do extensive reading when I have 0 vocab and 0 grammar. I mean I gotta start somewhere.

Also as my primary goal is JLPT and not native material, I figure there will be plenty of words I am going to have to stuff in the brain regardless of if I see them in the wild or not.

I also figure that even if things are difficult, some of it will settle down when I get to the native phase, but trying to get a start on it can make the reading process.

Aren’t there many people who just barrel through the core decks? I hope I can be one of those people. Having to look up every second word or trying to guess through context every second word will get very old very fast.


I was actually going to start a thread on vocab. I have multiple questions.

(2015-12-01, 3:17 am)Dudeist Wrote: Aren’t there many people who just barrel through the core decks? I hope I can be one of those people. Having to look up every second word or trying to guess through context every second word will get very old very fast.

There are, I was one of those people. It's pretty effective and opened the door to native material for me. On the other hand it's a very boring and it takes a long time to complete, which might be a huge turn off for some people.

(2015-12-01, 3:17 am)Dudeist Wrote: How can I do extensive reading when I have 0 vocab and 0 grammar. I mean I gotta start somewhere.

Also as my primary goal is JLPT and not native material, I figure there will be plenty of words I am going to have to stuff in the brain regardless of if I see them in the wild or not.

I also figure that even if things are difficult, some of it will settle down when I get to the native phase, but trying to get a start on it can make the reading process.

Aren’t there many people who just barrel through the core decks? I hope I can be one of those people. Having to look up every second word or trying to guess through context every second word will get very old very fast.


I was actually going to start a thread on vocab. I have multiple questions.

I never said that extensive reading is a good idea if you have 0 vocabulary and 0 grammar. What I said is that not recalling a few unremarkable words that you find in Genki 1 and 2 won't hold you back much. Extensive reading will take care of that kind of vocabulary that fails to stick because it turned out to be useless or too difficult for some reason.

I don't really know about Core decks because I haven't tried them yet. They're probably relatively efficient. The idea of going through extremely common vocabulary appeals to me as well, so I'll give it a try either before or after Tobira. It's also sentences, not just a word list, right? Because that makes a huge difference. (I don't know how to set it up exactly, but that's not an issue right now.)

Genki vocabulary decks on the word hand... well, I didn't like that approach much. I had to constantly delete words that I'd already internalized, since these words become a chore to go through. Unlike kanji, many words you'll become "yours" in no time and revewing them in Anki is probably a waste of time.

Also, many words that I never use in the exercises always pop up when I added all the vocabulary. Yes, I'm looking at you, special expressions section at the end of the chapters. And there's yet one final issue - going from an English word without any context to Japanese can feel pretty unnatural and you'll even end up making mistakes even when you do know the word sometimes.

Don't let me tell you what to do though... you can still give it a try. If it works well for you and you have enough patience, be my guest. But I still think reviewing Genki vocabulary yourself whenever you deem necessary is far better.

Words are for that matter Kanji that "are mine" [Kinda like 1, 2 3 etc for example] never bothered me much. If you mark them as easy they soon enough disappear unless you have a smaller max interval. I find many Kanji I got down so cold I sometimes have to actually think about the story, the link is straight keyword to writing the Kanji.

I was under the impression that Core was word to word with example sentences. At least that is the way I hope it is. Quite frankly aside from the first time encountering the word I'd rather not bother with sentences. Plenty of that will come with native material exposure. I read a few of those sentences in translation when looking through the shared decks and there is something about them that bugs me for some reason.

(2015-12-01, 1:55 pm)Dudeist Wrote: I was under the impression that Core was word to word with example sentences. At least that is the way I hope it is. Quite frankly aside from the first time encountering the word I'd rather not bother with sentences.

You can set it up however you want in anki.  Core certainly has words and english equivalents as well as sentences, and native audio for the words and sentences.  So you can format the cards however you like.