Hi everyone,

I'll be traveling to Japan 5 months from now, and that's been a great excuse for me to finally learn Japanese. The problem is that I'm in a bit of a time crunch, and I'm torn about how to go about my learning.

I was turned on months ago to AJATT, but I had no practical use for a foreign language, outside my personal interest, so it sat on the back burner. Now that I know I'm going, I've learned the kana and am 200 Kanji through Heisig, but my math tells me that I'm going to have about a month of actual sentence-crunching time before I leave, which hardly seems sufficient for much of anything.

The Heisig-first approaches seem like a great way to build a solid foundation for learning Japanese over the long term, and I've had great success so far...but at this pace, it seems that it's likely to leave me only slightly better off when I get there than I would be if I went now.

Now, I don't expect to be fluent. Understanding is more important to me than producing, and I'd like to continue to learn after I return. But I guess I'm hoping that there's a way to go about learning that's somewhere between drilling specific travel-related questions/answers (hyper-specific but quick and immediately useful) and Heisig-fronted methods (broad and slow, but oriented towards fluency in the long run).

I was encouraged to discover the Listening-Reading approach, since that's sort of holistic, but few people seem to report much success with it. Can anyone here who's been down the road provide some advice or perspective?

Thanks in advance,
jef

You can do Heisig at any time and I think its fine if people let it wait. Since the method is made to go from radicals in a sequential order that isn't necessarily most common to least, you should in my opinion just learn the first 200-300 most common at least by applying the method yourself. As for sentences just add things from travelers guides, try various ones. yeah, the japanese in them is formal, mostly stiff, etc but you have two ways to approach a language. Either a road to fluency or towards enough capability to do tourism/chat.

Since this site is mostly AJATT devotees, there is disdain to people just wanting a little japanese or tourist japanese, but if I was going to japan when I started I would have gone for reaching tourist level at least and then worried about the long...LONG road to fluency after.

Focus on conversation more than witting for now, that would be my advice. Even if you only learn a few grammatical patterns, learn to use them completely rather than trying to learn new ones. Yeah, people sound weird using super simple japanese and Desu all over the place but it works. A lot of this depends n what you're going to Japan for too. Fun? Studying? Job?

Good luck.

if i was you, i would just immediately start using iKnow http://www.iknow.co.jp ... you probably won't be able to say a whole lot if you don't work on your grammar, but with a with a large vocabulary you can get the gist of everything really easily, you don't need to know how to write the kanji in order to read them... i suggest studying the essential grammar too though, you can get the sentences to do it with here http://www.guidetojapanese.com

I'd still stick to finishing RTK1. With 5 months you can do it at a very casual pace and still have plenty of time to learn other "survival" phrases. Went I went to Japan by myself at the beginning of this year I didn't know jack squat about the language except for a handful of random vocabulary and while most important things are in English knowing the RTK1 Kanji would have been a big help. No you won't be reading lots of compounds in 5 months but being able to look at all the Kanji around you and actually see meaningful key words instead of just randomly lines is a huge plus for two reasons:

1. The key words will often give you some pretty good hints as to what the word is regardless if you know how to say it or not.

and

2. It will allow you to remember and identify things with much greater ease.


A good example is for things like street signs. I remember trying to keep track of a certain little side street when I was walking around Shinjuku one night and the only way I could try to remember it was through pure visual memory of a bunch of random lines on the street sign. Well guess what happened a few hours later after seeing a million other Kanji that to me at the time looked exactly the same? Yep you guessed it, I completely forgot what the Kanji on the street sign looked like.

By knowing RTK1 I could have looked at the street sign and said "Ok that sign says Green Mountain Roadway". It would no longer just be random lines, it would actually become something that made sense to me and that I could identify and remember later regardless if I knew that the reading is "Midori Yama".


In terms of survival phrases I think the key is to learn the actual grammatical structures of key phrases instead of just an entire question/phrases pertaining to only one thing. For instance instead of learning how to say "Where is the bathroom?" as a complete phrase concentrate on learning how the actual "Where is?" part of the question works. Once you do that you can fill in ANY object you want to know the location of. Same goes for the rest of the basic question words.

Of course asking questions doesn't really matter all that much if you can't understand the answer lol.

You might want to try the RTK lite option. There's an "Alter sequence" script for Firefox that Woelpad wrote.
See http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...9#pid16019

That changes the sequence of RTK1 so that the more common kanji come up first. There's a whole discussion thread about it with more details, including directions for setting it to preserve the 200 characters you've already done. Anyway, the lite sequence might help you focus on the more immediately useful kanji, leaving you more time for the other study you want to do.

If I were you, I'd look into Pimsleur. It's pretty much tailor-made for a "travelling to country [x] soon and need to learn the basics of the language" sort of situation.

There are thirty lessons in each level, and three levels, for a total of ninety lessons, which, if you do a lesson a day, you can complete within three months (I personally took a bit longer as I listened to many of them twice). They're pretty much only going to teach you polite Japanese (i.e. the "-masu" form of verbs and such), but you'll pick up a lot of underlying grammar fairly intuitively.

A nice complement to Pimsleur is Japanese the Manga Way, which explains some of the finer grammatical points and deals with more colloquial Japanese than you'll find in Pimsleur.

And of course, if you have the time, bust out Heisig's Remembering the Hirigana/Katakana/Kanji (in that order, preferably).

I suggest lots of Katakana practice so you can read it quickly, it will really help a lot with menus and signs. Most menus are katakana English, a lot of them even have ライス (rice) in English, it's rather baffling.

RTK is not important for you now. It will be far more motivating to do 5 months of grammar and conversation so you can at least say some basic things. Maybe go through tae kim's guide, add those sentences to an srs like anki, as well as adding some stock tourist phrases. Try not to type many sentences up, just scour the internet for beginning Japanese sites and cut and paste those sentences into the srs. Pimsleur is a good choice for beginning speaking practice, and you can do it solo. Michel Thomas is a similar, audio- only course to consider.

Try to listen to a lot of beginner Japanese things, too, links to this stuff is sprinkled throughout this forum. Try watching some Japanese tv or movies, you won't understand anything, but you'll get used to the speed and rhythm. Learn the hiragana and katakana, and then practice writing and reading them a bit.

As for listening-reading, it's not really a good fit for Japanese because of it's reading difficulty. It is more geared towards European languages which share the alphabet. You could probably phonetically sound out a text in Spanish at a fast enough speed to follow the audio plus recognising many similar to English words, but you will get stuck on the first kanji trying it in Japanese. Better just to watch Japanese dramas, it's mostly conversation, you'll get visual clues which help you decipher meaning, and it's not crazy speech like in anime. You can find scripts for dramas in Japanese if you like and decipher them separately, but trying to learn from an audio book will be extremely unforgiving for a beginner.

In your situation I would probably skip both RtK and sentence mining. Both are ways to get really really good in a language over time, what you need is to get to basic comprehension quickly. Best way for that: Basic textbooks. The REALLY basic stuff, like Genki where you aren't taught vocabulary grammar and kanji you won't use, but useful phrases and how they work.

Using SRS with this is fine, get some important sentences from each chapter and put it in, but the main point is to learn how basic Japanese works fast. If you go through Genki 1 and 2, you should be good enough for really basic stuff in Japan... ordering food maybe, asking how to buy a train ticket.

Once you've gotten some chapters in, go to JapanesePod101.com and start with the beginner lessons. Like Pimsleur, they let you hear conversations and parse audio, understand stuff Japanese people say. Unlike Pimsleur, it's not boring as hell and there's actual context... it's real dialogs.

I second Tobberoth's suggestion on this one.

Also, try to find a way to listen to a lot of Japanese.

I'll third Tobberoth.

After 5 months of basic grammar and tourist phrases, learning kana, and then traveling in Japan, I think you'll be in a good position at that point to make a critical assessment regarding your true desire to learn a new language, and Japanese in particular.

I'll second the seconding, in effect being 4th, as 2^2 is 4.

I recommend Pimsleur -- that's what got me started on Japanese way back when.

Wow, almost as many suggestions as there are responses...! Thank you all very much for your input. I was feeling discouraged when I posted, and half expected a few "if you're not hardcore, don't even bother" replies, but your constructive feedback has given me renewed hope...both in Japanese and in mankind.

So, I poked around with iKnow for a bit, and discovered two things:
1. It's pretty cool.
2. I remembered the vocabulary words that involved kanji I had already been exposed to via Heisig/this site far more quickly and easily than ones I had not. I really didn't expect that, but there it is.

So I'm thinking that RtK Lite may be just the thing to crash through before I start focusing on the other fine suggestions here. The Tae Kim stuff looks promising, and the idea of SRSing practical, need-to-know stuff from a language course (rather than mining from pop culture in general) seems pretty sound.

I'm familiar enough with hiragana and katakana that I can slowly sound my way through words. Is it worthwhile investing more time specifically to speed this up?

derthnada Wrote:I'm familiar enough with hiragana and katakana that I can slowly sound my way through words. Is it worthwhile investing more time specifically to speed this up?

I wouldn't suggest spending too much time on actively practicing kana. Rather, use other learning materials written in kana, and you'll get better at reading them without even trying.

Tobberoth Wrote:...go to JapanesePod101.com and start with the beginner lessons. Like Pimsleur, they let you hear conversations and parse audio, understand stuff Japanese people say. Unlike Pimsleur, it's not boring as hell and there's actual context... it's real dialogs.

I agree. Several friends I knew loved it immediately upon starting it, and the lessons are short enough not to overwhelm you.

If you don't have an iPod, you can still just download iTunes and listen to the lessons on your computer. If you have an iPod, you can sync the podcasts from your computer (you have to download them to your computer first with iTunes) to your iPod. With your iPod, any lesson or audio loops by default (I don't remember if you can change this), so you can start a lesson and listen to it repeatedly while doing anything else.

BTW, it is not only listening, but there are gaps in the audio for you to practice out loud, so you can self-test. Each lesson has a specific theme, which is great from a real-world learning perspective!

Agree, just using materials in kana will speed you up. For your short-term goal of having an enjoyable visit to Japan, I wouldn't even (for now) spend time practicing writing kana, nor would I do RtK light--just having keywords for a bunch of kanji isn't going to help you really figure out sentences you see, and even if they could, at that level of knowledge the amount of time spent trying to puzzle out sentences would be bad while traveling.

Focus on study materials in kana, and traveler's japanese/basic grammar. they'll be what you use the most in your travels, and will get you a good base if you decide afterwards that you want to really learn the language well.

If you must learn some kanji, make them very practical ones like days of the week (for store signs) and basic food related ones like cow :-) If you have any food allergies, you might want to learn the words and kanji for those items if at all possible.

I spent about the same amount of time studying before going to Japan and it didn't seem to help me at all. People don't talk the way they teach in books. Getting your tongue to work right so they will understand you also will take time.

Getting really good at katakana helps alot as it is everywhere and generally English words. I seem to be the only one who thinks this, but use this time to complete RTK. Then look around at signs to see how many kanji you recognize. It will be fun. It will be a good foundation for long term study.

bodhisamaya Wrote:I spent about the same amount of time studying before going to Japan and it didn't seem to help me at all. People don't talk the way they teach in books. Getting your tongue to work right so they will understand you also will take time.

Getting really good at katakana helps alot as it is everywhere and generally English words. I seem to be the only one who thinks this, but use this time to complete RTK. Then look around at signs to see how many kanji you recognize. It will be fun. It will be a good foundation for long term study.

Can't say I understand your thinking here, mostly because my expeirence differ.

I moved to Japan in 2007 for a year to study Japanese in Tokyo. A friend of mine from Sweden joined me. When we came to Japan, I was at about JLPT4 level. He was... well, he could read hiragana and ask for the time. Safe to say, we had very different experiences of how hard it was to get around etc. I could order in Japanese, he could not. I could ask for basic directions, he could not. If your goal is to speak politics with a Japanese person, of course it won't be enough, but for traveling in Japan? It sure makes a big difference. Doing all of RtK however? Completely useless.

I could ask some simple questions but didn't understand the responses. My pronunciation was so bad often my questions were not understood as well.

One amazing thing RTK does for you is make Japanese seem approachable. In just two months one can learn to recognize and write all the kanji required by Japanese students. Spend a few months more and learn the most common readings for those kanji from RTK2. It is fun to look around and not be intimidated by all that kanji around you. Trying to speak and understand it even with a couple years studying behind you is tough and deflating at times.

I'd say put RTK on the back burner, at least for the moment.... What you'll need is survival Japanese.... Not sure what level you're at, but here's the approach I'd take...

I'd:
1). Get hiragana and katakana down.
2). Learn a few basic kanji - like types of meats/other food things, the kanji/numerous words for bathroom, kanji/vocab for common landmarks (park, hospital, city hall, station,etc) that will help you out while you're navigating.
3). As other people have said, learn the things you'll be asked in a restaurant, what you'll need to buy a train ticket, how to ask for a map, how to ask which train you should get on, etc.

Then start filling in the blanks with basic conversation stuff. A good beginner textbook should be able to help you with all of this. NHK also has a beginner TV series that covers some of this stuff... it's called Erin ga chosen - Nihongo dekimasu (エリンが挑戦・日本語できます） and it's pretty easy to find for download.

If you have time, try to learn the kanji for the places you'll be visiting - cities, station names, etc. Yeah, there's English signage in most places, but occasionally you'll end up with a fare table or something that's not in romaji. And it makes things a bit quicker if you can pick up on the Japanese.

Since it's here, I'll comment-

If I was going to travel to Japan in the next couple of months, I wouldn't even bother with kanji and just go full sentence mining and total immersion with emphasis on being able to read common everyday things. Phauna's Japanese sign site is great. To go along with that, after a while I'd probably find a tutor who would teach my just by talking a lot. Like- everyday for a week sit down and talk exclusively in Japanese for an hour.

Ha, you've guilted me into doing more. I've got a backlog of pics but I'm getting lazy.

You know, we've all got lots of advice, but we never did ask how long you'd be in Japan, Derthnada. Are you going to be in Tokyo for two days on your way to somewhere else, or are you moving to some remote location as an English teacher for a year or three? Just curious -- seems like you've got plenty of advice now either way.

I came across this a little late, but I also agree with what Tobberoth said. When I went to Japan last year, I found that the survival phrases series at Japanesepod101.com were worth listening to, especially the series they do on riding trains and subways, taxis, and especially buses. And yeah, I already knew some Japanese, I had just started up again after a 2-3 year break. But it helped me knock the rust off.

I went to a lot of smaller cities, so I rode a lot of buses. Those lessons totally saved my butt. And that's all stuff that tends *not* to show up in traditional textbooks.

Thanks again for all your advice. Sorry I forgot to mention: I'll be traveling for pleasure, staying about 2 weeks. I know, spending 5 months cramming for 2 measly weeks is kinda silly from a practical standpoint, but...like I said, the trip is as much about the destination as it is an excuse/motivator to learn Japanese to begin with.