Tobberoth Wrote:I don't think you need to include genki chapter, why would you want to learn that? You're learning Japanese, not how Genki is laid out You're focusing a bit much on Genki I'd say, IMO it isn't even a particularly good textbook (finishing it won't take you to JLPT2 level, so you will need to use other material later anyway).

I thought about using genki chapters to tag vocabulary: Tomorrow I am going to review chapter 14, so I concentrate my review on vocabulary tagged with chapter 14. I plan to use Japan Times Intermediate Textbook after Genki, but its a long way until I will be able of doing that

Tobberoth Wrote:As soon as you feel you can, stop adding English on the answer side. I don't think it's detrimental, but it's good to rely as little as possible on English so when you're done with Genki 1 or so, maybe you should start looking in various japanese dictionaries like sanseido.net, see if you understand enough to use those definitions instead of english translations.

Best would be to have a pre-defined list of a textbook I use and put it in database, then set its data into relations with other informations and finally manipulate it for export into anki. Looking up a word in dictionaries seems a bit time-taking.

JLPT 2 is about 6-7000 words. I'll try to break down JLPT word list into a word list that groups vocabulary. Sometimes new words are combination of old words. A nice reading is "Building word power in japanese" from Timothy J. Vance: For example prefix "cho-" (super-) is used in "cho-omoshiroi" (super interesting), "cho-kantan" (super simple), "cho-baka" (super stupid).

jokoto Wrote:For example prefix "cho-" (super-) is used in "cho-omoshiroi" (super interesting), "cho-kantan" (super simple), "cho-baka" (super stupid).

Well, those aren't words. 超 is a word in itself, you can put it in-front of everything. One should be slightly careful with it though, sounds horrible when it's overused (see early Naruto to get a geist of it, a character in one of the early arcs uses 超 in pretty much all of his sentences).

Yo, I'd also aim for jlpt1. If you were studying in a different way, where kanji was not a priority and you did not had anki, jlpt1 would be something for the very long term.

But the way we study here. With kanji first and memorizing tons of vocabulary makes us better suited for the jlpt than everybody else.

I've put my hands in jlpt2 tests some time ago and they were pretty easy. But I still cannot speak much japanese. And still I don't know what will come first. JLPT1 or oral fluency. I looked some JLPT1 tests and they indeed are in a different level than jlpt2, but I could already do some of the questions.

I feel that the JLPT can get a good measure of fluency for traditional students, but not for us with our strong focus on literacy.

I'm in the party that says: Forget grammar. Focus on vocabulary. Its simply a much huger task to do. It will also improve the retention of your kanji.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I'm in the party that says: Forget grammar. Focus on vocabulary. Its simply a much huger task to do. It will also improve the retention of your kanji.

Just to provide some balance, I'm pretty much in the opposite camp and say I'd focus on the grammar above anything else. There are fewer "points" that require memorizing, and each one gives you the ability to say potentially thousands of sentences you couldn't say before. Learning one vocabulary word is, by itself, much less useful.

Besides, for me the biggest difficulty in speaking Japanese is not remembering the words you need, but putting them together in such a way as to correctly state what it is you want to say. Getting on that early has to make sense.

I think one should learn how to walk before they can run.

Edit: one should learn how to crawl before they can walk too^^l

mentat_kgs Wrote:I'm in the party that says: Forget grammar. Focus on vocabulary.

NightSky Wrote:I'm pretty much in the opposite camp and say I'd focus on the grammar above anything else.

How about 'everything in moderation' ? ;-)

There are good reasons for doing all of RTK up front (logical ordering, relatively constrained size of task, etc), but I do occasionally wonder reading these forums if it doesn't sometimes make people more inclined to the "focus on one thing" approach to the rest of the language, where those reasons don't really apply.

As a rule of thumb, work on whatever you're worst at. If you read stuff and you know the meanings of all the nouns and verbs but you're guessing about what their relations to each other in a sentence are, time for a little grammar work. If you encounter lots of sentences where you know it's saying "as soon as the X began to Y the Z Ked" but X,Y,Z and K are all mysteries, do some vocab. And so on. This also applies to listening vs reading and all the rest of it.

(This posting was brought to you by Captain Obvious.)

tokyostyle Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:I party says: Forget grammar. Focus vocabulary. simply much huge task. improve retention kanji.

Hmm, maybe you have a point ... but you do sound kind of funny.

That's still not grammar-free, though. This is: "I focus forget grammar huge improve kanji much party retention say simple task vocabulary".