Quote:Thanks for your post. Well, yes, I have checked some of the audiobooks. The problem is that I'm a beginner when it comes to sentences and listening practice. I've reached frame #1100 in RTK1 and that's about all "Japanese" I know. So maybe those audiobooks are too hard for me? That "boring content" looked a lot easier, and they have also got vocabulary lists for the texts.

There is a huge disagreement about this topic. Some defend graded material, some defend natural "difficult" material.

This is because there is an hypothesis, called the "natural order hypothesis", which states that you learn things in a certain order.
And that's true.
Some things are easier to learn in the beginning, some things not.
You can't hope to get everything right, right from the start.

Until here, everybody agrees. So some time ago, people started to create specific material for learners. These material are easier to comprehend, slow paced, structured, etc.

But in my view and the view of a few others, these are the path of failure.

Real language is different from the language presented on this stuff. It changes more, it has defects, it has ambiguity, slang, it is faster, some people have bad pronunciation, etc.
If you are not taking that in consideration, you are doomed to fail.

Also, you can get graded input from authentic material. All you have to do is focus on what you understand. Don't try to get it all right. You don't need to understand all words from a certain text. Chose a goal for the day.

For instance: Identify 20 new words/day.
20 words/day, in 2 years 20 * 365 * 2 are 14600 words.

14,600 authentic words.

You'll soon notice that 20 words/day is very hard in the beginning, but it gets easier after some time.

Grammar comes naturally.

Katzumoto said something about this too.
He divides the levels of listening in 4 stages and this is how I think of them:

1) The gibberish stage.
All you hear is gibberish. It takes some time to get familiar with the sounds. The only way to get past of it is to listen a lot.

2) The word picking stage.
You are more used to the sounds of the language. You'll often recognise words you know.

3) The sentence picking stage.
You are used to understand words. You finally start to understand full sentences. Not all sentences, just a few.

4) The word quest stage.
You are used to understand more than you don't understand, but you still can't understand all the sentences. Soon you'll start to get words just from context, while listening.

I didn't read the whole thing, but I have the answer:

Graded natural material.

In fact, I think you'll find that by both methods, the above is what you tend to end up with. If you do i+1 in your Anki deck from natural material, you'll end up with graded natural material automatically.

And I think you'll find that much of the graded material is natural material, but only up to a certain level.

wccrawford Wrote:I didn't read the whole thing, but I have the answer:

Graded natural material.

In fact, I think you'll find that by both methods, the above is what you tend to end up with. If you do i+1 in your Anki deck from natural material, you'll end up with graded natural material automatically.

And I think you'll find that much of the graded material is natural material, but only up to a certain level.

A more accurate description would be:

interesting material X graded material

usually that's the argument,

I don't know why you think graded material isn't natural. If it's good graded material it is natural, it's just not using the most difficult grammar, vocabulary, etc. IMO the best source of graded material graded books for native speakers. An example would be a TV show for children, manga, science textbooks, etc. These don't have difficult words in them that will will send you running to the dictionary after every sentence, however I'm sure everyone would say they are natural(well maybe parts of something like a TV show for children may not be 100% natural).
The main reason for using graded material is so that you aren't frustrated and you continue to read/listen to something. Some people say "If it's interesting you'll watch it even if you don't understand it", but I disagree with that. For me personally I don't enjoy watching things I don't understand. If it's something like sports or an action movie I can put up with it, but for a drama or a love story it's completely out of the question.
If you can do it and enjoy it more power to you, but I would guess most people can't stomach doing it. Moreover, getting +1 input is based on theory/science, while reading anything no matter what the level isn't based on anything. I'm not saying people shouldn't read whatever they want, but I don't think there is any reason to steer people away from graded material.

What are your suggestions of good graded material?

I really like a TV show called Chi's Sweet Home. It can probably fit in the category of graded material. But still I strongly recomend to everyone - it's simply too awesome.

Materials like these probably have their place in language learning. But it cannot be the main focus. The focus must be quality, interesting, heavy and natural material.

I think if you follow "fun and natural input" as your only rule, you will naturally grade yourself. If you're a beginner at Japanese, but you really like science, then you're still probably not going to enjoy reading a college level physics textbook. So, you go and read stuff that you can understand enough of to have fun. There you go. You grade yourself, and you don't have to worry if what your reading is unnatural.

Ow yeah Igor! That's how I think!

And If you like to make a fuss in forums, like me, you'll probably be delighted with the 政治 session of you favorite newspaper. It's all about flamewars lately. lol

Cool! I'm not the only one who likes Chi's Sweet Home. There's a manga too, by the way - a little on the expensive side (about double a normal 'pulp' manga) but every page is in color, and I think there's only 5 volumes.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I put down Yotsuba&! (a Khatzumoto recommendation) because it seemed too hard (= not fun), and read through the first volume of Chi's. Somehow, immediately after that Yotsuba&! wasn't hard anymore (= became fun) - I'm on volume 3 now.

I think Khatzumoto had espoused something like "read according to your interests, not according to your level" but that conflicted with the fun factor for me. I am used to reading extremely quickly, so when I had to struggle through natural material for adults while constantly looking at my dictionary, it was not fun so I didn't do it very often. When I found something closer to my level, it was so enjoyable that I'd be reading every time I had a free minute or two.

@mentat: that reminds me. how is your progress with the news? I know from reading your blog you moved on from anime to the news,etc.

I started watching Chi's Sweet Home because of the easy vocab, too.

chi's sweet home is too boring and easy for me. i honestly got to intermediate etc. from doing music lyrics. you learn a lot of vocab as long as you're not doign 100% j-pop which is mad cliche... now i'm doing drama and manga.

Yo, you can check it in my blog. I posted about the news project yesterday.