Is anyone out there actually literate from self-study? Like, is anyone able to pick up a manga or light novel in Japanese and understand it after teaching themselves Japanese?

I want to know what worked for you, and how you got there. I'm not going to Japan anytime soon, and aside from my gardener, I'm not around Japanese people enough to immerse myself. But I want to read in Japanese, and it has to be done from homestudy. I'm well into RTK 1, and should be done in a month or so. Then I was going to read Heisig's Remembering the kana. Then maybe the Rosetta stone for the audio.

Do you think that will work? Again, how did you become literate from homestudy?

I am not anywhere near fluent but I think RTK and http://smart.fm gives a one two punch that will offer a student as efficient a strategy as any out there. Don't bother with Rosetta Stone unless you have money to burn.

use real japanese for audio e.g tv, music etc

isn't it like even japanese people like can't read every single kanji/word in a book or whatever like I can't even do that in english (like harry potter lols. I dont' give a shit... i'm not gonna look up everything frikin' adjective that I don't nkow). i heard some japanese people they know what some kanji/word means but doesn't know how to pronounce it while reading a book or whatever.

personally i have no interest reading the news so i don't care if i'm literate with that... i don't really like listening/watching news in english anyways.

i don't like reading novels except for harry potter which is over now and i read twligiht but it ain't that good so i stopped at book 1.

i thnk just focus on why you want to be literate. what you want to read. i'm reading manga but ihate manga but i'm doing it for anime.

But basically you have to read A LOT... like I went from concentrating for 5 seconds to reemmber the pronounciation of some hiragana and going blank for pronounciation of some katakana character to reading hiragana/katakana without "thinking" as well as almost 2000 kanji (well there's a s***load of irregulars so idk).
you know how they say if you know 1200 you know 95% of kanji that's commonly (or is that 95% in newspapers) but i don't think that's really true... at least with stuff iwant to read. all the good stuff in the stuff i want to read is kanji i don't know? you know what i'm sayin... well written crap is well written well so

I read song lyrics (funnest way to speed up your hiragana reading speed)-> websites -> drama script/summary/manga
+ONE BIG MENTION is tae kim's guide I studied that shit like whatever but as boring as it was... it was beneficial. perhaps referencing as you run into stuff is funner/easier but i did the opposite order for the most part b.c. i learned spanish like this in school so like that principal/way of learning seemed "right" to me...

for manga even if you know all the words if you don't KNOW ( I mean KNOW not just some general idea etc) the grammar there's a chance you'll have no idea what the hell they're saing or why the hell they're saying it or who the hell they're saing it...

Semiliterate, yes (currently reading キノの旅, a giant stack of manga, and the first few pages of Battle Royale were readable enough until I put it down for something more pocket-sized); words still crop up that I need to infer from context or skim over, but I can read and enjoy material without a dictionary.

I could go over a long story as to what I actually did, and what of it I thought involved major contribution (in particular, I did take classes, and while I don't think it was a primary contributor to literacy I don't know how big the bootstrapping problem would have been without them), but unless you request that I'll focus on the bits that I thought worked for me.

1) basics of grammar from, for example, Tae Kim's Guide or somesuch. Probably not necessary to go all the way through it, though you can if you want.
2) big stacks of books that you want to read. For bootstrapping, especially books that target younger readers (and that will consequently have furigana).
3) Frequent exposure. Read every day. This may be more information than you actually wanted, but I found that switching over to ero-manga for my *cough* "personal needs" (おかず) provided yet another source of reading that was reliable, even if I was being kept busy by day-to-day life. Warning, this only works if you actually care about the plot
4) RtK.
5) A bunch of time.

Edit: I'm really not sure that Remembering the Kana is worthwhile. I've never used it, granted, but the set of kana is small enough to be memorized via repetition fairly easily.

Of course, if he has magic to disambiguate ン／ソ and シ／ツ the way he did 持／待, someone please let me know.

~J

I'm probably at high intermediate level in reading and did it thru self study. What has really helped is to read books in Japanese while keeping an English translation nearby to refer to when I get stuck. Of course, at the beginning that was virtually every sentence, but as time has gone on I'm able to understand more and more without having to look at the English. Now I can read a page of Harry Potter in Japanese and get the gist of what's going on even if I don't understand every word.

While I'm not 'literate', I'm getting there quickly. I took Spanish in Highschool, but I have never taken Japanese classes.

After 2 years of Spanish in HS, I could barely say anything and I was barely able to read anything.

After 1 year of Japanese, I'm able to read easy mangas and know about 2/3-3/4 of what's being said. It's definitely enough to understand what's going on.

I lay this success on 2 things:

1) RTK (I didn't do RTK, but I played a game that did something similar. RTK is probably faster and better, for those it works for.)
2) iKnow. The vocab I have gained from iKnow has been immense.

The book 'Japanese the Manga Way' has helped my grammar a bit as well, but not as much as the 2 above helped me.

The company I work for recently asked if I'd be interested in taking classes. They asked this after they saw me reading Japanese Mangas on lunchbreak. I told them "6 months ago, I'd be all over that. Now... My self-study methods are working too well and classes would only get in the way."

I can't really pick up any manga and read it, understanding every element perfectly, but I still think that I'm literate in Japanese. I'm a self-studier person. I've been studying for less than a year. I have trouble reading kids stories. I've just begun to understand the use of やっぱり and なけらばならない.

So, why does a total noob like myself consider... myself*... to be literate? Because literacy is a path, not an arbitrary destination. As long as you're striving to improve, and putting forth effort, literacy isn't even as issue.

kazelee Wrote:I can't really pick up any manga and read it...So, why does a total noob like myself consider... myself*... to be literate? Because literacy is a path, not an arbitrary destination. As long as you're striving to improve, and putting forth effort, literacy isn't even as issue.

~*wipes a tear from eye*~

we are...in the presence of greatness.

kazelee Wrote:なけらばならない.

I think it's なければ．
Please correct me on my mistakes, too.
howtwosavealif is beyond correcting, as far as english goes, anyway.

yukkuri_kame Wrote:howtwosavealif is beyond correcting, as far as english goes, anyway.

That is so mean, but it is a bit true. And yeah, it is なければ. Basically anything (safe to use this word?) that ends with い, excluding nouns, will conjugate to ければ.

Thank you for your help, especially itemized lists.

woodwojr -
So you learned the bulk of your Japanese from classes? 2-5, I got. I know squat, though, except for the kanji I've learned so far. I need to learn the kana, I need to learn the audio, I need to learn the grammar. So you think once I got kanji and kana down, a good grammar book should give me a decent foundation for literacy?

sheetz - I was wondering too if that might help. I'm glad to hear it does! I have some manga in both Japanese and English (I live near a Kinokuniya, and being too impatient for the US releases I often go buy the most recent volumes in Japanese and...look at the pictures. )

wccrawford - tell me about iKnow! Give me a link! I googled it and too much unrelated sites popped up. I actually saw 'Japanese the Manga Way' on Amazon, and was wondering if that'd be a good buy. So it worked for you, huh? I'm fluent in Spanish (lived in Spain for a while), and I swear, it's so much easier than Japanese! Japanese is so leveled, and different. It's foreign on every level.

Anyone else?

Thunk Wrote:woodwojr -
So you learned the bulk of your Japanese from classes?

That's a remarkably difficult question. I came out of my classes pretty much thoroughly illiterate, so they obviously weren't sufficient; however, whether or not they were necessary is a much more difficult question. My actual path to literacy was almost entirely self-study, but since I can't go back and try it again I can't say how important the foundation laid by the classes was, or how easy it would be to replace (or even how to go about doing that).

Quote:2-5, I got. I know squat, though, except for the kanji I've learned so far. I need to learn the kana, I need to learn the audio, I need to learn the grammar. So you think once I got kanji and kana down, a good grammar book should give me a decent foundation for literacy?

Well, here's what I think I had coming out of the classes:

1) Exposure to a range of grammar, usually sufficient for recognition if too slow for production.
2) A random smattering of vocabulary. Foundationally useful in that it kept me from having to run to the dictionary every single sentence.
3) A pitiful but nonzero assortment of known kanji that held me over until I discovered RtK.

So it seems to me that since 3 isn't necessary, a decent grammar book should give you 1. I'm of the opinion that explicit study of grammar becomes mostly unnecessary pretty quickly, but using it to bootstrap far enough that you have a clear idea of what's going on is a good call IMO.

~J

Yeah, I'm also in the "can follow along a manga pretty well" category.

Remembering the Kana is good. Yeah, you can get kana down with reps, but I think RTKana helps you write out the kana better for appearances.

RTK naturally.

Grammar points via sample sentences. Tae Kim, UBJG, or maybe Genki or other things. Don't fall in the DO ALL BEGINNER BOOKS trap. Find one book, get your sentences, get out. You'll get some vocabulary this way, but they should repeat enough to get the point across.

Vocabulary via sample sentences. Smart.fm, KO2001 are two great resources here.

With the above, you'll find you're able to read manga not with fluency, but with understanding. As you read more everyday, you notice you improve as you add vocabulary. Watching japanese tv shows with subtitles become easier.

Don't bother with Rosetta Stone. It's trumped by so much free stuff now, it's not even worth downloading illegally.

I have to agree with woodwojr in that classes will not help you gain literacy too well.
In terms of production, and listening, classes definitely have their merits, and I definitely don't believe I'd have come as far as I have without them.

But when it comes to reading, the classes haven't helped too much. Sure, I know the exact reading of 朝鮮民主主義人民共和国, and the meaning of it, that doesn't mean that I'd be able to read the individual kanji in other words.

This is the reason I've decided to finally do RTK. So much of Japanese is written in kanji that if you can't read kanji, you can't necessarily be considered literate.

I think it is useful to consider no-kanji knowledge (which still permits you to read real texts, even if only ones written for fairly young readers) as a separate and greater level of achievement than no-knowledge or no-kana knowledge (which permits you to read precisely nothing and precisely those texts written for foreign no-kana learners, respectively), but whatever it is, it is indeed not literacy.

Punctuation Rationer's Note: due to this poster's overuse of commas the quota for this thread has been exceeded. Please refrain from using commas or you will fall subject to standard rationing violation penalties.

~J

Nukemarine - bodhisamaya mentioned smart.fm, too. I just went there. WOW. So that's where the iKnow applicatoin is. I can see how that makes Rosetta Stone obsolete. And probably like most of us here, I have been watching subtitled Japanese shows for years, now, so it's familiar. How far have you gotten into their Japanese Core lessons?

I'm thrilled. This seems very doable.

One last question - should I bother with RTK2?
I'm incredibly intimidated by the dual readings of most kanji. @_@ Just learning what they mean is a monumental task. I'd think it'd take twice as long to learn how they're pronounced...

I did classes, and here's what I think I got out of them:
* some external push to study (in the "I must do this homework/whatever because I have a class on Tuesday" sense). Not everybody needs that, of course.
* a native speaker who could answer questions about stuff I didn't understand
* real-time feedback about whether I was making myself understood (especially important when I was just doing evening classes as a beginner and that was the only time I actually spoke anything...)
* a reason to be in the country and actually studying the language reasonably full time
* a firm enough grounding that it was easy to start reading real stuff

Basically I found my ability to use the language jumped hugely over the nine months I was in Japan taking classes full time, but of course you can argue about how much of that is the 'classes' part. That took me from 'just leaving beginner level' to 'heading for JLPT2'. But I think for pure reading ability the major question is 'how much do you read?'; a good class ought to include reading exercises but mostly they're just "read this" with assistance on potentially tricky bits plus some assessment that you understood it. (The 'assessment' bit is useful, incidentally -- there have been occasions when I was sure I'd understood something clearly but it turned out that I had totally the wrong end of the stick on some point of meaning.)

[I know you asked about non-class-study; think of this as the inverse viewpoint -- what you aren't getting that you have to compensate for and make sure you get some other way...]

Thunk, I honestly think that "kanji town" and Alyks's "movie method" do better than RTK2. Idea basically is let an Onyomi represent a location (in the movie method, it's an actual movie instead) and let the kanji (via primitives and the meanings) populate that location.

It takes effort to do in full, but what little I've used of it has been helpful.

yukkuri_kame Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:なけらばならない.

I think it's なければ．

I think so too

yukkuri_kame Wrote:Please correct me on my mistakes, too.

You know that saying, "the blind leading the blind"? In this instance a I'm blind, deaf, mute with ADHD and bipolar disorder.

yukkuri_kame Wrote:howtwosavealif is beyond correcting, as far as english goes, anyway.

I had to read that several times to finally understand what it said. That's like sofa king we tod it. LOL.

OP Wrote:Nukemarine - bodhisamaya mentioned smart.fm, too. I just went there. WOW. So that's where the iKnow applicatoin is. I can see how that makes Rosetta Stone obsolete. And probably like most of us here, I have been watching subtitled Japanese shows for years, now, so it's familiar. How far have you gotten into their Japanese Core lessons?

iKnow* is my new crack. Sometimes... I wonder, where has it been all my life? I'm currently on Core 6000 1 and finishing up some KO2001 lists.

Links, Nukemarine. Gimme links to kanji town and movie method. I searched for them just now on smart.fm, and couldn't find them. I noticed you have made some lessons over there, too! I'll be sure to check them out.

From alyks site:
http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com/2008/0...ethod.html

Thunk Wrote:sheetz - I was wondering too if that might help. I'm glad to hear it does! I have some manga in both Japanese and English (I live near a Kinokuniya, and being too impatient for the US releases I often go buy the most recent volumes in Japanese and...look at the pictures. )

If you're going to try this I recommend using something like novels because there's so much more material. One volume of manga probably has fewer words and sentences than a single chapter of something like Harry Potter.

I can read non-fiction decently now (日本史 ftw). Fiction, however, presents a tad bit of a difficulty.

I was never big on grammar. Most important: Read everyday. Start with manga. Manga is an awesome starting thing. After a few months of reading manga you'll find your ability has skyrocketed.

I started with a few manga that I already knew about or had read in English, simultaneously working my way through a basic grammar guide to figure out the whys and wherefores. Knowing the plot points beforehand gave me a way into the story, and helped me focus on figuring out how the sentences were being constructed.

I'm total self-study; right now I'd say I can follow the general plot of an unknown manga for the most part without a dictionary, although I get a lot more of the finer points when I stop and look things up. Non-illustrated novels/longer non-fiction texts are tougher for me, but I can read that stuff for gist. I can't say that I'm literate; not yet, at least. But I have to agree with Alyks--just keep reading. When I read, I can FEEL myself getting more comfortable with the language I'm trying to learn; and the more I do it, the better I get.