Hello, my name is Selene and I came here because of the insistence of Jorge. Well, lately, I’ve felt that I can’t do my kanji every day. Besides having tons of school work, doing kanji seems like, well, more work! Now, Jorge advised me to try another method instead of Heisig’s, because if I see Japanese as work instead of fun, I will never be motivated enough to learn. Now, I am fine and dandy with that because I think this is true. However, Jorge also suggested to try a method to learn for the JLPT 4. I think this is a good idea, but it does bring several questions into my mind which I thought maybe I could ask you guys here: How could I do this? What would I review? What would I focus on?

Maybe you can help me with this query, as I really want to learn Japanese, but I don’t want it to be all work and no play.
Thanks!

Those all sound like great methods, and I was hoping you would explain each in more detail. Well, I already know the smart.fm approach. And the second one is sentence mining, right? However, what is the movie method?

There are many people who have learned Japanese to fluency without doing Heisig. You by no means have to do it, however it is probably the best way for you. It also depends on what your goals are. You can get quite a good passive knowledge of kanji (able to recognize but unable to reproduce) without Heisig, but if you want to be able to write Heisig is by far the best way.

If I was you I would just do it. Once it is over you can quickly learn a lot of Japanese. I would recommend using Anki over this site, you should have less reviews to do if you do. Why don't have just go at a slow pace, say 20 a day and do them first thing in the morning? That is what I do.

You can always just start adding sentences to an SRS and see how you go though. Some people have brains that can cope with this. Or if you struggle to remember the kanji then maybe think about trying Heisig. Sorry, I am not familiar with other approaches.

Quote:* smart.fm
* starting with sentences and learning Kanji as they appear
* trying the movie method (which I couldn't try because I was already finished when I found about it) and if you like you can try, besides movies, books, comics, manga, dramas, etc.
* studying formal material for jlpt 4 which you can found online if you search for it.

If RTK is feeling like work, then these probably will too.
Maybe reading lots of manga, playing games and stuff like that would be more fun? Depending on your level.

Don't abandon the Heisig method. As yukamina said, anything else will be even more work. But find a way to make it fun.

Maybe don't stick to the Heisig order. Work your way through the book and just study those kanji that you can think of a good story for. Or maybe look through stoked's one kanji, one picture thread and study just the ones that look interesting. Follow your heart on this.

Try for the 100 first kanjis and see if you like it.

You should keep your feet on ground. Learning Japanese to a useful degree is a huge task.

But you can do it. And you can do it well.
The most important thing is to know that if you decide to put the necessary effort, you'll succeed.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Try for the 100 first kanjis and see if you like it.

You should keep your feet on ground. Learning Japanese to a useful degree is a huge task.

But you can do it. And you can do it well.
The most important thing is to know that if you decide to put the necessary effort, you'll succeed.

She is around 800 or something. She likes it. The problem is she says is frustrating because to her it feels more like "work" than "fun". And to tell you the truth at some points it felt the same for me.

I'm guessing it's the SRS reviewing part that's proving to feel like work. This is something I've struggled with for a long time, but eventually just came to get used to and accept. There are, however, many ways to make SRS reviewing more tolerable.

Personally, I've found that breaking review sessions into 15 minute segments (see also: "timeboxing") works incredibly well, with a short break afterward (a chapter of manga, or an episode of anime, or stretching and lifting some weights, etc). Afterward, it's another 15 minutes of reviewing. It's really a simple method that breaks up the tedium and gets you through reviews before you even realize it. Of course, you can also limit the amount of reviews you do per session, or have both a review limit and a time limit - whatever you feel works best. Anki makes all of this very easy to set up, but a good ol' timer can do the trick for timeboxing, as well.

My main point is not to give up just yet - while it's difficult to make reviewing a fun process, you can certainly make it a heck of a lot less painful. 15 minute segments with an episode of your current favorite anime in between sure as heck feels better than 60 minutes of nonstop reviewing with fatigue setting in and the desire to "just-get-this-junk-done-with-arrrgh" lingering over your head, doesn't it?
Heisig and SRSing are by no means the only way to learn kanji or Japanese, but I could hardly imagine a more enjoyable way. Keep at it and I think you'll get used to it!

If you fear you might not make it through Heisig, do Heisig LITE (rtk lite). You get like almost all the kanji you need and it's only 200 more than you've already accomplished.

Also, to keep my fun and interest up when a card gets up to 4 months I reschedule it to new and change it to the Japanese keyword.

It does seem like it would be a shame to give up now if you've gotten that far.

To make your reviews less like work, I suggest just not worrying too much about getting it right. Just fail it and move on quickly and try not to stress out. It's not that hard to go over your story again, usually it clicks back when you see the primitives.

RTK did feel like work at times for me too, but having completed RTK made kanji feel so much more familiar so it made my other studying much more fun.

I had the same feeling that RTK was getting really quite boring. In my case that was around 1700 however. I actually stopped then and started doing sentences and still haven't done those extra 300. I now know most of those kanji through exposure (kanji like 鳥 and 島 looked really confusing to me since couldn't recognize the primitives, but I just looked up the stroke order manually). I think if you get past 1000, then you can pretty comfortably learn the rest of the kanji through exposure.

bombpersons Wrote:I had the same feeling that RTK was getting really quite boring. In my case that was around 1700 however. I actually stopped then and started doing sentences and still haven't done those extra 300. I now know most of those kanji through exposure (kanji like 鳥 and 島 looked really confusing to me since couldn't recognize the primitives, but I just looked up the stroke order manually). I think if you get past 1000, then you can pretty comfortably learn the rest of the kanji through exposure.

In that case, you should do RTK Lite instead. In RtK1, tons of useful kanji show up in the last 1000 or 500, you're missing out a lot of good stuff by just doing the first 1000.

Tobberoth Wrote:

bombpersons Wrote:I had the same feeling that RTK was getting really quite boring. In my case that was around 1700 however. I actually stopped then and started doing sentences and still haven't done those extra 300. I now know most of those kanji through exposure (kanji like 鳥 and 島 looked really confusing to me since couldn't recognize the primitives, but I just looked up the stroke order manually). I think if you get past 1000, then you can pretty comfortably learn the rest of the kanji through exposure.

In that case, you should do RTK Lite instead. In RtK1, tons of useful kanji show up in the last 1000 or 500, you're missing out a lot of good stuff by just doing the first 1000.

True, RTK lite would probably be better, however if you can I would suggest just finishing it. It might be boring but you don't have to worry about it after, and it makes the rest infinitely more easy...

If it's not fun anymore, I would say, don't force yourself. That will only make it worse. Go on to something you do like. I myself hit a couple of "deadlocks" where I sitting in front of my computer, making up stories and doing reviews was the last thing I wanted to do. I just wanted to READ!

So I did some reading for a while... I realized how helpful Heisig was when I came across kanji I knew, and how frustrating it was when I came across kanji I've never seen. I always come back to Heisig after realizing reading would be a lot more FUN if I just get RTK out of the way.

So, my advice... pick up a textbook that interests you, maybe tae kim, or some short stories. Work on that for a while. And (if it doesn't kill you) keep up with those kanji reviews in the background, because if you decide to go back to RTK it will blow to have to do 600 reviews all at once and send half of them to the fail pile.

Sometimes, I like to do a reward system with myself... "Ok, if I do 30 reviews now, I'll watch another episode of Prince of Tennis"... "If I learn 15 new stories, I'll bake brownies"

Yeah, I think the "If it aint fun, stop" rule has limitations. I think not doing Heisig is one of these. I could already speak Japanese fairly well when I started and I stopped all other Japanese study to focus on Heisig. It was frustrating as I got comments from people that my Japanese is getting worse as I kept going with my RTK study. I actually enjoyed making stories and learning the Kanji at a fast pace, but I wanted to get back to learning real Japanese ASAP.

Anyway, I got through it in about 2 months and thanks to that since then my Japanese level has been increasing at a much faster rate.

It is ashame there is no RTK vs frequency list. Or RTK vs student vocab list. I am just starting lesson 27 (#951) and there are still loads of kanji I have seen/used in text books that I have not come across in RTK. In some ways it is quite frustrating. And then there are loads of kanji in RTK I just never seem to come across. I know its hard to know really as I am using text books so the slant on the language is a bit weird. But it does make RTK into a labour of love, as you have to just knuckle down and get on with it. This is great if you have the kind of mind that can do that. But for some of us that it takes longer it can be very frustrating.

Selene why are you learning Japanese?

thermal Wrote:I think the "If it aint fun, stop" rule has limitations.

Absolutely. Heisig is boring after the first 500 or so. I'm at 1500 now and I want to rip it to pieces and throw it in a fire.

I've said that before but in my opinion the first third is fun, the second one is work and the last third will test your determination.

Well, thank you all for answering and encouraging me.

As Jorge said, I have about 800 kanjis, and have already gone through this problem before, and I've lost interest not in Japanese, but in doing the kanjis because I feel as though it is more work.

However, I think that you all might be right in saying that it is necessary work.

Burritolingus, that idea of timeboxing is interesting. I did something similar before, when I was working on some math homework and every five problems I did five kanji. I ended up doing 40 new kanjis and not feeling tired or anything. Afterwards, though, I would take longer and longer breaks and would do fewer kanjis. Maybe if I read more on the idea, I could be more rigid about it.

welldone101 and bombpersons, I will certainly look up into this RTK Lite, as it seems interesting.

crayonmaster, I like your idea a lot. I am a huge bookworm, and would love to read Japanese fluently. I will certainly give it a try! Lately, I've been surfing for sites that are only in Japanese. I found an art site that sort of reminds me to deviantArt, pixiv, which is pretty cool. There, I've actually learned some new things, but I don't think I would have been able to do this without RTK.

mafried, that is an interesting suggestion. I like it too. Again, I'll definitely try it out.

AmberUK, I agree with you, there should be a frequency list in the site, as well as the student vocab list. I often wonder which is the way the Japanese learn their kanji, and how they are distributed through grade level. Well, the reason I got started on Japanese was actually because I proposed to Jorge that we should learn a new language, as it would be pretty beneficial. I actually started on Greek, but then he said it wasn't going to be that useful, so we got into Japanese. After wards, I realized that Greek wasn't as good as Japanese, and that there are more Japanese things that I like. I now want to learn Japanese because I think of all of the material and media that will be available to me if I do. There are many books that aren't in any other language but Japanese, and would love to read Japanese poetry in its original language. I'm also a huge fan of anime and manga, but I don't want to depend on subtitles or translations. I also like the idea of learning a new language; it is motivating to hear people speak a language that you don't. At least for me, I find that when I listen to jpop or jrock, or anime, or read manga in Japanese, I feel this desire to truly understand. This is one of the prime motivations for me in why I want to learn Japanese.

Again, thank you all!

[Katsuo]

aelirri Wrote:there should be a frequency list in the site, as well as the student vocab list. I often wonder which is the way the Japanese learn their kanji, and how they are distributed through grade level.

Here are links to spreadsheets containing this and other data. Links page
More specifically:
Grade & Frequency info
Another Frequency list

Well each time I feel it dragging I go on a anime binge. Some of the anime I understand enough to feel if I just did more of a push I would get over the next hurdle.

I think that your method of doing some kanji after a certain number of maths problems is a good work round. The fact you started to procrastinate maybe meant you had done enough or were tired or were dreading the next days additional reviews? Its worth trying to work out why you started to put them off. 40 kanji in a day is great, esp if they stuck. There is nothing wrong with setting a max number per day. Sometimes an open ended ever growing list is a put off.

RTK is something you just have to work through. I don't think people get that enough when they read the introduction. Because the order is set up in a certain way its hard to jump about in the book so your forced to do it as laid out. There are several places that have frequency lists and grade lists. But to do another RTK list that takes them into consideration would mean a large re-write. There is the option to find a kanji you need to know and break it down into the primitives and learn those. It would mean that your learning 3 primitives for 1 kanji and maybe not using them again which might be more work. I am surprised noone has done a graded or frequency list re-write.

aelirri Wrote:I found an art site that sort of reminds me to deviantArt, pixiv, which is pretty cool.

What site is that? I love art.

AmberUK Wrote:Well each time I feel it dragging I go on a anime binge. Some of the anime I understand enough to feel if I just did more of a push I would get over the next hurdle.

=D That reminds me of the time where I had just discovered One Piece, I watched like 350 episodes in the space of a few weeks...

I also find that it is motivating when you find something you understand, however it is sometimes demotivating if you try to read something where you can't understand anything =(

yukamina Wrote:

aelirri Wrote:I found an art site that sort of reminds me to deviantArt, pixiv, which is pretty cool.

What site is that? I love art.

Just goolgle pixiv, http://www.pixiv.net/
Yeah, I used to have my own webcomic, but it didn't get very far... This makes me want to start again (only this time it would be in Japanese..)

bombpersons Wrote:I also find that it is motivating when you find something you understand, however it is sometimes demotivating if you try to read something where you can't understand anything =(

I think that mostly depends on your mood. If you're already motivated, you'll focus on what you understand and get even more motivated. But if you're depressed you'll just see how much you don't understand and it can just make things worse.

Bombpersons: true. But listening to another language is such a difficult skill. And one you have to keep at. I have listened to some Japanese with the dialogue written out and still not caught it. Sometimes I rewind a DVD as I have seen a word I know I should know in the dialogue and not caught it. I think you just have to keep at it.

Plus there are so many words used over and over that I never once thought about learning as they are used so much. Its worth sitting there with a dictionary and picking stuff up. I am always pausing on a scene where there is a kanji on a sign/packet and spending ages looking things up. Good job I watch anime alone, I would be very annoying!