Chandlerhimself Wrote:

vosmiura Wrote:I finished the first half. Now I also finished half of Reibun de Manaubu. Making progress on these books translates into very noticeable gains, but at the same time they cover only about half of the Jouyou kanji, and KO only a few compounds for each kanji - so when you finish KO in terms of literacy you're still not half way to the half way mark, or so . But you can make a good attempt at reading a lot of stuff.

I agree. I finished both books and it helped me a lot. I was about level 3 when I started and my vocabulary more than doubled(maybe about 3x).

For me, transitioning from Rtk straight to KO2001 the benefit was even larger. My vocabulary has been multiplied by roughly 300x

(I knew at max 100 words beforehand due to 4 weeks of Japanese classes, and I've read that KO2001 includes ~3300 unique words.)

Chandlerhimself Wrote:

vosmiura Wrote:I finished the first half. Now I also finished half of Reibun de Manaubu. Making progress on these books translates into very noticeable gains, but at the same time they cover only about half of the Jouyou kanji, and KO only a few compounds for each kanji - so when you finish KO in terms of literacy you're still not half way to the half way mark, or so . But you can make a good attempt at reading a lot of stuff.

I agree. I finished both books and it helped me a lot. I was about level 3 when I started and my vocabulary more than doubled(maybe about 3x). It's worth doing and I don't regret it, but it's not a miracle book. After you finish you can't pick up any book and understand it, or even understand 90%(well if it's easy you can). However, it let's you understand enough, so that you can get through things and not have to use a dictionary on all the words. Remember that even if KO covers 95% of the kanji used(in news papers and business documents I'm guessing), that still leaves you with tons of kanji you don't know. I just picked up a random book and the 1st sentence had 19 kanji in it. That means, statistically I would not know one kanji in it and have to use a dictionary(I'm not even counting compounds where you know the kanji, but not the word).
In my experience, I don't have to look up a word every sentence, but there are things I can't read at all. Some things have multiple words I've never seen before in one sentence. Anyway, to answer your question, you feel like a child trying to read adult books. Take that however you want to. Some people will be disappointed, but I look at it as a big step up from illiterate foreigner.

I think that is a huge step up, because once you know those basic words you can just learn the words that you are coming across in your books you are trying to read and tv you watch and things, OR like me, you can just pick up a word frequency list once you finish and just methodically go through it, plus pick vocab from things you do in Japanese, I'm thinking fluency will come pretty noticeably that way. So far everyday I am making a lot of progress in Japanese... chinese is going ...um .. Ok, but hey soon I'll be in China and the chinese will take off, I'm so excited to be linguistically abused by uneducated idiots on the subway who's IQs are 75, but can rape me at speaking chinese, I'm talking about some of those factory workers alright!

I've only been doing K02001 for a few weeks now, but I can already tell that the extra vocabulary is helping. I've been having to look up less and less words when reading manga now =D

I recently upped the amount of sentences I added a day to 200. I've been able to keep it up for the weekend, but I don't know if I can keep it up for the rest of the week. Though if I keep this pace I should be finished in 10 days =D

bombpersons Wrote:I've only been doing K02001 for a few weeks now, but I can already tell that the extra vocabulary is helping. I've been having to look up less and less words when reading manga now =D

I recently upped the amount of sentences I added a day to 200. I've been able to keep it up for the weekend, but I don't know if I can keep it up for the rest of the week. Though if I keep this pace I should be finished in 10 days =D

It depends mostly on how much free time you have available more than the possibility of getting burnt out, in my experience. Provided you've actually got the time during the week, I think you should be able to keep it up.

In the past month I've gone from 60 sentences (20 kanji/day) to 150 (50/day) and in the past few days I've been pushing 250 sentences (80 kanji/day). The more you add, the better you get at and the more you can cope with.

EDIT: Btw tomorrow or the next day I'll drop back into this thread and let you know what sort of impact finishing KO2001 has had for me. I'm at 900 kanji now, should be done in 2 days max. I'm the perfect test case for RtK-->Tae Kim-->KO2001 because I'm virtually unsullied by any prior experience.

i've only been doing like 5 kanji/day in KO2001. I feel lazy =/

blackmacros Wrote:EDIT: Btw tomorrow or the next day I'll drop back into this thread and let you know what sort of impact finishing KO2001 has had for me. I'm at 900 kanji now, should be done in 2 days max. I'm the perfect test case for RtK-->Tae Kim-->KO2001 because I'm virtually unsullied by any prior experience.

I am interested in hearing how that works out,RtK-->Tae Kim-->KO2001 (and the total time frame).

Nii87 Wrote:i've only been doing like 5 kanji/day in KO2001. I feel lazy =/

I started over a year ago, and I'm only up to about 650, which is less than 2 a day :/

I haven't added any new kanji in about a month, and the last 50 or so I added before that didn't stick very well. I'm currently digging my way out of about 500 reviews due in anki (plus 300 from my grammar deck) after slacking off since the JLPT (although I've been watching and reading other stuff more). Down to 330 (+ 40) now. I average about 30mins a day of study, it's hard to make much progress.

blackmacros Wrote:In the past month I've gone from 60 sentences (20 kanji/day) to 150 (50/day) and in the past few days I've been pushing 250 sentences (80 kanji/day). The more you add, the better you get at and the more you can cope with.

EDIT: Btw tomorrow or the next day I'll drop back into this thread and let you know what sort of impact finishing KO2001 has had for me. I'm at 900 kanji now, should be done in 2 days max. I'm the perfect test case for RtK-->Tae Kim-->KO2001 because I'm virtually unsullied by any prior experience.

Well, I think there is also the factor that it gets easier as you progress. At the start of KO there will be on average 4 new kanji and several words per sentence. By the time you finish Vol 1, the number of new kanji per sentence is more like 1 per 4 sentences on average, and I imagine that the end of the Vol 2 is very easy going because it's just repeating stuff.

With KO I put every sentence in my SRS., With RDMKTK I changed to only putting in sentences that teach something new - some new vocab, or new nuance of usage of some vocab. At the beginning I was adding about 35 sentences per chapter, but mid-way I'm adding only about 14 per chapter.

If I studied like Blackmacros I'd be done by Thursday... but instead I will probably spend 2 months more. Mind you, I'm typing all the RDMKTK sentences by myself so it takes more time than KO.

vosmiura Wrote:With RDMKTK I changed to only putting in sentences that teach something new - some new vocab, or new nuance of usage of some vocab.

I'd rather recommend anybody to drop RDMKTK and use LOLWTF instead. It is basically the same book, but just much better.

xaarg Wrote:

vosmiura Wrote:With RDMKTK I changed to only putting in sentences that teach something new - some new vocab, or new nuance of usage of some vocab.

I'd rather recommend anybody to drop RDMKTK and use LOLWTF instead. It is basically the same book, but just much better.

What are the above two books please?

LOLWTF!! A better question is if it is better doing ko2001 over sentences that are actually fun.

agh-that still doesnt answer my questions

Yonosa Wrote:

Codexus Wrote:My philosophy is: Don't expect too much and you won't be disappointed.

KO2001 will teach you many things but no, it won't guarantee that you can understand that manga that you want to read so badly or anything. It's an important step but the road is still long.

The sad thing is I am not really a huge fan of manga, I do love nonfiction books....and I can only imagine what "A Brief History of Time", "The God Delusion", "The Elegant Universe"... I also love history... the most verbose type of reading in english tend to be my favorite... so I can only imagine and wait and study in anticipation of reading some great books in Chinese and Japanese! haha, only 2 or 3 years off at the most though, so it's not all bad, I'd prefer to spend my time doing something rewarding rather than the days of high school and excessive procrastination!

My goal is to read "the god delusion" in Japanese! I'm just waiting to find it at book off for cheap (new is pretty expensive...)

nonpoint Wrote:LOLWTF!! A better question is if it is better doing ko2001 over sentences that are actually fun.

I've LOLed at some KO sentences actually.

zazen666 Wrote:

xaarg Wrote:

vosmiura Wrote:With RDMKTK I changed to only putting in sentences that teach something new

I'd rather recommend anybody to drop RDMKTK and use LOLWTF instead.

What are the above two books please?

No idea. I guess LOLWTF might be any book about love, friendship and happiness, but only vosmiura will be able to reveal what RDMKTK is.

I'm doing Kanji in Context instead of KiC 2001, and I've noticed that even completing a quarter of book 1 that I can now play and understand most Japanese RPG's. It's a really exciting feeling. There's few things I have to look up, and it's amazing how I'm now getting words from context while playing for enjoyment. I can only imagine what I'll be like when I finish in a few months.

To put this in perspective though, I've already passed JLPT2. I've had quite a bit of experience reading Japanese from books and manga. So it's not like the first quarter of KiC is all you need, it's just that I already know all the most common vocab and grammar.

zazen666 Wrote:

xaarg Wrote:

vosmiura Wrote:With RDMKTK I changed to only putting in sentences that teach something new - some new vocab, or new nuance of usage of some vocab.

I'd rather recommend anybody to drop RDMKTK and use LOLWTF instead. It is basically the same book, but just much better.

What are the above two books please?

RDMKTK is KIC's hip younger brother. http://www.amazon.co.jp/例文で学ぶ漢字と言葉-西口-光一...gy_b_img_b .

LOLWTF (Laugh out Loud, What The F***?!) is how I felt a couple of months ago when I tried to use Kanzen Master 2kyuu because of all the vocab I didn't know. Well maybe more cry out loud.

OMFG KM is easy, is how I felt a quarter way through RDMKTK. RDMKTK FTW.

When does someone start to feel and see that they actually can recall everything they learned in their SRS from outside sources? I mean sometimes I tend not to recall readings for words that I know I learned and of course that happens, but when does one start to feel really solid about knowing all the readings for the vast majority of the information in their SRS?

I'm at the beginning stages and it can be a little frustrating not being able to recall some readings at times, but then again everything is still relatively new as I'm only 2 weeks heavily into the sentences.

Also: when does one tend to become as familiar with the sentence patterns as to be able where they just seem come out of nowhere. I tend to have quite a few sentences doing that to me, but maybe only 30 out of the 600 or so I am at right now. WAAAA!

Yonosa Wrote:When does someone start to feel and see that they actually can recall everything they learned in their SRS from outside sources? I mean sometimes I tend not to recall readings for words that I know I learned and of course that happens, but when does one start to feel really solid about knowing all the readings for the vast majority of the information in their SRS?

I'm at the beginning stages and it can be a little frustrating not being able to recall some readings at times, but then again everything is still relatively new as I'm only 2 weeks heavily into the sentences.

Also: when does one tend to become as familiar with the sentence patterns as to be able where they just seem come out of nowhere. I tend to have quite a few sentences doing that to me, but maybe only 30 out of the 600 or so I am at right now. WAAAA!

I experienced the same thing. There are lots of words, etc. that I "know" in my sentence reviews but might not recognize in real reading. In my experience, usually once the card matures and I'm more familiar with the sentence, it becomes easier to recognize the different words and parts of that sentence while I'm reading. For me, all it usually takes is one time of recognizing a word while reading that I technically "know" from my sentence reviews, and suddenly I feel much more familiar with the word.

Depending on the material, somewhere between 3 to 6 months I feel things really start to sink and and are effortless.

Of course, easier stuff might be right away.

Yonosa Wrote:When does someone start to feel and see that they actually can recall everything they learned in their SRS from outside sources? I mean sometimes I tend not to recall readings for words that I know I learned and of course that happens, but when does one start to feel really solid about knowing all the readings for the vast majority of the information in their SRS?

I find it varies, some things stick straight away and others just don't seem to stick at all. Often seeing a word in a completely unrelated context will act as a trigger that makes even a "hard" word stick really well. But without that initial exposure the word might not have even registered at all.

The more context you have, the more likely it'll stick, which is why using sources like KO2001 aren't "ideal". However, that doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile. My study time is quite limited, about 30mins a day, so sources like KO2001 provide me with a really good "bang for buck". I've noticed a big improvement in my reading since starting.

Does anyone know a good starting place with Chinese Grammar? I am going through the mastering chinese grammar and although it really isn't that difficult to understand, I would love to have any kind of source that starts basic and builds on itself, I want to try and actually know what grammar I know! Because not I am lost and confused as far as that goes.
Anyone have any resources?