This is a question for those who have finished RTK. Aside from the obvious things like listening, reading manga, watching shows and SRS-ing (or anything else really general), what is it that you are doing or have done that you think, if not for this method of studying, you be far from where you are now?


-Without iKnow, my word recognition count would be much lower. It wouldn't be quite as possible to breeze through Japanese blogs (I put sentences for unknown words/less familiar words into Anki)

-If I hadn't sent 60+ emails with a Japanese friend (I write in Japanese, she writes in English most of the time), my ability to construct correct sentences would be horrible.

-If not for the Read Real Japanese series and Breaking Into Japanese Literature/Exploring Japanese Literature books, my reading pace would be a great deal slower ( http://www.amazon.com/Read-Real-Japanese...582&sr=8-1 ) (<-- from that link all four can be found)

It scares me when I think about how far behind I'd be without them. So I'm wondering what other methods of studying I may be missing out on. What materials or study methods have you utilized that have benefited you so much that you're scared to think of what it'd be like if you didn't utilize them?

Nuriko Wrote:It wouldn't be quite as possible to breeze through Japanese blogs (I put sentences for unknown words/less familiar words into Anki)

I must be doing something wrong here, As I've said many times on this forum I'm JLPT 1 passer, I've got a ton of vocab(Iknow is no problem).

But there's no way I could "Breeze through Japanese blogs") Unless I was doing some super-speed reading where I was just looking for Keywords and not actually reading the blog. The amount of random casual Vocab/twisted vocab on blogs makes it incredibly Difficult, slow. I find real academic books so much easier to understand and breeze through.

What exactly do you mean by breeze through?

koyota Wrote:What exactly do you mean by breeze through?

Let's see... I guess I mean, I can go sentence after sentence without needing a dictionary at a speed that's quick enough to feel like I'm getting a good flow of information that the author intended to get to the reader (in other words, I don't feel a language barrier as I'm reading, for the most part). Of course, this depends on how easy the blog is. I'm thinking of very layman type blogs as I'm typing this. Examples:
Mangaka Watase Yuu's blog: http://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/wataseblog/
Child-raising/teaching related blog: http://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/nihongokyouiku/
Seiyuu Iwanaga Tetsuya's blog: http://ameblo.jp/tetsuyasan/archive1-200906.html
Blog about a guy who's always stuck having to watch his crazy kids: http://ameblo.jp/yugure/entry-10304884699.html
And of course stuff on http://www.lifehacker.jp/

If it's anything with a lot of 専門用語 then I'm lost. However, even on these "layman blogs" there can be some tricky words here and there, like "baking soda" just showing up out of nowhere, and the word doesn't even look like it would mean baking soda... anyway, it's not like my reading is always really smooth. I just get the impression that this is coming to me easier than I ever expected it would.

Do you SRS things outside of iKnow too? I find that a lot of the words I come across and recognize are also stuff I picked up from manga/magazine articles/news, and a lot of listening also pays off too. The iKnow thing was something I wanted to do to simply fill in gaps here and there, and it did a lot more than I expected. It shows that it pays off especially when you learn a word from iKnow and start to immediately recognize it everywhere.

Thanks for the nice reply!

I only mentioned Iknow, because the Iknow vocab is way below where I'm at now with my vocab level.

When you read, do you actually READ or just kinda look at the kanji and know the meanings of the word and continue on?

I think part of my problem is ocd, and I HAVE to know the proper reading of the Kanji. / Every word I see, if I don't know a word it trips me out. Also If I don't pay close attention to what I'm reading I'll skip over words like they don't exist that I don't know, which is okay to get info, but bad when you are trying to learn a language by learning frequently used words..

Let me give you some random examples of some blogs here all from a simple game site that is targeted towards teens and let me know if this are a "breeze to read"(just a paragraph or two is fine)

http://www.famitsu.com/blog/otsuka/2009/...ouls3.html
(I picked a random one, but you can check out anything from the back numbers)

I'm not nearly as advanced as the OP, so my response holds little weight I suppose. That said, my essentials are mining from context (jpod101) and having my SRS sentences using audio that I can hear on my ipod. I find it to be much easier to learn things that come from situational dialogue, as opposed to iknow style isolated sentences. I haven't gotten into subs2srs yet, but really look forward to doing that (for me it's a matter of not having the media or tech know how, but I want to figure it out in the near future). And my ipod is just as important as anki, for obvious reasons.

I finally found A Japanese person to tudor me too.....haven't started yet but I am excited about the prospect, and think this will be a huge boost too! I also have some pen pals, and while time consuming, it is very worthwhile and fun.

I also think it is essential for me to be organized and track my progress. Being consistent on a daily basis, and setting monthly goals and such gives me more clarity and focus for the long haul........essential!

Nuriko Wrote:Aside from the obvious things like listening, reading manga, watching shows and SRS-ing (or anything else really general), what is it that you are doing or have done that you think, if not for this method of studying, you be far from where you are now?

How is any of the above obvious?! I'm not doing any of those things (apart from listening which is hard to avoid!)... :-))

One thing that has helped me a lot was being forced to go through several thick books when preparing a few professional exams in Japanese. This was reading for time, reading for comprehension and retention, scanning the texts looking for the right info, etc. There was no time to pause and wonder about the right reading of a certain character, etc. This was good because it pushed me - and proved to me that it was possible at my level - to read massive amounts of text for comprehension, to learn new things in Japanese, through Japanese and not just learn Japanese as an isolated subject.

Building on from there, I am trying to read as much as I can, with only an occasional use of the dictionary. Reading for information, stuff that interests me, mostly books.

Two main benefits that I see coming out of it are: (1) ability to increase reading speed greatly, I'm starting to see long strings of hiragana as whole phrases that immediately make sense, without having to read them character-by-character. (2) Ability to pick out the important vocabulary through pure frequent exposure. I only look something up in the dictionary these days when a word makes me curious or when I see it for the n-th time and realise it's time to look it up. (Kato Lomb wrote something about this, too.)

One thing that really is my goal these days is increasing the reading speed. The faster I can read, the more exposure I can get.

Interestingly, it is really noticeable how reading speed increases within the same book. All authors tend to use their own little sets of words and turns of phrases - it takes a while to get used to these but after a couple of dozens of pages the going gets easier. (Halfway through the second book of Murakami's 1Q84 now and this effect is really noticeable - by the way, is this man paid by word?! filling whole pages with irrelevant ramblings about nothing is certainly an art to be rewarded...)

However, this euphoric feeling evaporates when I get a new book. Usually, it means going back to a (relatively) slow speed again until I'm used it the author's language.

How is 1Q84? Is it enjoyable? I keep thinking of getting it, but I'm put off by the fact that it appears to be 3 very very large tomes.

As for me, I found reading along with the Harry Potter audiobook with the physical book in front of me and following a long, was absolutely priceless for increasing my reading speed. I did this before I really knew any Japanese at all, so almost all of the vocab was foreign to me. But what it forced me to do was be able to keep pace with a relatively quick narrator, and be able to follow along with the text. It drastically improved my ability to quickly recognise and read kana early on, as well helped me start differentiating when words started and ended (so I could still follow along when they started reading kanji I didn't know the readings for).

Serge Wrote:Interestingly, it is really noticeable how reading speed increases within the same book. All authors tend to use their own little sets of words and turns of phrases - it takes a while to get used to these but after a couple of dozens of pages the going gets easier. (Halfway through the second book of Murakami's 1Q84 now and this effect is really noticeable - by the way, is this man paid by word?! filling whole pages with irrelevant ramblings about nothing is certainly an art to be rewarded...)

I really want to read Murakami but I still need furigana because there are just too many kanji I don't know the readings of.

Actually the biggest problem I'm running into in my study right now is my lack of knowledge on readings. Perhaps because I never did KO. Is this a good place to start? What advice would anyone give to have a way to better grasp readings? I've toyed around with using the Movie Method but I don't want to make Heisig-esque stories again- it turned me off enough the first time. I thought massive exposure would do it but I often find myself flopping readings (reading 表情　（ひょうじょう）　as じょうひょう, 強調 （きょうちょう) as ちょうきょう etc).

The number one most essential thing has been, hands down, the textbook Japanese: The Spoken Language by Eleanor Jorden. When I studied abroad in Japan I could barely read or write at all... but man could I speak and listen. I was talking circles around people, and my pronunciation was (and is) great. I still think it's the best book to learn Japanese, but I really doubt it would work as self-study. Sadly I haven't been using it in the last year.

Number two definitely has to be this website. Without this site I would never have finished RTK, and I would not know about many of the language tools that I am using today.

Number three would have to be RTK itself, since it's made my reading and writing catch up to my speaking.

captal Wrote:

Serge Wrote:Interestingly, it is really noticeable how reading speed increases within the same book. All authors tend to use their own little sets of words and turns of phrases - it takes a while to get used to these but after a couple of dozens of pages the going gets easier. (Halfway through the second book of Murakami's 1Q84 now and this effect is really noticeable - by the way, is this man paid by word?! filling whole pages with irrelevant ramblings about nothing is certainly an art to be rewarded...)

I really want to read Murakami but I still need furigana because there are just too many kanji I don't know the readings of.

Actually the biggest problem I'm running into in my study right now is my lack of knowledge on readings. Perhaps because I never did KO. Is this a good place to start? What advice would anyone give to have a way to better grasp readings? I've toyed around with using the Movie Method but I don't want to make Heisig-esque stories again- it turned me off enough the first time. I thought massive exposure would do it but I often find myself flopping readings (reading 表情　（ひょうじょう）　as じょうひょう, 強調 （きょうちょう) as ちょうきょう etc).

I can definitely recommend KO to brush up on readings that's for sure. I've just gotten halfway through it in two weeks. Progress? I went from not being able to functionally read all that much to being able to decipher news articles, follow anime subs with 80% comprehension and start using a monolingual dictionary.

mezbup Wrote:I can definitely recommend KO to brush up on readings that's for sure. I've just gotten halfway through it in two weeks. Progress? I went from not being able to functionally read all that much to being able to decipher news articles, follow anime subs with 80% comprehension and start using a monolingual dictionary.

That sounds like a pretty good pitch- is this something I can pick up at a larger book store in Japan? I know there's all sorts of resources out there for KO but I'm not sure where to start- I'll go digging through the forum and see what I can find.

i'll PM you a link of the deck i'm using.

koyota Wrote:When you read, do you actually READ or just kinda look at the kanji and know the meanings of the word and continue on?
...
http://www.famitsu.com/blog/otsuka/2009/...ouls3.html
(I picked a random one, but you can check out anything from the back numbers)

For the most part, I pronounce the word in my head as I go, unless I'm lazy and just want to get through the article to get a basic idea. If it's an unfamiliar word but the meaning is extremely easy to guess, sometimes I don't bother to look it up for the reading, but if I'm in a "good studying mood" I will.

Thanks for the link! So far I've gone through it and in the first two paragraphs these are the trouble areas for me:
総プレイ
ザコ敵
屠り去られ
惨殺
and at this sentence I kinda went "duh har, what does it all mean :B": 未練がましくパリィ道に邁進しようとする。「パリィ道．．．って？」"Oh ok, it's some road apparently"

And if I'm not that interested in it, I'd skip pronouncing the reading in my head for the following bolded words in this sentence: ザコより強い騎士系の敵にはナメてかからなくても余裕で惨殺されている。I can guess the meaning, but I just haven't seen the word before and can't quite register a "for sure" reading for the words.

Overall I get what the writer's talking about and can laugh and stuff in response to it, but I am hitting some walls. I'm not going to say it's anything to do with the genre because these words can be seen in many genres I've been exposed to. This seems to be a vocab problem. Good wake up call on my part!

blackmacros Wrote:How is 1Q84? Is it enjoyable? I keep thinking of getting it, but I'm put off by the fact that it appears to be 3 very very large tomes.

2 very very large tomes. About 1,050 pages in total. It is not unenjoyable: it has an intriguing plot (that moves soooo slowly...) and provides insight into some aspects of the Japanese life, the language is relatively easy and at times his choice of words is great. If Murakami is your thing, I really recommend reading it.

Murakami is definitely not my thing, though, so I can't be a balanced critic. I read several of his books in translation many years ago and realised that I actively disliked all of his characters and many things about his style of writing. So in fact, I am only reading this one because of its novelty value.

I've never read any Murakami before so I'm not sure if he would be my cup of tea or not. I had a quick peak at the first book today though at my local Japanese book store, and I found the language actually was pretty easy for me to understand. I got through 3/4 of the first page with 100% comprehension before I stumbled on a word I didn't know. I wasn't really expecting that, since its a full-blown novel. I actually found it much easier to read than the Haruhi light novels.

I'm still kind of put off by the sheer volume of it though...its huge...

Lots of Japanese dramas and jrock followed by lots of anki (core 0-10k MCDs and Death Note substosrs) and a little Japanese for Everyone textbook. Then maybe some podcasts, more dramas, anime and manga when I have more time left in the day.

For me if it wasn't for Sou Matome and Kanzen Master made into anki decks, I would prob be reviewing one of the beginners textbooks for the god-knows-manyth time. Combine that with pretty much buying any book or manga that looks remotely interesting whenever i stop by a konbini or Tsutaya.

RandomQuotes Wrote:For me if it wasn't for Sou Matome and Kanzen Master made into anki decks, I would prob be reviewing one of the beginners textbooks for the god-knows-manyth time. Combine that with pretty much buying any book or manga that looks remotely interesting whenever i stop by a konbini or Tsutaya.

I didn't even know those had decks, I'll be looking into them, thank you.

As for me - Core 10k deck hands down. I need that vocabulary.

It's my inability to get bored or tired of studying Japanese that's proven to be most essential. For a while I'll listen to radio dramas for most of the day for weeks on end and then not listen to a single one for months, other times I'll watch 3 movies a day for weeks and then nothing for 6 months. I'm now in my reading books phase, spending more time reading each night than I would usually. I had a month of watching Japanese dramas almost non-stop and then nothing, I just stopped for no particular reason. I don't know if I'll ever get heavy in anime again but I was early on. None of these things alone are essential because they're all so fleeting and I find it difficult to care terribly much about one particular form of media for very long. The only constant is my passion for Japanese itself.

Quote:[...]what is it that you are doing or have done that you think, if not for this method of studying, you [would] be far from where you are now?

The "Dragonball Z paradigm" has been particularly useful during my study. It's always refreshing to see infinitely powerful superheroes excited to grow stronger. Has anyone noticed that their power levels never stop rising? This weekly boost of optimism has kept me motivated for the past two years (Dragon Ball Z Kai - every Sunday at 9:00am JST).

At any rate, I've depended on the Familiarity Principle for the past two years. Also known as the Mere-Exposure effect, this phenomenon says that people like things merely because they're familiar to them. Familiarity also leads to an intense feeling of nostalgia and enjoyment. Dragon Ball Z Kai has been the most enjoyable aspect of my "Japanese Study", because of how consistent it is (especially considering it's a remastered and recut version of the original, which aired over 10 years ago). To answer your question, if not for nostalgia/familiarity I think would have quit a long time ago.

Method? Learn more words. Read sentences, listen (vaguely entertaining shows I leave in the background, I try to be selective), shadow/output if I feel like it.

Ajatt gave me a good boost at the beginning, this forum/ ja-dark/ jalup helped me refine my methods and understand other methods. But I eventually found that going from one reader to another was not a good way to learn Japanese; it was an effort to escape self-responsibility.

I take lessons once a week, I really enjoy that. You get to talk about culture and other fascinating aspects, which are connected to Japanese. Plus someone explains everything you don't understand to you. Other than that I guess it's anki and repetitions.

I have a question myself: what is this KO you have been talking about?

riogray Wrote:I have a question myself: what is this KO you have been talking about?

Kanji odyssey 2001

the 2 books and audio e-book presented 1110 kanji in an approximate order of frequency, with common example words, in sentences, and the audio e-book, had audio. Someone had also made a very useful anki deck out of it.

It was one of the big things before Core 2k/6k/10k came around and seems to have rendered the old KO deck obsolete ( though I still have the deck and the books, may well do a once through to pick up any missing pieces after core )

Seems it is an online thing now rather than books they are selling these days

http://www.coscom.co.jp/ebook/item_2001kanji.html

Thank you!