This thread is requesting responses from those few that have a high level of proficieny in Japanese as a second language.

So knowing what you know now what woud have done differently?

I know there are many threads/topics/theories etc as to how "it" should be done but what wouldn't you have done? What can we learn from the errors you made on your noble path?

P.S. If you're not high level in a second language pls don't post your theories here (not that i can stop you anyway). Just query/question/interrogate those that you wish to be.

P.P.S topic started thanks to shihoro's generous reply in this thread:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2849&page=2

Unfortunately, I'm not a super high level Japanese speaker like you want. But the first thing I would've done it is the movie method instead of RTK1.

Everything.

Not that what I did was a waste of time, but I spent hours, days, MONTHS figuring out what my best study methods are. I don't essentially mean going straight to the RTK->Tae Kim->KO or anything, but I spent a lot of time simply trying out scores of books and websites.

It was a good learning experience in a way, but I would prefer to have spent those hours learning my best.


As a note, I would have never tried to read Japanese Sci-fi for starters.
Now though...

I can't say I have many regrets (aside from how I think I should've changed work to part time sooner to make more time for studying). For the most part I feel like I made a lot of good decisions, such as going into raw Japanese material early on and listening to Japanese in every possible window of free time. There is one thing I kinda wish I would've done though, which is exposing myself to the news from the start. It's not really that huge of a mistake, but I'd probably be more news-literate now if I would've done so.

And currently there's one thing I wish I'd do: quit being so cheap and buy more Japanese books/DVDs. A person like me who gets excited over a penny in the street does not enjoy paying for amazon.jp shipping.

Edit: One more thing! If you have yet to check your local libraries for Japanese books, I think it'd be a good thing to go and do soon. Last month I checked the library around the corner out of curiosity and saw a whole shelf filled with Japanese books I've been missing out on for the past 2 years.

i think i would have used Anki more... but iKnow worked pretty well

Define "high level"?

~J

woodwojr Wrote:Define "high level"?

~J

We do this too much, it will just evolve into what constitutes fluency again.

If you are there you know.

I would have started reading as soon as I could, and read as much as I could about anything and everything... then read and read some more.

Erubey Wrote:We do this too much, it will just evolve into what constitutes fluency again.

If you are there you know.

Except in this case we're not trying to find a widely-acceptable definition, we're trying to figure out if we meet the OP's specific bar.

If it makes you feel better, I withdraw that question and substitute "Rooboy, could you give us a better idea of what kind of skill qualifies as 'high level'?"

~J

Nii87 Wrote:Unfortunately, I'm not a super high level Japanese speaker like you want. But the first thing I would've done it is the movie method instead of RTK1.

+1- or some other way to remember readings as well instead of just meanings, it's one of my problem spots now.

Use Anki and do more stuff in Japanese from the very beginning. That's about it.

woodwojr Wrote:

Erubey Wrote:We do this too much, it will just evolve into what constitutes fluency again.

If you are there you know.

Except in this case we're not trying to find a widely-acceptable definition, we're trying to figure out if we meet the OP's specific bar.

If it makes you feel better, I withdraw that question and substitute "Rooboy, could you give us a better idea of what kind of skill qualifies as 'high level'?"

~J

I deliberately avoided the use of the word "fluent" due to the 10 pages of arguments as to what fluency is that usually follow. I guess i see high level as somehwere beteween JLPT2 and JLPT1 (and above oc). But please don't debate that.

I don't think more experienced people give such good advice for newbies in this case. This may seem counter-intuitive. But the problem is that as we learn a language we forget what it was really like to be a newbie. I think that's a typical flaw of methods like AJATT.

Once we have found a method that allows us to make good progress, we think "why didn't I do that from the very start?" but really it wouldn't have worked if we had tried.

So my advice is to do what you think is right, to "waste" time trying many different things because that time that may seem like wasted when we look back from a more advanced perspective was actually necessary as a newbie.

Codexus Wrote:Once we have found a method that allows us to make good progress, we think "why didn't I do that from the very start?" but really it wouldn't have worked if we had tried.

Even at my intermediate level, I've already experienced that... But luckily, I'm still close enough, and I've tried enough different things, that I realized what you said above: At each level of mastery, different techniques work better.

And it's not even so simple as just growing out of a technique... I'm now going back to techniques that were working great, and then slowed down, because I'm now ready for more of what they have to offer.

I'll even go so far as to say: "There is no 1 technique." Not that I haven't said it before, but it becomes more and more obvious as I progress. Everyone should stop looking for that 1 magical technique that makes them learn faster and instead try different things now and then to see how it makes them feel. If the technique makes you feel good and you feel you are learning, continue to use it... But don't stop trying other techniques while you do it.

@Rooboy, a piece of advice: don't worry much about going through a "wrong" path in your Japanese fluency journey, and make sure to follow what you think is good for you.

Rooboy Wrote:I deliberately avoided the use of the word "fluent" due to the 10 pages of arguments as to what fluency is that usually follow. I guess i see high level as somehwere beteween JLPT2 and JLPT1 (and above oc). But please don't debate that.

There are probably just a many threads on the net about high level as there are about fluency. It good that you set a specific range here.

Like most I'd probably do the movie method right out of the blocks.

captal Wrote:

Nii87 Wrote:Unfortunately, I'm not a super high level Japanese speaker like you want. But the first thing I would've done it is the movie method instead of RTK1.

+1- or some other way to remember readings as well instead of just meanings, it's one of my problem spots now.

Not to derail the thread here, but start a kanjitown if you haven't. I've been doing it very spontaneously after finishing RTK1, adding kanji I meet while reading manga or whatever so I'm continuously adding to the different readings' worlds (using a notepad and lots of ctrl+f). I'm not going to argue which way's best, but if you're not going to do it all out with RTK2/movie method, it's a very useful alternative.

Anyway, I'm still intermediate so I'm not going to give any direct advice but I will say that blogs like AJATT (exercise speedreading if you're gonna read it) are very good - in that they have all this "fluff" text with stories from the earlier stages of learning. I've found many things to learn from in these stories that khatz himself disregards on AJATT but is, I suppose, exactly what others were talking about, things that seem worthless in hindsight but were actually useful at the beginning stage. Something that's often overlooked by advanced learners of anything is that they're way too hard and strict on their "old selves" - like many say they should've started RTK1 straight away but could they really have done that? Would it have been fun and satisfying doing that right away? Maybe, but a lot would have given up if they started too early due to lack of motivation.

So now that I know what the standard is, I think I meet it (hence why I asked for clarification in the first place ).

Unfortunately, my most significant advice is of marginal utility if you're already here. The big things I'd do differently would be to not waste time reviewing isolated vocabulary, to have spent more time memorizing basics (it took me an inordinately long time to buckle down and memorize the kana properly, and I didn't even nail down details in writing シ/ン vs. ツ/ソ until just last year), and to have been less aggressive about trying to say things that I had no idea how to say properly.

The wish-I'd-done-differently items that aren't common wisdom around here are less significant, but I'll give them in case they might be helpful:

I wasted a lot of time with Remembering the Kanji. Don't get me wrong, I owe a big chunk of where I am now to the boost it gave me, but I feel that once I got to 1000-1200 the returns began to diminish dramatically. I wasted a lot of time making stories and visuals for characters that reverting to rote memorization (with "rote" aided heavily by the feel for kanji I'd developed over the previous thousand frames) worked as well or better for.

I also wasted a lot of time with pure RtK. I've posted elsewhere about annotating cards with words that the kanji appears in; without that, I might still be on a cycle of failing one of, say, the 冷/涼/凍 triplets every so often because I confuse it with one of the others.

I wasted a bunch of time, effort, and will-to-review doing whole-sentence kana->kanji production. I still think kanji production is worth practicing, but as I mentioned in another thread I started recently this way just blows goats.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

~J