Here is my background, quick and easy:
- Last July was my first time in Japan for 3 weeks. So good!
- When I came back in August, I started with RTK and Pimsleur.
- Today, I'm at frame 545 in RTK and unit 26 of Pimsleur.

I think I have a pretty good knowledge of the tools and methods available to learn Japanese. Still, I'm wondering what the best route is to reach my goal: reading Japanese short-stories and novels, which rely - I guess without taking much risk - on far different syntax and writing style than the ones from mangas.

What should I best do to reach my goal once I'm finished with RTK1 and Pimsleur 90 units?
From what I read on this forum:
- First option : Tae Kim and KO2001 are the next big steps.
- Second option: some others would just priviledge the "movie method", that is, basically going back thought RTK1 while replacing the keyword with hiragana keyword (sorry for the shortcut explanxation here).
- Third option: a recent post here reveals that most kanjis found in novels can be found in RT3, so you should do that if your goal is to read novels.
I have not enough free time (2 hours every 2 days, or 30 min a day) to dedicate to Japanese learning to go the whole AJATT route.
- Things like the "retranslation method" seem to be very effective but really time-consuming and not focused on the reading skills... so may be a lost of time in my personal case.

Also, should I wait to be finished with RTK1 (and Pimsleur) before going to the next step^, or just add some ingredients in my learning approach?

Finishing RTK 1, Grammar(kim or others), and KO book one and two will get you where you want to go. (speaking from experience). RTK 3 doesnt hurt, but not 100% necessary beforing enjoying reading novels......

Finish RTK and then read translated books with fairly literal translations. I did this with the first 5 Harry Potter books, reading the Japanese and English versions side by side. At the beginning I could barely understand anything but now I can read the Japanese versions with around 90% comprehension.

YogaSpirit Wrote:I think I have a pretty good knowledge of the tools and methods available to learn Japanese. Still, I'm wondering what the best route is to reach my goal: reading Japanese short-stories and novels, which rely - I guess without taking much risk - on far different syntax and writing style than the ones from mangas.

The main thing you get in novels which you don't get so much of in manga is the descriptive text passages. This means more (and more complex) grammar structures, usually a wider vocabulary, and so on. Dialogue-heavy sections in novels can be very similar to manga, obviously. So what you need is grammar and vocabulary. (Actually, if you start off with something like books-for-older-children then just about everything has furigana and you don't really need much kanji knowledge at all.)

Quote:- Third option: a recent post here reveals that most kanjis found in novels can be found in RT3, so you should do that if your goal is to read novels.

I really don't think RTK3 is necessary. I certainly haven't done it. Almost everything you meet will be in the base set, and the handful of non-Jouyou kanji will probably have furigana to give you the reading anyway. Finish RTK1 (since you've started it), but don't worry about RTK3. (If you find later that you're reading and the biggest problem you have is running into kanji not in RTK1 then you can look at RTK3. But I'm betting that this will be way down the list of things you have difficulty with.)

You don't need RTK3. Most of those kanji you won't need, and many kanji you do need aren't in RTK3. Just learn them as you go, you won't need a book to break it down for you by that point.

YogaSpirit Wrote:Here is my background, quick and easy:
- Last July was my first time in Japan for 3 weeks. So good!
- When I came back in August, I started with RTK and Pimsleur.
- Today, I'm at frame 545 in RTK and unit 26 of Pimsleur.

You say you're doing Pimsleur and have 30 minutes a day to study Japanese. Pimsleur takes 30 minutes a day, so you're learning a bit over 5 characters per day with no time invested. I'd say that's pretty good, actually.

Quote:Still, I'm wondering what the best route is to reach my goal: reading Japanese short-stories and novels, which rely - I guess without taking much risk - on far different syntax and writing style than the ones from mangas.

漫画 is not very different at all. Much less text, less description, more dialog, smaller vocabulary. But, it's the same language, same syntax, and almost entirely the same vocabulary.

Quote:What should I best do to reach my goal once I'm finished with RTK1 and Pimsleur 90 units?

At this point you'll have 2000 characters, 2500 words, and zero rough-and-tumble real-world experience. I think you should start using monolingual dictionaries to study Japanese literature (broadly defined as anything created in the Japanese language for a Japanese audience). Note that even if you learn a lot ahead of time, real literature will be hard at first.

Quote:From what I read on this forum:
- First option : Tae Kim and KO2001 are the next big steps.

The purpose of those steps is to build a sense of how Japanese words work together (Tae Kim), and a core vocabulary (KO2001, Core2000, or something like that). Pimsleur should already have done that, so those two courses will be mostly redundant. The only new thing to learn will be reading, so if you do them, they should go quickly.

Quote:- Second option: some others would just priviledge the "movie method", that is, basically going back thought RTK1 while replacing the keyword with hiragana keyword (sorry for the shortcut explanxation here).

Actually, the Movie Method teaches the kanji organized by the sounds they make in Chinese-style words. You should already know how to write the kanji (RTK1), going back and doing Movie Method or Kanjitown will help you recognize the sounds in Chinese-style words (漢語). For a learner starting from nothing, that isn't terribly useful. But, you'll have some spoken ability at that point (from Pimsleur) without knowing the associated kanji, so kanji reading (Kanjitown or RTK2 or Movie Method) may be more helpful than usual.

Quote:- Third option: a recent post here reveals that most kanjis found in novels can be found in RT3, so you should do that if your goal is to read novels.

Here's the truth about RTK3:

After RTK1, you will encounter a few new characters in your reading.
After RTK3, you will encounter slightly fewer new characters in your reading. The first short story I read in Japanese had the character 鴫 (しぎ, a kind of waterfowl), which isn't in RTK1 or 3.

The advantage of RTK1 is that you will only have to learn a few new characters for everything you read (instead of hundreds). RTK3 provides much, much less advantage. I'm only doing RTK3 to reach the 3k-character level and learn to write 旧字体. Both of those are low priorities (I want to reach them over the next few months, but they're not as important as beginning to understand Japanese), so I'm only learning a few characters a day from RTK3, plus whatever characters I encounter in my media study.

Quote:I have not enough free time (2 hours every 2 days, or 30 min a day) to dedicate to Japanese learning to go the whole AJATT route.

Actually, AJATT isn't so much a "method" as a "manifesto." A set of radical ideas to be adapted to your own circumstances. One of those ideas is that you should focus on what you can control. If you can't really immerse yourself "all the time," you should still do what you can.

Quote:Also, should I wait to be finished with RTK1 (and Pimsleur) before going to the next step^, or just add some ingredients in my learning approach?

I think it's a good idea to actually go back a step (in the AJATT order of things) and surround yourself with fun Japanese if you're not already doing that.

For example, I love ふぁんた時間: read aloud story time from public-domain sources.

One of the authors they read is MIYAZAWA Kenji (宮沢賢治). He's not well-known outside of Japan, but he was a fantasy and early science-fiction author and poet, naturalist, and professor of agricultural science, mostly writing for children to young adults in Japanese and Esperanto. If, like me, you're learning Japanese to broaden your literary horizons, his work (and pretty much everything ふぁんた時間 plays) is a great place to start.

http://fantajikan.tea-nifty.com/blog/

Put a few hours of that on a music player (plus music, other podcasts, newscasts, whatever you like), and just experience it. You only have 30 minutes a day for study, but you probably have a lot more time in which Japanese can be going on in the background. It's better to hear and ignore than to not hear at all.

Anyway, language acquisition is a marathon. You gain skill so slowly you don't notice the change from day to day. But, if you just fit it in whenever you can and do at least a little each day, I'm sure you'll end up surprising yourself.

Summary: Don't give up. The 100-kanji-a-day crowd, while sometimes inspiring can also be intimidating. Their way isn't the only way to study! Five a day is OK, especially if Pimsleur takes up almost all your time each day. Try ふぁんた時間, enjoy it as much as possible, even though you won't understand all or even very much of it. For now, don't worry too much about what to do next, but KO2001 or Kanjitown for kanji readings (tying RTK and Pimsleur together) strike me as the logical next step of structured learning, but I think it will probably better to strike out into real literature instead. 頑張ってね。

(And that was enough English for today. Back to Japanese!)

Thanks to you all! Actually I forgot to mention that I consider Pimsleur being a "no time investment" for me since my commuting time lasts exactly the same than a Pimsleur unit.

Now, from your feedback, I'm not even sure I should go through Tae Kim and KO2001, or the Movie Method. May be I'm underestimating the benefits of Pimsleur after I'm done with its 90 units. Still, I cannot imagine having sufficient skills in terms of basic grammar and core vocabulary to just start reading straight away. At least, I will only know that once I'm ready to experience it, that in 10 years, when I'm finished with RTK :-)) Sarcasm here!
Wildweathel, you hit a point and got it right: those 100-kanji a day guys can sometime be intimidating and make you feel you depress. Thanks for your nice encouragement!

YogaSpirit Wrote:Still, I cannot imagine having sufficient skills in terms of basic grammar and core vocabulary to just start reading straight away.

That's very possible. I think the basic "test" is this -- take something you're interested in, and try to read the first paragraph or so. You can use whatever books or resources you want, but you can't ask anyone for help*. If you're able to do that with decent comprehension and in a short enough period of time that you don't get bored, then you're ready to use the reading material as a major learning source. Otherwise you should spend more time with more basic materials/textbooks.

The problem is that even if you're really interested in something, taking 45 minutes to read a paragraph at 50% comprehension probably isn't going to hold your interest.

(*I'm not saying you shouldn't ask people for help in general, just that if you're looking for something to be a learning resource as a self-studier, you should be able to handle most of it without having to ask.)

wildweathel Wrote:

Quote:What should I best do to reach my goal once I'm finished with RTK1 and Pimsleur 90 units?

At this point you'll have 2000 characters, 2500 words, and zero rough-and-tumble real-world experience. I think you should start using monolingual dictionaries to study Japanese literature (broadly defined as anything created in the Japanese language for a Japanese audience). Note that even if you learn a lot ahead of time, real literature will be hard at first.

Those kanji won't have any connection to the words learned from Pimsleur, how would YogaSpirit be able to read anything let alone j-j dictionaries and Japanese literature?

I've also heard that Pimsleur has a very low vocabulary, around 500 words. Has anyone here who has finished Pimsleur share their experiences maybe?

The amount of material covered in any of the Pimsleur courses (all 3 levels) is less than what would be covered in a single semester at a decent university.

Not that I'm trying to knock Pimsleur or say you shouldn't do it, just putting things in perspective.

That's a little bit of an exaggeration, I think, and I don't think most universities' Japanese courses would progress far enough in a semester to allow someone to understand all the audio material in the pimsleur III course without a script.

Parallel texts are most likely the best way if you ask me:
http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-into-Japa...491&sr=8-1

Under the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section you'll find more. I highly recommend "Reading Japanese With a Smile." Ignore the corny title. The cheesiness of the title doesn't reflect the content whatsoever.

I have done all Pimsleur, all Minna no nihongo 1 and 2 , 50 % of minna chuukyuu, 1600 RTK kanji (including all RTK lite) and 450 frames of KO2001.
My level now is half way between JLPT3 and JLPT2.
I would say Pismsleur contributes about 5 % to reach a decent JLPT2 level.
It is impossible to read anything with only RTK + Pimsleur.

yudantaiteki Wrote:That's a little bit of an exaggeration, I think, and I don't think most universities' Japanese courses would progress far enough in a semester to allow someone to understand all the audio material in the pimsleur III course without a script.

Not at all. Get any university-level textbook and check how much material is covered in half the the book (ie one semester's worth). If you count it all up, there will be more raw material than what is covered in 3 levels of Pimsleur.

But what Pimsleur does is stress the audio mastery; coverage of a particular grammatical item in a textbook doesn't necessarily mean a student (even a good one) will be able to understand it in a normal-speed dialogue without the aid of a script. Pimsleur doesn't cover as much material, but stresses a particular aspect of the language that's often not covered very well in other texts.

(I teach college-level Japanese so I'm somewhat familiar with what's covered in a semester.

Yudantaiketi, are you Japanese? Or an American person teaching in America? Have you already lived in Japan? For how long?

Sorry for such a digression on the initial topic, but you caught my curiosity.

I'm an American. I lived in Japan for 2 years; I'm currently doing a PhD in Japanese literature and I'm a teaching assistant at the same time (the "assistant" just means I work fewer hours; my responsibilities are the same as the full-time lecturers). I've been teaching for 4 years.