bodhisamaya Wrote:I am not sure why anyone would not be able to go directly from RTK/kana study into learning Japanese in context through watching Japanese video sources if Japanese transcripts are available and Rikaichan is incorporated. News, drama, anime, music... what ever a person's interest. Study the transcripts and enjoy the video. Sentence structure and grammar would be naturally learned. Though one could carry a pocket guide while waiting in lines or other lost time away from the computer.

Have you actually tried this? Even if you have a translation, there's just too much grammar to assimilate all at once and it's hard to tell what parts of the sentence are doing what. Rikaichan looks up vocab, but doesn't help with sentence structure at all. I don't think Rikaichan will take something like this and tell you what the parsing is (randomly pulled from web): ログインしても、カテゴリ開く度にゲストさんになってログインしなければならなくてはなりません. Even with a context and translation, it would be hard to "naturally" learn sentence structure when you don't even know where to break the kana or what to look up.

I'm not trying to discourage people from even trying it, but don't get so caught up in the "you must be having fun learning" that you ignore potentially beneficial things just because they seem a little boring. I mentioned before that I tried native sources really early in my learning and got nowhere; if I had been under the impression that that was the best (or only) way to learn Japanese, I probably would have quit a long long time ago.

I don't know, I'm actually a very selfish person, greedy about the knowledge I obtain, so I don't know why I'm always trying to argue about the methods I feel are better. I should just take malicious joy at watching others employ what I think are inferior learning methods.

@yudantaiteki
It comes from the context of the video being watched. You get the vocabulary from rikaichan and arrange the story sequence in your own head, then come to recognize the same patterns as you go. I have studied grammar some, but not a great deal. Verbs mostly all conjugate in a similar way. The major particles can be memorized in their most common forms fairly quickly. Other forms of speech can be learned as you go.

...I wouldn't try to learn from text only or video only. They compliment each other. Either alone is frustrating to study as well.

I think in the future we'll have to have some kind of self-study method experimentation, with control groups and all that stuff. ;p Till then... I'm right and you're wrong.

I was watching on the National Geographic channel last night. They were attaching wires to a guys head and he was surfing the internet just by thinking about it. In the future, they are going to laugh at us putzes for having to put in effort to learn something.

English won't harm your Japanese. I'm starting to think all that crap is a myth. On the other hand, turns out that not reading a few grammar rules for English seems to have harmed the OP's English.

10,000 sentences means nothing really. It's just a number. 10,000 people could do 10,000 sentences and still be at different levels from intermediate to advanced to hey whats going on here again?

There's no harm in trying this article method. Although I don't know if it will save you any time tbh. It may technically be "less reviews" but I guess you're reviewing MORE per review which is subject to higher failure rates so you have to review cards more often. On top of that you're charged with the task of figuring out exactly what the article says and memorizing everything new in it possibly several times a day.

Now there's nothing wrong with learning a lot per day or reading lots every day but a golden rule will always apply... If you're aiming for speed or volume, it's going to take you hours upon hours per day no matter which way you do it. I'm sure anyone who's done a crusade at such a speed knows exactly what i'm talking about, myself included.

I think watching videos with English subtitles doesn't help much in your studies. The OP is from Venezuela and wrote a fairly elaborate post. Anyone who can do that in a second language deserved kudos. I can't yet.

IceCream Wrote:i hope not!! efforts kinda fun ：）

ruiner... what are your methods right now anyway?

Ugh, right now I'm only studying Japanese about 20 minutes a day (ie timebox 20min in Anki) and that's about it, for various reasons. However, the ideal strategy I would be adhering to at this stage if I hadn't fallen off the wagon consists of video subs2srs decks for listening/parsing practice, looking up the vocabulary in those cards beforehand using other corpora (such as Core 6000 deck). Meanwhile when I come across interesting words/phrases outside SRS and don't think I'll remember from chance exposure, I keep them in a list to be studied later. Randomly accessing grammatical explanations as needed per encounter. Japanese the Manga Way/Core 2000 really did provide the perfect base.

It's frustrating to try and compare methods, because we've all tried so many things as we progress, hard to look back and decide what worked best, and devise new strategies based on that, but I guess it's the only way.

Edit: I said 'perfect base' but of course that's only relatively speaking... as I've mentioned in the past, I prefer to look at the structured/natural process as the same, it just requires more strategies and tools to bond them properly (like that site bombpersons was working on?) from the very beginning. (Other examples being using Oniichan's RTKO2001 mod w/ woelpad's Lite script and Nukemarine and Hashiriya's KO2001/smart.fm hybrid.)

Someone want to make one?
If you have a textbook, all the really common expressions are there in chapter 1. Watch any anime and you will find many of them - at least three. There are other common ones worth learning - they are scattered throughout the book. Expressions are the easiest to learn because most expressions have an equivalent expression in your language.

re:Reading Manga
You can read a furigana manga and not understand it...but at that point it is less like reading and more like looking at letters...

re:100 word pickup method
100 words is too many for me...I will never remember it. Better to memorize one contextless sentence at my level: ame ga futteimasu (it's raining). Now you can learn two words you didn't know before: ame (rain) and furu (to fall). Now when someone in your anime says "ame desu nee~" maybe you stand a chance at picking up the meaning - that is a real line from an anime. I can never understand lines with three or more nouns - I don't even try.

If you do try the 100 word method, I recommend fiction and not newspaper articles. Each author has their pet vocabulary (no idea how big that might be) - once you have learned it you will be able to read more works from that author with less difficulty.

The key is to do what ever keeps you motivated to study. Make too strict (or too relaxed) of rules and become one of the vast majority who start out on the path and give up after a few months, or a few years. Not spending tens of thousands of dollars on college tuition and getting faster results is a wonderful motivator for me.

IceCream Wrote:I've been thinking recently about that. I think it'd be great to make an anki resource of common phrases and expressions with sound and picture, and the call and response thing, from videos. So many expressions are commonly repeated that itd be a really worthwhile source for those who like premade packs...

This would be an AWESOME deck. Especially if it covered idiomatic expressions and the like, maybe lots of casual slang phrases and such. Stuff that a dictionary won't really help you with too much.

I'd be very interested in that.

Now that this season (Fall 2009) of Japanese dramas will come with exact japanese subtitles(i.e. the words are exactly what the actors are saying), I see no reason why using video after RTK would be bad.

If you don't know the meaning of the sentence, then watch the video (the subtitles have the timing info, so you can seek to the exact place in the video) and things should be clearer from context.

If you STILL can't figure it out, you have 2 options:

1)write down the sentence somewhere and ask you japanese tutor/conversation partner
2)put the sentence on lang-8.com and get feedback from native japanese speakers

Either way, the important thing to realize is that you're not alone and that you can
try asking other people for help.

For example, in new drama ("Ohitorisama" episode 1) I encountered the phrase "賞味期限切れ" which basically means that the "food expiration date has passed". The main character had food in the fridge and it passed the expiration date. So I was spoiled (and unfortunately seemed like the only thing in the fridge).

She then said "でも私には 賞味期限なんてない".

I took this to mean "But to me, this isn't expired......(and so I'll eat it anyway since I'm starving)".

I asked my Japanese tutor and it turns out I was wrong. Apparently, women can also be
"賞味期限切れ". It can refer to women that are "over the hill" and unable to attract good men anymore (since they are no longer young and beautiful).

For Japanese people, women can also "expire" in the same way that bad, rotten food expires......LOL.....

Anyway, the idea is that if you can't figure something out, write it down and try asking people. And in the meantime, just move on and keep continuing reading/watching.
Don't let one kanji/word/phrase/sentence keep you from moving forward.

scissor61 Wrote:I too tend to pass-over words I don't know, but i'll be reviewing an article that i should already know all the words so what i'll be testing is if i know or don't all the words in the article, if i cannot recall the pronunciation or meaning of one word i'll press fail...

So you're going to fail the entire article if you get one reading wrong?

chamcham Wrote:Now that this season (Fall 2009) of Japanese dramas will come with exact japanese subtitles(i.e. the words are exactly what the actors are saying), I see no reason why using video after RTK would be bad.

Either way, the important thing to realize is that you're not alone and that you can
try asking other people for help.

The problem is that if you require asking other people for help just to figure out the basic meaning of every sentence you encounter (which would be true of most people trying RTK->direct native sources), your progress is going to be extremely slow, much slower than if you use a textbook or other source like that.

Your experience is about not knowing the nuance of an idiomatic phrase, not the basic problem of not understanding には and なんてない because you can't look them up.

chamcham Wrote:I asked my Japanese tutor and it turns out I was wrong. Apparently, women can also be
"賞味期限切れ". It can refer to women that are "over the hill" and unable to attract good men anymore (since they are no longer young and beautiful).

For Japanese people, women can also "expire" in the same way that bad, rotten food expires......LOL.....

Never heard of the term "Christmas cake" in English?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.ph...ake%20girl

Funny that they reference Japan on urban dictionary.

I know this guy who came to Japan with no Japanese when he was in his 20s. He never used textbooks or learned grammar, and he just absorbed Japanese from real conversation, TV, and other native material. He has been living in Japan for about 20 years because of his job, but he wasn't particularly interested in Japanese when he came to Japan. He teaches math at university, organize faculty meetings, and does other job related things all in Japanese. He can do pretty much everything in Japanese. But his Japanese is nowhere near native fluency, and it's pretty easy to tell he's a foreigner from his speech and writing.

His wife also came to Japan with zero knowledge of Japanese, but she used textbooks and whatnot while absorbing real Japanese. Her Japanese is so perfect she's indistinguishable from native speakers. Grammar/vocabulary/pronunciation she learned from learning material are very small when compared with what she learned from exposure to native material. I don't know if she would have been able to reach her level without learning material, but I think asking her how much textbooks helped her improve Japanese is like asking an NBA player how much PE classes at elementary school helped him improve his basketball skills.

Their daughters were raised in Japan, and they learned Japanese exclusively from exposure to native material. They only speak Japanese and are native Japanese speakers.

They didn't use an SRS or any other modern learning tools, and only the father has a foreign accent and incomplete grammar. This is just a single anecdotal case, but it seems the mother's method is the best: always motivated, massive exposure to native material, take advantage of learning materials as much as possible, and never give up.

She's a Chinese-English-Japanese trilingual, so she probably took advantage of her Chinese to learn Japanese and had a larger phonetic inventory that probably helped master pronunciation. And if there is such a person as a linguistically gifted learner, probably she is that person.

mezbup Wrote:There's no harm in trying this article method. Although I don't know if it will save you any time tbh. It may technically be "less reviews" but I guess you're reviewing MORE per review which is subject to higher failure rates so you have to review cards more often.

Having articles instead of sentences in the end will mean less reviews and more reading in japanese, which is what i'm looking for, plus i'll be reading topics i enjoy, something that i do every day but in english.

mezbup Wrote:On top of that you're charged with the task of figuring out exactly what the article says and memorizing everything new in it possibly several times a day.

I would only judge myself for not remembering the meaning and the reading of a word. Each time i review an article i'll be knowing a little bit more about the content of the article.

mezbup Wrote:Now there's nothing wrong with learning a lot per day or reading lots every day but a golden rule will always apply... If you're aiming for speed or volume, it's going to take you hours upon hours per day no matter which way you do it. I'm sure anyone who's done a crusade at such a speed knows exactly what i'm talking about, myself included.

I know what it means a crusade, it was exhausting doing 100 kanjis a day, and the last two days of the "rtk crusade" i did 165, besides keeping with the reviews, that's why i want to make my new crusade enjoyable, also i already spend several hours a day reading articles in english, what i will do is changing the language in which i read them.

bodhisamaya Wrote:I think watching videos with English subtitles doesn't help much in your studies. The OP is from Venezuela and wrote a fairly elaborate post. Anyone who can do that in a second language deserved kudos. I can't yet.

Maybe it helps in the way that khatz recommend to listen japanese all the time without understanding, i did watch a lot of comedy with subtitles like seinfeld, but didn't help me to improve my english understanding though, thanks.

jcdietz03 Wrote:re:100 word pickup method
100 words is too many for me...I will never remember it. Better to memorize one contextless sentence at my level: ame ga futteimasu (it's raining). Now you can learn two words you didn't know before: ame (rain) and furu (to fall). Now when someone in your anime says "ame desu nee~" maybe you stand a chance at picking up the meaning - that is a real line from an anime. I can never understand lines with three or more nouns - I don't even try.

The point in memorizing 100 words (probably through iverson's method) is that the article itself will give me the context to remember the words in the long term memory, through my experience i found that i can remember better the words i have seen in an specifically context, than a method such Iknow or Anki, which are just about repetition with a limited context. Also my sister is using Iknow for learning english she is like in English core 5 or something, and she cannot even say a sentence or anything, that's probably because she doesn't have context with the words she has memorized, she doesn't see the words in action. So the best method i think is memorizing first and then give the words real context.

IceCream Wrote:When you get back to it, maybe looking all the words up beforehand is a bit time consuming? You can work out the meaning of some just from context (and quickly check with rikaichan or J-J dic). Other than that, i think your method probably is one of the soundest.

I'm planning to use Iverson's method just to acquire the words fast in the short term memory, i have read that is a fast way of memorizing new words, reading and reviewing just the article itself is what would make remembering the words at the long term memory, i'll just have to see, if it's to hard i'll add less words.

avparker Wrote:So you're going to fail the entire article if you get one reading wrong?

Yes, if i for instance i get 20 readings wrong or one i'll press fail, study those words again, later maybe read the article again or just the part where i fail depending how much i know the article, and in the next day i'll review the the words again, but nothing too hard, just reading lightly, besides like every new article i add is longer, it will contain a lot of words from the firsts articles making it easier to review. I like this way because instead of reviewing abstracts words an sounds i'll just be reviewing the words in their natural context and in topics i enjoy.

magamo, i think the difference between those two is the attitude, we are here with the same attitude of the woman, willing to find the best way to learn japanese, taking advantage of every resource available, on the contrary with the man who is just lucky of speaking japanese. i'm not dismissing the idea of getting help with grammar explanations to recognise better sentences patterns i'm saying that there are so many rules and exceptions in a language that learning them explicitly is a waste of time and counter productive, the people who study english here throughout paid classes have an horrible understanding of english although they can communicate, their vocabulary is too limited, and they speak incredibly slow, i think is because maybe they start thinking in grammar rules for each sentence they're trying to speak and they had have put too much emphasis on the output instead of focusing in the input.

A little bit of my english, learning languages and using the language.

I started with games like resident evil, translating small pieces of text just to know where that key was, or what was the code to open the lock. In games like resident evil there are a lot of words that doesn't require translation, stuff like "you have taken the red key" with the image of the key on it, so that way i have learned hundreds of words only by context with no translation. Resident evil type of games require completing the game several times to unlock everything, i remember that i unlocked all eight epilogues of resident evil nemesis, you can imagine that by the eighth time of playthrough i didn't need a translator. After that i was intrigued by rpgs, so i started to play a lot of them, Parasite eve, Tales of Destiny, Legends of legaia, FFVII, FFVIII, FF: tactics, Xenogears, you can imagine how much did i have to read, but i was having fun i wasn't trying to speak english, i just wanted to enjoy the story, now i can read anything i want.

About my grammar, i know is bad, and can be used against my argument of learning grammar naturally instead with explanations, but that's because my english is based only on input, i don't have nobody to practice nor the need to write in english, is probably normal to make mistakes in my case, although if i try for once to to practice my english output, my grammar will greatly improve. but i can tell something for sure, i have no problem reading or listening English content, in fact i read english much more faster than spanish, that's probably because i read in english all the time, other thing is that i can tell when my english writing is unnatural, i think is something like my input knowledge is judging my output knowledge or something, in my opinion when you start to learn a language you should do a lot of input first, with time you'll get to the point where you should start doing output practice if you don't want to sound like me, but we won't have to worry about that because we are trying to learn a language, instead of finish a game, we want near native fluency, right?

Hey that's a great story! I think your grammar is pretty good actually; I know native English who write far worse.

Thing is, I'm not 100% sure you can compare learning Japanese to learning English. Japanese is so different to European languages, with such different ways to express things. Here's a good example from Tae Kim:

朝ご飯を食べるんじゃなかった。
Literal translation: It is that breakfast wasn't to eat.
Meaning: You should not have eaten breakfast, you know.

I guess if you heard that line in a drama, with an angry housewife shouting it whilst looking at an empty breakfast bowl, you might be able to work out the meaning from context. But in a written article, I don't see how you'd work out the real meaning?

I guess you could spend 30-60 minutes looking up all the grammar in the sentence, and look up other example sentences that use the same format, OR you could just go through a structured grammar guide at the start and skip all that bother. Tae Kim's guide is free and really well ordered, and also it would only take a few days to go through if you're able to do 100 sentences a day! I highly recommend that approach.

Anyway keep us updated, I'm intrigued to hear how it goes!

scissor61 Wrote:

avparker Wrote:So you're going to fail the entire article if you get one reading wrong?

Yes, if i for instance i get 20 readings wrong or one i'll press fail, study those words again, later maybe read the article again or just the part where i fail depending how much i know the article,

Unless your memory works in a very different (and better ) way than mine does, I don't think that will work very well. There are always going to be those few words that for some reason you fail to remember properly. So you'll end up having to fail your cards all the time, defeating the whole purpose of using a SRS.

Codexus Wrote:

scissor61 Wrote:

avparker Wrote:So you're going to fail the entire article if you get one reading wrong?

Yes, if i for instance i get 20 readings wrong or one i'll press fail, study those words again, later maybe read the article again or just the part where i fail depending how much i know the article,

Unless your memory works in a very different (and better ) way than mine does, I don't think that will work very well. There are always going to be those few words that for some reason you fail to remember properly. So you'll end up having to fail your cards all the time, defeating the whole purpose of using a SRS.

I think it can be done. It's certainly prone to higher failure rates but srs will do it's thing. Logically if you split it up into all it's component sentences it'd take you the same amount of time to fail and review as it would failing the article until you could read all of it flawlessly. I guess it'd also give you extra practice at the stuff you knew well.

I'll keep this approach in mind cos I like the short little articles on kizzu news.

mezbup Wrote:

Codexus Wrote:Unless your memory works in a very different (and better ) way than mine does, I don't think that will work very well. There are always going to be those few words that for some reason you fail to remember properly. So you'll end up having to fail your cards all the time, defeating the whole purpose of using a SRS.

I think it can be done. It's certainly prone to higher failure rates but srs will do it's thing. Logically if you split it up into all it's component sentences it'd take you the same amount of time to fail and review as it would failing the article until you could read all of it flawlessly. I guess it'd also give you extra practice at the stuff you knew well.

I'll keep this approach in mind cos I like the short little articles on kizzu news.

Logically, you'd think that the same amount of time is spent on it, but that's not the case. With dozens of "failure points", that increases the chances of something you'll forget.

A number of us experienced this with the lengthier sentences of KO2001. We'd get a sentence with 5 new words and find ourselves failing, and failing again the same card. This in turn made the reviewing process very tedious (cue burnout). The suggestion was made to have a card for each word, just underline or bold the word that you MUST get right to pass the card. General response has been positive when this was tried.

Sometimes it's not about the most efficient route. Sometimes it's about taking the path that let's you reach the destination. Creating flash cards that encourage high turn-over and test a very specific thing can really help.

Now, there's nothing stopping you from also reading articles, and lots of them. Heck, you can isolate the sentences, test those, and still read the article as normal.

Plus don't go for perfection, in a way. If you look at an SRS you're pass rate is meant to be 80 to 90 percent. That means you're missing a lot of items. However, by having such a large number of items, you get 5 to 10 times more correct that wrong.

Then again, what you did with the video game is also a great idea. There's threads on these forums about doing just that.

Nukemarine Wrote:A number of us experienced this with the lengthier sentences of KO2001. We'd get a sentence with 5 new words and find ourselves failing, and failing again the same card. This in turn made the reviewing process very tedious (cue burnout). The suggestion was made to have a card for each word, just underline or bold the word that you MUST get right to pass the card. General response has been positive when this was tried.

Thank you!!! I did not see this approach anywhere but it should be very helpful.