xanan66 Wrote:...like 2000 words or something so I start to learn knew words and how to pronounce them

Core 2000

xanan66 Wrote:...then compliment it with some good grammar book

Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. 'All About Particles' is the only grammar book which I'd strongly recommend buying. 'A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar' is very useful but it's horrifically overpriced. You could try to find an ebook copy on Google Blog Search or alternatively just e-mail me if you want it.

Thanks m8 , done 40 kanji so far, I want to learn more but think that will do, better to keep an even phase of 40 a day, then to do 60,80 or maby 100 a day then after a week I get sick of it, learning should be fun =)

pm215 Wrote:Er, 'learn the readings' isn't really part of the 'traditional' approach [as I understand it] either; you still learn words, you're just trying also to remember how to read and write the characters as you go along.

Of course they still learn words. The problem is that they learn readings as they learn the kanji. I know loads of people who studied the traditional way and they know readings to kanji they can't even use.

"Oh, the on'yomi for 寝? It's shin!"
"Ok. Like in what word?"
"I don't know. I just studied readings using flashcards lol."

Waste of time.

I don't think it's fair to compare RTK to that "traditional way" -- saying that the "traditional way" is a waste because it only teaches you readings and no words is like saying that RTK is a waste because it only teaches you meanings and no readings or words.

"Oh, the keyword of 寝 is "lie down"."
"Ok. What's the reading? What is a word?"
"I don't know. I just studied keywords from RTK lol."

I studied the traditional way, and of course there were (and still are) some kanji that I knew the readings for but no words, but that doesn't mean the whole method is bad.

Tobberoth Wrote:Knowing how to pronounce the kanji isn't important. Knowing words is. If you already know the kanji when you start learning words, you can completely skip the "learn the readings" part. This is one of the reasons why traditional methods are slower and boring.

Very good advice, I've noticed that although I sometimes can pronounce an unknown word properly (based on previous knowledge of its kanji), its still pretty pointless since I can't be sure that its correct. So you either know a word and kanji it consists of or not.

Tobberoth Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:Er, 'learn the readings' isn't really part of the 'traditional' approach [as I understand it] either; you still learn words, you're just trying also to remember how to read and write the characters as you go along.

Of course they still learn words. The problem is that they learn readings as they learn the kanji. I know loads of people who studied the traditional way and they know readings to kanji they can't even use.

Oh well, there's obviously more than one 'traditional way'. I learnt a pile of kanji via the trad. approach before looking at RTK. I never learned readings in isolation, only by learning words with them in. My point was that "you can skip the 'learn the readings' part" isn't a good argument for why RTK is better than not-RTK, because there's no good reason to spend ages learning readings in a not-RTK approach either.

pm215 Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:Er, 'learn the readings' isn't really part of the 'traditional' approach [as I understand it] either; you still learn words, you're just trying also to remember how to read and write the characters as you go along.

Of course they still learn words. The problem is that they learn readings as they learn the kanji. I know loads of people who studied the traditional way and they know readings to kanji they can't even use.

Oh well, there's obviously more than one 'traditional way'. I learnt a pile of kanji via the trad. approach before looking at RTK. I never learned readings in isolation, only by learning words with them in. My point was that "you can skip the 'learn the readings' part" isn't a good argument for why RTK is better than not-RTK, because there's no good reason to spend ages learning readings in a not-RTK approach either.

This is true for everything. There's no good reason to not use mnemonics in a non-RTK approach either. The point is that almost everyone who is a critic of RTK is so because they find it odd that you learn kanji without learning readings.

My point was that the main criticism of RtK is exacly why it's superior.

Tobberoth Wrote:The point is that almost everyone who is a critic of RTK is so because they find it odd that you learn kanji without learning readings.

My impression is that it's more "without learning Japanese words that go with the kanji", ie I haven't encountered anybody who was anti-RTK because they thought you should learn readings in particular, so I disagree that this is the 'main criticism' of RTK.

My personal criticism of RTK is not the separation of 'learning forms' from 'learning vocabulary' so much as that it's a bit weak on suggestions of how to link the two up again.

xanan66,
You wouldn't happen to be studying at KTH by any chance?
Did some cool guy recommend this site to you?

At this point with all the possibilities of study with SRS and how to combine different angles and amounts of overhead into optimal strategies, to me RTK just means 'breaking down kanji into primitive/radical-based frameworks of meaningful imagery and creating/sharing them'. The rest is me/RevTK. ;p

Too Long Don't Read -- To add to my first comment in the thread: The line separating RTK from everything else to optimize the 'assembly line' aspect is fuzzy, but I guess with my current views, I draw it where each kanji has become a visual-semantic hook in my mind before I add context (vocabulary/sentence/situation) dependent meaning/sound to it, making sure the pitch/prosody/morphology/whatever is accurate per encounter as I progressively internalize a linguistic repertoire. At each level, having a door with as many handles on it as possible is crucial (elaborate encoding/rehearsal that's complementary rather than interfering), to use an odd metaphor from Medina's "Brain Rules". Taking advantage of the 'levels of processing' effect. Or something. That's kind of why I like the idea of using Japanese keywords in kana form or something, either off the bat or on later passes with the SRS, as wrightak suggested, and trying to blend that with custom kanji/word lists based on corpora that balance existing 常用 'guidelines' with usage you encounter...

nonpoint what is KTH? I don't remember how I found this site, think I find it from random google searches, anyway anyone learned japanese vocabulary with http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projec..._main.html ? Just writing down the kana, meaning, and kanji and study just like us non native english learned english, english on one side of the paper and our native language on the other and learn that way, or is the japanese core 2000 ( http://smart.fm/goals/19053 ) a better way of doing it? and ofcorse when learning new words I will of course combine it with a gramar book, any tips for learning words? Sorry if I already asked this guess I am just retarded =)

xanan66 Wrote:nonpoint what is KTH? I don't remember how I found this site, think I find it from random google searches, anyway anyone learned japanese vocabulary with http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projec..._main.html ? Just writing down the kana, meaning, and kanji and study just like us non native english learned english, english on one side of the paper and our native language on the other and learn that way, or is the japanese core 2000 ( http://smart.fm/goals/19053 ) a better way of doing it? and ofcorse when learning new words I will of course combine it with a gramar book, any tips for learning words? Sorry if I already asked this guess I am just retarded =)

Just put sentences in Anki.

http://ichi2.net/anki/

This is just the opinion of a student who's been at this for a couple of months. More than anything, you'll need to pick a course and start working on it. And yes, learning should be fun--that's like the absolute first rule. If it's boring, you're brain isn't working.

It sounds like your just starting out. If you haven't seen AJATT yet, you should spend some time to look over the method. I don't agree with everything Khatz suggests, but found it to be very inspirational.

Get immersed. Listen to Japanese without understanding. This will make common vocabulary easier to learn. It will give you a head start on listening comprehension. Your accent will be better for listening. Beautiful women will stop you in the street and ask you out. Only one of these statements is false.

Now, vocabulary. Your goal is to get to the point where you don't need to translate to a scaffolding language. I've tried the method you suggest: "[Japanese] on one side of the paper and our native language on the other and learn that way." Simply put, it worked for Esperanto (I now use a monolingual dictionary), but was a miserable failure for Japanese. I think the more foreign the language, the better it is to skip single words for example sentences--and you don't get much more foreign than Japanese. (Don't worry though, millions of normal people speak it, so it's not like you have to be a genius or anything.)

You can also use example sentences to learn grammar patterns. Explanations are good if you understand them, but too heavy for everyday use. You need to memorize patterns, not explanations.

With flashcards, the game is won by volume, not complexity. Your goal is to learn lots of very simple cards. As Einstein supposedly said: "as simple as possible, but no simpler." Eventually, you'll want to learn rare vocabulary and rare patterns, but you should limit cards to one point of complexity.

Starting out, you need simple patterns + common vocabulary, and I've found that Core 2000 delivers. There are only two downsides:

- A dozen hard sentences can easily take as much time as a hundred easy ones. Don't try to learn them all. Anki has a feature to automatically suspend cards that accumulate more than a set number of failures. I suspend anything that fails 6 or more times. Volume. Skip hard stuff--you can always come back later.

- There's adult-level business and political vocabulary, like「国会が再会した」= "The national assembly reconvened." It's not that bad (you'll learn those words eventually anyway), but I'd prefer even more of a focus on day-to-day and dictionary vocabulary. From what I've heard, KO2001 is even more business-oriented.

(That said, I love how「後に彼は総理大臣になりました」sounds like the last line of a bedtime story.)

Remember, the goal of RtK and Core 2000 should be to get you reading and listening to real material and understanding it--because that's when the real language acquisition really gets rolling. Strive to that and have fun and you'll do alright.

Tobberoth Wrote:

xanan66 Wrote:nonpoint what is KTH? I don't remember how I found this site, think I find it from random google searches, anyway anyone learned japanese vocabulary with http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projec..._main.html ? Just writing down the kana, meaning, and kanji and study just like us non native english learned english, english on one side of the paper and our native language on the other and learn that way, or is the japanese core 2000 ( http://smart.fm/goals/19053 ) a better way of doing it? and ofcorse when learning new words I will of course combine it with a gramar book, any tips for learning words? Sorry if I already asked this guess I am just retarded =)

Just put sentences in Anki.

http://ichi2.net/anki/

But how will I learn words and learn the grammar and learn to bend each word? go, went, gone etc if I only learn sentences? still sentences is good

xanan66 Wrote:But how will I learn words and learn the grammar and learn to bend each word? go, went, gone etc if I only learn sentences? still sentences is good

"to inflect each word"

Japanese doesn't have a lot of inflection--mostly stacked suffixes.

Khatz covers this topic. Basically, you treat 行く (go) as one word and 行った (went) as another. Eventually, your brain picks up the patterns, and you don't have to learn every form for every word.
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...ld-is-flat

P. S. There is a place for learning grammar explanations: it's easier to use a dictionary or figure out a difficult sentence if you know the rules. A lot of people like Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar . I think it's a good idea to at least read through it and learn what's inside.

It's a bad idea to learn grammar from a textbook for the purpose of writing or speaking. Use grammar to understand, not to create. Japanese grammar is really weird at first, and if you try to think about it, it'll come out wrong.

wildweathel Wrote:Khatz covers this topic. Basically, you treat 行く (go) as one word and 行った (went) as another. Eventually, your brain picks up the patterns, and you don't have to learn every form for every word.

It remains mindboggling to me that anyone thinks this is a good idea or actually does this in practice, but I guess everyone does their own thing.

(I can see in the comments section to that link exactly what I was saying -- native speakers of language saying "I don't know anything about the grammar, so neither do foreign learners")

Quote:It's a bad idea to learn grammar from a textbook for the purpose of writing or speaking.

I improved my speaking considerably (partly) through reading textbook explanations, and this was after passing JLPT 1.

xanan66 Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:

xanan66 Wrote:nonpoint what is KTH? I don't remember how I found this site, think I find it from random google searches, anyway anyone learned japanese vocabulary with http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projec..._main.html ? Just writing down the kana, meaning, and kanji and study just like us non native english learned english, english on one side of the paper and our native language on the other and learn that way, or is the japanese core 2000 ( http://smart.fm/goals/19053 ) a better way of doing it? and ofcorse when learning new words I will of course combine it with a gramar book, any tips for learning words? Sorry if I already asked this guess I am just retarded =)

Just put sentences in Anki.

http://ichi2.net/anki/

But how will I learn words and learn the grammar and learn to bend each word? go, went, gone etc if I only learn sentences? still sentences is good

While I fully agree with yudantaiteki, let's be devils advocate for a while.

How did you learn how to inflect words in your own language? Did your mother give you a grammar book where the inflection of each word was written? Probably not, you picked it up from hearing it a lot.

Now, that doesn't mean you should ignore grammar and just listen to stuff over and over until it sticks, that takes too much time. However, what you should spend the majority of your time doing is read sentences. Maybe a 1/50 ratio? That means, 1 minute reading how to inflect words should be accompanied by 50 minutes of reading sentences with inflected words.

The grammar explanations should be used to understand, not be actively memorized or anything like that.

Tobberoth Wrote:How did you learn how to inflect words in your own language?

I remember being honestly surprised when I first looked up "is" in a dictionary. It told me to look up "be," which made no sense at the time.

Quote:Now, that doesn't mean you should ignore grammar and just listen to stuff over and over until it sticks, that takes too much time.

If it doesn't stick, it's usually obvious. Either grab a grammar book and try to figure it out, or find an easier sentence. There's no real need to schedule a specific ratio.

My Latin is no where near proficient, but inflection is pretty much the one thing that doesn't give me a problem. I won't say "I never looked at inflection tables," because I did, but I didn't worry much about memorizing them. In my mind, forms like "dracone" and "draconum" are two different but closely related words, much like "weighing" and "weight" are in English or 返せ and 帰ろう in Japanese.

I'm not entirely sure how to describe Esperanto: some people describe it as an isolating language, and it's tempting to agree. Inflected words almost feel like phrases made up of "sub-words." The very high degree of regularity is probably responsible.

I've been using flat language theory for years. Yeah, look at a grammar book's descriptions of a language's patterns (especially if you're trying to figure something out), but I see no reason to do verb-conjugation exercises or try to memorize tables. Just review sentences and read.

I'm surprised you mention Latin, because it seems to me that it works even less well for dead languages than living ones. When learning classical Japanese, for instance, a big problem is that there just isn't as much of it, and there are no native speakers to create new sentences, so you're pretty much limited to what's in the specific texts you want to read. In Genji you get these large agglunative forms that mix multiple verbs and suffixes, and if you don't have the conjugation forms down pat you can't even parse the sentence. When I get to parts containing long strings of kana like 御しほたれがちにのみおはします or とく参りたまはむことをそそのかしきこゆれど, I'm definitely glad I spent time memorizing the forms. (And that's a friendly text, some of the commentaries I have to read have no dakuten, punctuation, or spaces -- there if you don't know the conjugations perfectly you're screwed.)

I basically just try to be aware of the rules in a cursory way, filling it in as I encounter new inflections for words I know. Of course, some things are trickier than others and require more effort...

Kanji/okurigana is nice for visual pattern recognition, too. ;p

wildweathel Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:How did you learn how to inflect words in your own language?

I remember being honestly surprised when I first looked up "is" in a dictionary. It told me to look up "be," which made no sense at the time.

Quote:Now, that doesn't mean you should ignore grammar and just listen to stuff over and over until it sticks, that takes too much time.

If it doesn't stick, it's usually obvious. Either grab a grammar book and try to figure it out, or find an easier sentence. There's no real need to schedule a specific ratio.

My Latin is no where near proficient, but inflection is pretty much the one thing that doesn't give me a problem. I won't say "I never looked at inflection tables," because I did, but I didn't worry much about memorizing them. In my mind, forms like "dracone" and "draconum" are two different but closely related words, much like "weighing" and "weight" are in English or 返せ and 帰ろう in Japanese.

I'm not entirely sure how to describe Esperanto: some people describe it as an isolating language, and it's tempting to agree. Inflected words almost feel like phrases made up of "sub-words." The very high degree of regularity is probably responsible.

I've been using flat language theory for years. Yeah, look at a grammar book's descriptions of a language's patterns (especially if you're trying to figure something out), but I see no reason to do verb-conjugation exercises or try to memorize tables. Just review sentences and read.

I would say that it is the non obvious stuff you would worry about when picking up a grammar book. Everyone who has read Japanese for more than a month or so should realize automatically that -て form can be used to give instructions. No need for any grammar help with that. However, how much exposure do you think you will need to understand the difference in use between 以上 and からには? Just a tiny bit of exposure of those two lets you know that their meaning is more or less identical. Finding those few phrases where they do not will take years upon years. Or just a few seconds looking in a grammar book.

Thanks for all tips etc guys!

One question while we're at it, about anki, is there a way to choose which cards I want to review? for now I have done 50 kanji and reviewed them. But let's say now I want to review just card 20-30 ? I haven't found any option for this, let's say I am at card 500, and want to review card 200-240 must I review all from 1-240 then? please help guys, love you all =)

First off, yes, it's called "cram." You can pick a tag and Anki will intensively drill you on those cards.

Unless you have to study for quizzes in class, you shouldn't use it, though. It's at best a waste of time, and at worst can interfere with Anki's normal scheduling. Better to just wait for reviews to come due. Anki does a pretty good job of stabilizing memories for the long run, so unless you're sure it's not working, you should just trust it.

Yeah thanks, yeah well I learned 10 new kanji around 12 today, and around 2 I reviewed it, and now at 19 I feel like try them again, but I already have them written down on paper so can just review them like that, thanks again m8

In order to choose which cards (not) to review:

1) Click the magnifying glass to go to the deck browser.
2) Highlight the cards which you do/don't want to review.
3) Click the pause icon to unsuspend/suspend them (they will turn white/yellow).