In about a month I will be done with KO2001. I have already finished Tae Kim, Smart.fm Core 2000, RTK1+RTK3. I really like using flash cards, and I kind of liked traveling the well-worn path up until now, which actually makes me a little bit anxious about where I should go from here.

Really, my primary goal is to build up my reading skills as much as possible, but I'm not sure what the next step is. Should I just switch to books? KO2001/Smart.fm seem a quite a bit watered down from what I've seen in terms of vocab/grammar usage, but is it enough to get started without being overwhelmed?

I was thinking grabbing Breaking into Japanese Literature (http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-into-Japa...4770028997) or perhaps a Haruhi graphic novel - I'm really curious about what other people do at this point.

You should already be reading in your spare time. Manga will be the easiest to understand, after that would be visual novels, and then paperbacks. Most importantly, just stick to whatever interests you the most.

Subs2srs is also good if you're still not tired of flashcards.

If you're into video games either dating sims, RPG's or visual novels are wicked because all you have to do is basically read read read and make choices. At least they're a great way to study on cruise mode inbetween doing other things.

http://news.tbs.co.jp/

is an awesome website to break into real news cos it has short news video clips with a full transcript of the clip so you can read along and look up words you don't know.

I was super glad to be passed KO and really just have fun whilst learning just as much if not more.

You could try children's stories too. Did you check out the audio book sticky yet?

Worth mentioning the first Harry Potter book too. The Japanese and English ebooks, and the japanese unabridged audio book are available online in the usual places for copy/ pasting into flashcards.

Mangajin (the original comics) are a good (assisted) way of getting into Japanese manga. "Read Real Japanese Fiction/Essays", "Reading Japanese with a Smile" and "Breaking into/ Exploring Japanese Literature" provide similarly assisted readings of essays and short stories.

If you like well-trodden paths with set goals and targets, maybe try for the higher level JLPT exams? (Might be a bit dry, though)

Most importantly (I think): If you haven't already, introduce as much Japanese into your normal daily environment as you can stand. Get rid of as much English language stuff as possible. You should know enough by now to at least stumble your way through things and start having more fun. You'll quickly find new things you want to learn.

Good luck (and congratulations for making it this far!).

Floatingweed5 Wrote:Worth mentioning the first Harry Potter book too.

Jesus the amount of times Harry Potter gets mentioned I think I'm going to wind up bloody well reading it just to keep up with the Joneses.

If you haven't read Polyglot by Kato Lomb, you should. I've been applying her principle of "autolexia" to 『もう一同読みたい宮沢賢治』, a book beyond what I can understand easily.

I'm enjoying it immensely.

(EDIT: HT to Ryuujin)

wildweathel Wrote:If you haven't read Polyglot by Kato Lomb, you should. I've been applying her principle of "autographia" to 『もう一同読みたい宮沢賢治』, a book beyond what I can understand easily.

I'm enjoying it immensely.

Do you mean autolexia? I think autographia is about writing, while -lexia refers to reading.

Also, by this do you mean you just sit there and try to figure out as much as you can of the book yourself, without the aid of a dictionary/grammar database?

And here's a link to her book: http://tesl-ej.org/ej45/fr1abs.html

Yes, on both points. I might go back with those tools later, but I'm now 9 pages of solid text into『風の又三郎』without a single look-up and I'm really enjoying the story even though my comprehension is fairly low.

A side-effect of this approach is that you can fall in love at first sight with some passages, like:

みなさんは朝から水泳ぎもできたし林の中で鷹に負けないくらい高く叫んだりまた兄さんの草刈りについて上の野原へ行ったりしたでしょう。けれども、昨日で休みは終わりました。これから第二学期で秋です。

If I insisted on trying to figure out exactly how 泳ぎもできたし relates to the rest of the sentence, I'd miss the flow of the whole thing or how 鷹（タカ）に負けないくらい高い is a really cool expression that doesn't obviously translate into English. ("High as a falcon" is positively clunky in comparison.)

In short, it's about fluency of recall and aesthetics rather than strict precision and full coverage. I think language study needs a balance between both.

I completely agree. Thanks for the point in the direction to Kato Lomb's book. I've been reading it for the past 30-40 minutes now and finding it fascination (not to mention I now think AJATT is this book summarized and specifically targeted towards Japanese).

I've also recently been trying the "dictionary-less" approach. I find it working quite well, but it does take more time. I need to invest some time where I sit down with a nice short story and just work through it. I'm thinking 村上春樹's パン屋再襲撃.

Thanks for the replies, some really good ideas there My long term goal is JLPT1, hoping to get there in a couple of years. Not necessarily because I need it, but rather just to have a solid, marked goal.

I'm pretty eager to finish up KO, even though I really see the benefit of it, it is a little bit school-booky and dry.