So, for professional reasons, I may need to put Japanese on the back burner and work on another language. I really haven't done much more than finish RtK and kana, but rather than come to a complete stop and doing RtK again down the road (one to two years), I figure maybe I should just keep SRSing my RtK deck in the background. But here's my question - could it be harmful SRSing Heisig's definitions for over a year without a sentence deck to give it context? Perhaps hammering in his definitions in isolation for so long could be harmful. Any thoughts?

*Edited for wordiness of original post

Since you've finished RTK, why not just read native Japanese media and SRS
words you don't know on the side? It would be such a waste to finish RTK
and do nothing afterwards.

Even a little bit on the side is OK.

For example, find one (or more) Japanese blogs to read every once in a while.
Most blogs I have are updated maybe every few days(or sometimes weeks). For me,
this is frequent enough to keep Japanese fresh in my mind, but not so often that I
burn out or give up.

Here are some of the blogs that I look at:

Kyoko Uchida (personal blog of a famous Japanese drama actress):
http://www.kyokouchida.com/diary/

Nihongo Day by Day (Japanese teacher in Tokyo blogging about Japanese!):
http://nihongodaybyday.blogspot.com/

The Daily Yoji (great for learning that 4-kanji compounds):
http://thedailyyoji.blogspot.com/

Sweet and Savory (Cooking blog by a japanese cooking instructor):
http://sweetandsavory.blog110.fc2.com/

If you are a fan of any Japanese musicians, actors/actresses, etc., they
might have an online blog. Or maybe you can find a blog written by a
normal person that shares a similar interest.

Blogs are really nice since they are very personal and you get a glimpse
into the life of a native japanese person.

They are short enough that they don't take much time to read.
And the best part is when you start responding to blog posts!

So basically my advice is to find something short and sweet to do everyday in Japanese.
Even 5 to 10 minutes is OK.

Surely you can find a little time in your day to study some Japanese.

chamcham Wrote:Nihongo Day by Day (Japanese teacher in Tokyo blogging about Japanese!):
http://nihongodaybyday.blogspot.com/

This is pretty awesome. It's damn easy to read too, so I can do it even when I'm really really lazy.

If you're going to do little to no Japanese, then continuing to SRS the deck is the best choice. If you have the opportunity, try to at least use Kanji Town or Movie Method to get onyomi attached to the kanji at least. This'll really help when you go back to Japanese.

No, to answer your question, it's not harmful at all and you should definitely keep SRSing what you've accomplished.

As for giving him the advice to read blogs, isn't that a BIT optimistic considering he has only done RtK and Kana? He doesn't know any Japanese at all, how is he supposed to casually read blogs? No, learning a language takes time and determination. If he doesn't have the time or will to do Japanese right now, he shouldn't. Keep those kanji clear in your mind instead.

It really depends.

Even if he doesn't know Japanese grammar, he could still read blogs and try
to guess the meanings of the kanji compounds. That would be really good for recognition. I'm sure in some cases he could probably guess what the sentence is saying.

Imagine if he/she learned Japanese vocab BEFORE taking the plunge and learning grammar to make sentences. He would have all these words that he could put together into sentences right off the bat.

In a way, that's the beauty of kanji. You can guess the meaning of words even if you've never seen or heard of them before. So if he sees 大人、he might be able to guess that it means adult. Whereas with english, just seeing the word"adult" tells you nothing about what it means.

If he's lucky enough to be in Japan (or in an area with Japanese stores), he could get by
with reading some basic signs (or even just practice reading a Japanese restaurant menu. No need for full sentences in that case).

Also, blogs would be good practice to reading kanji, katakana, and hiragana. He could learn to pronounce the words even if he doesn't know what they mean or know how to conjugate verbs. He can even work on his intonation and rhythm before jumping into grammar.

It really depends on how motivated he/she is. SRSing the deck is good practice.
But he could still use that knowledge to read native Japanese here and there.

Lack of grammar is no excuse for not being able to pick up vocab.
Just a little at a time is enough.

chamcham Wrote:It really depends.

Even if he doesn't know Japanese grammar, he could still read blogs and try
to guess the meanings of the kanji compounds. That would be really good for recognition. I'm sure in some cases he could probably guess what the sentence is saying.

Imagine if he/she learned Japanese vocab BEFORE taking the plunge and learning grammar to make sentences. He would have all these words that he could put together into sentences right off the bat.

If he's lucky enough to be in Japan (or in an area with Japanese stores), he could get by
with reading some basic signs (or even just practice reading a Japanese restaurant menu. No need for full sentences in that case).

Also, blogs would be good practice to reading kanji, katakana, and hiragana. He could learn to pronounce the words even if he doesn't know what they mean or know how to conjugate verbs. He can even work on his intonation and rhythm before jumping into grammar.

It really depends on how motivated he/she is. SRSing the deck is good practice.
But he could still use that knowledge to read native Japanese here and there.

Lack of grammar is no excuse for not being able to pick up vocab.
Just a little at a time is enough.

The general opinion is that you can't learn vocab without knowing grammar, this is why we only enter sentences into anki and only once we know what they mean. Since languages aren't nomenclatures, you can't simply say word X means word Y, you have to see word X in action to realize how it is similar to word Y and many other words.

All you would do is learn a lot of Japanese words and some generic English translations to those words, you wouldn't actually know the words.

Tzadeck Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:Nihongo Day by Day (Japanese teacher in Tokyo blogging about Japanese!):
http://nihongodaybyday.blogspot.com/

This is pretty awesome. It's damn easy to read too, so I can do it even when I'm really really lazy.

The newest post on her blog is actually very interesting (言った vs 言ってた).

Tobberoth Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:It really depends.

Even if he doesn't know Japanese grammar, he could still read blogs and try
to guess the meanings of the kanji compounds. That would be really good for recognition. I'm sure in some cases he could probably guess what the sentence is saying.

Imagine if he/she learned Japanese vocab BEFORE taking the plunge and learning grammar to make sentences. He would have all these words that he could put together into sentences right off the bat.

If he's lucky enough to be in Japan (or in an area with Japanese stores), he could get by
with reading some basic signs (or even just practice reading a Japanese restaurant menu. No need for full sentences in that case).

Also, blogs would be good practice to reading kanji, katakana, and hiragana. He could learn to pronounce the words even if he doesn't know what they mean or know how to conjugate verbs. He can even work on his intonation and rhythm before jumping into grammar.

It really depends on how motivated he/she is. SRSing the deck is good practice.
But he could still use that knowledge to read native Japanese here and there.

Lack of grammar is no excuse for not being able to pick up vocab.
Just a little at a time is enough.

The general opinion is that you can't learn vocab without knowing grammar, this is why we only enter sentences into anki and only once we know what they mean. Since languages aren't nomenclatures, you can't simply say word X means word Y, you have to see word X in action to realize how it is similar to word Y and many other words.

All you would do is learn a lot of Japanese words and some generic English translations to those words, you wouldn't actually know the words.

Not at all.

For example, what if we took a japanese menu and could guess the meanings of the words. And then he could go to a restaurant, order the food, and see what it looks like.
In that case, he wouldn't even need an English translation.

Also, if he sees the kanji for "baseball" and "throw", you can pretty much guess it means "throw/threw the baseball". No need to even care about learning what tense is being used. He can guess it has something to do with throwing a baseball.

Or what if he just looked at newspaper headlines, which often having pictures
attached to them. He can pretty much get context from the picture.

Or maybe when he watches a Japanese movie, he'll suddenly hear a word he knows and
then see it in context.

Do you really need grammar to katakana words(as used by native Japanese) or nouns that refer to concrete things (bike, car, toy, key,etc).

He/she would be able to point at things and say a couple of words at a time. That can get you reasonably far and still help to keep interest.

Then, when the time comes to learn grammar he/she will have a stockpile of words at his/her disposal.

You don't need grammar for learning the meaning of many kanji compounds.

Also, many English-speaking Japanese learners use Japanese-English dictionaries anyway
and can manage very well on their own.

Chamcham, what you are talking about is guesswork and it's hardly recommended for adult learners, it's a perfect way to get into very bad habits and very unnatural language.

One can guess what a word means from the kanji involved, but it's never anything more than a guess. And you shouldn't consider something you learned from a guess to be learned at all.

Thanks everyone, I didn't mean for this to turn into a debate about isolated vocab vs. sentences. I agree that even if I'm learning another language, maintaining my progress and learning even a few new sentences per day would be best. This is a remote possibility, but a possibility nonetheless, so I just wanted to be prepared.

I appreciate your feedback, you can get back to arguing now.

*Edit - I meant to say thanks for the blogs Chamcham, those are awesome! Too bad I can't really read them yet, haha

Tobberoth Wrote:Chamcham, what you are talking about is guesswork and it's hardly recommended for adult learners, it's a perfect way to get into very bad habits and very unnatural language.

That only makes sense if babies have magic baby juice that lets them just guess and learn their native tongues perfectly. I don't believe in magic baby juice--unless you say adults have magic language juice, too.

Language is self-correcting. True story: I used to think that 取引 was a less negative synonym for 我慢.

(Thanks to Core 2000 using "deal with" in 「私たちは中国の会社と取引しています。」. Classic 1st-language interference.)

Watching cartoons cleared it up. (Seriously. Language acquisition is so beautifully iconoclastic...)

Remember, dictionaries, translations, and Hesig's keywords are all "wrong"--not flat-out contradictory, but at least somewhat (and sometimes significantly) removed from real meaning.

For the most part, "unnatural usage" comes from guessing at production time with too little input, not from guessing at comprehension time. Incorrect understanding is unstable--it's not likely to make sense. That's why mondegreens are the exception, not the rule.

There's no such thing as magic baby juice, but babies learn their first language in a completely different fashion than adults. This has been an accepted fact in language learning science for years, the question is to which degree it matters and if it can somehow be copied by adults, something which is unlikely. The point isn't that they are babies, it's that they have no language yet the human brain is somehow made to have one, which is why the first one is acquired as fast and effectively as it is.

That errors in language are eventually fixed is a fact, that doesn't mean you should consider guessing what words mean to be an effective or even useful way to learn vocabulary. How fun would it be to learn from guessing that 現金 means modern currency only to a year later find out that it means cash? Seems like an ineffective way of learning which will just bring the learner down. If you want to learn a language, just learn it properly instead.