mezbup Wrote:http://news.tbs.co.jp/
Read it every day and Anki all the words you don't know. It's a brilliant site.

Here are some othe news sites I visit often:
asahi
nhk
fnn
tv-tokyo

Why enter vocab into an SRS though? A year ago I was all gung ho about SRS as well but now I am convinced that watching and reading new sources every day is the way to go. Especially with news clips, you get the 30 second video to go along with the transcripts for context. It keeps you up to date with current events as well. Don't know a word? just scan it over with rikaichan and move on seamlessly.

Yeah, books can get hard. In fact, manga and anime can be harder than you think, it just depends on what content they're talking about. Shounen is the easy crap. Seinen can get really hard.
reaching 95% really is easy, but the last 5% will feel like never ending hell.

right, I think using anki too much can be a mistake. If you're spending too much time in anki rather than in Japanese material, then it's not good imo

Shonen and seinen are pretty equal in difficulty, broadly speaking, with the exception of the kanji not having furigana in the seinen manga (which is a big difference, of course). There are some very easy seinen manga and some pretty hard shonen manga in terms of grammar and vocab.

As for the 3000 figure, it's pretty pointless to try to name any sort of number. By the time you even get close to 3000 you will have long lost track of how many exact kanji you know.

The seinen Berserk I'm reading is pulling out tons of non-常用漢字 and there's an unbelievable amount of archaic speech :O
of course it's still readable, but with a normal shounen manga I can go countless pages without looking a word up, but this one I got to keep a dictionary close

My experience is that the further you get from everyday situations -- whether it's shounen or seinen or shoujo or novels -- the harder it gets. I've read novels for an elementary-school age group that were as hard as light adult contemporary novels, just because they were fantasy. Fantasy words, or archaic words, or science fiction technobabble, all can get in the way. Or specialized jargon in any field -- I read a Mori Eto short story about a young woman looking for just the right clay bowl on her boss's behalf, and there was a surprising amount of pottery jargon.

yeah, and learning all that jargon for everything is going to be hell

Interesting thing I noticed is that if you read one author's books, you will find that they use tons of the same vocabulary even if they're doing different stories. You can master an author's vocabulary, then you think you're a hot shot who doesn't need a dictionary anymore, but when you switch to a different author, bam, a whole new world of vocabulary lol

@Yudan

We've had this discussion before but I feel the breakthrough point is closer to 1500 kanji than to 1000. Or at least that's how it was in my experience. The first 1000 kanji are more like the super common ones that you absolutely need to understand basic words.

Once you reach probably 2300 kanji, the battle for kanji is pretty much over. You will encounter more kanji but it will most likely have furigana and be very rare

I'd imagine Japanese who don't go to college probably don't even know 3000, and most of them don't go it looks like

raseru Wrote:Shounen is the easy crap. Seinen can get really hard.

There's actually a lot more weird Kanji in Naruto than in any newspaper you could find. Not that it would be necessary to know them.

If you guys want to read ("real") books though, be prepared to learn a few extra Kanji (few as in 500+ish). They usually give you the furigana for rare stuff, but don't count on it.

あいつは木の葉隠れの里のうずまきナルトだ！

I'd agree with the "breaking through" point being definitely situated closer to 1500 than 1000 because that's how it felt for me too.

One can blow through RTK in a few weeks (as has done by a few members) so I see no reason in settling for a subset. Putting something "behind you", like RTK, is very motivating.

bodhisamaya Wrote:あいつは木の葉隠れの里のうずまきナルトだ！

何言ってんだってばよ!!

Although in a way I feel a little ashamed having read the whole thing. But seriously, some of those attacks use Kanji from outer space (or outer Jouyou, if you will).

Evil_Dragon Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:あいつは木の葉隠れの里のうずまきナルトだ！

何言ってんだってばよ!!

He is Naruto Uzumaki, of the village hidden in the leaves!

bodhisamaya Wrote:

Evil_Dragon Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:あいつは木の葉隠れの里のうずまきナルトだ！

何言ってんだってばよ!!

He is Naruto Uzumaki, of the village hidden in the leaves!

Wow, even cornier than the original.

Jarvik7 Wrote:One can blow through RTK in a few weeks (as has done by a few members) so I see no reason in settling for a subset.

I don't think most people can finish RTK in a few weeks. In any case, "settling" for a subset implies that you will never learn the rest of the kanji, which is up to the learner. The nice thing about RTK lite is that it lets the learner get some benefit from the Heisig approach without committing to the full book, and then afterwards, if the person decides that they really like RTK and want to do the rest of it, there's nothing stopping them from doing that. Or they can decide that 1000 or so from Heisig is enough and that they can learn others that they need through reading or other approaches.

Jarvik7 Wrote:One can blow through RTK in a few weeks (as has done by a few members) so I see no reason in settling for a subset. Putting something "behind you", like RTK, is very motivating.

I'm with Yudantaiteki here, I don't think "a few weeks" is anywhere near average completion time. In any case, why not start with the "lite" subset regardless? When you've done the subset you'll have a much better idea of how long it will take you personally to complete the full RTK set, and thus whether for you it makes more sense to complete RTK immediately or move on having just done the subset.

(FWIW, it took me about a year to finish the full RTK set.)

A few weeks is lightening fast. Took me more than 6 months. It's a massive undertaking mentally. If I had to do it all again I'd do rtk lite. Easy enough to do the rest when it suits you or as you go.

Btw: I just started saving the video of every news article I read using forefoxs download helper plugin. It should rack up to a sgnificant amount in no time but the plan is to put em In a playlist and loop the crap out of it. I'll be pwning the news in no time.

Jarvik7 Wrote:One can blow through RTK in a few weeks (as has done by a few members) so I see no reason in settling for a subset. Putting something "behind you", like RTK, is very motivating.

Jarvik, those guys for the most part still invested the same number of hours though they just did more hours per day. Some guy posted about doing visual recognition in lieu of stories, but I forgot who he was and if he posted after action feedback.

So for the most part, if one can only invest 1 or 2 hours a day, then a quicker RTK Lite (JLPT2 or KO2001 variants) gets a learner to the grammar, vocabulary, and/or real Japanese stuff that much sooner (1 to 3 months instead of 3 to 6 months). On top of that, those 1000 kanji will account for 90% of what you'll run into so that's nothing to sneeze at.

haha, yea naruto does use kanji i haven't seen. But i'm already use to the vocabulary of that manga. Since it's related towards ninjas and all their techniques. It will definitely use some rare kanji you won't really see.

@bodhisamaya
I hear yea. SRSing is effective but without the addition of native materials+immersion of japanese, i agree with you completey. It's like saying you're trying to learn a language by never immersing yourself in it. Passive learning through exposure and immersion does work. I'm going to start nowadays SRSing news sites nowadays.

Another vote for an RTK Lite-type approach for some people. For the reasons mentioned. Learning the kanji vocab after RTK takes time. Not much point having to maintain RTK reviews for all the kanji many people won't even get to for a long time. [edit: See Offshore's recent post.] Most people can't study many hours/day post RTK either. And with so many graded materials at the beginner level, people can get the satisfaction, confidence and reading fluency from reading much earlier without encountering many unknown kanji.

The folks we hear from are mostly RTK survivors. I suspect that AJATT's RTK first approach has turned off plenty of potential Japanese learners. There are many good reasons for deferring and/or segmenting RTK, imo.

iirc, Kanji in Context divides kanji after 1400 into areas of interest. Their idea is that you need around 1400 for a general foundation and much of the vocab after that will depend more or less on what topics you read about.

kanji in context.Yea i might invest in buying that book and srsing it. I too have done RTK and am stilling doing it till this day. To be honest it doesn't take long at all. Only a few minutes to do kanji reps and go onto the bigger game.

Does anyone have that site that you can enter an link and it will display the readings for the kanji on any site? I kinda lost the link. Thanks in advance!