I had brought the first volume about 2 years ago but never finished because it was too hard for me at my level then. I had got to Lesson 19 and stopped. This book claims one can be at a high intermediate level in 1-2 years of study, but many a review on the book series suggests the second volume is better because it teaches you to think in Japanese. I read the sample pages on Amazon and I could see how that could be possible, but due to financial reasons I cannot get the book anytime soon.

The book, Vol 1, is 52 lessons long. I planned on during one lesson a day, writing out each sentence and putting unknown vocab into an Inversion list(memorizing 5-7 words at a time).
From there, I planned on picking out sentence structures and substituting nouns and verbs in them like the second book seems to do, and memorize them. Mainly it would be facts and basic sentence structures I'd mine.

All of this in conjunction with Iknow and immersion ofcourse.

Has anyone blitzed through a textbook like this before? Advice?

crap! that's some expensive books, but they do look nice . Do not rely on iKnow to be effective in long-term Japanese memorization. I tell you this from personal experience.. Anki or nothing

I use Iknow for new vocab, not to memorize facts.

Edit 1:

Or rather, I use it to get the new vocab in my mind, rather than memorizing the sentences it offers, mainly.

What is your current level of Japanese? If you are around JLPT3 or above I don't think writing out all sentences completely will be worth the effort.

I went through a couple of textbooks before at a rate of about 1lesson/2 days. However, the lesson were larger than those of the textbook you are talking about (judging from the Amazon Preview, I don't own the book).

Your plan seems very time consuming though. How much time per day do you want to spend on this? I recommend simply going through the book and making sure you understand everything, while putting vocabulary and interesting sentences (especially those with new grammar points) into Anki, possibly into two different decks. Then review those regularly.

I'm a low intermediate I believe. I really do not know my level, but I know it isn't very high.

If it matters, I made it through "Japanese the Manga Way" and remember alot of basic grammar, I did around 500 frames in RTK before going into Iknow and clearing about 1300 words/sentences, again, Lesson 19 in ItMJ, etc. This is being generous as my output is nonexsistant right now, meaning I have no one to talk to in Japanese though I can think up basic phrases and such.

Edit 1:
Darn it.

I spend about half an hour a day(any day) to a full hour doing my Iknow sessions, getting in 30-50 words done.

Judging from doing this just now, I can write out sentences and identify what needs to go into my Inversion List in about 40-50 minutes. I guess another hour would be spent making the lists and sample sentence drills. Probably 5 minutes per list review on the next day. This is on a day I'd be off. On a work day, I'd probably spend a half hour doing this.

My immersion includes random youtube shows, news, and Pokemon.

i absolutely love these books. and when you finish them, there is a 3rd volume called Cambridge Intermediate Japanese. the first 2 volumes are used at cambridge in an intensive 1 yr course. book 2 is exercises and more practice, but unfortunately answers aren't provided. nevertheless, i think at that level they're worth doing. what i did was work on them myself and then ask a japanese friend to check the ones i was most unsure about. as for the vocab, i just reviewed them in anki before attempting to read the passage that starts each chapter; it goes much smoother that way.

honestly i think 3 months is unrealistic. much better to thoroughly absorb the info (it's rather dense) than to rush it.

A pokémon fan! Nice That makes two of us.

How does your immersion work with Pokémon? Where do you watch the (japanese) shows?

Good textbooks: Genki 1/2 and Minna no Nihongo 1/2 (I like Genki's explanations the most, but also like MNN because it has quite some example sentences.

radical_tyro Wrote:i absolutely love these books. and when you finish them, there is a 3rd volume called Cambridge Intermediate Japanese. the first 2 volumes are used at cambridge in an intensive 1 yr course. book 2 is exercises and more practice, but unfortunately answers aren't provided. nevertheless, i think at that level they're worth doing. what i did was work on them myself and then ask a japanese friend to check the ones i was most unsure about. as for the vocab, i just reviewed them in anki before attempting to read the passage that starts each chapter; it goes much smoother that way.

honestly i think 3 months is unrealistic. much better to thoroughly absorb the info (it's rather dense) than to rush it.

What do you mean exactly by that? I should just scan the chapters, put all the vocab I don't know yet into Anki and review it that way? Or should I learn them first then review in Anki(in which case, how?)

IceCream Wrote:yeah, the second book is excersises & word lists only. the excersises are very helpful if you are prepared to be fairly bored, and they're definately helpful if you're going to work through it like a textbook.
Actually, this was a book i bought years ago, then forgot about learning japanese. but tbh, i couldn't understand most of the explanations until way way later anyway (i mean, i only looked at it again yesterday). I think it would be a great book to learn with if your on a course, but that you probably get the most out of this textbook as a reread later after a lot of immersion and other srsing.

btw, definately SRSing the vocab is much easier than trying to learn on iKnow!! Get anki!!!

would you like me to scan a couple of chapters of book 2 for you and email them to you? which chapter would you start on?

Is that allowed to be discussed here? I guess, but posting examples of how the book teaches would work just as well. And is there a vocab pack on this book on Anki or something? Elaborate please.

[qoute=CarolinaCG]A pokémon fan! Nice smile That makes two of us.

How does your immersion work with Pokémon? Where do you watch the (japanese) shows?

Good textbooks: Genki 1/2 and Minna no Nihongo 1/2 (I like Genki's explanations the most, but also like MNN because it has quite some example sentences.[/qoute]

Pretty sure I shouldn't post a link here so I won't. It shouldn't even be hard to find, considering it's on the biggest tv tube in the world. Hintcoughwheeze

I meant playing the games really, though I do watch it ofcourse. I can't go back to playing an English version, I'd feel like I'd lose retention or something.=/

And not getting another text until I finish this one first.

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:What do you mean exactly by that? I should just scan the chapters, put all the vocab I don't know yet into Anki and review it that way? Or should I learn them first then review in Anki(in which case, how?)

If you simply learn the vocabulary through Anki, without having anything to relate it to, it will be much harder to memorize. It doesn't really matter when you put the vocabulary in Anki but don't review it until you have worked on the chapter in the book so that you know how and when the words are being used.

For the textbooks I worked with I always preferred to put the vocabulary lists and grammar into Anki first (just to get it out of the way), then work through the chapter in the book, then review in Anki. However, I don't know how your book is organized, so if you need to read/scan through the whole chapter first to pick out words and grammar points you don't know, just put it into Anki as you go along working on the chapter.

Same goes for sentences. No need to write everything, just put the sentences that jump out at you (e.g. you don't know the grammar point, you find the sentence challenging for some other reason) into Anki as you go along. When you are reviewing in Anki and fail a sentence then I would recommend writing it out. Same for Vocabulary.

Well, that's just my method. Just try different things and see what works best for you ;)

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:What do you mean exactly by that? I should just scan the chapters, put all the vocab I don't know yet into Anki and review it that way? Or should I learn them first then review in Anki(in which case, how?)

rather than try to read the passage and have to stop every other word to check the definition, i found it was much smoother to first learn the J->E def. given in book 2 for each chapter in anki, then get the contextual meaning from the passage. how long you want to review them in anki before starting the chapter is up to you of course. but i guess you need book 2 for those vocab lists. i can probably post the ones i typed up (most but not all the vocab) if people don't freak out.

If you can without it being against the rules, sure.

Also, I got Anki but I'm looking through the sample decks it has and am unsure which to start on. I heard about a KO deck on here but after doing some research, that is taboo here so I won't ask on these forums.

Obviously people have been learning without it so what premade deck is the most effective from there?

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:I heard about a KO deck on here but after doing some research, that is taboo here so I won't ask on these forums.

Click the "Get the Anki deck now" link on the page http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3283

So that(deck) is really ok to be discussed here? I was getting mixed signals there. Thanks.

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:So that(deck) is really ok to be discussed here? I was getting mixed signals there. Thanks.

The idea is that if you own the book (or CDROM), you should feel to download the deck that they spent so much work making. If you didn't buy the book and didn't support the company, you really shouldn't use the contents of the book (which are the contents of the deck).

However, now that we don't actually check to be sure you bought it, the world will never know either way.

I have and use these books too. They're ideally for someone taking a course as IceCream mentioned, but I think you can gain a lot from them by working through them on your own. The fact that some of the material can be so challenging is a plus for me because it really gives you a firm base. You do need both books though... can't really have one without the other (well you could just get book 2, but I wouldn't).
As for doing these in 3 months? Crazy! Thats a LOT of grammar, and I think it takes closer to a year or 2 to reach the finished level because you should be supplementing these books with other materials along the way. I guess it is doable. 3 months of just that would also be very boring... i stopped half way through the course to build up some more vocab through iKnow before going back to it.
All in all though, I love these books!

Yeah, looking at it now, I don't think it will be so easy to rush through.
Still gonna SRS these words though. I quit in the first place because my vocab sucked too.

How far are you? What methods do you use?

i finished it a few years ago. it took me about 4 years though cause i was also in college and doing RTK and other stuff at the same time. there's no rush. vocab shouldn't be an issue if you have the second volume since every new word in each lesson is listed in the vocab list. that's why i say study the next chapter's vocab in anki first to prime yourself for the lesson, then it's not frustrating.

Hate to ask this, but I can't seem to import the deck in Anki correctly.

I extracted the ko2001 anki file and the media file(which is 0 bytes oddly) from the first zip and imported the anki file which shows the answers but not the kanji and such. Its not even giving me the option to import the media file I extracted.

Er, what am I doing wrong?

PkmnTrainerAbram Wrote:Er, what am I doing wrong?

The media folder is in the multipart archive named ko2001.part1/2/3.rar.

I just can't get it to work. All the media files I see are 0 kb, and I tried to import them but it opens up the whole folder instead. A few times it gave me an error message on importing the text deck.<_<

What good premade decks should I use instead?

Ah wow this is an amazing book why havent I not heard of this book before! I like tae kims but this one really goes into specific detail on when and how to use it. When I can actually afford it I am so buying this book.

Hashiriya Wrote:crap! that's some expensive books, but they do look nice . Do not rely on iKnow to be effective in long-term Japanese memorization. I tell you this from personal experience.. Anki or nothing

Hey, can you tell me a bit more about your experience with long-term use of iKnow?

I've always used Anki but recently decided to give smart.fm's new "Drill beta" a try, mainly because I've gotten bored of only using Anki all the time. The early scheduling in "Drill beta" seems similar to Anki's scheduling.