Hello everybody, I would like your recommendations on my study plan for the next three months. I am a college student on vacation and I'm going to study in Japan starting the end of September.

Let's start with where I'm at now. I began studying Japanese in January 2009, with a Japanese Language program for Nintendo DS. I did that until July 2009. It got me some vocabulary, grammar and Kanji, but very basic. In August I found RTK by chance (thank god for that). Started RTK and completed at the end of November. Started KO2001 at the begin of December at a slow pace (circa 15 cards/day, including listening cards). In March I added Core 6000. One month ago I quit KO2001, because it took me a disproportionate amount of time and I already knew a whole lot (my passing rates of KO2001 were +97%, which is too high to be efficient imo). Picked up the pace with Core 6000 the last month and scheduled to finish it in 3 days. Furthermore I have a 'Japanese various' deck, a vocab deck where I add words which I find in the wild It contains about 1500 words or so.

Skills:
Speaking: Ok. I have been talking to a language exhange partner for the past 3 months. I am able to hold a conversation in Japanese, but that is only because my langauge partner is simply awesome: he waits patiently while I stumble over my words, he can understand my horrible grammar and he talks pretty slowly and easily himself.

Writing: Non-existent. I did RTK without writing a word down. Don't want to learn the skill, because it doesn't seem to me like I need it. Otherwise it doesn't have top priority.

Reading: Ok. I started reading a book and a manga. I can understand the gist of both, but I read very slowly. Reading is sort of easy, because you can take the time to understand it.

Listening: Horrible. Unlike most of the immersion people here, I am more of a 'first know the words, then try to understand it' kind of guy. It just seemed silly to try to immerse yourself in a language when you simply lack vocabulary. However I can sort of understand more why it is useful, because I'm now at a point where I know the words, but can't catch them in high-speed-speech.

Plan:
Vocab: I still lack vocab. When I read something or hear something, there's still a lot of words I don't know (seriously how many words do Japanese use!). My plan here is to take the Japanese CorePlus deck and study the JLPT words not in Core6000 (25 words/day). Is this useful? After that, just work my way through the Core Plus deck, excluding sole-RTK2 words, because they are simply there for knowing a reading and I want to be effective, not learn every reading there is (although I wanted that at first).

Grammar: Mine Dictionary of a ... Grammar at 25 sentences/day, but I think I just delete sentences which I know at first glance, otherwise I'm not learning much. I still want to do some grammar and this seems like an efficient way.

Listening: So here my plan is to use the pre-made Gokusen3 sub2srs deck. I already started a bit and found that I understand very little of sentences that are a bit longer than 5 words. Also there is still a lot of vocab that I don't know but ok. Disadvantage of this deck is that there is no English translation, so I don't really know if I understand correctly. Also there are people who lisp so much I doubt if a Japanese can understand them but oh well.
I also looked at audiobooks (in the audiobooks thread), which are better because they are clearly pronounced and sometimes there is a translation. I think I'm gonna focus on the audiobooks.
I also looked at Nuriko's awesome Podcast thread, but I could barely understand the one she marked as easy (nee nee kitte), which was a giant confidence booster :S

Anyway, apologies if I was too extensive. I thank anyone who had the patience to read through my story and I hope you can give me advice/recommendations/feedback.

As for how many words Japanese use, don't expect to get full-on understanding until you're at at least 15 000, probably more. At that point, you should hit that sweet 98-99% understanding needed to learn from context in most situations.

I know you've said you thought immersion was silly when you didn't understand the words, but now you do actually have a fairly decent vocabulary. Time and time again people dismiss immersion then stumble over listening later on. It definitely helps. Just listen to Japanese music at the very least. It just helps your brain adjust to rapidly processing speech in your target language, even if you aren't understanding the words you are learning to distinguish them accurately.

If you're struggling with longer sentences that sounds like a grammar problem. Working your way through some good audiobooks with transcripts and translations could be a nice way to tackle both the long sentence comprehension and the listening comprehension problems. I personally like all the Sherlock Holmes series in Japanese - being previously familiar with the stories really helps glean meaning from confusing sentences.

Regarding Nuriko's podcasts, I have found this one much more helpful than nee nee kiite, which I don't find easy.
http://oda999.tea-nifty.com/blog/archives.html
Besides, you have the transcripts.

listen a lot,even if you don't understand anything. I started off with just words, then it lead to phrases than almost the whole thing nowadays.
I suggest reading/following subtitles in japanese. that helps a lot.

Tobberoth Wrote:As for how many words Japanese use, don't expect to get full-on understanding until you're at at least 15 000, probably more. At that point, you should hit that sweet 98-99% understanding needed to learn from context in most situations.

true, i agree so much with this.

I have been listening to tons of japanese music over the last couple of years simply because im a huge fan of certain groups. Of course I didnt learn any real japanese from listening to the songs but now that I have really stepped up my game and finished RTK and expanding my vocabulary I find my immersion quite useful since I remember words more easily when I have heard them before in a context, it also makes it easier when watching an anime etc.

Btw I am a "writer" but thats not mainly because I wanna write kanji by my hands(it looks quite awful) but more because I want to use all my senses to learn new words/kanji, I think they stick better that way.

I once saw a video on Spanish listening that suggested one should try to hear the end of every word, even if one doesn't understand the words, to train one's ear to distinguish one word from the next. Similarly, other sources advise us to concentrate on hearing the words, and NOT to consciously translate as you listen -- indeed, to avoid pausing to think about what a word means. Those techniques do seem to help me with Spanish, where my vocabulary is reasonably large, but I still have trouble understanding fast spoken speech.

Does this listening advice translate (ha ha) to Japanese?

kaeru Wrote:I have been listening to tons of japanese music over the last couple of years simply because im a huge fan of certain groups. Of course I didnt learn any real japanese from listening to the songs but now that I have really stepped up my game and finished RTK and expanding my vocabulary I find my immersion quite useful since I remember words more easily when I have heard them before in a context, it also makes it easier when watching an anime etc.

Btw I am a "writer" but thats not mainly because I wanna write kanji by my hands(it looks quite awful) but more because I want to use all my senses to learn new words/kanji, I think they stick better that way.

I use TunesTEXT (for Mac OSX) and am able to get kanji lyrics for 70%-80% of the japanese songs I have. When you can read the lyrics, it really changes the experience.
If you're a fan of karaoke, even better.

chamcham, thanks for the heads up on TunesTEXT. It works great.

Cheers.

Thanks all for the suggestions/comments.
I guess now with people not smashing my plan that I'm going in the right direction, which I was kinda expecting since it's not a very unconventional or crazy plan. I just liked to write it down, since I'm thinking about it a lot. But the details also come down to how much time I can invest and my study speed, which are hard things to gauge for outsiders I suppose.
Although.....maybe one question about relative time investments. At this point, what should be my relative time share divided over immersion, vocab, grammar and sub2srs?

Now that you have a plan in place. My advice is: just do it!

Don't worry about things like "relative time share". Just do whatever
you feel like doing at that moment. Go with the flow and if the
need ever arises, you can take a step back and plan some more.

I'm trying to work on my listening too. Can read ok but can't seem to listen well.

What's frustrating is I follow the immersion method and listen most of the day, but doesn't seem to help without a transcript. When I listen to songs I always just hear the tune (even in english), and not the actual words.

Trying to go back thru the core6000 deck now without using my eyes and see if that helps.

Those Nuriko podcasts with a transcript seem like a good thing too.