Hi, my order of RtK just went through Amazon and should be here within the week. This means... my study of Japanese as a serious student begins!

I've been studying Japanese in middle/high school for 4 years now, but you guys know how that goes. The classes are pretty useless. I know some important stuff, but not much.

Basically, I know Hiragana, Katakana, some verbs, some verb tenses (polite masu, masen, masen deshita, etc, as well as ru, nai, -te forms, etc), some adjectives and some conjugations. Basically, my knowledge is really, really scattered.

Why? Because 1) The classes suck and 2) I went to Japan. And when I went to Japan on a homestay for a month, I learned a bunch of random everyday things that didn't mesh with what I was learning in school. I'm forever thankful that I was able to go and learn a little more Japanese, but it's left me in a state of confusion.

What should I be doing while I do RtK?

I will be immersing myself in music and podcasts and stuff, and I'm 'perusing' Tae Kim's Grammar site, but otherwise, I'm not sure what I should be doing.

Vocab? Grammar? what?

I'm trying to dedicated 2 hours a day to studying Japanese (outside of my Japanese classes) on weekdays and a little more on weekends, including my RtK studies. I'm still a high school student so I still have to do other work so that's why.

Thank you for the help and info. I've learned so much from coming to this site and other Japanese learning blogs online.

To be truthful, I'm just sick of listening to music and only being able to understand a few words in a sea of garbled strangeness. I want it to be the other way around - understand the gists of what's going on, with a few things I don't understand. It's just really intimidating to hear all these complex words and verb forms that I recognize, but have no idea what they mean, only to hear the word "じぶん" or "いって" every now and then.

I really value my strong grip on the English language (for my age at least). I'm proud of the fact that I can construct complex sentences and at least hope that I sound intelligent. My one true goal is to be able to sound as natural or at least seem as natural at Japanese as I am now at English.

hi.

if you're lucky enough to be able to have minimum 2 hours of study per day, I'd definately devote all that time to RTK. Don't let RTK become a long drawn out thing. It's best finished in an intense burst, idelly in a few months. I did 829 kanji over a year, then I managed to finish the rest of the book in another month. It just comes down to disciplining yourself to sit there and finish it. So use every scrap of time to finish it as quickly as possible.

I think also, don't devalue so much what you've done in class. There is no perfect, step-by-step, comprehensive way to learn Japanese. It's a language, and languages are messy. So at the beginning, no matter how you learn, things will necessarily feel scattered. It's once you learn more and more then look back and think "wow how was I learning such disconnected things at the same time when I was starting?" that's what i felt with french after doing classes for 5 years at least.

just persevere and you will get there. good luck!

Quote:I think also, don't devalue so much what you've done in class. There is no perfect, step-by-step, comprehensive way to learn Japanese. It's a language, and languages are messy.

This is solid gold. I wish someone had told me this when I first started, so that I wouldn't have been constantly chasing "The One True Method".