So over the course of three years I've followed the advice laid out here, and from other sources, on how to study Japanese. I've gone through Genki I & II, gone through Tae Kim, done RTK, done KO2001, using Lang8, finished Core6k and finished up an N2 grammar book.

Now I know what I should be doing next. Practicing using native materials, i.e. watching dramas, reading books etc. But before embarking on the push from intermediate to advanced it would be nice to hear some advice on how particularly I should be approaching this. There's a wealth of material regarding studying Japanese up till intermediate but everything seems to disappear beyond that.

So I guess this is an inventory regarding, what's working for you at this stage? What would you advise, recommend, etc. Also since I've been SRSing for three years it would be nice to hear from people on how they studied without SRS or dropped it.

I think, as you move from an intermediate level to an advanced level, you have to move past SRSing using premade decks. At an advanced level, there's no objective standard for what words you have to know, so I think it's counterproductive to be studying something like Core10k when you could be studying words in context.

So, some options for vocabulary study are:

-Sentence-mining native materials
-Intensive reading of native materials, where you look up words you don't know in a dictionary but don't put them in an SRS program
-Extensive reading of native materials, with very little dictionary lookup

I'm a huge advocate for extensive reading -- I think it improves speed and fluency and grammatical intuitions, and it builds up a library of words that are glancing acquaintances, so that it's that much easier to learn them later. Plus, it's a lot easier to get into the storyline of a book when you're reading 20 pages a day than when you're reading just 2. But just because written Japanese isn't phonetic, passive vocabulary acquisition may be harder than with other languages.

So I find it worthwhile to do both a lot of extensive reading and a smaller amount of sentence mining -- doing extensive reading with a book that's fairly easy, and doing sentence mining with a book that's fairly hard.

I haven't said anything about listening, but that's not because I don't think it's important. I just think that so much depends on having experience with listening *and* on having the vocabulary to understand what's being said, so... it's a little bit harder to deal with. Japanese subs make things a lot easier.

strengthen your weakest point and master grammar.

The reason resources disappear at your level is because gains start to come more from practice with native materials than with explicit studying.

I agree with pretty much everything Fillanzea said. Start diving into things you find interesting, but make sure that you're doing the small things you need to do in order to improve your level. It's easy to get carried away with some stuff, forget to look up words, and then have your ability stall.

Like Fillanzea said, Japanese not being an entirely phonetic language, it's more difficult to pick up words passively through just listening or just reading.

I got sick of SRS, removed premade decks and just use the record audio function to insert words into a deck when I dont understand a phrase or something. Simply figure out the meaning and move on. The cards are simply nothing more than a recording of the now known phrase. Its simple, easy to review, and gets away from tedious typing words into SRS. More importantly, its a deck full of stuff that I once didn't understand but now do. If there are japanese subtitles, they get thrown in for fun.

Of course, to fully grasp the meaning of a phrase or word its often needed to hear it in different contexts, so I also sometimes record words that I have heard but dont feel comfortable with.

Can't say whether this is an effective long term solution or not, but it seems just as good as everything else. I think if there is something that was super effective for language learning it would already have been found (and commercialized)

In short, just do what you feel like you can continue doing which involves a sustainable but not aggravating amount of unknown words.

erlog Wrote:Like Fillanzea said, Japanese not being an entirely phonetic language, it's more difficult to pick up words passively through just listening or just reading.

I think you need a different word here. Japanese is entirely phonetic. The stuff is read the way its spelt. I think what you meant is that its full of homophones.

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@vix86 thats not what they meant.

Id also say go at your own pace and don't compare yourself to people who have spent years in Japan if you have only been there once - I see that a lot and it saddens me.

I didn't mean that Japanese has a lot of homophones; I meant that, if you see Japanese text, you can't derive the pronunciation of the word just from the kanji if you don't know the word. And that's true even if you know the on-yomi and kun-yomi of all the kanji in the word.

There is a great deal of research that has been done on the value of extensive reading in acquiring language:

http://erfoundation.org/bib/bibliocats.php

See also this page by Rob Waring:
http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_why..._vital.htm

To see the 5000th most common word in English once (satellite), you would need to read about 130,000 words. That's a good-sized novel -- a little longer than Sense and Sensibility. To see that word twenty times, you would need to read 2.6 million words -- that's almost as much as reading War and Peace four times. In Japanese, that's 48 books the size of 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 *. So, you have to read a LOT. If you are pausing several times a page to look up an unfamiliar word, you are not going to be able to read a LOT. And you will not be able to read as many pages as you need to read if you are pausing to look up every unknown word. (It also makes reading very boring.)

"But," you say, "You can see the word 'satellite' 20 times just by putting it in Anki!"

That's true. But what you can get from extensive reading, that you can't get from an SRS, is experience seeing a word in all of its different contexts, with all of its different nuances. Knowing a word is not just knowing the English word that it translates to; it's knowing how it's actually used in real life. It's getting intuitions about what sounds right and what sounds wrong. You only get that through extensive reading; intensive reading is just too slow.

*Calculated by using the word-count of the English translation to spitball an "equivalent" for the Japanese words-per-page.

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merlin.codex Wrote:

Fillanzea Wrote:Knowing a word is not just knowing the English word that it translates to; it's knowing how it's actually used in real life. It's getting intuitions about what sounds right and what sounds wrong. You only get that through extensive reading; intensive reading is just too slow

That's what example sentences are for.

1. The whole point of being advanced is that you get to read something more interesting than example sentences.

2. For a lot of constructions, you have to meet them many many times in many many different contexts to start to get a feel for what sounds good and what does not. So, are you going to find 20 or 30 example sentences? At that point isn't it easier just to read stuff?

I agree with Fillanzea.

One of the great things about extensive reading (and I'd add listening too) is that if you stick with it, you begin to realize that most of the time you don't even have to be seeing words 20 times (be that in anki or not). Often you don't need a heap of re-exposures in order to memorize something, you just need to let some time pass, and give you brain time to alter.

Also the end result of lots of extensive reading is that you get to consume a whole heap of interesting culture.

I too agree with Fillanzea... and nadiatims. Especially with this one:

nadiatims Wrote:and I'd add listening too

... but why did you mention this in passing? Personally, I value listening even higher than reading - the pace is faster and can be less intrusive.

I will third that example sentences do not capture how words are actually used. They may be from native sources in the first place, but removed from their context it becomes difficult to know exactly when and where to use them. There's some words I've needed to encounter quite a lot in native material before being able to use them myself.

Most of the stuff I SRS to learn I only have a kind of fuzzy vague understanding of at first. It's only later when I start encountering it in the context of native material that I get a really solid understanding of the concept.

Fillanzea's example of 'satellite' isn't really the best since it's so concrete, but the idea is definitely true. There's lots of words describing complex emotions that just don't feel clear until you have the context of an entire situation backing them up.

On the other hand, example sentences are always helpful as an addition to native materials because sometimes they can distill the core expression into an easily digestible nugget. I don't think there's ever a point where you can just say flat-out "I never need example sentences, I have native materials."

Some things are fairly simple and can be easily covered by example sentences. For instance, you might wonder how to express the idea of putting sugar into coffee, since the verb you use in Japanese might not be immediately apparent. This is something where looking up words without any examples isn't going to help, but if you look at a dictionary with an example, it's easy:

add sugar to one's coffee
コーヒーに砂糖を入れる

You don't really need much more context or exposure than that.

EDIT: Also, I did both intensive and non-intensive reading when I was at that stage; it doesn't have to be one or the other.

One more comment:

Quote:I meant that, if you see Japanese text, you can't derive the pronunciation of the word just from the kanji if you don't know the word.

While this is true, if you do not know how to pronounce the word you won't understand it in speech (or if it's written in kana). I also think it slows down your overall reading speed when you hit words you do not know how to pronounce.

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I don't really understand the point of what you're saying. You're recommending reading boring things outside your interests? That seems like a good way to give up on Japanese. I never did that and I've gotten along fine.

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Inny Jan Wrote:I too agree with Fillanzea... and nadiatims. Especially with this one:

nadiatims Wrote:and I'd add listening too

... but why did you mention this in passing? Personally, I value listening even higher than reading - the pace is faster and can be less intrusive.

I didn't really mean it in passing. it's just as important. For practical reasons though I think some people will read more, and others will listen more. It all depends on what kind of content you have available.

@merlin
Surely it makes sense to build up your speed/confidence/knowledge using content that is enjoyable and then you branch out as your level improves.

Where do you draw the line anyway. Surely the whole point of studying is so you can use the language for the purposes you're actually going to use it for. If you're not interested in 15th century pottery and wouldn't read about it in your own language, why would you go out of your way to read it in another language. Do you also read about every other obscure topic *just in case*?

Quote:One more comment:

Quote:I meant that, if you see Japanese text, you can't derive the pronunciation of the word just from the kanji if you don't know the word.

While this is true, if you do not know how to pronounce the word you won't understand it in speech (or if it's written in kana). I also think it slows down your overall reading speed when you hit words you do not know how to pronounce.

That was my point exactly; that extensive reading, on its own, doesn't get you as far with Japanese as with languages that are written more phonetically because even if you can get the meaning from context, you can't always get the pronunciation.

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On vocabulary acquisition through native materials:

I've learned a lot of agricultural and sake-brewing terminology from watching Natsuko no Sake (which is a GREAT older drama, even if you're not particularly interested in sake) and a lot of math terminology from Ogawa Youko's The Professor's Beloved Equation. I learned a heck of a lot of nuclear power plant terminology in March 2011. I read Tensei Jingo and historical novels and current events magazines. But you have to accept, even as an advanced student, that you're not going to learn *all* the words, and sure, you can make up hypothetical situations where you would have to have a conversation about an obscure topic, but why not deal with those hypotheticals after you already have a really solid base in vocabulary that's not restricted to particular contexts?

As an early-advanced student (between N2 and N1, lets's say?) I tried to force myself to read a lot of stuff on politics and economics, and I don't think it was a particularly good use of my time. I think trying to get a grasp on the Japanese political situation and the language at the same time was the main thing that tripped me up. But now that I'm more advanced, I can read that stuff, and even if I don't know the specific political terminology involved, I can understand enough of the rest so that things fall into place easily. Maybe that's a long-term backwards kind of solution, but I haven't been interrogated about the Japanese political situation in the meantime...

Everyone here has ignored the whale in the room... Speech.

In my opinion you can be N1 and beyond and still not be able to put 2 reasonable sentenced together unless you get some close friends/ gf with whom to practice

dtcamero - yeah, defo. Kanji will get your grades up in JLPT no end. What you described is easily imaginable to me. I shocked a Jap Phd by not understanding her but spotting a mistake in a book she had and knowing about and being able to read manyogana. I had a Japanese girlfriend but she left after I threatened to kill her. I am tired and can't think of a tirade to launch against you.

I agree with Filanzea about reading loads. Book floods ftw. I am currently trying to get 4 hours of listening to Japanese a day. I don't agree with her about n1 meaning an advanced student as neurotic kanji knowledge such as my own could easily pass it without much knowledge of *Japanese*

frequency list: http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/frqc/internet-jp.num

There's no question that in order to be able to speak well, as in with good pronunciation, speed and comfort, you have to speak a lot. But in terms of what you're able to say - how you use the language - it's about how used you are to it, in my experience.

Because when you speak, you're not thinking about the technical aspects of language, you're using what you're used to, what you've acquired, what's there and quickly accessible. You can study the technical aspects and pass tests, and analyze the language as if it was a long decipherable code. But you generally can't use it on the fly when you speak. In that case it's what you've acquired through many hours of advanced - dare I say it - exposure.

Ok woah this got more responses than I was expecting.

Fillanzea Wrote:I think, as you move from an intermediate level to an advanced level, you have to move past SRSing using premade decks. At an advanced level, there's no objective standard for what words you have to know, so I think it's counterproductive to be studying something like Core10k when you could be studying words in context.

Totally agree with this. At the moment I'm definitely not trying to go for another premade deck. Continuous SRS has gotten a bit tiring and I'd rather not plow through another few thousand fact deck.

Fillanzea Wrote:So I find it worthwhile to do both a lot of extensive reading and a smaller amount of sentence mining -- doing extensive reading with a book that's fairly easy, and doing sentence mining with a book that's fairly hard.

So are you suggesting reading two books at the same time. One for just pure exposure with reading and another for sentence mining?

merlin.codex Wrote:You said that you write in Lang-8. OK, how are you faring? Do you make grammar/particle/word mistakes often? Fix what you suck at. An average native speaker won't make such mistakes. Is your work coherent enough? Do you make difference between 天才、秀才、奇才、鬼才 and 神童? Do you say 会社に勤めている人 instead of 会社員／社員 or （普段）スープに入れるもの instead of コンソメ (there must be a lot of stuff you can put in a soup anyway)? Etc...

Definitely something I've neglected. Referring to HonyakuJoshua's comment also I really should go back and identify problems and work to fix them.

dtcamero Wrote:Everyone here has ignored the wale in the room... Speech.

The thing with speech is, or maybe this is just for me, it's quite easy to actually study. I mean just using it regularly should help me improve my speech, right? Since I do have chances to speak Japanese regularly I've tended to ignore practicing it specifically.

From my cold medicine: 次の一回量を一日三回、食後なるべく三十分以内に服用してください。

I get it, but I am not sure about 次の一回量を. What is that? I mean, I know the words but I don't see the logic.