So I've been wanting to follow the AJATT way of Japanese but I'm failing pretty hard at it I must say. I have anime to watch which is fine but when it comes to anything to do with reading.. I'm stumped.

News sites right now are pretty boring to say the least. Sure I might be able to make out a couple of kanji per article and the kana but I still don't know what the hell I'm reading. Plus with no pictures I get pretty bored.

I'd love to play games but because I can't read 90% of it and understand even less I'm still lost. Even children's games are hard because I don't understand the instructions.

So... what do I do? What did you do?

This is going to sound slightly heretical, but you need to get a basic working knowledge of Japanese grammar before you'll be able to start understanding things. I would suggest SRS-ing grammar sentences from a beginner level textbook like Genki. The quicker you get the basic grammar under your belt the better off you'll be. It's gonna be really boring for a while, but trust me it opens up a lot after that. The textbook can also help teach you limited amounts of vocab along the way.

Another good starting point would be Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide. It's a more condensed version of a beginner level textbook. That's really what worked for me because you need to be able to decipher all the verb forms and tenses before you can know how to even begin looking up words in the dictionary. For instance, newspapers are written almost entirely in the passive tense, which tends not to be taught until way late in the beginner curricula. So beginners have lots and lots of trouble bootstrapping from news stories.

You need something to teach you the basic japanese sentence patterns, and work your way up from there.

If I understood correctly, you haven't finished RTK yet.
So you can read manga, they have pictures and furigana.

You can get serious about reading when you've finished RTK. The trick is to find the kind of stuff you would read in English. For some people it's sci-fi novels, for others it's manga, and for you if it's games, then fine. But it's a bit unrealistic to want to read without kanji and a little grammar.

By the way, I'm reading 'Coin locker babies' by Murakami Ryû, it's by the far the best fiction book I've read in years, I highly recommend it to you all.

Well I agree with the AJATT method to a point, I believe that immersion helps the language learning process, but only once you've reached a certain level. Trying to read and listen to Japanese without at least a basic knowledge of grammar and vocabulary is just a waste of your time imo, immersion is something that will reinforce the language learning process once you've reached a certain point. Also grammar does exist, sure grammar won't help you with everything a language entails, but certain basic concepts can be learned by reviewing grammar for only 15 minutes, which is far less than the time you'd spend trying to figure the syntax out for yourself without any help, like AJATT suggests. I suggest you just focus on grinding kanji for now and after that vocabulary and grammar, once you've got the basics down you'll be able to actually make out what a certain text is about. I also believe that after a certain point, it's no longer necessary to SrS sentences. Take English for example, which is not my native language. I learned English by first getting an idea of the basic grammar and vocabulary, and once I was able to understand most of what I read in English it became a self sustaining process. I just read a ton of articles in English, watched TV shows without subs and before I knew it I was able to express myself at a native level. But all that only took place after I had a firm grasp of the fundamentals, imo trying to make out what newspapers are saying at this stage is time that could be better spent on other things.

Kuma01 Wrote:Well I agree with the AJATT method to a point, I believe that immersion helps the language learning process, but only once you've reached a certain level.

Immersion= motivation

LadyMissie Wrote:So I've been wanting to follow the AJATT way of Japanese but I'm failing pretty hard at it I must say. I have anime to watch which is fine but when it comes to anything to do with reading.. I'm stumped.

News sites right now are pretty boring to say the least. Sure I might be able to make out a couple of kanji per article and the kana but I still don't know what the hell I'm reading. Plus with no pictures I get pretty bored.

I'd love to play games but because I can't read 90% of it and understand even less I'm still lost. Even children's games are hard because I don't understand the instructions.

So... what do I do? What did you do?

Finish RTK and then start learning simple vocab, that is very common. Numbers,dates,basic phrases. Learn basic grammar via basic sentences. If some of them don't make sense, it's natural. In the beginning I knew nothing, now I know more than 2000 kanji/can read and understand Japanese text easily.

You can do it, but it will take time. Use sentences to learn grammar. Without it, it's really annoying(we learn best by context)

So basically it's going to boring as all hell until I finish the kanji? Well shoot. Oh well.

One more question while I'm here. Is there like a site somewhere that has a list of Japanese words that only use kana? While I learn the Kanji it would be good to learn non-kanji words right?

I may be mistaken, but I think the only words that don't have kanji are the foreign imports that are written in katakana. There are alot of words that are usually written in hiragana though.

If you're looking for words to learn alongside RTK you can use http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5091&page=1 , which is the core 6000 with the option to sort into RTK order. The obvious problem is that you won't learn alot of the really common words until the end, so you'll still find yourself unable to read most things until you finish RTK, but they're all still pretty common.

Another option is to focus on audio until after RTK. Just learn the most common words with kana, and only worry about the kanji if you already know them. This way you'll be able to enjoy your anime more, and it will be clear that your making progress with your Japanese, which is important for maintaining motivation. Its alot easier to learn to read words that you already know, so this will still be useful for you're reading.

Obviously you can do neither or both. I did the first one, but in retrospect I think the second would have been a better use of my time. (and more fun^^)

Splatted Wrote:I may be mistaken, but I think the only words that don't have kanji are the foreign imports that are written in katakana. There are alot of words that are usually written in hiragana though.

The fun thing is, depending on the source, some of them are written in kanji or hiragana. They're usually hiragana, yes, but it's always good to know their kanji equivalent...

nohika Wrote:

Splatted Wrote:I may be mistaken, but I think the only words that don't have kanji are the foreign imports that are written in katakana. There are alot of words that are usually written in hiragana though.

The fun thing is, depending on the source, some of them are written in kanji or hiragana. They're usually hiragana, yes, but it's always good to know their kanji equivalent...

I find it better to learn the kanji version of it. Why? Eventually you'll notice that you can recognize it in it's kana form. And plus kanji will get you further into your japanese studies.

ta12121 Wrote:

nohika Wrote:

Splatted Wrote:I may be mistaken, but I think the only words that don't have kanji are the foreign imports that are written in katakana. There are alot of words that are usually written in hiragana though.

The fun thing is, depending on the source, some of them are written in kanji or hiragana. They're usually hiragana, yes, but it's always good to know their kanji equivalent...

I find it better to learn the kanji version of it. Why? Eventually you'll notice that you can recognize it in it's kana form. And plus kanji will get you further into your japanese studies.

Yup. Even words like "kawaii" that are normally kana, in the novel I'm reading it's in kanji. Go figure.

So things like　こんにちは and　さようなら actually have a kanji for them? Huh.. I had no idea.

LadyMissie Wrote:So things like　こんにちは and　さようなら actually have a kanji for them? Huh.. I had no idea.

Yup! Welcome to Japanese craziness.

LadyMissie Wrote:So things like　こんにちは and　さようなら actually have a kanji for them? Huh.. I had no idea.

今日は

左様なら

do song lyrics it's fun.
i don't do news but i understand 90+% (more so witth the transcript in japanese or japanese subs) of news because i watched a lot of talk/variet shows. you don't HAVE to do news.

Splatted Wrote:

LadyMissie Wrote:So things like　こんにちは and　さようなら actually have a kanji for them? Huh.. I had no idea.

今日は

左様なら

That's こんにちは? I never even made the connection. /facepalm

LadyMissie Wrote:

Splatted Wrote:

LadyMissie Wrote:So things like　こんにちは and　さようなら actually have a kanji for them? Huh.. I had no idea.

今日は

左様なら

That's こんにちは? I never even made the connection. /facepalm

Well, it's one way of reading it. I believe 今日 can be read as　きょう, or "today", also. 今晩は,　or こんばんは, is another one.

LadyMissie Wrote:So things like　こんにちは and　さようなら actually have a kanji for them? Huh.. I had no idea.

yea they do

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:do song lyrics it's fun.
i don't do news but i understand 90+% (more so witth the transcript in japanese or japanese subs) of news because i watched a lot of talk/variet shows. you don't HAVE to do news.

yea, only do news if you find it interesting. But I've found out that, if you treat it like your native language. Listen to news the morning/at night. Eventually you'll be able to understand all of it in no time.

nohika Wrote:

LadyMissie Wrote:So things like　こんにちは and　さようなら actually have a kanji for them? Huh.. I had no idea.

Yup! Welcome to Japanese craziness.

almost everything has a kanji version. But it's naturally said in kana form most of the time. If you watch older jp shows(i..e traditional japan. You'll find that they use heavy kanji usage and barely any kana.)

LadyMissie Wrote:So basically it's going to boring as all hell until I finish the kanji? Well shoot. Oh well.

That's the way RTK is, I guess. If you don't like it you could try the "RTK light" version which uses a reduced set of kanji so you can actually start on interesting stuff earlier. Or don't bother with RTK at all ;-)

pm215 Wrote:

LadyMissie Wrote:So basically it's going to boring as all hell until I finish the kanji? Well shoot. Oh well.

That's the way RTK is, I guess. If you don't like it you could try the "RTK light" version which uses a reduced set of kanji so you can actually start on interesting stuff earlier. Or don't bother with RTK at all ;-)

RTK lite contains the first 1000 common kanji characters. If you do RTK at a small pace, then I don't think you'll get bored of it. Because you won't be feeling it at all. That's my take on it. I remember when my srsing was only 20-30mins a day. I actually said to myself "this feels abit too easy for my tastes..."

ta12121 Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:

LadyMissie Wrote:So basically it's going to boring as all hell until I finish the kanji? Well shoot. Oh well.

That's the way RTK is, I guess. If you don't like it you could try the "RTK light" version which uses a reduced set of kanji so you can actually start on interesting stuff earlier. Or don't bother with RTK at all ;-)

RTK lite contains the first 1000 common kanji characters. If you do RTK at a small pace, then I don't think you'll get bored of it. Because you won't be feeling it at all. That's my take on it. I remember when my srsing was only 20-30mins a day. I actually said to myself "this feels abit too easy for my tastes..."

I don't know, for me Remembering the Kanji is worse at a slow pace. I've been at it for about six months now and it's hard to keep pressing on when you realize you still have another 700 kanji to go after all this time. It makes you want to finally get to some interesting stuff, but you can't. It's sort of like a trap. Though I recognize the benefit of RtK in the long run, you start to ask yourself if you will ever get to the long run. No offense OP, but judging from your posts I really doubt you have the will to finish RtK. I don't want to discourage you, but just know it will take hours upon hours of going through extremely boring material, with no noticeable benefit in your understanding of the Japanese language. And there will be days when you miss a review or two and it feels like you've forgotten everything...

I'm not doubting the benefits of RtK just know that it will take an iron will and hundreds of hours of study that you may not be willing to put in. Since you seem to really want to get started now perhaps there are other alternatives to take.

MountainDewGuy Wrote:I don't know, for me Remembering the Kanji is worse at a slow pace. I've been at it for about six months now and it's hard to keep pressing on when you realize you still have another 700 kanji to go after all this time. It makes you want to finally get to some interesting stuff, but you can't. It's sort of like a trap. Though I recognize the benefit of RtK in the long run, you start to ask yourself if you will ever get to the long run.

Yes, I agree. That's why if you're going to take an RTK-style approach at all I think that it makes more sense to do a smaller number of the more common kanji. You can do the second thousand later. I think that's a much more sensible allocation of effort unless you're one of the handful of people who seem to manage to burn through the whole thing in a month.

If you have an iPhone or iPad (I swear I don't work for Apple), why not check out Midori? I just downloaded it a few days ago and it's something I wish I had for a long, long time.

It has a "translate" feature that let's you copy and paste text into it, hit translate, and it will auto highlight all the vocabulary and, if you're on the ipad, put it on the right for quick reference, or on the iPhone you have to tap the words. However, it's awesome. I'm really having a blast copy and pasting some more advanced and/or text with a lot of 専門用語.