Omoishinji Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:I think it's definitely the best way to do it first, as long as you combine it with other forms of study that don't require kanji at the same time, i.e. grammar and listening, et cetera. ... .

I combine everything, but only focus on one aspect. "傷口を消毒して包帯を巻く。"　I might focus on the grammar points in one situation. The Kanji in another. Is that what you mean?

I'm saying that when you're establishing a foundation, internalizing the kanji (piecemeal in batches or organized according to orders you might see in RTK Lite that are designed to complement JLPT or KO2001) from the bottom-up for in-depth knowledge of the writing system, you can use complementary components to optimize your learning time, so that you establish a foundation of how Japanese is structured by also going through a text like Japanese the Manga Way, which doesn't require knowledge of the kanji, you simply focus on the grammmatical explanations, how sentences are put together. At the same time you can focus on other sensory modalities, i.e. audio, to establish a foundational knowledge of basic phonology, which also doesn't require knowledge of kanji.

As you chunk these things together into a foundation, you then find new complementary components, i.e. words/sentences with the kanji you've learned and native audio, using the grammar you've just learned (i.e. Core 2000); how you do this can be structured by general frequency or however it meets your personal goals (since there's no universal frequency for all learners, unless they're stagnating in externally-imposed, very slow methods using textbooks). The knowledge you've optimally gained and integrated at each stage feeds into, fuels the later stages, more and more.

As we further develop tools for customizing materials based around individual goals, such as subs2srs and cb4960's frequency generator, what comprises a foundation becomes even more flexible.

It seems everybody already gave you a lot of good hints. I'll just give you another one: when you feel overwhelmed by the language stop the "active studying process" and just listen to the music in that language or watch a movie, a tv-series, etc... There is a magical software called Perfect dark (I don't know if I'm violating any forum rules talking about a p2p software).......You can use it to find dubbed series you are likely to know as Lost, Dexter, The mentalist, The big bang theory, etc... Even if you don't understand a word and you can't grasp anything besides "hello" and "My name is..." you'll enjoy it anyway. I did it with English and with Japanese and it worked

I am surprised that nobody mentioned the possibility for people living in isolated places to take virtual classes online. I have been using JOI (http://www.japonin.com/) for over two years now and am pretty enthusiastic about the service they provide. Teachers are very kind and well trained, the language is studied in a systematic way, and there are plenty of opportunities to communicate in Japanese in the private lessons, but even in the small group lessons (hardly more than 2 or 3 people usually). I then practice new vocabulary using Anki in the usual way. Kanji is not the main focus there, so I keep studying RTK using this site. This really saved my day.
You can even test it with 3 lessons for 9 $ !

ThomasB Wrote:Are you still doing your RTK reviews or did you stop that completely?

I am still doing some reviews. I got behind and have about 300 reviews to do. But I don't worry about finishing them. I just do 10-15 minutes and figure eventually I'll get them down.

Quote:- 1 Lesson of "Elementary Japanese 1" per week. That should be doable with ~1 hour per day. It's about the same pace a good university class progresses. If you don't have enough time you can skip some of the exercises that you think are not useful. While you are going through the book put the new vocabulary into Anki and review it. Don't forget to go back and review Grammar occasionally. It comes with a CD so you can listen to that on-the-go as well. If you have any questions you could ask the Japanese woman or just post your questions here....
Elementary Japanese 1 has 14 Lessons, so in 3-4 months you'll be finished with that and you'll be at a level somewhere between N5 and N4 with a good foundation in grammar and vocabulary.

If I discipline myself (which I want to) I have 2 hours a day. I actually have more than that, but I can't seem to study for more than an hour or 2 at a time. I COULD study in the late afternoon and after dinner. Probably 2 hours each. I'm just lazy. *embarrased* I want to overcome that though.
If I did decide to do 3-4 hours a day, what would you recommend? Right now I can't spend that much because I'm jumping around and it burns me out. I think with an organized schedule I could do 3-4 hours a day. I'm definitely a type-A, like it to be organized, learner. Classes would be awesome, but there are none here. Would any of those online classes be good?
Thanks so much for your help!

what's your ultimate goal?
do you have smaller goals along the way?

i think once you structure that, your study program will proceed accordingly.

for example, if your goal is to read books, then you would have milestones like reading a chapter or a page, and completely understanding it.

when you see a part you don't understand, you might dive into the textbooks. or perhaps it's beyond your grasp at the moment, so you decide to study some more vocab and grammar and come back a week later or something.

i think if you don't have set and defined goals, of course you'll feel lost because you don't know where you're going anyway. =)

I would advise against 1-2 hours of "structured" study per day. If you do that you'll probably just burn yourself out and lose your motivation. The brain can't handle that much new information in a short period of time anyway. If you really have more time to spare just spend it doing your Anki Reviews or consuming some kind of Japanese media like music, tv shows, movies, etc. Whatever you like.

kainzero Wrote:what's your ultimate goal?
do you have smaller goals along the way?

My ultimate, ultimate goal is to live in Japan someday soon. So I want to be able to function as an adult over there.
But medium goals(?) would be reading, be able to study my Bible in Japanese and writing in my journal.
I guess I don't really have any "small" goals right now. Maybe reading a page without having to look up every 4th word? lol

Quote:i think if you don't have set and defined goals, of course you'll feel lost because you don't know where you're going anyway. =)

That is so true. I really hadn't set any definite goals. Maybe doing that will help too. Thanks.

ThomasB,
Okay, I will just use the extra time to review and do fun things.
Again, thanks so much for you help.

I agree with much of what you said tokyostyle, but actually I think the better your Japanese pronunciation gets the easier it becomes to launch into the fake gaijin accent. As you become more aware, you can take it to a whole extra level.

@Omoishinji

Just as an addendum to my previous response, this recent article (original paper not online yet) reminded me of the bases for the complementary components stuff I often talk about when it comes to multimodality (multiple senses) to take optimize cognitive capacity (e.g. working memory): http://www.psychologicalscience.org/inde...doing.html

What's interesting is that Logie and Baddeley's multiple-component model has been a standard model for years (re: the visuospatial sketchpad, the phonological loop, executive functions, etc.), but I think the paper will probably be underscoring how its core principles regarding multiple components' capacities and their interactions and dynamics are misunderstood or underemphasized.

Edit: You'll see similar principles in circuit training/supersets or multi-tasking of course, and I used the analogy of an assembly line.

If you're familiar with this time hack, it follows a similar principle: http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/proc...-hack-1025

I actually have some ideas and links on this topic of multitasking and cognitive load that I updated recently but have lost my train of thought, I'll have to get back to that.

Edit 2: Ahha, I'm starting to remember. It was tied to cold cognition and the region of proximal learning in task-based time allocation.

Angeldust Wrote:My ultimate, ultimate goal is to live in Japan someday soon. So I want to be able to function as an adult over there.
But medium goals(?) would be reading, be able to study my Bible in Japanese and writing in my journal.
I guess I don't really have any "small" goals right now. Maybe reading a page without having to look up every 4th word? lol

But what does it take to function as an adult over there? Do you know what kind of jobs you want to get? Do you want to be able to communicate socially and professionally? Have you been to Japan before?

I'm not trying to be facetious or anything but the more closely you define and explore your goals, the easier it would be to concentrate on studying.

For example:
-I want to live in Japan!
--I need to be able to understand contractual language and how to fill out applications.
---Let me try to fill out applications and simple forms, like on Amazon.jp.
----I don't understand some of this, let me study some more.
-----After studying, I understand this part of the form, but now this part is a bit harder.
------I can understand most of this form, but now this other form I'm completely lost, let me study more and ask for help from the Japanese help desk.
-------I don't understand these parts of the CSR's response, let me go over it.


...and so on. By getting feedback and seeing your progression, it makes easier to work through textbooks when you see the real results you're getting and the real questions you get, and it helps you sketch out a better plan through which to work with.

Kainzero, that's awesome. I want to create a flow-sheet like that for myself...thanks~

I'm gonna have to disagree with your nest0r. I think a person should first learn how to pronounce and write all the kana first before anything else. It'll give you the most bang for your buck as it's easy and they're gonna see them everywhere including grammar study. Just saying.

KMDES Wrote:I'm gonna have to disagree with your nest0r. I think a person should first learn how to pronounce and write all the kana first before anything else. It'll give you the most bang for your buck as it's easy and they're gonna see them everywhere including grammar study. Just saying.

Doing kana first is a given, isn't it? It's what I've always advocated. Don't we have a bunch of threads about that (and Reviewing the Kana, which I also recommend)? ^_^

Just because I use the word first, without mentioning the kana, doesn't mean you're disagreeing if you say do the kana first. I don't have to give a comprehensive outline of every single component of language learning whenever I mention doing something first, do I? ;p

Edit: I think this is the last time we discussed it: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid127552

I think we might now have that ideal deck I speculated on, actually: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid127566 - Maybe not, I see I mentioned animated .gifs there for kana.

Which reminds me, wasn't I supposed to play with Brain Workshop's dual n-back with the kana audio I integrated with it? *wanders off*

nest0r Wrote:Doing kana first is a given, isn't it? It's what I've always advocated. Don't we have a bunch of threads about that (and Reviewing the Kana, which I also recommend)? ^_^

Not if you go by AJATT gospel, which tells you to do kana after doing kanji. Which is WTF right there.

KMDES Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Doing kana first is a given, isn't it? It's what I've always advocated. Don't we have a bunch of threads about that (and Reviewing the Kana, which I also recommend)? ^_^

Not if you go by AJATT gospel, which tells you to do kana after doing kanji. Which is WTF right there.

It would be strange not to learn Hiragana before Kanji, and Katakana while learning Kanji. If not learning the reading of the Kanji you don't need to learn Hiragana or Katakana, then there should be no problem. However, when writing Japanese you need Hiragana.

I would recommend 日本語発音レッスン, as an essential aid in learning Hiragana and Kanatana. The book is designed to improve ones pronunciation, but it does have Kana charts and the included CD has the pronunciations.

tokyostyle Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:Not if you go by AJATT gospel, which tells you to do kana after doing kanji. Which is WTF right there.

That is the most logical order for those whose goal is proficency. The majority of the information of a sentence is contained in the kanji not the kana.

It seems like you have no sense of history if you don't immediately recognize that the approach pre-AJATT was to only learn the kana and then maybe a few hundred kanji. That method of teaching was popular for decades and is still the most common method at university level. Thus the AJATT approach is to point out how incredibly important the study of kanji is to someone who wants to become fluent in Japanese. Your attempts to try and project the opposite as fact, that AJATT shuns kana completely, is going to be easily seen through by almost everyone here.

The only thing that AJATT really shuns are romaji and L1 subtitles.

The problem with that statement is that yes, the majority of the information in a sentence would be kanji (assuming the text even has kanji in it) but the learning curve to learn what the kanji mean/learn to write/etc is far more extreme, taking up to years more than what kana takes, which could be learned in a single weekend with a bit of effort. Proficiency-wise it makes no sense because you're going to spend possibly years learning kanji while these 'squiggly lines' that show up in basically every Japanese sentence will allude you. Why wait years to learn something that takes less than a week to learn and takes up somewhere between 30-50% of all the sentences you will read? It's kind of like learning thousands of words first and then the Alphabet later. Doesn't make much sense right?

Plus the more you know of a subject, the easier it is to learn more of it, so why not do the most bang for your buck?

That's why kana should be first, not second to learn.

not to mention you can then make use of furigana, and you'll never have the need to use romaji to transcribe the pronunciation of words.

tokyostyle Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:Not if you go by AJATT gospel, which tells you to do kana after doing kanji. Which is WTF right there.

That is the most logical order for those whose goal is proficency. The majority of the information of a sentence is contained in the kanji not the kana.

The kana have most of the grammatical information; without that, the kanji is useless. You can't tell if anything is positive or negative (just to mention one example), which disqualifies you from getting any meaning out of the sentence at all, even if you know all the kanji. In any case, RTK does not give you enough information to understand the meaning of all the *words* written in kanji you will encounter.

Also you can read some texts with only kana, but nothing with only kanji. All of this is academic, though, since you need to learn both. (RTK itself doesn't say anything about whether you should learn kana first; it's not necessary to use the book but Heisig doesn't say you shouldn't. Heisig is somewhat unclear and inconsistent in his statements about how RTK should be used with other Japanese programs.)

Quote:If you can understand spoken Japanese and follow the flow of a conversation you can function better than most young Japanese adults.

Huh?

tokyostyle Wrote:It seems like you have no sense of history if you don't immediately recognize that the approach pre-AJATT was to only learn the kana and then maybe a few hundred kanji. That method of teaching was popular for decades and is still the most common method at university level. Thus the AJATT approach is to point out how incredibly important the study of kanji is to someone who wants to become fluent in Japanese. Your attempts to try and project the opposite as fact, that AJATT shuns kana completely, is going to be easily seen through by almost everyone here.

Universities and other higher learning institutes teach kanji comprehensively which includes readings, actual words, and proper writing form, as opposed to RTK's stroke order and a nebulous keyword. While it's only "a few hundred kanji," you will have learned much more than you would just doing RTK.

For that matter, RTK isn't really learning kanji before learning kana, but getting a (relatively) brief overview of kanji before learning kana.

tokyostyle Wrote:That is the most logical order for those whose goal is proficency. The majority of the information of a sentence is contained in the kanji not the kana.

RTK enable students who were never formally taught Kanji to remember them without have to be concerned with its readings. This is separate from when to learn Hiragana or Katakana. The fact the 48 Hiragana and 48 Katakana were derived from Kanji, shouldn't be overlooked.

It is durig the complusary 9 years of education that Japanese students are taught the standard Kanji. However, this isn't the end of them learning Kanji. The Kanken, or Kanji Keiken, first grade preparation includes an addition 2699 not included in the standard Kanji.

大人 meaning and reading differs on the context in which it used. There are additional Kanji that are like this, including 日本 and 音.

In Japanese, Kanji deemed difficult are substituted with Harigana, or Furigana is added as an aid. Also, Okurigana is Hiragana that are included with Kanji to form words such as verbs and adjectives.

When looking up the meaning of words in a Japanese dictionary Harigana must be understood. Japanese dictionary using Romaji create various problems.

Finishing RTK aids the Japanese language student by allowing them to focusing on the correct reading of the Kanji, without having to learn how to write them.

nest0r Wrote:@Omoishinji

Just as an addendum to my previous response, this recent article (original paper not online yet) reminded me of the bases for the complementary components stuff I often talk about when it comes to multimodality (multiple senses) to take optimize cognitive capacity (e.g. working memory): http://www.psychologicalscience.org/inde...doing.html

What's interesting is that Logie and Baddeley's multiple-component model has been a standard model for years (re: the visuospatial sketchpad, the phonological loop, executive functions, etc.), but I think the paper will probably be underscoring how its core principles regarding multiple components' capacities and their interactions and dynamics are misunderstood or underemphasized.

Edit: You'll see similar principles in circuit training/supersets or multi-tasking of course, and I used the analogy of an assembly line.

If you're familiar with this time hack, it follows a similar principle: http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/proc...-hack-1025

I actually have some ideas and links on this topic of multitasking and cognitive load that I updated recently but have lost my train of thought, I'll have to get back to that.

Edit 2: Ahha, I'm starting to remember. It was tied to cold cognition and the region of proximal learning in task-based time allocation.

@nest0r

Wow thank you for all that information. It will take me sometime to digest all of it. I don't know how I originally missed it. Some of the things that you mentioned I am might be currently using. As, I stated before I want to read everything that you provided.

Here's a couple papers I've mentioned that I think you should read, if you missed:

Four Principles of Memory Improvement: A Guide to Improving Learning Efficiency

Abstract: Recent advances in memory research suggest methods that can be applied to enhance educational practices. We outline four principles of memory improvement
that have emerged from research: 1) process material actively, 2) practice retrieval,
3) use distributed practice, and 4) use metamemory. Our discussion of each
principle describes current experimental research underlying the principle and
explains how people can take advantage of the principle to improve their learning.
The techniques that we suggest are designed to increase efficiency—that is, to
allow a person to learn more, in the same unit of study time, than someone using
less efficient memory strategies. A common thread uniting all four principles is
that people learn best when they are active participants in their own learning.

(Which I first mentioned and discussed a bit here: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid142019 - See also that link at the bottom of the comment.)

The Four Strands

Abstract: The activities in a language course can be classified into the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. In a well designed course there should be an even balance of these strands with roughly equal amounts of time given to each strand. The research
evidence for the strands draws on the input hypothesis and learning from extensive
reading, the output hypothesis, research on form-focused instruction, and the
development of speaking and reading fluency. The paper concludes with 10 princi-
ples based largely on the four strands. The strands framework and the principles
provide a basis for managing innovation in language courses.

And connected to the working memory is multimedia learning/multimodal integration: http://brainrules.net/sensory-integration?scene=