Hello guys,

I've been reading a lot and it seems RtK1 is the best place to start. I will try to get the book very soon, and work through it. However, my main goal is to speak/understand spoken japanese. Would doing all the grammar involved help?

I mean, being able to read japanese manga would be quite exciting, but I would much rather be able to converse, and understand anime without reading sub titles

sorry for my ignorance if there has been topics like this

tokyostyle Wrote:

KeirTuS Wrote:Would doing all the grammar involved help?

There is no Japanese nor Japanese grammar in RTK1. It is only kanji and English.

I think he meant just grammar in general?

tokyostyle Wrote:If you only care about listening then you don't necessarily need to learn kanji.

True, but reading the language will help you immensely anyway, which will work towards your listening ability.

You should choose a learning method that suits you. Some people like to study all the grammar with textbooks, sites like JapanesePod101 and good reference guides like Tae Kim's. I can't tell you much about that as I'm one of those who like to "study" by doing almost nothing but immersing myself in Japanese media and learning through input - listening and reading a lot of the language. It's how I learned English.

Maybe you've already read some of AJATT or looked at the opinions of people like Steve Kaufmann. And also, about using an SRS to review sentences/words to retain what you pick up during your exposure to the language.

If you want to hurry up and be able to say something in Japanese as soon as possible, maybe you'd want to go down the path of studying grammar. If you want to learn by having fun yet without having to sweat tears and blood, and acquire the language in a natural way, I think you should do input based learning. But then you might have to accept that the speaking part could have to wait until you get further along, as we inevitably make so many mistakes in the beginning.

Well, it's not that you HAVE to pick one of those two and that it would be bad to mix them up if you wanted to, but you need to find a way that you're comfortable with.

I feel there are two groups of people learning Japanese. Those that want to Listen/Speak and those that want to Listen/Read. So that kind of highlights that Listening is one of the most important skills to develop. Grammar helps but the hard part about grammar is just being able to listen and understand it does not mean you will be able to speak it. You need to start making sentences in your head and constructing Japanese sentences whenever you can to practice. it gets faster the more you do it. I don't speak well at all. Maybe at a 102 or 201 level (read Genki 1 and 2) but I understand up to a 302 level for my school (Genki 1+2 and AIATIJ)

The Kanji helped my listening skills... after I learned how to read them. when people speak japanese to me quick flashes of kanji fill my brain so instead of translating from Japanese to english when I stumble on a word. I switch from Japanese to Kanji and then to english if i still can't figure it out.

One tip I would give is if you are using anki to add Japanese keywords with the english keyword while you are going through. use jisho.org or any place where you can look up words containing the kani you are studying. and add them to the keyword. This saves time later because when you finish you will inevitably switch to Japanese as english doesn't belong in your Japanese studies. English helps in learning them but eventually it starts to hold you back.

Example:
http://nosleeptilfluent.files.wordpress.....png?w=178

Keep the english keyword in there if you aren't 100% with the Kanji. My english keyword is there it's just hidden.

If you want to learn spoken Japanese, Japanesepod101 & Assimil are a better place to start than RTK, which you should avoid altogether if you don't plan to master the writing/reading skills at some point.

Hmm, I wouldn't say I want to ONLY learn speaking/listening, I would also want to read/write.

So I guess, learning the characters would help in my pronunciation right?

I have actually read AJATT, and honestly, I think I'm already somewhat immersed in Japanese. I watch at least 2-5 hours of anime a day. Of course with english sub titles. That said, I've picked up a few phrases that was commonly used. So I wouldn't say that I have no experience in the language I guess?

I just want to develop my understanding even more in listening, and in reading.

So I guess my main question is,

Would learning kanji/hiragana/katakana first through RtK, and SRS, and Tae Kim's website make learning grammar/listening/speaking easier?

I actually have Anki downloaded along with Japanese core 2000 Step 1 Listening and Heisig's RtK 1+3. However, they haven't been much use to me, because I don't know any of the characters :/

KeirTuS Wrote:So I guess, learning the characters would help in my pronunciation right?

Not really.

I would personally suggest focusing on getting RTK1 out of the way first, while you can SRS some and keep watching anime. But turn the English subs off! They prevent you from paying attention to any Japanese that isn't very short phrases (unless you keep going back and compare the subs to what's said, I guess) and half the time they aren't actually real translations you'd want anyway.

Seriously, the more you start understanding what they're saying, the more you'll want the subs gone. You'll realize more and more how bad they feel in comparison, you might even start coming up with stuff you think would fit better as translations.

What may seem stupid is that RTK doesn't really teach you any Japanese. All you get is the recognition and the writing of the characters linked to a basic meaning. The characters will be burned into your mind as a first step, it's after you're done with it that you can start learning the readings and how they work in compounds through immersion. That's when you read and SRS a lot, or try to find Japanese subs to anything you watch.

Studies I've read indicate that L1 (e.g. English) subs are better than no subtitles at all, actually. (It depends on what your focus is, such as comprehension vs. speech perception [in which case I think it's more an orthographic issue].)

Most recently I read: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...x/abstract

Edit: That's from a batch of papers I've been gathering on subtitles in language learning research, I'm still organizing and adding stuff to it. I meant to finish up and post it in my Japanese Subtitles For Films thread but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Hiragana and katakana are pretty easy and worth learning early; but many people who learn Japanese only start to learn the kanji gradually and later on. If your main aims are more focused on the spoken language then I think you could easily ignore RTK; come back to it later if it seems like it's something you want to deal with then.

@OP

Have you seen this? http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5110

It's a good example of the kinds of ways you can break up your study.

nest0r Wrote:Studies I've read indicate that L1 (e.g. English) subs are better than no subtitles at all, actually. (It depends on what your focus is, such as comprehension vs. speech perception [in which case I think it's more an orthographic issue].)

Most recently I read: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...x/abstract

Well I won't refute science Σ(´∀｀；)ﾍﾍｯ but I still think they will end up as annoyances for anyone who takes learning the language seriously. I've grown up with Swedish subtitles for anything English on TV or in the movies (pretty much everything), and I always felt they were corny, unfavorably translated, and inevitably untrue to the original script. It was the same with Japanese, I'd watched subbed anime for years before I got convinced that I could learn the language, and after that they became nothing but obnoxious.

Surely the best use of anime you can get is to have Japanese subtitles on after getting better at reading. That way no word will go by you, and you practice more reading at the same time.

Okay, I've decided that I'm just going to go through the japanesepo101 audio lessons, and try to find some grammar and vocab resources. Thanks guys

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Studies I've read indicate that L1 (e.g. English) subs are better than no subtitles at all, actually. (It depends on what your focus is, such as comprehension vs. speech perception [in which case I think it's more an orthographic issue].)

Most recently I read: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...x/abstract

Well I won't refute science Σ(´∀｀；)ﾍﾍｯ but I still think they will end up as annoyances for anyone who takes learning the language seriously. I've grown up with Swedish subtitles for anything English on TV or in the movies (pretty much everything), and I always felt they were corny, unfavorably translated, and inevitably untrue to the original script. It was the same with Japanese, I'd watched subbed anime for years before I got convinced that I could learn the language, and after that they became nothing but obnoxious.

Surely the best use of anime you can get is to have Japanese subtitles on after getting better at reading. That way no word will go by you, and you practice more reading at the same time.

I am a little confused. I know that subtitles sometimes don't perfectly reflect the spoken words of the actors. What I think nest0r is mentioning is where the language of the subtitles and the actors are the same. Which is different from the subtitles being a translation. Maybe, I am wrong.

I'm saying studies show that while L2 subtitles (e.g. Japanese subs for Japanese-language video) are best, L1 subtitles (e.g. English subs for Japanese-language video) are better than no subtitles at all for listening comprehension.

While if you're listening to refine your speech perception, discriminating the sounds, etc., you want to avoid English text (or ローマ字) when listening to Japanese, that's something you don't need to practice 24/7 as there's much more to listening practice than getting used to the phonology of Japanese (such as vocabulary recognition), and really there's better ways to do that anyway (such as controlled shadowing using @balloonguy's tool Kage Shibari, and subvocalization/sentence repetition in Anki), so there's no need to banish English subtitles and actually good reason to incorporate them, despite extreme advice you might come across.