Paid sites like.. Yes Japan, Text Fugu, Nihongo Up, J-Pod 101, iKnow! & LingQ ...

I'm new here.. I poked around a bit & didn't really see much on them.. Found Nihongo Up listed on a couple posts, but didn't see anything on YJ, TextFugu, iKnow!, LingQ or J-Pod 101.

Also.. What about AJATT's Silver Spoon?

I'm pretty much a noob.. I know I need to learn the kana first, before I can really do anything.. Just would like to have some kind of structure, since I'm learning on my own. I'm 27 & have been out of school for a long time.. I'm not going to be taking any college classes or anything like that.. So I'm just going to be learning on my own. I suppose I could take some classes or get a tutor, but I'd like to at least try by myself for a bit & see how it goes.

I want to be able to read blogs & websites, understand the music's lyrics that I'm listening to.. I'd like to be able to watch some interviews and tv shows & movies in Japanese & just have a good handle on the language & be able to talk to people & make new friends that I can visit & hang out with.

Alrighty, thanks for your time. Have a great day!

I spent alot, maybe too much.

AJATT SS - way too expensive now. I stayed one month, now I miss it somehow.
The other ajatt products I do like alot, especially Red Dao. AJATT site = good for motivation... especially with so many people quitting learning japanese.
Maybe its better to spend on native materials later and not Silverspoon.
Khatz recommends this for japanese: beliefs > immersion > kanji > kana > sentences.
These are presented like layers, you never stop some of them. I did what he recommended but stopped after 250 kanjis and learn hiragana and katakana in 10 days~. So yeah, I refused to read materials in romaji and don't care too much about it.
Anyways on the RTK forum AJATT discussions aren't received well, be aware.

Jpod101 - Bought 2 year subs - I like it, I don't mind Peter's voice like others but I don't get it why he laughs most of the time when talking normal things. So many lessons with transcripts, kanji in details, flashcards and more. If you have premium you can download all with one click (Didnt work for my country but will work for you).

MichelThomas audio - This is awesome! But it advances a bit too fast.

If you have ipod/ipad... Tae Kim grammar - free app. There are good paid apps like iKana, Daijisen dict

I bought Textfugu full but didn't use it yet. Cant be bad. I do RTK now and I didnt want to learn kanji 'the textfugu way'.

I heard good things about Lang-8, LingQ and ReadTheKanji.

When you'll use ANKI for kanji reviews, this guide is good.

If you have time read some articles about language learning:
http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/japanese.htm
http://l2mastery.com/the-linguistionary

IME, sites that offer a narrow focus tend to do their stated mission well, but sites that offer a wider focus fail pretty badly.

I haven't tried the most expensive, like Silver Spoon, so they might be different. But I doubt it.

Jpod101 annoys the crap out of me. WAY too much English and chatter and not nearly enough Japanese, even on the harder ones. The beginning ones are sickening.

Pimsleur was great for pronunciation and learning to listen to Japanese, but doesn't teach hardly any vocab at all. If you're stuck for 30 minutes driving a car each day, then it's a good idea. Other than that, I don't see it working well.

Nihongo Up doesn't have hardly any content... And what it does have is extremely basic.

Read The Kanji was pretty good, but I feel I'd have had a better time with it if I could already speak the language and was just learning to read... This is the opposite of how I'm approaching Japanese, so it ended up not working for me. But I thought it was well done, otherwise.

iKnow has been my fall-back. Every time I try another site, I end up on iKnow again afterwards. I've learned more vocab there than every other site combined.

Lang-8 is great practice, but you aren't going to learn much there. The corrections help, but only if you understand why the corrections are correct. With a lot of extra work on your part, it could work... But why would you put yourself through that? It's easier to pick up a book or watch a movie and get that info AJATT-style. Lang-8 is also a great place to meet a Skype language partner.

Skype language partners are just like Lang-8... Great practice, little learning.

In the end, my toolset is iKnow, Lang-8 and Skype, combined with a ton of anime (Eng-subs still, but I understand a lot of the spoken stuff at the same time, and can point out the differences) and reading.

the AJJAT site is worth reading when you're a beginner to drill in some common sense and get motivated. I don't recommend his methods though.

J-Pod101 I think is mostly rubbish. I used it a little when I first started. There's too much english, peter's voice is annoying and I don't agree with the methodology.

Pimsleur is decent listening practice for complete beginners. I wouldn't pay for it though. It's very limited in its scope (first step on a thousand mile journey)

Michel Thomas is like Pimsleur but slower. It feels like it's effective when you're a beginner and don't know any better but I'm no longer convinced it actually is, as its all based on grammar conversion and output instead of training comprehension.

Textfugu... I'm not convinced this guy can actually speak Japanese to a high level. All marketing and ego and lengthy explanation (in English) about Japanese from a non expert.

iKnow...super boring. But if you can enjoy it more power to you.

LingQ...could be worth it. It's based on extremely sound principles. The free version which is all I've used, I found too restricted and I think the interface could do with a lot of work. Steve Kauffman is the man though and you should definitely follow his blog.

RTK is great with a few caveats. Don't take it too seriously though, and just get it done.

Google Taekim guide to Japanese for a very well explained and accurate (imo) explanation of grammar.

Overall in the long run, 95% of your journey is going to come done to consumption of japanese media and conversation with natives though. Torrents, streaming video, sharedtalk (for speaking with natives) are your friend.

Get a high quality non-paper dictionary. This is well worth spending up to 200 dollars on.

You might want to consider some structured free options before you pay for something.
Nukemarine's Suggested Guide for Beginners is good. If I was starting over I would do something like Kana>RTK>Tae Kim's Guide>Core 2000/6000 Anki deck to get to intermediate level, all while watching lots of stuff in Japanese.

[Zgarbas]

I suggest you get RTK.
Then do RTK with reviews on this lovely free site. It should take a few months(all depending on your dedication and the time you can spare, of course).

Then learn kana, which can be done in less than a week (some say as little as a few hours, but again, this depends). There are many free online sources and games to help. I especially recommend the games since quick reading means quicker learning (no surprise here).

Then come back here and read this thread and get started .

I am thinking of starting an online business but my gut tells me there is so much japanese language learning sites. So it might not be so smart to jump into that but I am focusing on the things that relate to most general people and people my age(20-30's). I'm still developing what I really want to get out of it (I decided to just take my time and release it when I feel it's at a good time to do so). I'm looking at what people want from general things like learning,teaching,languages,memorization,understanding,etc There are plenty of sites out there with what I want to do but I have to find ways of making it different. Starting a website/blog isn't too bad in price but better to prepare than jump into it.

I do have some good ideas going but I will wait and ask people around me personally before I release anything solid.

@Zgarbas

Zgarbas Wrote:I suggest you get RTK. [snip] Then learn kana.

Why am I under impression that you bought AJATT?

@OP
I would second nadiatims' post. There are few minor things where what (s)he suggests is not necessary what I would subscribe to but I'm not in position to argue with a fluent speaker

At the very list nadiatims brings some common sense to those inflicted by AJATT.

Jpod101 is expensive for what it is... but on the other hand, you don't have to -stay- if you make a plan. You can sign up for a very short time, download all the existing material, and work with it offline afterwards. While you are signed up, play with the online tools to see if you think it would be worth it for you - being able to play the dialogues line-by-line and have the script in front of you is nice for really getting listening comprehension down on each line. It definitely has it's limits, and the beginner stuff may be a waste of time, but the upper intermediate dialogues are good to have along with the lesson PDFs. The lesson portion of the podcast may or may not be worth bothering with.

iknow is also expensive for what -it- is, which is a glorified SRS flashcard program. But a really pretty one with accompanying sound. I used it when it was free, and it was a nice vocabulary builder / listening comprehension builder. I would have paid to stay on except that I felt they were charging about twice what they're worth, and they never fixed the bugs in the 'dictation' program so that the best listening comprehension tool they had became incredibly annoying and painful whenever you hit a kanji that had the wrong reading in the text you typed - not only do you have to type a wrong word or non-word, but do so in direct defiance of the sound that you're hearing (or maybe loosely based on it) ... "Oh, they said 'toki' but in this card the text has the other reading for 時 so I better type 'ji' ... "　(And all the more painful for less elementary kanji where you may never have seen the other reading... pause program, go search dictionary, come back to give 'wrong answer' ...) I have no idea if they've fixed this in the two years since I used it, but they hadn't in the three years before that that people had been filing bug reports and I won't pay for badly maintained software.

AJATT Silverspoon - if you have to ask, it's not for you. It's expensive enough and experimental enough that unless you're already sure it's what you want to do then, it's not what you want to do. You can read the AJATT site if you want, but you won't learn any Japanese from it (at least not from the unpaid portions) - it's only English talk -about- learning Japanese. If you do spend much time reading AJATT methods, check out antimoon.com sooner rather than later for the source of many of Khatz's better ideas delivered in a clearer manner - but from the perspective of learning English - and also search around for some other perspectives on input method.

I don't have any experience with the other products you asked about. I would second the recommendation of Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese, and also check out nukemarine's thread on this site for beginner resources and buonaparte's thread on this site for audio/text resources (which are useful in their own right, as well as containing links to discussion of a listening/reading focused learning method that works for some people.)

[Zgarbas]

Nah, I don't do Ajatt, but I've come to really appreciate the RTK-first idea. It gets a mountain out of the way.

P.S. I like iKnow, but if you get along with anki then don't bother with it. It's a matter of preference when you're a beginner, after which it becomes a bother since Iknow can only take you so far and it is limited in what it offers, whereas anki covers anything you will ever need to SRS.

Zgarbas Wrote:Nah, I don't do Ajatt, but I've come to really appreciate the RTK-first idea. It gets a mountain out of the way.

That's ok when you can do the RTK in a matter of 3-4 mouths (~20 new characters/day). But what if you can't? Or you don’t know whether you would be able to? Do you wait 1-1.5 years (~5 new characters/day) before you start using the language?

I hate saying that but the sooner you start using Japanese the sooner you get better at it. And this is exactly why I’m so fond of the approach taken by Minna no nihongo. The workbook is all Japanese from the very beginning. You learn kana first. Kanji get introduced gradually as a matter of course. And although the order you learn kanji is different from Heisig's, it doesn't mean that you can't use Heisig's approach.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Jpod101 is expensive for what it is... but on the other hand, you don't have to -stay- if you make a plan. You can sign up for a very short time, download all the existing material, and work with it offline afterwards.

Imho, this is why we can't have nice things. That site has hundreds of hours of audio on it. Are you calling it expensive simply because it's not free? From memory they charge like $5 a month. What would be a fair price in your eyes?

The way i see it, it works on the honour system. Just because you *can* abuse it doesn't mean you should. It'd suck if they started charging by the lesson because too many people did what you propose.

Inny Jan Wrote:

Zgarbas Wrote:Nah, I don't do Ajatt, but I've come to really appreciate the RTK-first idea. It gets a mountain out of the way.

That's ok when you can do the RTK in a matter of 3-4 mouths (~20 new characters/day). But what if you can't? Or you don’t know whether you would be able to? Do you wait 1-1.5 years (~5 new characters/day) before you start using the language?

If it takes you 1.5 years to learn RTK then RTK isn't for you. Frankly, learning japanese probably isn't for you either, assuming you intend to get past the survival level.

If you're not willing to set aside at least 30-60 minutes a day to learn a language, don't be surprised if you make little progress.

[Zgarbas]

I'm not very good at explaining myself and I am sure that there are plenty of people here who could explain the benefits of it much better than I can(especially since this is not the approach that I have taken), but I can try =).

1. I think this is true to most people, but Kanji are a pretty scary thing, something that pop culture helps perpetuate (as I suppose most people have heard the OMG IT TAKES 20 YEARS TO LEARN ALL THE CHARACTERS and assorted common beliefs...). Doing RTK allows one to get a logical approach to them, getting rid of a huge barrier.

2. Given (1), I think it provides a considerable confidence boost and it encourages a newbie to continue their studies. Most people I know that have started Japanese and quit after a few months did so because the Kanji were overwhelming and it was depressing to not know how to read basic words because of them.

3. Minna no Nihongo is a good book. Keep in mind that they offer the kanjis as well, right next to most vocab words. This works well with Heisig since basically you start out knowing the word as well as the kanjis used for it, offering a greater advantage in the long run. You're not learning びじゅつかん＝art museum, you're learning 美術館（びじゅつかん）=art museum, whilst also getting some of the readings for the three kanjis in the process, almost mindlessly.

This also helps enhance the learning process. You see the kanji first and think ""beautiful arts place"=art museum. That makes sense. " instead of memorizing びじゅつかん=art museum mechanically.

I don't think I've ever learned kanjis from minna since obviously that was a bonus and I would focus on vocab. I'd only notice the kanjis when they were ones I had already learned, which brings me to...

4. Say you're using whatever resource to learn a kanji. Say something basic like 曜, which comes across in the very first lessons of any textbook. The process would be to first learn how to write that spawn of Satan, then remembering the reading, then remembering the use, then associating it with 日、月、火, etc. If you already learned it with heisig then you just need to focus on the reading and associating with the known days of the week. huge bonus imho.

5. You can actually read whatever people are saying when you ask for input on lang8, you get a better and more logical feel when you see a word for the first time, you get to learn patterns and what not. Of course, textbooks and other sources will also do this for you, but at a much slower pace since you're spending time learning the Kanjis as well.

So yeah, I can see and understand the benefits of doing RTK before learning anything else. That way you get the kanjis out of the way and can focus on actually learning the language.

As for the time it takes you...Well, no one can help him with that. Language learning is not so much dependent on the method you use as it is on the dedication you have, the time you're willing to allocate and similar factors. And confidence for "don't know whether you would be able to" part. If you are serious then you should be just as serious about a friendly Kanji-learning method as you would be about learning the language. If you can only do 1 Kanji per day, what makes you think you can do more than 1 word per day, or one grammar structure per day, etc? The progress would be the same, but instead of at least getting a sound foundation done, you would get bits and pieces from various sides done.

zigmonty Wrote:If you're not willing to set aside at least 30-60 minutes a day to learn a language, don't be surprised if you make little progress.

Let's do some number crunching, ok?. 20 new characters/day within 30 min (~1.5min/char) is already a big ask. Plus you need to allow for reviews. OTOH, with 5 new characters/day, within the same 30-60, you have 6min/char, which is likely to be generous. Any remaining time can be used for actual language study and you are making progress. Just a bit slow, unsurprisingly, in comparison to those who can spend 5hrs/day for language study.

Zgarbas Wrote:Say something basic like 曜, which comes across in the very first lessons of any textbook. The process would be to first learn how to write that spawn of Satan...

Actually, the first thing you do is to learn (as primitives) 日, then 羽, then 隹, and then combine all those into nice story to help keeping 曜 in memory. Then learn 月, 火, 水, 木, 金 and 土 (they are primitives, so no stories for them). And now you can read, write, say, hear all days of the week. All within quite short span of time.

Thank you all for your responses.. Inny Jan, I'm a female.. lol My name on here is Candy.. Which is also my name in real life.

Anyways.. Thank you guys. No one's tried Yes Japan? No one really commented on them. lol

I don't mind free things.. I just have it in my mind that they're not as good, because they're free... I suppose I need to get over that & just do SOMETHING, since sitting here like a bump on a log obviously isn't helping me reach any of my goals. lol

You folks really did offer some nice suggestions and lots of valuable information, so I'll check out the things you've suggested & hopefully find something that works well for me! I'm excited to get started! I really do appreciate the honest advice!! Thank you all again!

zigmonty Wrote:

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Jpod101 is expensive for what it is... but on the other hand, you don't have to -stay- if you make a plan. You can sign up for a very short time, download all the existing material, and work with it offline afterwards.

Imho, this is why we can't have nice things. That site has hundreds of hours of audio on it. Are you calling it expensive simply because it's not free? From memory they charge like $5 a month. What would be a fair price in your eyes?

The way i see it, it works on the honour system. Just because you *can* abuse it doesn't mean you should. It'd suck if they started charging by the lesson because too many people did what you propose.

It's $8/month for Basic, for one month. If you only get basic, I don't know why you would sign up for more than one month. Basic is -only- access to the lessons and new ones don't come out very often. It's $25/month for one month of Premium where you actually get access to the interactive features of the site.

To get the advertised rates, you need to buy 2 years of service at once, eg. $240 payment now for the next 2 years of premium. If it was -actually- $4/month and $10/month that would be different. (There's a scale, of course, between 1 month and 2 year blocks of time.)

Anyway, $8 for all the back content is certainly a great deal; the question of value is for the longer time subscriptions.

And it's not abuse - the business model entices you in with the backlog of lessons you can download and hopes you'll stay for the interactive features of a premium subscription or even better for them, paying for a live instructor. Buying the loss leader and declining the marked-up items is not 'abuse', it's being a savvy consumer.

If you do decide you like the interactive features of the site, it probably makes sense to stay on their mailing list for awhile and buy 2 years of premium at 33%-40% off (ahem, of course, this assumes you're quite committed to learning Japanese and will use the site for two years... )

OTOH, $240 (or whatever after 33% off) still buys a lot of Japanese learning books and/or software other than Jpod101, so if one doesn't already have an electronic dictionary, the dictionary of basic japanese grammar, and a good textbook...

Inny Jan Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:If you're not willing to set aside at least 30-60 minutes a day to learn a language, don't be surprised if you make little progress.

Let's do some number crunching, ok?. 20 new characters/day within 30 min (~1.5min/char) is already a big ask. Plus you need to allow for reviews. OTOH, with 5 new characters/day, within the same 30-60, you have 6min/char, which is likely to be generous. Any remaining time can be used for actual language study and you are making progress. Just a bit slow, unsurprisingly, in comparison to those who can spend 5hrs/day for language study.

Can't say i terribly agree with your numbers. How do you spend 6 minutes on a character? My process involved clicking the link in the anki deck, copying the top rated story, writing the character once and moving on. 20 characters a day with reviews is probably pushing it for 30 minutes. Easily doable in an hour. No need to bring in the straw man of 5 hours. And you'll be done in ~3 months.

On top of that, there's a false dichotomy here. There's a happy medium between doing all 2042 kanji in RTK before learning これは本です and considering it a waste of time and being functionally illiterate until very late in your studies. I actually don't support doing all of RTK before learning japanese. If you only do the JLPT2 kanji (RTK Lite), that halves the time required, and gets you a solid foothold on kanji (you'll never be scared of them again). Suddenly 2-3 months looks comfortable, and kanji won't get in your way again until you're around N2 level.

As Zgarbas says, the efficiency comes from not learning vocab in hiragana only, then trying to attach kanji to them later. I remember being expected to do silly stuff like write 食じ and 日本ご because we hadn't been taught all the required kanji yet. I had to learn びじゅつかん before i knew the kanji and had to invent silly mnemonics to keep it together in my mind. The whole thing is based on the outdated notion that westerners will never really master kanji, so might as well not bother doing more than drip feeding them. Or the notion that because japanese natives learn the spoken language before the written that that is a sane order for an adult gaijin.

zigmonty Wrote:How do you spend 6 minutes on a character?

You don't - I did write it's generous, didn't I.

zigmonty Wrote:My process involved clicking the link in the anki deck, copying the top rated story, writing the character once and moving on. 20 characters a day with reviews is probably pushing it for 30 minutes. Easily doable in an hour. No need to bring in the straw man of 5 hours. And you'll be done in ~3 months.

Obviously, your numbers are not mine - everyone is different?

zigmonty Wrote:If you only do the JLPT2 kanji (RTK Lite), that halves the time required, and gets you a solid foothold on kanji (you'll never be scared of them again). Suddenly 2-3 months looks comfortable, and kanji won't get in your way again until you're around N2 level.

That's a fair point.

zigmonty Wrote:I remember being expected to do silly stuff like write 食じ and 日本ご because we hadn't been taught all the required kanji yet. I had to learn びじゅつかん before i knew the kanji and had to invent silly mnemonics to keep it together in my mind.

That's not the case with Minna no nihongo - art museum is 美術館 the moment it's introduced.

You don't need to even pay for a month to get back content on jpod. Get a trial, mirror site, done. Plenty of material for a beginner.

[Zgarbas]

Inny Jan Wrote:That's not the case with Minna no nihongo - art museum is 美術館 the moment it's introduced.

Erm...no?

I am not in the mood to take a picture of the textbook now but it is

びじゅつかん　　（美術館）　art museum

with the kanji in small letters. In the first 3-4 lessons of Minna 1 IIRC. Unless you know the kanji then you're just going to ignore the small kanjis in the middle. It is what I and everyone in my class did, and what was expected of us. Kudos to you for getting it, but when you're still learning how to write 日 it's a big audacious to randomly learn 術. Knowing them beforehand however...

BTW, Candy. Minna no Nihongo is one of the basic textbooks for beginners =). I recommend it. Most Japanese textbooks are pricey as hell though.

Zgarbas Wrote:I am not in the mood to take a picture of the textbook now but it is
びじゅつかん　　（美術館）　art museum

Yeap, that's how it is there.

Zgarbas Wrote:Unless you know the kanji then you're just going to ignore the small kanjis in the middle. It is what I and everyone in my class did, and what was expected of us.

As I suspect, this was before Heisig days - skipping the kanji was unintended unfortunate consequence.

[Zgarbas]

...Exactly? Which is why I suggested doing Heisig first?

Zgarbas Wrote:...Exactly? Which is why I suggested doing Heisig first?

... and then I suggested to interleave? (Aren't we running circles? Not, that I mind )

EDIT:
@Candy - And when you do Minna no nihongo, remember not to skip the kanji . Anyway, if you can afford doing Heisig exclusively for 3 months, do it. If not... well, it's all above in this thread.