Hey everyone.

I've been studying japanese for a while and would like some suggestions on how to progress further. My main goal is to be able to read forums/blogs/etc in japanese and I'd also like to be able to listen/watch shows and whatnot eventually (after I'm "done" with reading). I don't care at all about writing or speaking.

With these goals in mind, my progress so far was:
- rtk
- core2k (the optimized order on the sticky)
- tae kim

I started out with rtk and moved onto core, adding 30 cards/day. I do these cards kanji->kana+meaning. While I was doing that, I also studied tae kim. With this, I find my reading capabilities are pretty good as long as I know the vocabulary or use rikaichan. All my other skills are terrible, except for writing, but like I said, I'm just worried about reading for now.

Since I just finished core2k, I've been looking around for what to do next.

I looked around for some easy stories since that seems like the natural progression, but easy stories are mostly kana, with very few kanji. This is a bit hard for me to read since I sometimes don't know what a word means if it's not in kanji (probably due to my kanji->kana+meaning cards), and there's also words I don't know yet obviously. I was thinking about converting the stories from kana to kanji first and then using them as reading material.

Instead of doing this, I could also keep going for core6k (30/day like I've been doing since I don't get bored this way). I just don't know whether actually reading stuff would be more beneficial at this point.

Any suggestions? (these or others)

If I were you, I would focus on easy to understand and enjoy listening and reading content. Stuff like shounen manga, dramas, anime, nature documentaries and things. With these things you have additional context (pictures and video) that helps you comprehend and enjoy the content while your vocabulary is still too low to understand a lot. Even though you say you want to concentrate on reading, I think you should devote at least as much time (if not more) to listening as this is what will improve your real-time grammar intuition which will improve your reading in a round about way. Try to spend the majority of your study time on reading and listening and some of your time on your vocab/grammar studies.

i've said this in other posts but you could also read something, underline parts you don't understand, and then when you finish the chapter/article you can go back and look up those parts and add them to your anki deck.

I looked around for some easy stories since that seems like the natural progression, but easy stories are mostly kana, with very few kanji. This is a bit hard for me to read since I sometimes don't know what a word means if it's not in kanji (probably due to my kanji->kana+meaning cards), and there's also words I don't know yet obviously. I was thinking about converting the stories from kana to kanji first and then using them as reading material.
--->>

Do not do that. Just find anything you want to read. There's rikaichan and other tools to help you.

I would definitely suggest practicing the stories that are in kana, rather than just skipping over them. You can't always depend on words to be written in kanji, so you have to get over that hurdle at some point. And if you ever want to listen to Japanese, you aren't going to have kanji available to help you there, either :p

As someone who is currently nearing the end of core6k, I'm not really sure how valuable it is. A lot of the words seem business or political. So unless you are planning to be reading a lot of that type of material, its probably not the best way to spend your time. That's not to say it doesn't have a lot of useful vocabulary in it though. It might be good to just go through and pick and choose what you think looks useful. I would definitely at least do all the katakana words, as they are basically free (little effort).

Zarxrax Wrote:I would definitely suggest practicing the stories that are in kana, rather than just skipping over them. You can't always depend on words to be written in kanji, so you have to get over that hurdle at some point. And if you ever want to listen to Japanese, you aren't going to have kanji available to help you there, either :p

I'll second that. If you read some kids' books that are heavily kana, you'll also pick up a lot of common vocab along with context. The Magic Tree House books in Japanese are great for this - lots of common vocab in short, simple sentences. I've also heard good things about 魔女の宅急便, but haven't checked them out myself. Might be more useful going that route and adding to your own custom deck than doing Core6K.

I'd also recommend the stories on http://hukumusume.com/douwa/betu/index.html. You'll hit some more classical terms plus speech mannerisms that aren't that common, but you'll still pick up a ton of vocab and grammar reinforcement. Plus a lot of the stories have word-for-word audio for listening comprehension.

You can use your favorite anime or dramas and create sub2srs decks in Anki.

Or you can use balloonguy's tool, Kage shibari (as nest0r likes to call it)
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid127148

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I tried those stories and some manga and can read them fine (with lookups). Manga seems nice since the speech is more casual but in order to lookup words I have to write them on firefox and use rikaichan, which is a bit annoying.

As for the kana only studying, I figured after reading more it should naturally come, no? Some words I couldn't understand if they were in kana, but could in kanji, started making sense after a while without trying, just by reading them in kanji. That's why I'm not really worried about not recognizing them right now.

Finally, about the listening, I really am terrible at it so subs2srs seems a bit overwhelming. Do you think I'd benefit from having, say, a seperate core2k deck just for listening since I can already read it? Something like sentence(audio only) -> sentence(written).

The suggestions in this topic (primarily what nadiatims wrote) is what I realized a while ago that I didn't do which made me stop learning Japanese, again.