I just finished RTK1 yesterday, and I want to move onto learning readings and vocabulary. However, I see 3 main methods that people use to go about this (RTK2, Core2000, and Kanji Odyssey) and I have no idea which one I should use. Can someone help me please on which method I should use to get the most proficiency in Japanese vocabulary?

Thanks in advance.

I'd recommend trying all three, or at least checking them out before deciding, because they're going to be different experiences.

RTK2 just didn't quite work for me. Partly because he only chooses one word per kanji to help remember the reading, and also sometimes those words are really freakin' obscure. He also just kind of gives up when it comes to kun-yomi, IMO. There's only one chapter on it in the whole book, and it's not very useful. Might be useful as a way to cluster readings of on-yomi, but you're kind of on your own there. That is the one useful thing he does-- help you learn on-yomi by showing how some radicals sometimes indicate similar on-yomi. But I didn't want to go through the hassle of essentially reworking it to be useful for me.

Core2k has pictures and audio, and a lot of people like it. It's supposed to get you going with 2000 basic words through learning them in sentences. I think that would be an easy way to wade into the pool, and the deck is already out there. (Should be, at any rate.) By the time it came out, I was already past that. Not sure how it deals with kanji.

My experience with Kanji Odyssey is that it has a good progression of vocab, and is really useful for learning a lot of vocab you'll use, especially if you're going to read newspapers and such. *BUT* the sentences that come with it are too long and have too many unfamiliar words to make it easy to use as a study aid.

The best way to use KO is to buy the CDROM, copy out the word lists, pick out the most frequently used words for each kanji (don't go overboard), then stuff that into something like EPWING2Anki (Win) or DictScrape (Linux) to go pick shorter, easier to understand sentences from either EPWING dictionaries (E2A) or the Yahoo.co.jp dictionaries (DictScrape).

You don't need to even use KO, to be honest. Any decent word list (like from a JLPT vocab book, starting from N5 on) will give you a good guide for useful words to study. But the one good thing about KO and things like it (like Kanji in Context) is that it gets you used to the readings, one kanji at a time. In KO's case, it does it in groups of 5 kanji that are all somehow related. And if you buy it, you get access to the CosCom website, which has some useful support material for KO. (Like workbooks and such to practice on.)

I don't use Tatoeba/EDICT for a sentence source, because both rely on the unreliable Tanaka Corpus for sentences. Find a professionally-edited source of real, grammatically correct stuff to study. Are there good sentences on Tatoeba? Probably. Do I know for sure? Nope. Am I going to risk it? Nope.

I found that the best way to learn stuff fast for me was to plug in 3-5 short, simple sentences per word. That gives me multiple exposures. The shortness makes for quicker reading/reviewing, and less random crap to cause me to fail something. (Unless I forget the word.) The sentences still give enough context to be useful, so I have a general idea of how the word should be used.

http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/2001.Kanji.Odyssey
http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji
Core2000 is 2000 sentences with a (supposedly) a single word t learn with each one. Based on most used vocabulary.

Also you should consider studying grammar.

Good luck!

I'm not finished yet, but the first few cards in core2k seemed amazingly useful. There's a lot of good information on each card and it breaks down sentences and vocabulary well... and it's free.

what exactly is Kanji odyssey?

warakawa Wrote:what exactly is Kanji odyssey?

http://www.coscom.co.jp/ebook/e-2001kanji.html

Core 2k/6k before Kanji Odyssey. Core introduces you to one new word in each card, while Kanji Odyssey has much longer sentences and focuses on readings. I've tried doing Kanji Odyssey first(around 1000 cards) with very basic vocabulary and it just gets too hard, sometimes there are few new words in a sentence. KO is great after rtk for readings, but it's too hard without vocabulary. It even made me frustrated sometimes, because i knew readings and not even 1 word from the sentence. Definitely Core for vocabulary first and KO for readings later(imo both).

You can also make your own vocabulary deck with sentences taken from a textbook or something similar (tae kim, etc.). You don't NEED to do Core if you want vocabulary.

Pros and cons of a premade deck:
http://japaneselevelup.com/2012/02/29/th...ortcoming/
The method I've been using:
http://japaneselevelup.com/2011/02/01/ho...ences-j-e/

meeatcookies Wrote:Kanji Odyssey...focuses on readings.

No, you're making that up and you're wrong.

meeatcookies Wrote:KO is great after rtk for readings, but it's too hard without vocabulary. It even made me frustrated sometimes, because i knew readings and not even 1 word from the sentence.

It's a vocab resource. The whole thing is nothing but vocabulary. You used it incorrectly by failing to learn the words.

The sentences are long, but you can skip over the words that you don't know. You should at least try to learn them, but don't make them a goal to pass the card. Eventually you will know most of the words in the long sentences, and they end up being free practice for words you're still learning since they appear several times throughout the deck. Rather than frustrated, you will be delighted at this, since you find yourself understanding entire sentences that you skipped over before.

To answer OP's question, do the Core first since it's more lightweight and easy-going. An interesting experiment is to do both Core6K and KO, but introduce the KO vocab/sentences a little while later (say, two weeks after doing them in Core6K), and use inflated intervals in Anki for the KO deck so you don't get inundated with reviews of the same vocab in two decks. I wish I had done that, looking back.

OK, I downloaded Kanji Odyssey from you know where, it's in .iso, when I double click it, it opens up notepad and have this


<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>2001.Kanji.Odyssey</TITLE>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</HEAD>

<FRAMESET rows="56,*" frameborder=0 border=0 framespacing=0>
<FRAME SRC="index-ue.html" NAME="ue" SCROLLING="no" MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0">
<FRAME SRC="index-body.html" NAME="body" SCROLLING="auto" MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0">
</FRAMESET>

</HTML>

Does anyone know how to run it?

warakawa Wrote:OK, I downloaded Kanji Odyssey from you know where, it's in .iso, when I double click it, it opens up notepad and have this


<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>2001.Kanji.Odyssey</TITLE>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</HEAD>

<FRAMESET rows="56,*" frameborder=0 border=0 framespacing=0>
<FRAME SRC="index-ue.html" NAME="ue" SCROLLING="no" MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0">
<FRAME SRC="index-body.html" NAME="body" SCROLLING="auto" MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0">
</FRAMESET>

</HTML>

Does anyone know how to run it?

That's an HTML file (AKA a webpage file ), so you might want to see if there's a way to view the contents of the iso file and run the HTML file in a web browser.

cool, thanks.

.iso is a packed file - an image of a disc. You can upack it with WinRar for instance, and you'll get the content. Then you'll have to click index.html or something like that to run the proggy - in your web browser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image
An alternative would be to burn the image into a disc.
Or you can use a virtual disc proggy - daemon tools for example - and run it.

well, I just rights-clicked it and opened it with Chrome -_-

warakawa Wrote:well, I just rights-clicked it and opened it with Chrome -_-

Chrome opens .iso files? I didn't know that.

As to the original question. Core2000 vs. Kanji Odyssey? If you're into vocab and example sentences, you should use both probobaly.