I would say definitely re-learn katakana and hiragana (katakana ends up being more useful for a beginner loose in Japan--just by being able to read menu items and stuff like that), along with a basic textbook (Genki) and Rosetta Stone or Japanesepod101 or something for speaking/listening practice. 

Does he have money to spend?  Doing Core2k on iKnow would probably be useful for vocab.  I feel like that's a better way to do it in the short term than anki.

I also recommend a textbook over Tae Kim just because the learning curve is high on Tae Kim.

Last edited by Tzadeck (2012 November 12, 6:54 am)

I would agree that Genki Japanese is a great self study book. If he uses it in conjunctions with anki and the audio mp3 for Genki. He can learn a lot in 3 months (useful stuff to him getting around). He'll learn hiragana/katakana and some kanji even so that he will learn stoke order and be able to look up kanji via radicals with an app like imi wa? Best of luck

What about drilling words/sentences from Core2k or Genki without having done RTK? Isn't that quite difficult? Maybe having furigana on the front side would make sense in my friends case.

I'm sure he has money for a textbook or two, but not a private teacher.

ryuudou wrote:

http://japaneselevelup.com/2012/08/18/power-leveling-1-speed-learning-japanese-in-record-time/

All he needs. Don't listen to cynics.

He, that's pretty much what I'm doing now. About to start the sentence phase but for what it's worth, in respect to RtK at least, the initial high failure rates of learning 100+ a day (I learned some 500+ on my last day) get rather quickly overshadowed by the climbing retention rate. For example, sitting down last night idly writing out kanji (while waiting for the shower/bathroom to be free) on graph paper it came to my attention that the problem wasn't in not having the kanji to recall but in trying to choose which one to write out. Could probably sit down right now and spend hours simply writing out different kanji from memory.

That's with about 15 days of RtK. So at least "Powerleveling", for one person, clearly works. Short term memory can be effectively utilized by cramming a progressively large amount of information in your head, provided they have some semblance of logical links between them. Anki takes care of the rest- like a personal slave, lol.