As long as you're enjoying the process, you don't "need" anything else that what you've already laid out. Keep it as simple as you can. The key is actually starting and keeping at it every day, even if only a little bit every day.

You don't "need" to devote yourself to Japanese, because it isn't something to place on a pedestal. You've got seven months to spend a lot of time studying, reflecting and enjoying. Let's say you become comfortable with hiragana, katakana and kanji, and are going through sentences in Anki. Keep this up every day and in seven months time your Japanese should be miles ahead of where it is now. Will it be strong enough to enable you to read light novels, etc.? Maybe, maybe not.

The key difference between reaching this and burning out/slowing down, is the enjoyment/motivation factor. Only you can find this. Just don't try to over think the process. Reach your third stage and take however as much time you need to understand as much of it as you feel you need to. J-J sentences will come in time; you will reach a level where you will either feel comfortable with transitioning over to J-J or not really care too much for it and remain at J-E.

Though, since you have an interest in anime and light novels, I doubt you will stop yourself from attempting to read/watch without subtitles/in native Japanese, over the seven month period. As your Japanese progresses, you will find yourself understanding more and more of what you're watching/reading. This will probably end up fueling motivation to continue studying. Or not. But it probably will.

If you want to be "told" what to do, here goes:

1. Relax
2. Enjoy yourself
3. Failing in Anki isn't failing Japanese
4. there is nothing wrong with watching/reading the same anime/light novel over and over if you enjoy doing it.
5. The only thing you "need" to do with Japanese is to take it off whatever high branch you've placed in on (which could be why you seem to speak of your progress in "oughts") and set realistic, mini-goals. Japanese is a human language. An organic changing thing. Treat it like a friend: laugh when you do stupid things together, cheer when you do great things together. Bring it down to earth. Showing up and enjoying the language everyday will get you further in the long run than trying to over analyze it and end up spending more time 'about' the language than 'in' it.
6. Smile. ^_^

Yeah, kanji learning is very flexible. I went through most of RTK3(500+ new cards) in the span of like 3 days, but I had lots of experience to draw on at that point. The method is really pretty sound and notably does not rely very much on short term brute force memory. So it scales very linearly to the time you put in. Your expired cards will be insane at first, but they subside pretty quickly.

I suppose it's difficult to get a nice check point path to follow for a language other than to do what ever you can every day.
Could anyone post a few example Japanese to English sentences they've used?

I've been working on building Japanese > English beginner deck from the Genki textbook to get me started but it takes quite a while to write this stuff out and triple check it isn't wrong so that's why I'd like to see some examples of lower end beginner Japanese > English flash cards.

egoplant wrote:

I don't get the whole sentence thing. Why do people feel it's so important to do this? Wouldn't just reading various things be the same thing as SRSing sentences, except each sentence would be different and not recurring, and therefore different exposure, which leads to learning better?

Isn't it because it's too difficult at the start to do that? so people SRS sentences till they can read various things like manga and learn from that instead.

I suppose I'd much rather fail at reading manga than succeed in SRSing sentences.

Zlarp wrote:

I do have to add that I did do the Anki Tae Kim MCD deck though, along with reading through Tae Kim. If I hadn't done that, manga would probably have been a lot more frustrating - so as a bandaid solution to get started I think it's pretty gosh darn ideal.

Thanks this is the type of information I'm looking for to get me started when I finish RTK1.

subkulture wrote:

I suppose I'd much rather fail at reading manga than succeed in SRSing sentences.

I don't see why it has to be one or the other. You can read manga and whatever else you want and use an SRS to review what you come across. Words or phrases here and there that you particularly feel like working for keeping in your memory.

Sometimes when I've been reading light novels I used to use those colored highlighters to highlight words I want to look up later. Either words that I can't understand through the context or words that I do kinda understand but feel like solidarizing. Then in order to not break the immersion I go through them sometime after I'm done reading, look them up and add some of them to a simple vocabulary deck.

It takes time to make your own cards in comparison to using core etc. but it can be more interesting to review your own stuff.

partner55083777 wrote:

I'm a big proponent of doing what you like to do.  So if you want to read manga instead of using an SRS, then I would say go for it.  Don't look back.

However, to answer your question, I think because it's easier.  It takes relatively a lot of mental effort to go through a manga when you don't really understand Japanese.  However, it's dead easy to grind on an SRS.  The things you need to study are already decided for you.  You just open your program and go.  And if you keep your correct-answer percentage above 90% or so, it even feels really easy.  If you can get into a "flow", everything just... flows.

I'm not against SRS at all. I use it all the time. My problem is with doing it with sentences. Reading the same sentence multiple times isn't going to help you learn as well as reading the same sentence with a slightly different structure (like you would see while reading) or reading the same structured sentence with different nouns, adjectives, etc. Vocabulary is something you need to memorize though, and SRSing that I think is completely fine. I'm not really at a high level so maybe I'm not the best at giving advice, but shouldn't you try and read at x+1, x being your current reading level? Once you read and understand a sentence, it becomes x. Time to move on.

egoplant wrote:

I don't get the whole sentence thing. Why do people feel it's so important to do this? Wouldn't just reading various things be the same thing as SRSing sentences, except each sentence would be different and not recurring, and therefore different exposure, which leads to learning better?

There are a few reasons, though you'd have to keep in mind that people have different methods of using sentences to revise in Anki. Since I can only speak for myself, here is roughly how I 'use' sentences as a form of review.

As a current example, I am progressing through the Core 2000 Anki deck. This deck has 4000 cards with apparently 2000 different "words"- or facts where the vocabulary word is used as an example within. The grammar is rather simplistic (and unrealistic compared to common usage colloquial Japanese- but that's not the focus of this deck) which helps beginners to understand the sentence easier.

Here is the next card to be reviewed in Anki, from this deck:

夜 -- 昨日の夜は家にいました。
This is the "kanji" version of the fact, and below is the corresponding "kana" version of this fact

よる -- きのうのよるはいえにいました
They are essentially the same sentence, with the same "vocab" word in front, though you are being tested on a different form of recognition. Here is the English translation provided:

"I was at home last night."

The sentence is there to provide context for the vocabulary term. Helps with terms which have the same kanji stem, etc.

How I "use" this deck is more as a review for the actual "study" of the deck, which takes place before-hand. At the moment I am taking (copy/paste) the next 200 or so cards and putting them into a text document, then going through each individual vocabulary term and physically writing out the "kanji" version, then the "kana" version below, along with my rough translation of key terms involved (not the sentence "meaning", merely nouns and such). Er, as an example... (pretend this is written out in somewhat messy black ink on paper)

<c>手　・　分かった人は手を上げて下さい。
て　・　わかったひとはてをあげてください。
hand . understand person hand bring up/raise please</c>

If I come across any entirely new terms, I will look them up on Wakan to check the readings and meanings, etc. to get a deeper general insight into the question. If that fails I might check it out online somewhere, but usually Wakan is good enough.

This process will go on for about 50 or so cards worth of writing out and understanding, then I will nu-suspend said cards in Anki and test my memory of the vocabulary term's readings and meaning. Meaning is usually easy to remember. Readings are a bit of a pain, but that's the way it is.

Prior to using this vocabulary deck I was reading through Tae Kim's grammar guide and testing myself with the Anki deck, while reading up on various grammar points, etc. within the various collected, er, resources I have on the computer. A few pdf versions of a lot of the common study resource names you'll come across on this website. I'll leave it at that.

Basically the actual usage of Anki "sentencing" is to revise what has already been studied, and this helps with both short term and long term memory. Let's face it, I'm not going to revise daily. Anki can do that for me.

There are other methods of revision, such as using "close deletions", but I won't go into detail at the moment. I think one important thing to be "taken away" from this is that Anki "sentencing" is probably best thought of as a revision tool to help memorise certain grammatical examples, vocabulary, etc. as opposed to an outright learning tool. I've tried going through the Tae Kim deck, for example, without actually reading the source material, and it was more of a game of rote memorisation than it was revising what was already known.

The "Sentence Method", as created by Antimoon, is a lot different to how it has been presented on AJATT, which is a little (a lot, honestly) deceiving of the audience. Those Polish guys were already advanced English language students who wished to hone their English ability and pick up on nuances, etc. What a lot of people do not realize is they they had already formally studied grammatical structures, etc. of their target language, and in so where able to use sentences as a form of internalising the finer points of their target language which rely less on being taught and more through example via massive exposure, to really bring home the lessons and "rules" they were exposed to throughout their formal education, etc.

Personally, I do not have that sort of patience. If I were able to read material in my target language aimed at fluent speakers as determined by the target demographic, then I would probably find myself dropping Anki altogether and simply reading as much as I could comprehend and writing in the same fashion- as I did with my native language. This is my current short-long term goal. Though, on the finer points of certain usage patterns, etc. of personal interest, it is hard to "remember" to nuance further down the track without repeated exposure. This is essentially where these interesting examples are able to be plugged into Anki and memorised.

Sorry if all that was a bit rambled.

subkulture wrote:

Very helpful to me thanks the vagueness of how to study when I'm done with RTK1 is clearing up bit by bit.

Here is a shortlist of the resources, aside the internet (which is sometimes difficult to find accurate advice) which are at my disposal to help the overall process:-

A Dictionary Of Intermediate Japanese Grammar
A Dictionary Of Basic Japanese Grammar
Tae Kim's Grammar Guide
A Dictionary of Japanese Particles, by Sue A Kawashima
Japanese The Manga Way
An Introduction to Japanese Syntax, Grammar and Language, by Michiel Kamermans
Making Sense of Japanese Grammar - A Clear Guide Through Common Problems, by Zeljko Cipris and Shoko Hamano
Japanese Particles Cheatsheet, by Tofugu
A Handbook of Japanese Grammar, by Masahiro Tanimori
Japanese Particle Workbook, by Taeko Kamiya

Though, to be honest, it is somewhat more of a case of too much choice leading to hesitation. If I could suggest only a small handful of these, I would point you in the direction of

A Dictionary Of Intermediate Japanese Grammar
A Dictionary Of Basic Japanese Grammar
Tae Kim's Grammar Guide
Japanese The Manga Way
A Dictionary of Japanese Particles, by Sue A Kawashima

JTMW is a great introduction to sentence patterns and usage, whereas TKGG is a nice resource for followup over-view from a different perspective. I say followup as it has a higher learning curve and less explanatory volume than JTMW.

The "A A Dictionary of Japanese Particles" is an excellent resource for almost any and everything involved in particle usage- many of which I wasn't even aware were particles, though a decent vocabulary and understanding of common grammatical patterns may be required to gain the most out of it.

There are many places to buy and find these books, in various formats, over the internet. The means and madness of this process is up to your digression.