Yes Tae Kim is definitely the way to go after RTK, in fact I'd recommend starting Tae Kim before you finish RTK (Unless of course you can persevere with not actually learning any real Japanese, then its best just to power through RTK).

Okay, thanks for both of your answers!

chamcham wrote:

Tae Kim is a good start. When you're done with it, I'd suggest "Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication". If you search the forums, I think there is an excel spreadsheet with all of the sentences from the book. If not, then sent me a private message.

Okay, nice. I will look into that.

Honestly I think JtMW is much better than Taekim for immediately after RTK. It covers just as much material, but has real manga examples for every concept, orders the concepts better, and explains them better. I think Taekim's explanation of は vs が was written very autistic-like and in a way that is hard to understand for a beginner.

Last edited by ryuudou (2013 February 10, 5:21 pm)

AlgoRhythmic wrote:

Will doing Tae Kim (and I mean learning it all properly) give you a good enough foundation to be enough to learn the rest of the grammar you need effectively by immersion, or would you say it's better to continue your grammar studies with more textbooks or whatever resources there are?

It depends; Tae Kim is not enough to cover all the grammar you're going to see -- you don't necessarily need to study from textbooks after that but you'll almost certainly need help from this forum or the grammar dictionaries to help you along after that.

chamcham wrote:

Tae Kim is a good start. When you're done with it, I'd suggest "Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication". If you search the forums, I think there is an excel spreadsheet with all of the sentences from the book. If not, then sent me a private message.

The spreadsheet is still up on mediafire on the other topic; however, the google books link is no longer as generous (many pages removed now.) If you wish to get hold of this book, check Amazon but if it's really expensive (US site) or takes weeks to arrive (UK site) then try BookRepository[.com] instead. I believe the publisher has stopped trading, so it may become harder to get hold of!

I couldn't find any pdf copies of the book on the usual sources either.

Honestly I think JtMW is much better than Taekim for immediately after RTK. It covers just as much material, but has real manga examples for every concept, orders the concepts better, and explains them better. I think Taekim's explanation of は vs が was written very autistic-like and in a way that is hard to understand for a beginner.

I did Tae Kim's beginner section and didn't find his explanations very good. In addition, I didn't like the way more and more vocab is thrusted upon you in what's meant to be a pure grammar resource; especially when simplier words could be used. My personal 'favourite' for this would be:
高速道路を走る。
and
街をぶらぶら歩く (Why bother with ぶらぶら, just walk through town would do!)

The site has a lot of praise given to it, but I believe that's more down to it being a free resource. If you want to go the free way, then use imabi[.net] alongside TaeKim.

Genki 1+2, or DoJG would do a better job with grammar but either will set you back close to $100.

Thanks for the replies, appreciated. I think I'll start consuming media and reading immediately after finishing Tae Kim while doing Core vocab concurrently, and then I'll deal with new grammar when it actually shows up. Those grammar dictionaries I've been reading a lot about sounds interesting.

RawToast wrote:

If you want to go the free way, then use imabi[.net] alongside TaeKim.

Genki 1+2, or DoJG would do a better job with grammar but either will set you back close to $100.

Actually I've tried Genki for a bit, but I think I like Tae Kim more I must say (though I admit I didn't do much of Genki). The order of which things are introduced feels more natural in Tae Kim, and I actually like most of his explanations. Thanks for the link btw, that looks really useful.

Last edited by AlgoRhythmic (2013 February 11, 1:14 pm)

RawToast wrote:

chamcham wrote:

Tae Kim is a good start. When you're done with it, I'd suggest "Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication". If you search the forums, I think there is an excel spreadsheet with all of the sentences from the book. If not, then sent me a private message.

The spreadsheet is still up on mediafire on the other topic; however, the google books link is no longer as generous (many pages removed now.) If you wish to get hold of this book, check Amazon but if it's really expensive (US site) or takes weeks to arrive (UK site) then try BookRepository[.com] instead. I believe the publisher has stopped trading, so it may become harder to get hold of!

I couldn't find any pdf copies of the book on the usual sources either.

The book was republished August 2012. You can find it on Amazon.com.
You can also buy it from Kinokuniya.

Last edited by chamcham (2013 February 11, 2:08 pm)

daevil wrote:

When I'm done with RTK, is it wise to do Tae Kim grammar guide first and then start on the core decks? (I already know kana)

No, definitely not. You should do Tae Kim Basic and the first lesson from Tae Kim essential. Then you should work on your vocab (i.e. 500 sentences from Core2K). Then you should do Tae Kim Essential, and work on your vocab some more. And then, finally, do the rest of Tae Kim.

Otherwise, you'll be overwhelmed by that weird Eastern language Tae Kim, for some odd reason, decided to use in his Japanese grammar guide, and you won't be able to understand the examples.

You'll just come back here and annoy everyone to death with comments like "why does Tae Kim have to use big words I don't understand, like  ぶらぶら?". I wish he just used one noun, one adjective, and one verb through the whole guide. Cause that wouldn't bore the 99% of us learning Japanese rather than just grammar, at all. It would be perfect.

RawToast wrote:

街をぶらぶら歩く (Why bother with ぶらぶら, just walk through town would do!)

He should've just used:
NounをVerb.

That way, you would've been able to learn Japanese grammar perfectly and not understand a single thing in Japanese. You'd been inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most useless skill ever.

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 February 11, 3:30 pm)

I can't say I feel slowed down by the vocab introduced in every lesson in Tae Kim to be honest. Sure there are some new words most of the lessons, but it feels like at least 80-90% or something along those lines are usually words already used in some earlier lesson that you already know. The only lesson so far where the vocab felt overwhelming was in the honorific/humble lesson, and there it felt pretty necessary.

Stansfield123 wrote:

overture2112 wrote:

The issue is that you want to learn grammar and vocab separately (as per i+1 principle), especially since you'll learn vocab more easily from native sources instead of context-less, canned, boring sentences.  Grammar books shouldn't slow you down from learning grammar by having vocab get in the way unless it's required in order to properly demonstrate a grammar point.

True. But using different vocabulary in different contexts is necessary. A grammar book can't just use fish as the only noun, whenever it happens to fit, or the examples will all get jumbled together in memory.

I think the vocabulary in Tae Kim is well below the level of grammar it is being used for. There is absolutely no reason why someone should be studying high level grammar if they know almost no vocab yet.

We're discussing Taekim Basic. Everything overture 2112 has said is logically sound and true. It's part of the reason I also think Taekim's guide isn't very good.

Last edited by ryuudou (2013 February 11, 6:56 pm)

Stansfield123 wrote:

True. But using different vocabulary in different contexts is necessary. A grammar book can't just use fish as the only noun, whenever it happens to fit, or the examples will all get jumbled together in memory.

Agreed. Most textbook sentences are already canned and bad enough; limiting yourself to one noun would make it even worse. But that's a far cry from introducing vocab lists with multiple dozens of new words at the start of every chapter like I've seen in many textbooks (I'm looking at you, Wheelock's Latin...).

Stansfield123 wrote:

There is absolutely no reason why someone should be studying high level grammar if they know almost no vocab yet.

This is good advice.

overture2112 wrote:

(I'm looking at you, Wheelock's Latin...).

Teaching a dead language is a different issue because you don't have any native speakers of the language so it's hard to make up new sentences with confidence that they are correct.  Also, you don't have tons and tons of content available like in a living language; you just have to make do with the sources that have survived.  (Latin is a bit different but in something like Wheelock that is geared towards literary, classical Latin it still applies.)