The title of your thread says a lot. Prepping as much as possible for native material could really become an endless process.
Why not try subs2srs and don't worry about understanding every single word. In a TV series the same words will pop up again and again.

Yep, theres no reason you can't start watching some TV now or reading some Japanese webpages already. I know how you are thinking though, I bounce back between "structured" and "lets just watch lots of TV!!" type study all the time.

As long as you are getting more and more exposure, it doesn't really matter what you do. Just keep doing something. If you keep studying exactly as you are doing now, but then watch an hour or two of Japanese TV on top of that, it can only help!

I don't know how anyone manages without native material, or why anyone would want to. The whole point of learning Japanese is to understand native material, right? So why not get started already? Unless you have pretty much no vocabulary at all, there's stuff that you can understand.

Try watching a kids show and see what happens - I recommend Dokidoki Precure (I have a subs2srs deck for it, if you want it - but it's a fun show even without understanding everything they say). Or read manga focused around normal life ('ライフ' being the easiest such series I've found). It certainly can't hurt to try watching/reading things.

At what point would you consider native material to be accessible, anyway? When you can understand a kid's show 100%? When you can understand the news? There's no hard line there.

If you're not studying for the test in particular, and just want to cram generally useful vocab, I don't know why you would do anything other than use nukemarine's 'optimized' Core 10k deck.

I think the main problem the people who know several thousand words, have gone through grammar books, etc., but still don't find native materials accessible have is that they're intimidated by it. And, so long as they never actually do it, they're gonna continue to be intimidated by it. No amount of SRS-ing sanitized Core sentences is going to prepare you to deal with a block of native Japanese text. Not 100.000, not 1.000.000 reviews.


Just to balance things out a little:

I'm at 1k in Core (also did Tae Kim, RtK). I can read several manga comfortably (I'm on volume three of Yotsubato! for instance, and at this point I very rarely have to consult the English version). I also read blogs, and can watch variety shows without subs.

These are all native materials, and they are very much accessible. What I did to make them accessible, aside from actual studying of pre-made materials, was to watch a lot of media (with subs), listen to a lot of comprehensible material on my Ipod (material that was comprehensible mainly because I had watched it with subs before), listen to a lot of music, read a few graded readers, and mine some words/sentences from native materials. This helped me: 1. be able to decipher Japanese text made up of known words into meaningful sentences (very hard to do, actually, at first, even if you know everything in the sentence). 2. be able to mentally handle unknown words as blanks (basically, ignore them but at the same time be aware that there's something there), and just figure out the meaning of the rest without knowing what that blank stands for. You'd be amazed at how adept your mind becomes at this, with a little practice.

Obviously, most native materials (novels, movies, many TV shows) are not fully accessible to me yet). But just cramming more vocab would do very little to make them accessible. Doing actual reading and listening is not only necessary, but far more effective at making more advanced native material accessible (and less intimidating).

P.S. I'm about to start reading a short story (a relatively easy one, but nonetheless one aimed at native adults), that I prepared for by learning the most frequent words in it using Anki. I'll let you know how it went in a couple of days.

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 March 31, 2:07 am)

I'm basically doing what Zgarbas did by learning a lot up front.  I went through Genki I & II, Tobira and Kanzen Master 2kyuu and 1kyuu.  I did 6000 words via iKnow! and so far 2000 additional out of the remaining 4600 from Core 10000.  So I'm at about 8000 words out of 9600 from Core 10000.  I started reading a Japanese light novel and I got hit with approximately 250 new words on the first 50 pages.  This includes stuff like onomatopia, exasperations, and words that are compound words from ones I know but it's still a lot.  I haven't checked yet how many of these new words are in the 1,600 words I have yet to study from Core 10000.
Basically, no matter how many words you start off with under your belt, you are probably going to be hit hard by reality when you get to native stuff.  I could of started with easier manga and stuff like that but I'm not too interested in it.  But the grammar prep has really helped.  You'll can find N2 and N1 constructions in a light novel, even if it's fairly simple like the one I'm reading.

I don't do any of that complicated stuff; I'm really lazy that way.
I went through core 6k on Iknow, then through various pre-made vocabulary and sentence decks. I was going to go through with the coreplus deck, but after deleting my anki collection by mistake I moved on to a deck called JPPI. If I see a word I know I just pass it off as easy because I don't like stopping reviews to delete cards (it ruins my flow).
When I'm not feeling lazy I also mine song-lyrics and occasional tidbits, but since I can't make rikai-sama import work on my computer for some reason I don't really mine(I'm so lazy I can't bother with installing complicated programs which would make my life easier; go figure). As I said, I don't feel any particular boost from drilling a mined word versus a pre-made list, so it's not that important for me.  I do mine from the books I read with yomi-chan,though, because it is just so convenient.

While I don't feel absolutely confident in all the words I learned in anki, they are usually enough. If I encounter it in a manner in which the nuance doesn't make sense I'll look it up on goo, but usually context gives me all the info I need. I do have a problem with production, but not with recognition. Rather than focus on what the kanjis means I always learn the word first. So, say, if I'm learning 輸出 I won't think of it as transport+exit, I think of it as 輸出＝ゆ＋しゅつ＝exit. Collocations often make sense, so while in production I might stumble before saying them they make sense when reading, and in time I get used to them (the most important aspect of reading, imho. Memorizing collocations is troublesome).

Soo, yeah. I'm not exactly a model learner ^^'. I just spend lots of time studying and it worked out nicely for me so far. Persistence > Method. I don't really know which would be a good direction to point you to, other than just find out what works best for you.

By the way, There is a vocab list of the vocabulary in こころon renshuu. And then there's Yomi-chan. If it weren't for Yomi-chan I think I would've postponed my dive into Japanese literature far longer. I haven't gone through こころ yet aside from a few extracts, but in those extracts I'd average about 1 unknown word per page (~2 if you put collocations I didn't know, but were easy to figure out such as 指を折る）

Tori-kun wrote:

Stansfield123 wrote:

I'm at 1k in Core (also did Tae Kim, RtK). I can read several manga comfortably (I'm on volume three of Yotsubato! for instance, and at this point I very rarely have to consult the English version). I also read blogs, and can watch variety shows without subs.

Are you implying you can understand these shows? Sorry, but this does not sound like truth to me given you know 1000 words >_> Or your definition of "understanding" is different.

Stansfield123 will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the reference to 1k in Core is purely a reference to Stansfield123's progress through Core, and not a reference to Core as others tend to use to gauge their passive vocabulary.

EDIT: for example, there are a lot of words I have come across in various manga, etc. which are not in the core deck, and yet comprehended the nuance/meaning within the context it was used.

Last edited by uisukii (2013 March 31, 1:47 pm)

Tori-kun wrote:

Are you implying you can understand these shows? Sorry, but this does not sound like truth to me given you know 1000 words >_> Or your definition of "understanding" is different.

I have no idea how many words I know. I said I did 1k of Core, not that I only know those words. Besides, knowing a number of words doesn't translate directly into a certain level of comprehension of a variety show. Watching a lot of media (most of it with subs) taught me more than just words. It taught me to recognize entire sentences and common expressions (often without ever knowing what the specific words mean), and it taught me massive amounts of non-verbal communication the Japanese entertainment industry employs.

Communication in a variety show consists pretty much of everything face to face communication consists of: gestures, body language, facial expressions, voice quality, intonation, volume, speaking style, etc., etc. In fact, all those aspects of communication are exaggerated and fine tuned by participants who are more skilled than the average person in non-verbal communication, and are therefor very unlikely to send mixed or wrong signals about their message.

And that's just direct communication. Then there's the environment, people's behavior, how people look and are dressed , the actual faces and names of the participants!!! etc. (missing just this last aspect, and failing to easily recognize and know the backstory of the participants in a show, would set someone's understanding back more than not knowing a good 10 percent of the words people use).

Understanding these aspects alone (understanding which only comes with watching, and a lot of it - non-verbal communication is in fact a very complex system of communication, just as complex as any language) easily makes up 50% of everything there is to be understood about a variety show.

Then there is the fact that the language, which is at most 50% of the whole, is not just a list of words either. It's grammar too, not to mention accents and slang.

So, I guarantee you that, if you were to find someone who has never been exposed to non-verbal communication before (grew up on a desert island or something, and only had a dictionary to study), teach him 10.000 Japanese words, and you take a second person who knows only 1000 Japanese words and basic grammar + slang, but is well versed in the non-verbal communication these shows engage in (everything from gestures and speaking styles and mannerisms to Japanese fashion, habits, societal preconceptions, etc.), the first person would understand nothing and the second person would understand pretty much everything.

Obviously, that's an unrealistic scenario, and even someone who's only contact with Japanese has been Core10k would understand some non-verbal communication, but not a whole lot. Certainly not enough to follow along, just because they know all the words as spoken by the voice over professional who read those cards.

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 March 31, 2:49 pm)

Zgarbas wrote:

By the way, There is a vocab list of the vocabulary in こころon renshuu.

Any chance you have a link? I searched every which way ( 夏目漱石, romaji version, the title), but can't find it.

I love those lists on renshuu, they make life very easy. Currently working my way through the baseball terms one. Who knew there are 133 baseball related terms.

Stansfield123 wrote:

Who knew there are 133 baseball related terms.

On an unrelated note (though it is relavent to semantics), you should check out George Carlin's old bit about the language of baseball terms compared to those used in American football. Sorry @Sebastian, I mean United States of American football.

dizmox wrote:

On 4chan there was some guy saying he had read 50+ LNs in the space of about 6 months, after having been learning Japanese for about a year. Not sure about the veracity of the claim or how much he really understood of them, though, but he had a nice graph of his progress, so I guess it might have been true.

Maybe he read this book

Last edited by chamcham (2013 March 31, 7:56 pm)