Thank-you guys - that helped a lot. wulfgar, the advice to not let the failed stack get too high was really good... I should try that! It's always awful to finally get through all your expired cards, only to find a huge number waiting for you to relearn.

Many of my cards were in the more mature "columns" - so I didn't think of it before, but those will probably be easy to relearn. I'll take it at my own time, a little every day like vinniram suggested, and I WILL finish. I'm just over half-way through... no way I'm stopping now! I probably just needed that gentle shove in the back.

gavmck, thank-you - I'd always wondered about what really came after I finished RtK. Reviews every single day?? But it makes sense - once I can learn and recognise them, I'll be able to read them, and reading and writing will lodge them in my brain for good. Describing it as a crutch was a great metaphor.

Once again, ありがとうございました！

If you are reading this and you need encouragement then you're in luck. If you study RTK right now you will have learned JAPAN-*******-ESE. Now do it. Just get off this forum and learn it. Just do 5 kanji. Just 5. If you do 5 kanji you will have learned 5 kanji which puts you ahead of people who know less than 5 kanji (and there are millions of people who don't know a single god-damned kanji). Now! go! learn 5 right now.

bizarrojosh wrote:

If you are reading this and you need encouragement then you're in luck. If you study RTK right now you will have learned JAPAN-*******-ESE. Now do it. Just get off this forum and learn it. Just do 5 kanji. Just 5. If you do 5 kanji you will have learned 5 kanji which puts you ahead of people who know less than 5 kanji (and there are millions of people who don't know a single god-damned kanji). Now! go! learn 5 right now.

Hhaha that post was brilliant!

jettyke wrote:

If there is ONE non-japanese video you allow yourself to watch, then let it be THIS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiVs_NkTMNo
Read the lyrics as the song goes, and feel the power.

This is a HIGHLY MOTIVATIONAL video.
For your life.

And once again my assumption that the majority of people on these forums are under 20 got proven   Lucky bastards

I love you too.

Hey, if you are reading this get your ass off the internet and just do 10 Kanji. That's all its going to take. Just do ten. Trust me. If you do 10 that will be 10 that you will know and then you can move on to another 10 kanji later. Just do it right now and you will know 10 ******* kanji. That's 10 more than you will know right now and probably lots more than you would have ever thought you would have known. Just think about all the stuff you are going to be able to read. NOW GO DO 10 KANJI.

Raschaverak wrote:

jettyke wrote:

If there is ONE non-japanese video you allow yourself to watch, then let it be THIS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiVs_NkTMNo
Read the lyrics as the song goes, and feel the power.

This is a HIGHLY MOTIVATIONAL video.
For your life.

And once again my assumption that the majority of people on these forums are under 20 got proven   Lucky bastards

Well I don´t really listen to that kind of music at all, just that about 6-7 years ago I liked it and now by happenstance I found it and felt nostalgic. I wouldn´t ever have thought that I can find anything close to useful in that video, but in fact I did. But really, personally I think no matter who the artist is, it doesn´t change the fact that the lyrics can be motivating. If you know his story, then you might understand more. Recommending this video doesn´t have anything to do with my age... as I already said, my taste of music is different.

Last edited by jettyke (2010 April 29, 9:10 am)

@ta12121:  For "native-level" abilities, I don't think you can quantify an amount of time to achieve such a thing.  I really think its just a process you go through and one day we will all just work up fluent .  Also living in japan would most certainly be the fastest way to get to this ever elusive "native-level" ability because over time you start to have a Japanese frame of mind, which might what is required to be native-level fluency.  Bottom line, if you keep trying and you are having fun, you will get there.

ta12121 wrote:

I know anyone can get fluent in japanese(I.e. have a strong command of each skill:listening,reading,writing,speaking. But I've always wonder if native-level can be obtained. A lot of people have stated depending on what you do, 2-3 years is the initial years, again depending on what you do, you can achieve fluency. But what of native-level abilities? would that take double the time? or would it require going to japan itself and living the culture so that "native-like" things can be achieved. This is still kinda bothering me though...

2-3 years seems way overly optimistic for the vast majority of people learning Japanese.  For example, the US government does a program for 'Limited Working Proficiency' at about 1,410 class hours.  They do the program in 47 weeks, which is 30 hours a week (and more than that in homework, assignments study).  At a university, normally about 5 class hours a week, it would take 9.4 years to get that much class time.  Most people have classes or work other than Japanese, so doing the equivalent of thirty class hours is literally impossible for them (since, in practice, it's many more hours than that).  And remember, we're not even talking fluency, we're talking basic proficiency.

I would say around 7 years is a much more reasonable guess for how long it takes most people to achieve a level close to what could be called fluency.  My guess is that people on this forum often call limited working proficiency by the word 'fluency.'  Another guess of mine is that the RTK/Anki Sentences method is no faster than a similar amount of time spent studying in regular classes (though I think it's a great method for self-study).

I've done classes for three years, various textbooks, RTK, Core 6000 via anki, read a lot of native material, lived in Japan for two years--about 5 total years and thousands of hours of sutdy, and there's no way I would call myself fluent.

Last edited by Tzadeck (2010 May 01, 9:34 pm)

Well, as an example of why I wouldn't call myself fluent:  Yesterday I saw the Trigun movie, Trigun: Bandlands Rumble, in theaters.  I pretty much understood what was going on, and got the majority of the jokes.  However, there were numerous plot points that I didn't completely understand even though I could tell in which scenes they were revealed.  I was sometimes left with one or two theories of what was revealed.  Some of them that I didn't at first understand, I could understand by the end of the movie.  Some of them I'm still not sure of.  Now, if I tried, I couldn't produce nearly half the things in the movie that I understood.  It's not like Trigun uses all that much out-there vocabulary or anything.

Tzadeck wrote:

My guess is that people on this forum often call limited working proficiency by the word 'fluency.'  Another guess of mine is that the RTK/Anki Sentences method is no faster than a similar amount of time spent studying in regular classes (though I think it's a great method for self-study).

Just quoting for truth.


On a side note, my dad is Swiss. He was born and raised in Switzerland, and never even had the thought to study English. Came to the US on a road trip with his buddies, 0% comprehension, and met my mom.
Nowadays, some 26 (?) years later, going back and forth between countries, most people would agree that he is indiscernible from a native, and actually more proficient than quite a few.

I asked him how he studied English. How long, what did he do, etc...
his answer: "I've never studied English."

I ask my mom, and she just says "I don't know. He likes to read"

6355 sounds tempting man lol jking. Here is where I found it.
http://blog.anokorok.com/2009/11/how-ma … e-to-know/

I understand perfectly, you don't need to know all that much kanji to become fluent in japanese in terms of reading. 3007 is a solid number in terms only coming across 1 kanji you may not know in a few paragraphs full of kanji in a book. But I think once you reach a certain levelall you need to do is add kanji you come across that you don't know.

I do like learning kanji, so I might just keep going on learning a few everyday until I reach 4000 or so. I do plan on going to Chinese so it seems realistic and good to go for more kanji. But then again, the characters are different so I would need to learn that particular character set all by itself.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 May 01, 11:35 pm)

I hit a wall at 1366 and this thread was nowhere to be found! D:

There's a million kanji with the thread radical, it's insane. ><

Anyway, がんばってね to all of you that are still going! You can do this, really. No matter how tedious it seems, no matter how many there seem to be left; at some point you will be done! ^^