I am not anywhere near fluent but I think RTK and http://smart.fm gives a one two punch that will offer a student as efficient a strategy as any out there.  Don't bother with Rosetta Stone unless you have money to burn.

isn't it like even japanese people like can't read every single kanji/word in a book or whatever like I can't even do that in english (like harry potter lols. I dont' give a shit... i'm not gonna look up everything frikin' adjective that I don't nkow). i heard some japanese people they know what some kanji/word means but doesn't know how to pronounce it while reading a book or whatever.

personally i have no interest reading the news so i don't care if i'm literate with that... i don't really like listening/watching news in english anyways.

i don't like reading novels except for harry potter which is over now and i read twligiht but it ain't that good so i stopped at book 1.

i thnk just focus on why you want to be literate. what you want to read. i'm reading manga but ihate manga but i'm doing it for anime.

But basically you have to read A LOT... like I went from concentrating for 5 seconds to reemmber the pronounciation of some hiragana and going blank for pronounciation of some katakana character to reading hiragana/katakana without "thinking" as well as almost 2000 kanji (well there's a s***load of irregulars so idk).
you know how they say if you know 1200 you know 95% of kanji that's commonly (or is that 95% in newspapers) but i don't think that's really true... at least with stuff iwant to read. all the good stuff in the stuff i want to read is kanji i don't know? you know what i'm sayin... well written crap is well written well so

I read song lyrics (funnest way to speed up your hiragana reading speed)-> websites -> drama script/summary/manga
+ONE BIG MENTION is tae kim's guide  I studied that shit like whatever but as boring as it was... it was beneficial. perhaps referencing as you run into stuff is funner/easier but i did the opposite order for the most part b.c. i learned spanish like this in school so like that principal/way of learning seemed "right" to me...

for manga even if you know all the words if you don't KNOW ( I mean KNOW not just some general idea etc) the grammar there's a chance you'll have no idea what the hell they're saing or why the hell they're saying it or who the hell they're saing it...

Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2009 March 14, 7:15 pm)

I'm probably at high intermediate level in reading and did it thru self study. What has really helped is to read books in Japanese while keeping an English translation nearby to refer to when I get stuck. Of course, at the beginning that was virtually every sentence, but as time has gone on I'm able to understand more and more without having to look at the English. Now I can read a page of Harry Potter in Japanese and get the gist of what's going on even if I don't understand every word.

Last edited by sheetz (2009 March 14, 5:37 pm)

I can't really pick up any manga and read it, understanding every element perfectly, but I still think that I'm literate in Japanese. I'm a self-studier person. I've been studying for less than a year. I have trouble reading kids stories. I've just begun to understand the use of やっぱり and なけらばならない.

So, why does a total noob like myself consider... myself*... to be literate? Because literacy is a path, not an arbitrary destination. As long as you're striving to improve, and putting forth effort, literacy isn't even as issue.

kazelee wrote:

なけらばならない.

I think it's なければ．
Please correct me on my mistakes, too.
howtwosavealif is beyond correcting, as far as english goes, anyway.

Last edited by yukkuri_kame (2009 March 14, 7:48 pm)

Thank you for your help, especially itemized lists.

woodwojr -
So you learned the bulk of your Japanese from classes?  2-5, I got.  I know squat, though, except for the kanji I've learned so far.  I need to learn the kana, I need to learn the audio, I need to learn the grammar.  So you think once I got kanji and kana down, a good grammar book should give me a decent foundation for literacy?

sheetz - I was wondering too if that might help. I'm glad to hear it does!  I have some manga in both Japanese and English (I live near a Kinokuniya, and being too impatient for the US releases I often go buy the most recent volumes in Japanese and...look at the pictures. )

wccrawford - tell me about iKnow!  Give me a link! I googled it and too much unrelated sites popped up.  I actually saw 'Japanese the Manga Way'  on Amazon, and was wondering if that'd be a good buy.  So it worked for you, huh?  I'm fluent in Spanish (lived in Spain for a while), and I swear, it's so much easier than Japanese!  Japanese is so leveled, and different.  It's foreign on every level.

Anyone else?

Yeah, I'm also in the "can follow along a manga pretty well" category.

Remembering the Kana is good. Yeah, you can get kana down with reps, but I think RTKana helps you write out the kana better for appearances.

RTK naturally.

Grammar points via sample sentences. Tae Kim, UBJG, or maybe Genki or other things. Don't fall in the DO ALL BEGINNER BOOKS trap. Find one book, get your sentences, get out. You'll get some vocabulary this way, but they should repeat enough to get the point across.

Vocabulary via sample sentences. Smart.fm, KO2001 are two great resources here.

With the above, you'll find you're able to read manga not with fluency, but with understanding. As you read more everyday, you notice you improve as you add vocabulary. Watching japanese tv shows with subtitles become easier.

Don't bother with Rosetta Stone. It's trumped by so much free stuff now, it's not even worth downloading illegally.

I think it is useful to consider no-kanji knowledge (which still permits you to read real texts, even if only ones written for fairly young readers) as a separate and greater level of achievement than no-knowledge or no-kana knowledge (which permits you to read precisely nothing and precisely those texts written for foreign no-kana learners, respectively), but whatever it is, it is indeed not literacy.

Punctuation Rationer's Note: due to this poster's overuse of commas the quota for this thread has been exceeded. Please refrain from using commas or you will fall subject to standard rationing violation penalties.

~J

Last edited by woodwojr (2009 March 14, 9:20 pm)

I did classes, and here's what I think I got out of them:
* some external push to study (in the "I must do this homework/whatever because I have a class on Tuesday" sense). Not everybody needs that, of course.
* a native speaker who could answer questions about stuff I didn't understand
* real-time feedback about whether I was making myself understood (especially important when I was just doing evening classes as a beginner and that was the only time I actually spoke anything...)
* a reason to be in the country and actually studying the language reasonably full time
* a firm enough grounding that it was easy to start reading real stuff

Basically I found my ability to use the language jumped hugely over the nine months I was in Japan taking classes full time, but of course you can argue about how much of that is the 'classes' part. That took me from 'just leaving beginner level' to 'heading for JLPT2'. But I think for pure reading ability the major question is 'how much do you read?'; a good class ought to include reading exercises but mostly they're just "read this" with assistance on potentially tricky bits plus some assessment that you understood it. (The 'assessment' bit is useful, incidentally -- there have been occasions when I was sure I'd understood something clearly but it turned out that I had totally the wrong end of the stick on some point of meaning.)

[I know you asked about non-class-study; think of this as the inverse viewpoint -- what you aren't getting that you have to compensate for and make sure you get some other way...]

Last edited by pm215 (2009 March 14, 9:40 pm)

yukkuri_kame wrote:

kazelee wrote:

なけらばならない.

I think it's なければ．

I think so too

yukkuri_kame wrote:

Please correct me on my mistakes, too.

You know that saying, "the blind leading the blind"? In this instance a I'm blind, deaf, mute with ADHD and bipolar disorder.

yukkuri_kame wrote:

howtwosavealif is beyond correcting, as far as english goes, anyway.

I had to read that several times to finally understand what it said. That's like sofa king we tod it. LOL.

OP wrote:

Nukemarine - bodhisamaya mentioned smart.fm, too. I just went there. WOW.  So that's where the iKnow applicatoin is.  I can see how that makes Rosetta Stone obsolete.  And probably like most of us here, I have been watching subtitled Japanese shows for years, now, so it's familiar.  How far have you gotten into their Japanese Core lessons?

iKnow* is my new crack. Sometimes... I wonder, where has it been all my life? I'm currently on Core 6000 1 and finishing up some KO2001 lists.

From alyks site:
http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com/2008/ … ethod.html

I can read non-fiction decently now (日本史 ftw). Fiction, however, presents a tad bit of a difficulty.

I was never big on grammar. Most important: Read everyday. Start with manga. Manga is an awesome starting thing. After a few months of reading manga you'll find your ability has skyrocketed.