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Learning Japanese fast - Why not use frequency lists for 80% coverage?
Index » RtK Volume 1
Most people here seem to attempt to do most of RTK first before studying the readings, compounds, and words. I personally suspect it is faster to learn a fundamental set of things before building on that, such as learning compounds and readings. I think learning multiple things at the same time slows things down.
Also, I realize that for an 80% or 90% kanji list, it would still need to be cross-checked against an 80% or 90% word list to find out if there are some kanjis that need to be included before being ready to study the relevant word list.
EDIT: Or what the administrator said 
Last edited by scuda (2009 June 19, 2:41 pm)
scuda wrote:
It seems that to quickly get to 80% coverage of kanji and words, it would only require memorizing 555 of the most common kanjis and 2164 of the most common words. At a rate of 30 items/day, would result in 80% coverage of the Japanese language in a mere 90 days, or 3 months.
80% coverage sounds nice in theory but think of it that way. For every 5 words there is one that you don't understand.
Frequency lists are a nice starting point and great when you don't know what to study next. But ultimately there is no shortcut. It's going to take time to learn those 20748 words and then some more. 
ahibba wrote:
Aijin wrote:
Studying kanji before studying any of the words that use those kanji seems a little odd to me.
When you started learning English, didn't you learn the alphabet first before any of the words that use those letters? or did you learn it in this way: A apple B banana. How can you you read the word "apple" if you did not study letters p, l, e yet?
Actually I knew a handful of English words before ever learning the alphabet 
That happens when you're exposed to common words in media before you've even begun formal education on the language though.
I don't know if the analogy is fair. I'd compare the roman alphabet more to hiragana/katakana, which of course has to be learned before it can be used. But for kanji, it's hard for me to imagine learning only how to write the characters first, and then having to go back and learn all the readings, and then on top of that having to learn all the vocabulary that uses those various readings.
To me it makes more sense to do it at the same time, so that you can instantly use what you learn. If you only learn how to write a character and it's rough English meaning, it has no practical application until you learn the readings and words that use it. But, I think that probably both ways of learning have their advantages and in the end equal the same amount of time. So whatever works best for people is great
I would be interested in hearing more about how you guys feel that style helps you/is better than learning everything at once though! Pros/cons would be great.
Aijin wrote:
for kanji, it's hard for me to imagine learning only how to write the characters first, and then having to go back and learn all the readings, and then on top of that having to learn all the vocabulary that uses those various readings.
To me it makes more sense to do it at the same time, so that you can instantly use what you learn. If you only learn how to write a character and it's rough English meaning, it has no practical application until you learn the readings and words that use it.
James Heisig wrote:
"STUDYING THE KANJI
The big question is, of course, how to train one’s mind to read and write Japanese. There are those who simplify matters by deciding that there is no need for persons educated outside of the Japanese school system to bother learning how to write the language. If you can read, you will remember how to write a few hundred of the kanji along the way and you can leave the rest to computers to handle for you. Or so the argument goes. It has the full support of most Japanese who have never met a Western-educated individual who can write the kanji with the same fluency as they and have somehow decided that, without the benefit of an education in writing that begins at the pre-school level and goes all the way up to the last year of high school, there is no way they ever could. This is not only the case for ordinary readers of Japanese but also for the great masses of scholars of Japanese scholarship in the
West. The hiragana and katakana, and perhaps a third-grade level of writing—but more than that is unreasonable to expect.
If you accept the argument, you are solidly in the majority camp. You would also be as wrong as they are. To begin with, there is no reason you cannot learn to write the kanji as fluently as you read them, and in a fraction of the time it takes to do it through the Japanese school system. What it more, without the ability to write, you are forever crippled, or at least limited to walking with the crutch of an electronic dictionary or computer. Finally, by learning to write you have helped to internationalize the fullness of the Japanese language beyond the present-day limits.
All of this is common sense to the Korean and Chinese who come to Japan to learn the language. The reason Westerners tend to dismiss it is their fear of not being able to learn to write, or at least not without devoting long years to the task. As I said, this fear is unfounded.
The key to learning to write is to forget the way the Japanese learn and pay attention instead to the way the Chinese learn Japanese, and then adapt it to the West. Consider the following diagram.
The conclusion should be obvious: If you want to learn to read and write all the general-use kanji, you should study them separately.
Which one do you start with, the reading of the writing? You might be surprised, but the answer is—the writing. There are two reasons. First, by doing so you end up in basically the same position as the Chinese coming to the study of Japanese kanji: you
know what they mean and how to write them, but you still have to learn how to pronounce them. Second, the writing is a rational system that can be learned by principles, whereas the readings require a great deal of brute memory."
Aijin wrote:
I don't know if the analogy is fair. I'd compare the roman alphabet more to hiragana/katakana, which of course has to be learned before it can be used.
oregum wrote:
I think of RtK as a very complicated form of spelling. Imagine not knowing the alphabet of completely foreign language that has 3007 common words. Instead of trying to memorize each word as a picture (kanji), you break it up into letters (primitives). By knowing all the primitives you can build words. Like any language, the letters must be put in the correct order for the word (kanji) to make sense.
Last edited by ahibba (2009 June 19, 5:37 pm)
Aijin wrote:
To me it makes more sense to do it at the same time, so that you can instantly use what you learn. If you only learn how to write a character and it's rough English meaning, it has no practical application until you learn the readings and words that use it. But, I think that probably both ways of learning have their advantages and in the end equal the same amount of time. So whatever works best for people is great
I would be interested in hearing more about how you guys feel that style helps you/is better than learning everything at once though! Pros/cons would be great.
For me, the bad thing about learning vocab along with reading and the kanji is that there is a lot of nothing. The kanji mean nothing. The readings mean nothing. Some would say context will tell you what you need to know, but if you're just starting then context means nothing, so you drudge through the dictionary. Once you've finally managed to memorize all these elements together you then have to go back and learn context.
By using RTK or the Movie Method then mining sentences, there still a lot of drudging if you can't fully understand the context, however, you're learning context as you learn vocabulary, and readings. The work's about equal as you say, but one seems less stressful than the other.
If there were an efficient way to learn them all at once, though, I'm sure people would be doing so.
Aijin wrote:
I don't know if the analogy is fair. I'd compare the roman alphabet more to hiragana/katakana, which of course has to be learned before it can be used. But for kanji, it's hard for me to imagine learning only how to write the characters first, and then having to go back and learn all the readings, and then on top of that having to learn all the vocabulary that uses those various readings.
I learned about 200 characters the 'standard' way, by learning the writing, meaning, and readings at the same time. I found it very difficult to do this, and my retention rate was horrid. My theory is that the 'chunk size' of learning everything at once is too large. For me, there was too much information to connect to one character at once. Only learning the writing and a keyword has a smaller, more digestible 'chunk size.'
Incorporating the reading is also more difficult because its harder to make a connection to a seemingly arbitrary reading. Some try to incorporate a reading into their writing mnemonic, but I found I would have to stretch my stories too far to be rememberable.
I never actually went through and learned readings individually; I couldn't do it. After finishing RTK, I went AJATT style and learned readings through new vocabulary. This worked great for me.
To me it makes more sense to do it at the same time, so that you can instantly use what you learn. If you only learn how to write a character and it's rough English meaning, it has no practical application until you learn the readings and words that use it.
I fail to see how learning an arbitrary reading lets you use a character immediately, unless you already knew words using that reading. I think learning new vocab after knowing characters is more efficient, because you have more things to connect the new vocab too while learning.
Learning a character and its rough meaning doesn't have a direct practical application, but it provides major benefits. For me, it removed the feeling of 'omg what are all these random scribbles I'll never be able to learn this stuff' and replaced it with 'wow, I recognize most of these; I can actually become literate.' I likely would have stopped studying Japanese had I not stumbled upon RTK.
Also, going through RTK allows you to use real Japanese text as study material basically as soon as you are finished. You won't understand much or be able to actually read it, but you can study with something you enjoy, rather than being stuck with boring graded readers for a year or two while you learn kanji the standard way.
Also, when learning new words, already knowing the general meaning of kanji allows you to see the logic behind many compounds, and gives another mental hook to remember the word.
But, I think that probably both ways of learning have their advantages and in the end equal the same amount of time. So whatever works best for people is great
I would be interested in hearing more about how you guys feel that style helps you/is better than learning everything at once though! Pros/cons would be great.
Basically, I see it like this:
RTK is a 3 month investment of not getting any 'practical' use. In return, you get a huge stepping stone towards literacy. When I decided to go through RTK, I had no need for output, only a desire to understand. I also had stopped taking Japanese classes, and wasn't bound by a specific curriculum.
Standard study gets you through the kanji slower, but nets 'practical' results right away. For those who want immediate results, or need to produce output for class/work/etc, this may be better.
