My advice would be to focus on RTK, and nothing but RTK until you're finished with it.  After that, going through and reading Tae Kim, and entering the sentences into your SRS will be sufficient to get you used to the grammar, and give you some vocab to start out with.

If you're really really anxious to get into sentence mining and the actual japanese part, a lot of people opt to do RTK light, which is only about 1000 kanji i think, and then they jump into Tae Kim, etc. 

Personally, I think doing RTK all in one go before you do anything else is definitely worth it (as long as you keep reviewing) and it's what I would recommend.

Edit - Also I would actually recommend trying to speed yourself up a little bit, just to see what you're capable of in terms of memory retention.  Since short term memory only gets better from practice, and an SRS takes care of long term, pushing yourself memory wise allows you to do things you wouldn't have thought possible before.

Last edited by sup3rbon (2009 August 11, 4:19 pm)

travis wrote:

Don't bother typing in the sentences in Anki, just File->Download->Shared Decks and grab the Tae Kim grammar deck from nukemarine, that'll save some typing.

Just to offer another perspective, I'm going through Tae Kim right now, and I find it helpful to type everything.  It helps me internalize the structures better, and make sure I'm not misreading or skipping over anything.  It's also good practice with the Japanese IME.

I waited until finishing RTK to start.  I think that's the way to go, just from the standpoint of efficiency and making sure you actually finish RTK.  Unless you start getting really burnt out and need a break, that is.

I'd be very happy to read other replies than the already excellent ones above, but I'm too impatient not to add my comment. :-)
First, I'm surprised on how everybody here - or more exactly you 3 people having replied to me as of now - seems to agree on the 2-step approach to take:
1. RTK
2. Tae Kim's for grammar.
I'd be happy to read counter-opinion regarding to that apparent religion. Also, what would then be your steps 3. 4. and 5. ?

I'm myself a strong believer of the doctrine of "internalization by doing" but I'm also happy to have learnt the existence of a ready-to-use Anki deck regarding Tae Kim's vocabulary & sentences seeing the tennis' elbows I got at the moment. One question still: how can I make sure Anki only offers me the cards corresponding to the Kim's lessons I've gone through when reviewing/testing myself. To be concrete, let's say I've gone through lessons 1 & 2: I would not like sentences from other lessons to contaminate my reviews. I downloaded the deck but I saw no specific card tags related to the lesson/chapter numbers. Travis (or others?), can you please elaborate on how I can use this appropriately?

Now, another variable I'm adding to the big picture: I actually have a Japanese friend in my country till February 2010. She's offering me to have a 3-hour a week session where we would teach each others' language. First thing: that's why I'm not tempted to wait to finish RTK before learning as much grammar and vocabulary as I can in order to benefit from my time with my Japanese friend. But may be I'm wrong here, which leads me to my second thing: seeing this context, would you adjust your initial advice, and also, what would you recommend for me to take the most out of my linguistic time my Japanese friend?

The case sounds interesting and I'm eager to read your thoughts.

I perfectly agree on the workload issue. Regarding the sounds of the language: this is no issue coz Japanese and French (my mother tongue) share may be 92% of their sounds.

But what do you mean by "basic conversation"? In other words, I don't really see how I can have a constructive dialog - even the most basic one - with my friend if I'm only doing RTK, which will give ZERO grammar + ZERO vocabulary. This is my KEY QUESTION: how should I concretely try to make the most out of my time with my Japanese friend without polluting my RTK learning? For example, should we decide on 2 or 3 topics to cover before her departure in February, such as talking about oneself in the present tense, etc. We could also go the traditional way like they do in schools or in private tiution: 1/ read a text 2/ understand it 3/ talk about it. But what text then? Well, well, well...????

Other, non-related questions:
- Should not Pimsleur be the third pilar of RTK + Tim's guide + Pimsleur ? I'm thinking that Pimsleur may be a good key to find a route with my friend...?
- Kanji Odyssey: what is it exactly and when should I think about adding that to my toolkit?

YogaSpirit wrote:

This is my KEY QUESTION: how should I concretely try to make the most out of my time with my Japanese friend without polluting my RTK learning?

IMO you shouldn't be basing your learning around optimizing time with your Japanese friend .  3hrs per week of sitting around trying to do mutual conversation lessons is not going to do much for you at all and it will do even less if you don't have a way to permanently internalize it in actual Japanese (such as adding the conversation topics into an SRS).   If you aren't familiar with the Kanji you're either going to have to cram a ton of unknown information on just raw visual memory, or type it out in Romanji *cringe*. 

Like others have said focus on knocking out RTK1.  Kanji is the foundation of the entire language.  In fact wanting to "optimize" time with your friend should be good motivation to get RTK done as quickly as possible.  The quicker you complete it the quicker you'll be able to add full Japanese sentences (well you can add them now but it will be a major PITA).

Transparent_Aluminium wrote:

Regarding the sounds of the language: this is no issue coz Japanese and French (my mother tongue) share may be 92% of their sounds.

You should not be too confident in your pronunciation. In my experience, French people also have an accent when speaking Japanese.

Yeah that might become an issue later if you overlook it now.

and 92%? How random. >_>

Last edited by ryuudou (2009 August 11, 9:23 pm)

YogaSpirit wrote:

I know the pronoums (watashi, boku, oame, kanodjo...)

Oh the horror, my eyes start to bleed!! This is exactly the reason why you should do RTK first

As for your concerns it's not a religion. You don't have to do it in that order it's just easier that way. While doing RTK you can simultaneously immerse yourself in Japanese environment and gradually gather resources for next steps.
There are tons of stuff you can do thats beneficial for your long term Japanese study that you should be doing while working on RTK. You want to have: mangas, magazines, novels, books, animes, podcasts, radio stations, tv stations, news stations, games (console, pc, psp), interesting websites, news websites, interesting blogs. Its a lot of work!

Also with 1h a day no matter what approach you take it will take a loooot of time to actually get anywhere.

Codexus wrote:

Also Tae Kim is OK and free, but there are better introductions to Japanese for complete newbies.

And what would those be? Japanese in Mangaland seems like another good approach to getting down basic grammar in the beginning. I haven't really read it but I have glanced over it.

Nevertheless, Tae Kim still seems to be the most popular choice around here.

So, no one really answer the key question: seeing my context and level of study, how to take the most out of my sessions with my Japanese friend? Isn't a creative way of having us dialog together based on my work on RTK?

I guess that what you're looking for is a way to have a fun conversation with your friend while learning Japanese. You could use kanji as a starting point and ask her for words that are associated with that kanji. (don't start with 胆) A more structured approach would be to use a textbook (something like Minna no Nihongo) prepare the lessons beforehand and go through what you didn't understand with her.

The big nuance in-between my friend and I are the following:
- she's taken a 3-month intensive class to learn French, where I've self-studies for about 3 weeks.
- but above all, she's got a job in France and does live in France till February, which means she's FULLY IMMERSED (at work, in the streets, in the subway, in the supermarket...) where I can only immersed myself in an artificial and limited way (I can't force my girlfriend to watch only Japanese news, Jap TV, Jap movies, eat Jap and so on...).

Friendship will be hopefully the key, you're right. I guess our time shared together will benefit her French more than my Japanese.

Regarding Anki and its Tae Kim's pre-made deck: how can I make sure Anki only offers me the cards corresponding to the Kim's lessons I've gone through when reviewing/testing myself. To be concrete, let's say I've gone through lessons 1 & 2: I would not like sentences from other lessons to contaminate my reviews.

If you're using the deck I put up on Anki, it's tagged by the four major levels. Each level's sentences are numbered in order in addition to chapter and section names in the notes columns. It should be easy to go in the order of the website.

Suspend all sentences, and unsuspend each group of sentences as you get to that chapter. Have the sentences appear in order added.