Thanks for Anki. One question still: imagine I have a deck where I enter Japanese words in kana in order to learn some vocabulary in the same time I've working on RTK. Once I'm finished with RTK, I plan to edit those vocabulary cards in replacing the kana by kanji. In that case, will Anki consider the edited cards asa new cards and offer me to review them as if they were really brand-new? If not, how should I proceed?

YogaSpirit wrote:

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?

Well, you're in a bit of a bind.  What you and your friend need are language teaching techniques, while this forum is probably a better resource for language self-study techniques.  The two aren't the same.

RTK is a solitary pursuit by nature.  So is SRSing Tae Kim or Minna no Nihongo or really any textbook.  The best way to do that is to spend all your time in front of a computer with Anki.

That would be a waste of your time together.

Disclaimer:  I have no professional training in language teaching.  I haven't had the opportunity to try these ideas myself.  This is just what I'd try in the same situation.

I'd forget about RTK, Minna no Nihongo, iKnow, etc.--they're for self-study, not natural language acquisition.  Do them on your own time.  Instead, I'd focus on maximizing the amount of comprehensible input each of you hears.  For your friend, this means you should express yourself exclusively in French.  You may mimic your friend's Japanese but not make your own yet.  For you, your friend should express herself in Japanese.  Since you are effectively a child in Japanese, she will have to simplify it significantly. 

Now, you need something to talk about.  Ideally, this would be an interesting two way conversation where you speak (mostly) French and she speaks (mostly) Japanese.  But, you're not good yet, so you need to start with something you can understand.  This means commands, present tense statements, or yes/no questions about physical objects and actions.

This technique is called "Total Physical Response."  Here's a good introduction. I've seen it work: a monolingual teacher teaching immigrant elementary students.  It's silly, but it works.  Maybe it works because it's silly--you have to go back to very childish play to find things that can be understood at first. 

Finally, your friendship is more important than getting immediate results from language exchange, so if it starts to grate, take a break. 

Those would be the only real rules: only speak your native language, play like children, break the first two rules sometimes for the sake of friendship. 

For more ideas, you might want to look at how schools teach immigrant students.  I personally have seen American schools be very effective in teaching English to immigrants.

Good luck and have fun!
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About Anki:

Edited cards usually keep the same schedule.  Actions -> Reschedule can be used to "reset" cards, which makes them act like new cards.
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PS:  I think Pimsleur isn't worth the time, much less the money.  It's great if you only want to dabble in a language and impress people with your native-like pronunciation of a few set phrases.  From what I've heard (admittedly only the first six hours I checked out from the library), it's kinda like programming a phrasebook into your head.  While that's fine (that's basically what I'm doing with the Core 2000), Core 2000 + Anki is superior for several reasons:

1) Anki schedules sentences based on your answers.  Tapes are limited to a set order.
2) Pimsleur schedules reviews very densely.  This builds fast recall, but limits both memory stability and learning speed.  Anki (using the SuperMemo algorithm) is tuned for rapid acquisition of stable knowledge--with the downside that it does not teach very high fluency. 
3) Pimsleur is output-oriented.  You will end up speaking phrasebook-Japanese--some of it quite useless.  I can only remember a handful of the phrases (thanks to the low stability), but one of them means "Where is __ street?"  Great, you've said that with perfect pronunciation.  Can you understand the answer of the poor 日本人 who you've just hoodwinked into thinking you know more Japanese than you do?  Probably not.
4) The grammar explanations are sometimes just plain wrong.  "Use が after nouns in sentences."  Fortunately, the sentences are right (as far as I can tell), but why include false "facts" at all.
5) There are very few new sentences per hour.  It's all overpriced, dense repetition of a few useless phrases.  At best, you can impress non-speakers with your fluency (you get really good at the very few things you study) and get yourself in trouble with speakers.

All in all, waste of time and money.  Do not want.

Last edited by wildweathel (2009 August 15, 10:25 pm)

Unfortunately, I don't have personal experience with teaching TPR, I've just seen the results of a TPR-based classroom.  But, http://www.tpr-world.com/Merchant2/merc … y_Code=200 looks like a good place to start.

Last edited by wildweathel (2009 August 18, 4:21 pm)

Nukemarine : I downloaded your Anki deck (Tae Kims Guide to Japanese), should I have got audio files as well? They are referenced in the cards but I dont think they were downloaded!

Cheers
CJ

A lot of people seem to support downloading the pre-made decks related to Tae Kim. It's a good site and that sounds like a good method, but let me add a different perspective:

Typing out your own cards is NOT a waste of time.

I for one find it extremely difficult to work with other people's decks. I like studying at my own pace with words I've chosen as well as words I find useful, from sources that I like and trust (I'm not a huge fan of Tae Kim). On top of that, the very process of typing in the cards is in itself a party of the study process. If using pre-made decks works for you, and it is a very efficient method, then by all means continue, but I would definitely try and start adding your own words as well if not starting to make your own deck.

Another thing to keep making decks interesting; work around themes. Learn the planets, emotions, chemical elements, bodily functions, anatomy, each in their own bracket. Helps break up the monotony.

As far as textbooks go, I HATED Minna No Nihongo, but I loved Genki as an introductory text. Past that, I'd recommend getting a book in Japanese (Kitchen by Yoshimoto Banana is a wonderful start), buying the Basic and Intermediate grammar dictionaries by Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui, and reading real Japanese. It's very dialogue heavy so not too hard, and the English translation sucks horrifying arse so it's worth a read.