YogaSpirit wrote:
Here is my background, quick and easy:
- Last July was my first time in Japan for 3 weeks. So good!
- When I came back in August, I started with RTK and Pimsleur.
- Today, I'm at frame 545 in RTK and unit 26 of Pimsleur.
You say you're doing Pimsleur and have 30 minutes a day to study Japanese. Pimsleur takes 30 minutes a day, so you're learning a bit over 5 characters per day with no time invested. I'd say that's pretty good, actually.
Still, I'm wondering what the best route is to reach my goal: reading Japanese short-stories and novels, which rely - I guess without taking much risk - on far different syntax and writing style than the ones from mangas.
漫画 is not very different at all. Much less text, less description, more dialog, smaller vocabulary. But, it's the same language, same syntax, and almost entirely the same vocabulary.
What should I best do to reach my goal once I'm finished with RTK1 and Pimsleur 90 units?
At this point you'll have 2000 characters, 2500 words, and zero rough-and-tumble real-world experience. I think you should start using monolingual dictionaries to study Japanese literature (broadly defined as anything created in the Japanese language for a Japanese audience). Note that even if you learn a lot ahead of time, real literature will be hard at first.
From what I read on this forum:
- First option : Tae Kim and KO2001 are the next big steps.
The purpose of those steps is to build a sense of how Japanese words work together (Tae Kim), and a core vocabulary (KO2001, Core2000, or something like that). Pimsleur should already have done that, so those two courses will be mostly redundant. The only new thing to learn will be reading, so if you do them, they should go quickly.
- Second option: some others would just priviledge the "movie method", that is, basically going back thought RTK1 while replacing the keyword with hiragana keyword (sorry for the shortcut explanxation here).
Actually, the Movie Method teaches the kanji organized by the sounds they make in Chinese-style words. You should already know how to write the kanji (RTK1), going back and doing Movie Method or Kanjitown will help you recognize the sounds in Chinese-style words (漢語). For a learner starting from nothing, that isn't terribly useful. But, you'll have some spoken ability at that point (from Pimsleur) without knowing the associated kanji, so kanji reading (Kanjitown or RTK2 or Movie Method) may be more helpful than usual.
- Third option: a recent post here reveals that most kanjis found in novels can be found in RT3, so you should do that if your goal is to read novels.
Here's the truth about RTK3:
After RTK1, you will encounter a few new characters in your reading.
After RTK3, you will encounter slightly fewer new characters in your reading. The first short story I read in Japanese had the character 鴫 (しぎ, a kind of waterfowl), which isn't in RTK1 or 3.
The advantage of RTK1 is that you will only have to learn a few new characters for everything you read (instead of hundreds). RTK3 provides much, much less advantage. I'm only doing RTK3 to reach the 3k-character level and learn to write 旧字体. Both of those are low priorities (I want to reach them over the next few months, but they're not as important as beginning to understand Japanese), so I'm only learning a few characters a day from RTK3, plus whatever characters I encounter in my media study.
I have not enough free time (2 hours every 2 days, or 30 min a day) to dedicate to Japanese learning to go the whole AJATT route.
Actually, AJATT isn't so much a "method" as a "manifesto." A set of radical ideas to be adapted to your own circumstances. One of those ideas is that you should focus on what you can control. If you can't really immerse yourself "all the time," you should still do what you can.
Also, should I wait to be finished with RTK1 (and Pimsleur) before going to the next step^, or just add some ingredients in my learning approach?
I think it's a good idea to actually go back a step (in the AJATT order of things) and surround yourself with fun Japanese if you're not already doing that.
For example, I love ふぁんた時間: read aloud story time from public-domain sources.
One of the authors they read is MIYAZAWA Kenji (宮沢賢治). He's not well-known outside of Japan, but he was a fantasy and early science-fiction author and poet, naturalist, and professor of agricultural science, mostly writing for children to young adults in Japanese and Esperanto. If, like me, you're learning Japanese to broaden your literary horizons, his work (and pretty much everything ふぁんた時間 plays) is a great place to start.
http://fantajikan.tea-nifty.com/blog/
Put a few hours of that on a music player (plus music, other podcasts, newscasts, whatever you like), and just experience it. You only have 30 minutes a day for study, but you probably have a lot more time in which Japanese can be going on in the background. It's better to hear and ignore than to not hear at all.
Anyway, language acquisition is a marathon. You gain skill so slowly you don't notice the change from day to day. But, if you just fit it in whenever you can and do at least a little each day, I'm sure you'll end up surprising yourself.
Summary: Don't give up. The 100-kanji-a-day crowd, while sometimes inspiring can also be intimidating. Their way isn't the only way to study! Five a day is OK, especially if Pimsleur takes up almost all your time each day. Try ふぁんた時間, enjoy it as much as possible, even though you won't understand all or even very much of it. For now, don't worry too much about what to do next, but KO2001 or Kanjitown for kanji readings (tying RTK and Pimsleur together) strike me as the logical next step of structured learning, but I think it will probably better to strike out into real literature instead. 頑張ってね。
(And that was enough English for today. Back to Japanese!)
