mezbup wrote:

http://news.tbs.co.jp/
Read it every day and Anki all the words you don't know. It's a brilliant site.

Here are some othe news sites I visit often:
asahi
nhk
fnn
tv-tokyo

Why enter vocab into an SRS though?  A year ago I was all gung ho about SRS as well but now I am convinced that watching and reading new sources every day is the way to go.  Especially with news clips, you get the 30 second video to go along with the transcripts for context.  It keeps you up to date with current events as well. Don't know a word? just scan it over with rikaichan and move on seamlessly.

right, I think using anki too much can be a mistake. If you're spending too much time in anki rather than in Japanese material, then it's not good imo

The seinen Berserk I'm reading is pulling out tons of non-常用漢字 and there's an unbelievable amount of archaic speech
of course it's still readable, but with a normal shounen manga I can go countless pages without looking a word up, but this one I got to keep a dictionary close

yeah, and learning all that jargon for everything is going to be hell

Interesting thing I noticed is that if you read one author's books, you will find that they use tons of the same vocabulary even if they're doing different stories. You can master an author's vocabulary, then you think you're a hot shot who doesn't need a dictionary anymore, but when you switch to a different author, bam, a whole new world of vocabulary lol

Last edited by raseru (2010 February 09, 11:22 pm)

Once you reach probably 2300 kanji, the battle for kanji is pretty much over. You will encounter more kanji but it will most likely have furigana and be very rare

I'd imagine Japanese who don't go to college probably don't even know 3000, and most of them don't go it looks like

あいつは木の葉隠れの里のうずまきナルトだ！

One can blow through RTK in a few weeks (as has done by a few members) so I see no reason in settling for a subset. Putting something "behind you", like RTK, is very motivating.

Evil_Dragon wrote:

bodhisamaya wrote:

あいつは木の葉隠れの里のうずまきナルトだ！

何言ってんだってばよ!!

He is Naruto Uzumaki, of the village hidden in the leaves!

Jarvik7 wrote:

One can blow through RTK in a few weeks (as has done by a few members) so I see no reason in settling for a subset.

I don't think most people can finish RTK in a few weeks.  In any case, "settling" for a subset implies that you will never learn the rest of the kanji, which is up to the learner.  The nice thing about RTK lite is that it lets the learner get some benefit from the Heisig approach without committing to the full book, and then afterwards, if the person decides that they really like RTK and want to do the rest of it, there's nothing stopping them from doing that.  Or they can decide that 1000 or so from Heisig is enough and that they can learn others that they need through reading or other approaches.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 February 10, 9:43 am)

A few weeks is lightening fast. Took me more than 6 months. It's a massive undertaking mentally. If I had to do it all again I'd do rtk lite. Easy enough to do the rest when it suits you or as you go.

Btw: I just started saving the video of every news article I read using forefoxs download helper plugin. It should rack up to a sgnificant amount in no time but the plan is to put em In a playlist and loop the crap out of it. I'll be pwning the news in no time.

haha, yea naruto does use kanji i haven't seen. But i'm already use to the vocabulary of that manga. Since it's related towards ninjas and all their techniques. It will definitely use some rare kanji you won't really see.

Another vote for an RTK Lite-type approach for some people. For the reasons mentioned. Learning the kanji vocab after RTK takes time. Not much point having to maintain RTK reviews for all the kanji many people won't even get to for a long time.  [edit: See Offshore's recent post.] Most people can't study many hours/day post RTK either. And with so many graded materials at the beginner level, people can get the satisfaction, confidence and reading fluency from reading much earlier without encountering many unknown kanji.

The folks we hear from are mostly RTK survivors. I suspect that AJATT's RTK first approach has turned off plenty of potential Japanese learners. There are many good reasons for deferring and/or segmenting RTK, imo.

iirc, Kanji in Context divides kanji after 1400 into areas of interest. Their idea is that you need around 1400 for a general foundation and much of the vocab after that will depend more or less on what topics you read about.

Last edited by Thora (2010 February 11, 12:03 pm)

Does anyone have that site that you can enter an link and it will display the readings for the kanji on any site? I kinda lost the link. Thanks in advance!