The price of higher education in the US is out of hand, no doubt, but I don't think self-study and the internet can substitute for that yet. A good university library buys specialized academic books -- this stuff isn't available on the internet, and it's not available in public libraries. A good university library subscribes to academic journals, for which subscriptions (paper or electronic) are insanely expensive. Besides -- every field is filled with infighting and crackpot theories and ridiculous controversies, and self-study on the internet means that you're going in there without anyone to help you sort out the ridiculousness, and you don't have someone to challenge your own wrong theories and weakly-formed ideas. (And you can't go right to the research and find things out for yourself if you can't pay the huge fees that it costs to access the research.)

Tuition is really expensive and I wish we had a better solution, but (with the exception of some highly motivated people, in fields where self-study is feasible) it's not self-study.

Evil_Dragon wrote:

What's a gimmicky learning method? Anyone care to elaborate?

In the case of learning Nipponese, such is trying to learn Nipponese outside a classroom. On the more narrow subject of Kanji, such would be trying to learn the reading other than straight memorization and trying to learn the symbols themselves other than constantly copying them. (Flashcards do not necessarily count as "gimmicky.")

Somehow this whole discussion seems like feeding the troll.

Why don't we call it a day and get back to learning Japanese in any way we see fit.

kazelee wrote:

Fillanzea wrote:

Tuition is really expensive and I wish we had a better solution, but (with the exception of some highly motivated people, in fields where self-study is feasible) it's not self-study.

Take a class with more than 50 students and you'll quickly realize how not true that is. You end up teaching yourself half the time and then being taught be a friend or tutor the other half.

My undergrad school was huge. I've taken some lecture classes with ~100+ people in them. But professors made themselves available for office hours, and you could go to smaller weekly seminars with the TAs, so no, I didn't have to teach myself. Except to the extent that doing the required reading is teaching yourself...

I've been to 3 different colleges, 1 rather good college, 1 community college, and 1 state institution. I think the whole system is crap and a way to leech money off of people. Why do I go then? Because in our screwed up system, a degree is practically required to get any kind of real job.

Loved paying my $50 graduation FEE too. WTF does that pay for?? I didn't even go to my school's ceremony because they don't hold one for summer semester, so I didn't have to pay for anything. The school just had to mail me my degree. It just annoys me because I know that $50 just goes straight into the school's pocket. I may sound hot-headed and vengeful towards the college system, but it really is completely out of hand. And tuition rates are STILL increasing almost every year. I had a conversation with my dad a few weeks ago where he was incredulous at the fact that one of his coworker's children had recently finished school. Despite the fact that he was able to get a good job, my dad couldn't believe that this poor kid was paying more per month on student loans than my dad pays on his damn MORTGAGE payment on the house.

You could be the smartest person in the world with the best experience and portfolio, but some newbie fresh out of college can still quite easily get the job just because he has that shiny degree. It's a ridiculous.

I can also say that many places are the same in terms of what education you'll get from professors. I went to Drexel for one year, and my local community college for the next 2, where I received my Associate's. What did I notice? That I got the same EXACT educational experience and quality, only it costed me $40,000 less per year.

I hesitate to try to respond to the general contempt for teachers and classes, but I do want to point out that issues with tuition or the college system doesn't mean the actual classes themselves are bad.

For the rest, there's nothing much to say about it because you can never argue against people claiming generalities by offering specific examples to the contrary.

I went to college as an aviation major for two years, then starting my third year there was a mix up with my financial aid arriving late and I was not able to start classes without it.  I got a high paying job anyways a month later and so didn't return but it took me ten years to pay my student loans off, and I didn't even get the degree!  My memories of college were of sitting through confusing lectures, then going to the library to teach myself until midnight or so.  I left with the feeling the whole process was for a piece of paper, not for an efficient way to learn.

I have a lot of the same complains with university level classes. All my classes in the US (silicon valley) felt like it was an English training school. It seemed like everybody in my classes were foreigners. Not that foreigners are bad, but the classes were a waste of time for the above reasons, but at least foreigners were getting a great education/experience (maybe not related to the classes though...)

That's what made me decide to become a foreign student in Japan! It's cheaper than our US schools too...

Um..btw, is there some kind of forum etiquette I should know when it comes to responding to an earlier post when the topic has since changed course?  It somehow feels kind of awkward.

Nah, pure ego - i didn't want to make an ass of myself. ;-)  Remember, I had to ask what the deal is with double posting and necroposting.

Yudantaiteki:  You mention a few different ideas earlier. Let me separate it into two.  Re RTK as supplement:

Thora wrote:

I suppose I don't see RTK as a separate system because we did it as a supplement during univ.

yudantaiteki wrote:

Heisig says in the intro to RTK 1 (italics are in the original):
"The reader will not have to finish more than a few lessons to realize that this
book was designed for self-learning. What may not be so apparent is that using
it to supplement the study of kanji in the classroom or to review for examinations
has an adverse influence on the learning process. The more you try to combine
the study of the written kanji through the method outlined in these pages with
traditional study of the kanji, the less good this book will do you. I know of no
exceptions."

I believe Mr Heisig is saying RTK shouldn't be done in the order and at the pace of traditional kanji learning. In other words, a teacher shouldn't assign an RTK kanji story and constituent primitives as each kanji is introduced in class. This would adversely affect the RTK learning process.  RTK's component based order is not the best order for learning readings/vocab. The idea is to complete this learning technique to facilitate subsequent vocabulary learning.

Similarly, (conversely?) I imagine he cautions against incorporating the readings into the RTK1 process. (Some here have experimented with learning one on-yomi with apparent success, though.)

By supplementing my classes, I meant doing RTK in the order and pace intended as a complement to regular kanji learning, not enmeshed into it. For example, a student could do RTK in their own time along with the regular curriculum (one term?). This isn’t limited to class takers, of course. Self-learners can combine RTK with whatever method(s) they choose.  They don’t have to create their own method.

People have been combining RTK with other methods for 20-30 years.  If the quoted Intro paragraph is ambiguous, it doesn’t seem to have caused major problems. :-)

(Beyond that, even here it's often recommended to completely finish RTK 1 before doing anything else, except maybe learning kana.)

Are you talking about the order of learning language skills (reading before speaking, for eg) or the idea of completing the full RTK before learning any readings? Again, the order of skill acquisition is beyond the scope of RTK.

In terms of reading skills, someone planning to do RTK should do it before embarking on an activity such as 2001KO or Kanji in Context. RTK is obviously still very worthwhile for those who can already read x hundred kanji though.

If your concern is the % of RTK, I think you already know my personal advice to beginners would be to first complete a useful subset of about 1400. Doing 2000 obviously won't do any harm, I just don't think it's necessary at the beginner stage. And some people with time constraints are keen to start learning to read!

Thora wrote:

Um..btw, is there some kind of forum etiquette I should know when it comes to responding to an earlier post when the topic has since changed course?  It somehow feels kind of awkward.

Thora, good question. You can use the quote button to quote an earlier post, however people sometimes quote huge posts so it's nice if you can edit out the irrelevant parts. personally sometimes I like to just type @personname: ... (as in "at person"), though I don't know if that's common but I've seen a few others here do it too.

Jarvik7 wrote:

hereticalrants wrote:

IceCream wrote:

sometimes i wonder if your ALL nest0r

Hah.  You can´t fool me!

You´re nest0r too!!!

No, I am Spart.. I mean nest0r.

I'm really confused now. Am I... nest0r?

IceCream wrote:

nest0r wrote:

Jarvik7 wrote:

No, I am Spart.. I mean nest0r.

I'm really confused now. Am I... nest0r?

i don't think that we think that your not the one that's not nest0r

What's sad is that I immediately understood this, and that the only thing that piques my peeves, as it were, is the your/you're. I think we've fully entered Bizarro World.