Hello everybody, I would like your recommendations on my study plan for the next three months. I am a college student on vacation and I'm going to study in Japan starting the end of September.

Let's start with where I'm at now. I began studying Japanese in January 2009, with a Japanese Language program for Nintendo DS. I did that until July 2009. It got me some vocabulary, grammar and Kanji, but very basic. In August I found RTK by chance (thank god for that). Started RTK and completed at the end of November. Started KO2001 at the begin of December at a slow pace (circa 15 cards/day, including listening cards). In March I added Core 6000. One month ago I quit KO2001, because it took me a disproportionate amount of time and I already knew a whole lot (my passing rates of KO2001 were +97%, which is too high to be efficient imo). Picked up the pace with Core 6000 the last month and scheduled to finish it in 3 days. Furthermore I have a 'Japanese various' deck, a vocab deck where I add words which I find in the wild It contains about 1500 words or so.

Skills:
Speaking: Ok. I have been talking to a language exhange partner for the past 3 months. I am able to hold a conversation in Japanese, but that is only because my langauge partner is simply awesome: he waits patiently while I stumble over my words, he can understand my horrible grammar and he talks pretty slowly and easily himself.

Writing: Non-existent. I did RTK without writing a word down. Don't want to learn the skill, because it doesn't seem to me like I need it. Otherwise it doesn't have top priority.

Reading: Ok. I started reading a book and a manga. I can understand the gist of both, but I read very slowly. Reading is sort of easy, because you can take the time to understand it.

Listening: Horrible. Unlike most of the immersion people here, I am more of a  'first know the words, then try to understand it' kind of guy. It just seemed silly to try to immerse yourself in a language when you simply lack vocabulary. However I can sort of understand more why it is useful, because I'm now at a point where I know the words, but can't catch them in high-speed-speech.

Plan:
Vocab: I still lack vocab. When I read something or hear something, there's still a lot of words I don't know (seriously how many words do Japanese use!). My plan here is to take the Japanese CorePlus deck and study the JLPT words not in Core6000 (25 words/day). Is this useful? After that, just work my way through the Core Plus deck, excluding sole-RTK2 words, because they are simply there for knowing a reading and I want to be effective, not learn every reading there is (although I wanted that at first).

Grammar: Mine Dictionary of a ... Grammar at 25 sentences/day, but I think I just delete sentences which I know at first glance, otherwise I'm not learning much. I still want to do some grammar and this seems like an efficient way.

Listening: So here my plan is to use the pre-made Gokusen3 sub2srs deck. I already started a bit and found that I understand very little of sentences that are a bit longer than 5 words. Also there is still a lot of vocab that I don't know but ok. Disadvantage of this deck is that there is no English translation, so I don't really know if I understand correctly. Also there are people who lisp so much I doubt if a Japanese can understand them but oh well.
I also looked at audiobooks (in the audiobooks thread), which are better because they are clearly pronounced and sometimes there is a translation. I think I'm gonna focus on the audiobooks.
I also looked at Nuriko's awesome Podcast thread, but I could barely understand the one she marked as easy (nee nee kitte), which was a giant confidence booster :S

Anyway, apologies if I was too extensive. I thank anyone who had the patience to read through my story and I hope you can give me advice/recommendations/feedback.

Last edited by kame3 (2010 July 01, 4:03 am)