What is your goal?  How does this book help you achieve that?  What could better help me achieve that?

Those are the things you need to ask yourself.

If your goal is to read manga, then you should start reading manga.  The easy ones are within your grasp if you know kana and anything at all about Japanese.

If your goal is to talk to people, you should be studying a few phrases that let you do so and then getting a Skype partner.  Preferably one who is pretty good at English and can help you along.  Later, you'll want to find one who is bad at English and will force you to use your Japanese to help them along.

If your goal is simply to learn Japanese, I'm afraid you've already lost the battle.  Learning for the sake of learning is the hardest, most useless thing imaginable.  You need to actually use your skills to cement them in.

The reason you can't learn those phrases is because they don't mean anything to you.  You aren't actually in the situation for them, and you can't (or don't) imagine yourself using them.  You're trying to rote-memorize things, and that is the worst possible way to learn.

There's no need to drop it completely.  I study for about 30-45 minutes a week.  The rest of the time,  I'm doing one of my many hobbies.  Sometimes that means reading manga in Japanese, or writing on Lang-8, or watching anime (with e-subs, still).  Sometimes.

Don't feel pressured to study hard-core.  Do what you feel you want to, and that's it.  My 30-45 minutes a week is spent on iKnow.jp learning vocab.  I don't study grammar except when I come across something I want to know, and then I look it up.  I'd hardly call it studying.  When I'm reading, I almost never use a dictionary and usually opt to remain ignorant of the word.  When I see a word after having studied it, though, I usually know it. 

Life's too big to worry about studying.  Just go have fun with the language and your mind will take care of the rest.

PkmnTrainerAbram wrote:

I don't want to just flat out quit learning.

Why?
Simply put, and probably you already know it, if you don't have enough motivation to learn the language, quit it... BUT there's one side to consider, that is, maybe there's something else in your life that burns your energy and leaves you short of patience to learn anything, think about it.

Edit:
@dtcamero Nice limk:P If only I could get my eyes on that quote in the end 6 months ago...
“There is no such thing as discipline. There is only love…You are the result of what you love most.”
Had to realize it recently the hard way!

Edit2 (I read you other posts):
Isn't there anything that you enjoy that can be at your level in Japanese? For example, Manga or games other than the ones you bought?
Maybe when you start doing something you enjoy and understand most of it, and you stumble upon something new, then you can look it in a dictionary or read about the use of that new particle, just to give you a better understanding of what you enjoy. Maybe at that point SRS becomes more enjoyable since it contains fun stuff.

Make sure to watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzUf3mMy … sz3LcVgCcI

Wishing you the best.

Last edited by undead_saif (2012 February 22, 3:09 pm)

I feel like I learned the most when I used Iknow myself, but I haven't used it in years. I heard you have to pay for it now?

Maybe I should go back to that instead of using Anki to SRS. I certianly don't need to drill everyday and it's already set in a format that makes it easy to hop on the computer and just goof off with it whenever like Facebook/etc.

Edit: I'll check that link out later undead saif. I really should get back to just having fun in this langage.

Thanks everyone for being flat out honest. I was thinking the same thing, but I felt I was just being lazy instead of realizing I was running myself into the ground. I just need to put this on the backburner and focus more other things in my life.

Last edited by PkmnTrainerAbram (2012 February 22, 3:22 pm)

the KOOHII rikaichan version can be configured to allow imports into Anki cards with the vocab and sentence which would help to get more phrases through exposure via reading more and importing it all in. idk if that helps anyone but eeh who knows =/

Do what you like to do the most, getting exposed to the language a lot will make you encounter words over and over, which is another way of memorizing words.

In that video, I liked how he got this idea across: Many ways (to learn a language) work, but the most effective one is the one you enjoy the most.

PkmnTrainerAbram wrote:

I don't watch TV or anime much aside from Hunter X Hunter and Pokemon every week now. I'm hardly into dramas, but I can get into stuff like CSI if it interests me. Any shows like that in Japanese? And don't say Detective Conan.

i think the language used in cop shows is generally more difficult than in other dramas, but there are planty of good ones if you're into that.

Here's some off the top of my head:
* BOSS
* Zettai Reido
* Bloody Monday
* Galileo
* Mr Brain
* Tokyo Dogs

also try Liar Game, just cos it's awesome. You might also like Kurosagi.

If you type these in google it should come up with a synopsis so you can work out if you're interested in any of these...

Falafel wrote:

Your name can't be more delicious

I feel I need to post again in this old thread after little more than a year from it. If this is against the rules I am sorry.

I made the choice myself that if I could not finish RTK this time I would simply drop Japanese from my life. At the time I was 29. I turned 30 about a month ago. I believe I started when I was 24-25 years old.

Turns out I finished it in little over 3 months and learned about 700 vocab words in little over a month. I don't even care about how many reviews I get right anymore, I just do what I can in 30 mins as fast as I can and that's that. I listen to Japanese when I can. I read when I can, speed reading even. I am currently not following a textbook as right now, I have more important dreams in my life to worry about. I only wish I didn't neglect my drawing so much doing the first 3 months time, but you live and learn. I just now watched Saint Seiya Warriors of the Last Holy Battle with no subs and pretty much got the gist of what was going on. Even if I couldn't understand all the vocab I knew where the words end and began. It's something.

I wish I had learned how to manage my time better in my mid 20s when I started. My mother got sick and passed and I had to give up some things, but even worse my attitude towards things at the time didn't help. Fretting over "failing at Japanese" didn't help. I felt like the past 2 years have been spent building up my ideal self after stumbling midway.

I dunno what the point of this post is but I have to get it out. While I don't regret taking up Japanese, and I feel that the last 4-5 years haven't been a total waste due to trying to get it back on track in the last two and getting goals done, I do feel that I haven't been living my late young adulthood the best way I could have. I'm mad at myself for that.

Sorry for the rant guys but I need to get this out. The past 2 years has been a huge wake up call and these weeks after my birthday have been filled with a sense of clarity of happiness and deep fear I haven't felt in quite some time since my last wake up call at 15.

Last edited by PkmnTrainerAbram (2013 July 31, 9:30 pm)

I'm sorry to hear about your mother.  That's certainly not going to help your study.

I feel like from a lot of your other posts, you compare yourself to others on this site too much, and that is detrimental to your progress.  Remember, most users here are in high school or university age.  Both you and I are a fair bit older.  So it's bound to take longer, things won't stick in your head as easily, and your brain isn't as plastic.  Like everything else people study, different people pick it up faster or slower than those around them.  For me, I've been studying Japanese since I was 11, but I'm still not close to passing even N2, whereas a friend of mine was N1 level (and passed it, iirc) after only about 4 years of study.

I think that if you have motivation that day to study on a particular day, you should make use of it, and if you find you don't have any motivation, give yourself a break, and don't beat yourself up over it.

For me, I decided that I won't worry too much about what my failure rate is for cards, because in the long run, they'll eventually stick, and Anki will take care of things for me.  Sometimes (at the moment I'm going through RTK2) I'll fail a card every day for a week, and I refuse to let it bother me, because eventually it'll go in.  When I'm done with RTK2, I don't know what I'll do, because manga and anime and video games do not interest me in the slightest, but I'll need native materials that I find engaging in order to continue my studies..

Good luck with your studies^^

My Response to first post is no. Just reading it out loud wont do much. Olyou have to listen a lot preferablely at least 50% comprehensible. Japanese has intonation so you're never gonna pick that up if you just limit it to your own speaking. If you don't know what intonation is or can't really notice or feel it that's fine... You will eventually start to feel it so long as you keep listening

Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2013 August 02, 6:12 pm)

As far as Phrase books go, how about look at a method that actually makes use of them, like Benny's FI3M/Talk From Day One.

I'm no expert, but in my personal experience, my listening has improved a lot just by turning off those subtitles (or switching on Japanese subs) and watching simple kids anime like Pretty Cure or Ginga e Kickoff daily. Learning to guess what you don't know is an important skill. If I hear a sentence and understand everything but one word, I'm likely to pause/repeat and pay closer attention. If it's a word in my giant Subs2SRS anime deck, I'll queue that word up for learning more in depth.

In many respects there is no right & true method, just what works for you. Discovering what works for you is the tricky part.