I agree with you that novels are not easy, but for now I want to just read manga, play video games (mostly text heavy games like rpgs and visual novels), would that be enough to understand most of these media ?
I don't mind adding new words and sentences as I encounter them but I just thought that if I learn all these decks I'll have to spend a bit less time looking for sentences  on the net to add to my decks and more time enjoying playing and reading.

Oh, and I also wanted to add that Murakami kicks ass, an awesome author, I'm so jealous you actually read his novel in Japanese

Last edited by loverkanji (2012 April 12, 5:31 pm)

I've finished about 3500 words out of core6k. At this point I have enough vocab to be able to read very simple manga, but I still can't read most manga without lots of dictionary lookups. Maybe that kinda puts it into perspective a bit.

Core2k is probably good to get you started, and then actually pulling words from manga and stuff might be better than going with core6k, as it really has a lot of business related words and stuff.

俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない is written by Tsukasa Fushimi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_no_Im% … ake_ga_Nai). I think vix wasn't referring to any specific novel by Murakami.

Both of those strategies are fine strategies that have served me well. I think if you put every unfamiliar word you encounter into Anki you're probably memorizing a few rare or specialized words, but -- nothing wrong with that!

I don't think you need to concentrate on doing the core decks unless you know so few words that you end up getting really frustrated when you read.

If you read a lot of manga and video games or, well, anything besides newspapers and political/financial books and magazines, you're probably going to miss out on some of the political and business words that are included in Core 6K. I don't think that's a big deal; we're not in the bubble years anymore and unless you're planning on working for a Japanese corporation in the near future there's not much reason to make it a priority. Core 6K takes a lot of its word frequency data from newspapers so it's kind of slanted in that respect.

Last edited by Fillanzea (2012 April 12, 8:21 pm)

Ah. You have achieved enlightenment.

I've done JLPT 1kyuu, I've taken classes in Japanese universities with native students, I've read a couple dozen novels, and I still feel like it's never enough -- especially if my standard is that I'm able to understand everything. And I think part of getting good at Japanese is getting used to not understanding everything.

Core 6K may help, but so may reading easier stuff.

For easier stuff (most manga, most contemporary novels) I can read things with about 98% comprehension, but still much slower than a native speaker. With older novels and historical novels, and current events magazines that have more political/business vocabulary, I can still read with good global comprehension but with lots of individual words I don't know.

My listening comprehension sucks, but that's my own fault.

Oh, believe me, I've tried.

(I have some auditory processing issues even in English, so it may just be a little harder for me.)

How then did some people use the AJATT method like katz' and do it in only 18 to 24 months ? Because from what I get it's just impossible.

I have learned other languages this way too, I just wasn't aware that I am learning, all I did was having fun and without anyone explaining anything to me I began to understand the language and then one day there was this kind of a switch in my brain that suddenly I understood almost everything 100%, so I do know it works but with Japanese I am forcing myself to learn and that's where much of the pain comes.

I didn't have anki then, heck I didn't have a computer, all I did have are some magazines and a TV.

Last edited by loverkanji (2012 April 12, 10:16 pm)

I finished core6k and have learnt additionally about 4200 vocabularies I added with Rikai-chan up until now ever since January 2011. I cannot say I understand "almost everything" and what do you mean by understanding? Grasping single words, grammar and making sense of some sentences? Or understanding the whole plot line?

@Nagareboshi: It is greatly dependant on the type of anime you watch I think! Watch something like 'Arakawa under the Bridge' and you will be surprised how "bad" your Japanese is. The same counts for anime's that have a great amount of their own language like Naruto, Bleach or where there are longer dialogues (e.g. Detective Conan). I could understand 90% on the fly with the transcript, but not more. I hear occassional words, phrasings now, but that's about it. Anyway, just wondering how other users define their "understanding" or "not-understanding" when watching anime or shows. I guess the problem I face when watching/listening to native sources does not apply to such a great extent when I'm reading. I'm reading ノルウェイの森 by 村上春樹 right now and yeah, there are words (e.g. onomatopoeias, I do not give a damn about right now as I cannot remember them anyway lolz) I leave out and still get the sense and my reading speed increases the more I learn words with Anki (@Zorlee, you were absolutely right about that )

But there's a wide gap between "understanding a few words, guessing the rest" and "understanding everything."

I just started a book called カラフル　by 森絵都. I expected it to be fairly easy for me to read, and it is, but in the first two pages I found seven words I didn't know (although in some cases that's "I know what it means but I'm not totally sure how to read it"). Which is pretty typical for me even for an easy-ish book.

For most of those words, the context plus knowing the general meaning of the kanji was enough for me to know the meaning of the word. For the rest it was a really small detail with enough context around it that I could move on with a slightly fuzzy understanding. It still felt like enjoyable, quick reading, not guessing or decoding.

There's been research done that if you can understand 98% of what you read, then you can read with sufficient understanding and enjoyment, and learn new words from context. Think 98%, not 100%.

Last edited by Fillanzea (2012 April 13, 6:40 am)

Native speakers and people good at a language gain an ability to judge which words are important within a particular context. In a sci-fi novel you could probably ignore dysfunctional reality or some other jargony word because you understand that its not really important within the frame of things--its merely a flowery word that the author threw in to spice things up.

One other thing to keep in mind too is that a lot of L1 speakers may not actually "know" what a word means yet they know. That sounds a bit paradoxical, but a lot of big words in English for instance, if you were to quiz people on the street by reading them a passage and then asking them to paraphrase the meaning; they'd get it. But if you then go back and define some word like "antipathy" they might go "erm um...its like.." Yet they just paraphrased a passage where it was used. People know the meaning of words from context they hear them in and gain a "feeling" of the meaning of the word but not a dictionary definition of it. Probably the most frustrating part though is that it doesn't take a heck of a lot of repetition of a new word, for it to stick for an L1. Where as I'm sitting here doing 100's of reps on Japanese words to get just an inkling of it to stick...annoying.