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I’m currently *on* my first trip to Japan, in Kyoto with my wife and a couple of friends for Christmas and New Year’s. It might be mid-January before I have all the pictures up on Flickr to my liking, though. I’ll try to remember to post a link here.
I was doing 10/day and it was taking me about an hour/day, between learning new words and then Anki reviews. I recently upped that to 20/day in an attempt to finish before I go to Kyoto in mid-December. I’m currently at 835, and learning new words and Anki take me around 2 hours/day now. I don’t have a lot of free time, though, and I tend to be slower overall than others on this board, so YMMV.
Afterwards, I was planning on (quickly) going back through the grammar of the old Textfugu Seasons 1-2 (new 1-4), and then finishing out the new seasons and going from there. I’d be open to other ideas, though, and will also check out the Core2k/6k decks.
I’m at 795 kanji in RTK. I want to do 20/day – and 25/day on Saturdays/Sundays – to finish RTK before I take my first trip to Japan in December.
I watched “Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon” earlier this year, for the first time each. My wife, a native Japanese speaker, didn’t seem to have any problem at all understanding the films. I’ve meant to watch “High and Low” for a while now. “The Eel”, “I Live in Fear”, and “Tampopo” are all good films. I found “Stray Dog” and “Ikiru” interesting, though a bit slow (yes, slower than the first half of Seven Samurai). In general, you shouldn’t have trouble watching anything from the post-war period. Note that I’m only 8 months into learning Japanese, and have spent the last 2-3 only on RTK, so I’m nowhere near fluent and was watching these films with English subtitles.
All of the verbs in the Season 2 lessons are also in the Ultimate Verbs deck, and there you can learn them in different forms, and/or as kanji, etc. It’s more a la carte. As far as why they’re not learned as kanji vocab, it’s probably because at that point in the lessons, you don’t have most of the kanji you’ll need to learn them. After getting through Season 2 (and the Ultimate Nouns and Adjectives decks), I’ve gone on a Textfugu hiatus while I’m taking a few months to get through RTK, but in my Textfugu review deck on Anki, I’m gradually adding back in the kanji-based flashcards for the vocabulary I already know. If you already know a lot of kanji, you could do the same thing – add the cards for the kanji you know, suspend them for those you don’t.
@OP
JFDI is the key. You basically have to choose to focus on something, and do it on a regular basis, to get really good at it. I’ve been running seriously for over a year now, and learning Japanese (Textfugu and RTK) since January. I do these two things virtually every day. I ran – 19 or 20 miles on a couple of days – on a business trip to Taiwan in January. I studied 10-15 kanji a day in RTK for the past 2 weeks while getting setup on a 3-month business trip in Sweden and going sightseeing on the weekends with my wife. There are many days where I don’t do much more than work, eat, sleep, run, and learn Japanese. But you only have so much time no matter what your schedule is, so if learning Japanese is a priority, you have to actually prioritize it over some other things in your life.
As an example: I started playing Go last November. I really enjoyed it, and I had a friend to play with regularly. But I started learning Japanese in January, and after a few weeks I found out that I really didn’t have time for both (and running). So… unfortunately Go had to go. But I’ll get back to it later.. when I can read strategy books in Japanese. Two birds with one stone, but each in its own good time.
I’m about 250 kanji into RTK, and am comfortably doing 10-15 a day while holding down a full-time job. I got through all of the 1-4 stroke kanji in Textfugu before getting RTK, but for the time being I’ve put Textfugu on hold and am concentrating on RTK (Anki reviews for Textfugu vocab etc are still ongoing, of course). I’ve found it useful to concentrate on one of them at a time, and I’m hoping that when I get back to Textfugu that I can use stuff like the kanji cards in the Ultimate decks (Season 3) that I was previously ignoring.
I haven’t had any issues with going from Textfugu kanji to RTK, though note that they have different meanings for many of the radicals/primitives. I suppose this could be confusing if you are continually using both methods, or are switching back and forth between them. I haven’t had any issues with my approach, though. I do plan, after finishing RTK, to continue with Textfugu, including the readings/vocab for the 5 and 6-stroke kanji. So I’ve found both to be useful, but would recommend concentrating on one at a time.
As long as we’re talking about compressing decks… there’s a lot of overlap between decks. The Ultimate Verbs/Nouns/Adjectives decks have some of the same words from their non-ultimate cousins; some words from the kanji decks appear in non-kanji decks as well, etc. I have Seasons 1/2 and Ultimate Nouns/Adjectives all in one giant deck (by the process Mister mentions), but it did take some doing to toss out all the repeats. It would be awesome to eventually have a deck that covers all of Seasons 1/2/3 with no repeats.
I’d say kanji, without knowing the exact form that the kanji workbook will take.
Thanks Thisiskyle – I was wondering this as well.
I tried to find podcasts from NHK, but couldn’t find much. This appears to have a variety of professional podcasts:
http://www.podcasts.jp/podcast-directory.html
A couple I tried appear to be able to be put on iTunes, so they’ll probably go on my iPod too. That’s at my office, though, so I can’t check it right now.
What Sumisuben said. I can learn kanji readings and vocab associated with kanji without problem, but learning vocab not associated with kanji got 10x easier when I started making my own mnemonics for each one.
That actually is about how long I’ve been a member, and I’m sort of in a rut now. Seasons 1/2 done, working on the Ultimate decks (nouns done, starting on adj.) and ordered RTK while I wait for Season 3, then go back through grammar. Definitely still feel like a beginner.
Either that, or you wave the bloody stump and start your speech with “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
Well, I didn’t mean that I was ogling the kanji or anything. But they’re everywhere of course, kind of hard to miss. It was a reminder of what I hadn’t been working on, for years.
Winter – the priority is to be able to speak to my wife, hence Japanese. I see her every day, trips to Taiwan will only be every 18 months. I also have two college friends who are in Japan, one permanently, one for a year, so I hear/read about their experiences, as well. Being able to recognize kanji while in Taiwan is really just a bonus, though being able to speak Japanese while on the trip might help at the airport and hotels (the hotels I stayed at both had staff who spoke Japanese, since they mostly have a foreign clientele).
My wife is very kind, correcting my pronunciation and answering questions I have about vocabulary or grammar, though half of the time I can’t understand the difference between my way of saying a word and hers. Hopefully I’ll improve with time.
