The Now Habit: Language Acquisition as a Long-Term Project
Buttocks and Binary Fission
LiveStation
NHK High School/NHK高校講座
Kanji Pict-O-Graphix
KanjiPoster
Remembering the Kanji
Remembering the Kanji III
Remembering the Kana
All About Particles
Japanese In Mangaland
Japanese In Mangaland 2
Japanese In Mangaland 3
Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self-Study Course and Reference
Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics (Part 2)
Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics Vol 1
13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese
英語は絶対、勉強するな！２：不安が消える・疑問が打っ飛ぶ・マジでペラペラ
英語は絶対、勉強するな！：学校行かない・お金掛けない・だけどペラペラ
Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You
The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages FastThat’s right. Don’t learn a language. Any language. It can’t be done (except by John Travolta in that movie where he plays the angel — that’s Hollywood for you). So don’t try. Instead, do this:
1. Learn a letter/character
2. Repeat (1) until all basic characters are learnt. That’s 2000 in Japanese; 3000-4000 in Chinese.
3. Learn the meaning of a new word, (or, if necessary, learn a new character)
4. Learn the meaning of a phrase containing words from (3)
5. Repeat from (3)
It’s that simple. Everything else is decoration. Notice how “language” doesn’t crop up anywhere in there. This also hints at why you can become fluent in any language in such an apparently short time: because you can repeat steps (3) to (5) at a much higher speed than people who learn the same language as native speakers. I don’t know about you, but I never learned 50 new English words a day as a kid.
Totally agree. If I were starting Chinese over again from scratch I would have invested the six months of effort that it would have taken to learn the first 3000 or so characters and then started the task of proper learning. It would have saved me so much time compared to the piecemeal way I actually went about it.
I wonder about how fast we learned words as children. I think the key was that, except for spelling tests and the like, we didn’t learn words explicitly like we are when studying a foreign language. At first we probably encountered hundreds or even thousands of unknown words per day and through that exposure slowly caught on. It was probably slower than 50 per day (after all, as adults we have the benefit of having already worked out all the concepts behind the words we’re learning, whereas when we were children we had to do that, too), but I suspect it was pretty fast.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Great site, and mucho hilarioso! Thanks!
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
Learning the letters/characters first…wow, I never thought of that. I thought it was “learn the words first, and after 40 of so start learning sentences at the same time…and maybe, just maybe start learning the characters if you really really really really…..really want to.”
why learn the characters first?
Like or Dislike:
0 
1
Read the intro to RTK, here
Like or Dislike:
1 
0