“the best thing that has happened to language learners since Lorayne”

So my question is: do you reach a phase where you outgrow SRS? or should you keep with it and let the card volume naturally disperse over time?

1) a short concise clear steps kinda guide would be nice. I can follow the table of contents but the continuity isn’t really felt, I had to do a lot more reading just to get a better idea of what you were talking about. Though I love your humor and encouragement, it would be nice to see more bulletin type steps.

2)Explain how you’re getting from complete noob (no kanji/kana) to using kanji and kana and English, to kanji/kana no English in srs/dictionary/media. I either can’t find the articles explaining this better (specifically srs/dictionary), or it doesn’t exist .

3)Adding in voice and sounds to srs, you say to do this, just not exactly how. I’m resourceful and use Audacity so I’m fine, but more noobish people might need help here.

4) I’m poor. I don’t allow this to be my excuse and find all sorts of free and fun jp stuff out there, but maybe other’s in this boat (like younger kids and/or such) need help with how to find free things without it being scams. The way to immerse the environment without spending the G

5) Looking for things when you don’t know how. I often get more experienced JP speakers tell me to go search such and such up, but I don’t know what the JP current world usage for it is. I cannot type in google.jp “free online video games” or “home cooking recipes” because I don’t know how someone would say it, and short of annoying the Heck outta my friends continually for stuff like this, maybe there is something out there to help with this sort of thing. It seems this sorta beginner to middle ground step is a bit hard to cross. I know enough to know that I can find English equivalents, but not enough to use terminology/lingo that internet users use. I don’t even know if you’ve talked about this any either, but to me I love to be a web surfer (its my fun) but I don’t know how to “surf” in Japanese. XD

6)I know it isn’t your job, but maybe helping people with setting up your computer to allow asisan language packs (or mac’s way), inputing, changing the os (some don’t know how to even install a jp os much less read it), ect. Programs aren’t always set up for easiness to some people, and it’d be nice to get more information on some of this stuff you talk about with automation of desktop environment, ect.

That’s about all I can really think about for now. Honestly to me the hardest step of all is getting through heising. I do a lot of media and talking to friends as much as possible in jp, but to me the heising method is rather boring. is there something else out there to get kanji down with the heising method that doesn’t feel like teeth pulling at the same time? (and no the knuckles game isn’t exactly fun to me either lol)

Regardless what you do Kaz I love your site!

Joshua

If you could write some more about your reading method, that’d be good. Your description is good, but still too ambiguous to be any real help, if you get what I mean.

Example, you just finished RTK and you know no readings and only English meaning, yeah? So how would you pick up anything when you’re reading without a dictionary to give you the kanji’s reading? And how would that kanji make any sense in a sentence, as the sentence is the foundation of this method?

So yeah, any further clarifications you can give would be a big help!

Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZCidTXwMOE

Haha, I wish this were true. It happens quite a lot that when I try to chat in my native language (German), but just can’t find the right words and default to L2 (English) in the middle of the sentence. Over 10 years of doing everything of interest in English leave their mark. This has not yet happened to L3 (Japanese), but I’m kinda expecting it soon. It already affects my pronunciation, as my accent slowly, but surely turns into a Japanese one.

Anyway, I agree that it’s very distracting to mix languages at the same time. I can’t listen to an English podcast and do Japanese reps, for example, but アニメ on the side is fine.

@topic

The one thing that I wish someone told me (maybe only more often and louder) is the importance of constant fun. Understand why you are learning L2 in the first place and just do what you would do in it as if you were already fluent. I made the mistake of reading Japanese sites and watching shows out of a sense of duty, just because they were Japanese and not because I liked them. Nobody has to tell a WoW addict that he must reach level 70 asap and he better start grinding now, after all.

If you have to force yourself to do something, it’s most likely not worth the effort.

Are you insane? L1 is your fluent mother tongue. I hope you’d know when you speaking in your own native language as oppose to when you weren’t. It’s impossible for you to mix these up.

I know It may seem like an obvious matter, but some clarification on the idea of how one might best structure one’s learning around the minimum information principle. Say you want to learn the lyrics to a song (eg: 椎名林檎–ありあまる富) when you barely understand them. In that case, my initial response would be to find a few dictionary examples for each word I didn’t know, learn those, and then the entire phrase from the song.

However, it might be considered preferable to provide some spacing between the dictionary examples and the phrases from the song. Or you might even choose to only learn those lines from the song that contain a few new items at that time, deferring the rest until you have a better understanding.

Yours gratefully,

Cez.