I have been trying to learn Japanese by myself after taking your class about a year ago. I have purchased Remembering the Kanji and it is truly a great system. I have already fully memorized the meaning of 250+ kanji after about 2 weeks of using his book. I also bought "My Japanese Coach" for the DS which is great for vocab review and word recognition. Now this is where my problem starts, after learning the meaning to all these kanji I've noticed that my vocab is greatly laking. I am learning the kanji at a much greater rate than the vocab. I don't know if this is a huge problem but it's been bothering me that I don't know the word in Japanese when I see the English word, and I looked ahead in the 2nd book for Remembering the Kanji and it seems like he assumes that you should know the words already. It feels like I'm going about this all the wrong way and I was looking for a little help with that.
On another note, I don't like how "My Japanese Coach" presents the particles or the conjugation of verbs. I think that is mostly from me taking Tony Sensei's class and his teaching methods of these things. If anyone has some good self-study methods that they think might help I would love to hear them.
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Hi all I am learning japanese language but it is difficuilt to learn. Tell me some tips for learning japanese language. From where should I start. Actually I found one website which is about japanese language shall I refer this.
I highly highly suggest Anki if possible, that's what made the ridiculous 32 words/day study track possible for me. That's really way too much, but I had a few months with nothing to do pre-departure and decided to go nuts.
If I had got started on all this self study earlier I probably would have chosen 10 - 20 new words per day (obtained from sources like articles, TV, movies, books, etc. Not at random.) and done so steadily for 2 years. I'll go for that next year to fill in my vocabulary gaps. Always keeping a big goal in mind (along with the little goals required to reach it) is a fantastic way to keep yourself on track. That's why I decided to read a novel and why this group of people at UGA has decided to do the same thing, I imagine. I'm currently finishing up a nerdy, bilingual and mildly ridiculous article that I was inspired to write from my experience with language learning outside of the walls of a creativity/commonsense/nativespeech-killing classroom. I've named it "If Language Learning Were an (MMO)RPG / もし語学学習が(MMO)RPGだとしたら."
Don't worry, self-study is only scary for the first little while. Once I got into a good groove last summer I couldn't imagine learning any other way.. and I didn't really have any support other than the pull of fluency that's keeping me going even now. (Turns out even if you can read a novel and understand 90%, you can still be seemingly far from fluency). It's good to find motivational content or other people doing the same thing. (the ridiculously motivated guy over at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/ is good for motivation. And even study methods (if you don't care to have a life). I took a lot of motivation from him and other sources and made my own slightly more life-allowing plan.) The biggest support for sure will come when the results start showing up. They just make you want to keep going so you can see more.
My productive study has been almost exclusively self study for the past year (I almost wrote 2 years just now because it's hard to imagine how much can happen in one year when you're busy) and, while I can't promise to have all the answers for self-study problems, I can tell you things from my experience that should be useful. I understand how you're feeling with the Heisig book in thinking "When am I ever going to learn the vocabulary associated with these?" but don't worry. Heisig certainly isn't a perfect system but if you finish it you will be thanking Heisig for the rest of your Japanese learning career.
The next part will be very very long (but hopefully helpful).. It's a post I made on a group made of people who are attempting to gain the skills required to read a Japanese novel in 1 year. (I think they're all 3rd year students however so I find that a little silly. Once you have the basics in a language the absolute best way to learn how to do something new in that language is to just get over the fear of being overwhelmed and DO IT!) It's the story of how I came to read Japanese novels and is basically a "how I self-studied Japanese" article. I also suggest simple online articles such as the ones at http://www.lifehacker.jp/ and http://www.gizmodo.jp/ if a novel is too big, frightening or simply unobtainable. My absolute biggest recommendation for language learners is, as Tony-sensei said in his response, to get started on native materials as soon as possible.
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I don't know if all of you know me, but I joined this group for moral support as I have already done something similar to what you're aiming to do. However, I'm no longer at UGA so I can't attend any of your meetings..
I will be attending Kobe University in Kobe, Japan for one year starting in October to polish the diamond I've been carefully cultivating as a lump of language-learning coal for the past year in my Japanese Self-Study.
I don't know what level of Japanese you all are currently at but, as a heartening thought, I began reading my first novel in Japanese in the winter break after having taken UGA's 2001 level Japanese. Upon returning from the break I enrolled in Japanese 3020 because the effect of a minor self-study plan (put into action the summer before taking 2001) had made class too easy. As another saddeningly heartening thought, that same study plan made classes so easy that 3020 required no effort. I call it a "minor self-study plan" (when in reality it was anything but minor) because all I did that summer were the basics. The basics, however, are incredibly important. I plugged Tae Kim's Grammar Guide (http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar) into Anki and committed it to memory and I rocketed through James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji 1" so that I would have no excuse not to learn Kanji with my vocabulary as I learned new words. (Turns out knowing Kanji is also absolutely vital for reading real Japanese. Who knew? :]) I also added a book called "All About Particles" by Naoko Chino to Anki and committed it to memory. I didn't stop to ask exactly what a grammar point meant or to study the points in depth as they came up in Tae Kim but rather added them to Anki along with example sentences and gradually got used to them as I saw them in my reading.
I firmly believe that you won't be able to get a satisfactory explanation of most grammar points (or even some words) but rather must see them in action and come to understand them on your own.
Upon starting my first novel, the Japanese vocabulary in my head was from Genki 1, Genki 2, and a small portion of the 3000 level textbook. A smaller yet portion of vocabulary came from my self-study the summer before as I plugged example sentences in for all of my grammar points. I say all of this not to say that you should copy me, but rather to show how little was actually in my head before I cracked the cover on a novel. And, to be completely honest, it was terrifying. There were 10 - 20 words every other page that I didn't know, grammar I'd hardly seen in action at all, and simply a very real Japanese way of saying things that I wasn't used to (having not yet read much "real" Japanese).
I began by defining unknown words immediately. I had to or I wouldn't have been able to understand a sentence of the novel, much less a page. I added words to Anki as I went and slowly committed things to memory. Picking out what you should add to Anki and what you shouldn't is almost an art-form to be honest.. but you gradually get used to it. (I ignored that advice sometimes. Why is 統合失調症 in my anki file..!?) Eventually I stopped immediately defining words and began just writing them down and looking things up only if missing one word's meaning derailed the meaning of the story. I would later add them to Anki. That Novel-inspired Anki file (supplemented with words from TV, Movies, News and etc.) now has ~3100 words and phrases. (Note: ADD EXAMPLE SENTENCES WITH YOUR WORDS. This is very important. You want to remember how that word is used even if you think you'll remember at the time. Using words in wrong ways is why people who haven't studied a language for long sound so silly. (The (http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/) Dictionary and Jisho.org's sentence page are handy for this.)
I've read 3 novels now (2 complete novels this summer, 1 year after I started my self-study) and just began my 4th (1Q84!). Simply by reading my reading ability has increased (this makes sense, I know, but it's scary and often avoided in favor of reading a textbook's toned-down phrases for carefully structured classes). I read faster, understand more, and sometimes go entire chapters only looking up 3 or 4 words.
I did a slightly extreme study track this summer (added 32 new words/phrases to my study file per day for 3 months) and will take a short break in September to let things solidify in my brain before I go to Japan. I now have a vocabulary of around 8000 words and have absolutely no fear of reading (modern) Japanese novels. (Older Japanese can even be scary to less-learned Japanese people, with all of its old phrases and words, but I do have a few older novels that I'll begin probably during the school year at Kobe).
Some days I feel like I know a lot, some days I'm keenly aware of how much is left to be learned, but I've read 3 novels in 1 year and I'm no genius so have no fear about whether or not this 1-year plan is possible- just stick to it!
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Learning kanji and vocabulary is kind of a chicken & egg problem. Learning vocabulary words is much easier if you know the kanji they use, but when you learn a kanji it is difficult to find words that 1) will be useful to you, and 2) only use other kanji that you already know.
One of the shortcomings of Heisig is that the order that the characters are introduced have no relation to how useful those characters are likely to be for vocabulary building, early grammar study, etc. Put somewhat mathematically, he assigns an equal importance weight to every character and so optimizes the order of introduction strictly according to how easy it is to learn a given character at some point. This can result in some funky things, like learning 曰 (not sun, it's that "one inside of a mouth" kanji) in the first lesson, despite the fact that knowing this kanji is pretty much worthless information for any beginner Japanese student. So kanji are introduced because they *can* be introduced, not because they *should* be introduced.
I keep making fitful starts at "re-doing Heisig" in a way that complements other studies like important grammar and vocabulary, but I'm so busy recently that it is hard to find the time.
In the meantime, I recommend that you not worry about it too much. If you're going to do Heisig (which I still think is a great system, despite its shortcomings), then you just need to bite the bullet and hammer through it as quickly as possible (your goal should be to get through Vols I & II in less than a year). Don't worry about learning to write the characters, just be able to recognize them. As you learn vocab from other sources, if you know the kanji for them (via Heisig) then go ahead and learn to associate the sounds, kanji, and meaning. Otherwise, just learn the word without worrying too much about the kanji for now.
After you finish Heisig and start learning Japanese by actually using it (reading web pages, manga, etc; writing with a learning partner via a site like LiveMocha.com, whatever) you will probably find that you go through a vocabulary explosion as you are suddenly able to associate new words with kanji that you already know).
I've seen My Japanese Coach, but have never used it. I'll let others suggest other methods. =)
After reading your reply it feels like I need to set a pace for myself while doing this self-study. 32 new words a day is for now a little much but 20-25 should be perfect and around 1 lesson of Heisig since I have about 8 hours a day to study Japanese (while I'm at work >_>). I really felt like I was just doing my study all wrong because I was so caught up in learning kanji I was almost completely neglecting vocab/grammar....Doing this by yourself can be a little frightening at times and I blame myself for not using excellent online learning communities like this one and many others.... Expect to see me a lot more active on here again.....
Also is there anywhere you can buy paper flash cards for kanji/vocab because I can't use a computer while I'm at work and thats where I get a vast majority of my studying done at and making the flash cards take a long time and my handwriting is poor even when writing English not to mention when I try to write the kanji....needless to say I throw away 1 out of 5 cards.