Ok so it's not much of an adventure.. but I'll pretend it is.
I don't have much reason for posting this other than boredom and the hope that by sharing what I've done/am doing I will be able to help anyone else with a desire to learn on their own by providing an example to rip apart and bend to their own schedule and will. Constructive criticism is cool too.
After a semester of Japanese I realized the class was moving slowly. After a year, I decided to make it my focus in and out of class as it's my major, part of my future work, and a huge goal.. and I've always been a sucker for a good challenge. So I tracked down a few learning resources and got to work.
As an unfortunate side effect it will make most language classes boring. I'm still ok with them, though, because it provides a nice base to ground myself in and see where I may be getting off track.
This is what I've done and where I'm headed:
1. [x] Genki 1 + Heisig's Remembering the Kana - Because the class made me do it! It did lay a great grammatical foundation for me to build on, though.
2. [x] "Remembering the Kanji 1" by James Heisig - I love this book. I love Kanji. I may or may not be addicted. Readings come fairly quickly if you're focusing on the language and as such I've decided to not go through the second book in favor of learning readings as I learn grammar and vocabulary.
3. [x] "All About Particles" by Naoko Chino -- A nice little handbook of particles. I figured with how important they are, having a learning resource for them would be a good idea. I did catch a few typos or errors, but that's a possibility with any book and I'm not too worried about it.
4. [x] Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar (www.guidetojapanese.org) - I love this site, and I just recently finished going through it all. I added the grammar rules along with their example sentences to Anki and it's working beautifully.
5. [ ] Genki 2 - I'm using it for class. Now that I'm finished with Tae Kim I suppose I'll go through adding all of Genki 2's vocabulary to Anki (on Tony-sensei's recommendation!) and pick up any common grammar points that fell through the cracks.
5.5 [ ] While going through Genki 2 and JLPT vocabulary lists I will continue to read and find examples of natural Japanese including the words and grammar I'm learning.
6. [ ] JLPT Vocabulary Lists - I plan to check out the JLPT vocabulary lists once I'm done with Genki's. Probably up to JLPT2 for now.
7. [ ] ??? I really don't know what I'll do at this point other than read a lot.. and then a lot more.. all the while trying to track down people to talk to in Japanese. Speaking ability is lagging terribly but I suppose knowing what I'm saying will help with that.
The biggest hurdle at this point is that, as in putting together a puzzle, even if you have all the pieces you don't necessarily know how they fit together. That will just take time and exposure, I imagine.
Anyway.. that's it! I think! ...for now!
------
Edit: Added point 5.5 :)
------
I did look for pre-made decks before but, after seeing them, decided it would probably be faster for me to input them myself because of wanting the Kanji attached to each word.. and probably some kind of OCD in which I can't bear using the way someone else has formatted their deck!
Also, I don't believe most existing Anki decks for Genki (I or II) have the chapter-end extra vocabulary or the extra vocabulary listed under the Kanji for each section. Gotta be thorough!
Hi, drdunlap. One of my previous students created a deck of cards containing all the vocabulary words from Genki. I still need to open it up and take a look at how it's tagged, but I'm pretty sure it will be usable. Are you sure there aren't any Anki decks out there that are keyed to Genki II? I haven't searched myself, but I'd be surprised if there aren't any already. You'll still need to do some modifications yourself, no doubt, but it should be a good starting point to save you a lot of time.
I've begun entering the Genki II vocabulary into Anki up to the class's current place (Chapter 15). It's somewhat mind-numbing to enter all of that at once so hopefully it becomes bearable now that I can take it one chapter at a time. All of the cards are tagged for the chapter they appear in and I'm writting in Kanji every word that has common Kanji. I'm also including the words and phrases from the short sections at the end of chapters as well as the extra vocab presented in the Kanji and Reading sections in the back.
I may or may not feel obligated to go back and do all of Genki I as well to catch those words in Kanji + the words from the chapter-end special sections and Kanji sections that I didn't necessarily learn. That will probably drive me crazy(er). I'm seeing about 100 cards per chapter in Genki 2 so I imagine the two books combined would make a total of ~2200.
If anyone wants these files when I'm done, though, (or as I work) I can probably set them up to be shared. I realize they may not be the most convinient things for sharing, though, because they're made with someone who's completed Heisig 1 in mind.
Try searching amazon.co.jp for the word 対訳. That will give you a list of books presented in both English and Japanese for language study. There are two collections of Hemingway's books there, as well as a bunch of others.
I would avoid the Shakespeare one... 笑
Oh, and if you don't have it, the Firefox plugin "Rikaichan" is an absolute must-have. Fantastic tool!
Ahh yes I'm scared of the impact that the crazier manga and anime could have on a person studying Japanese (like mee!) who takes away everything they hear (like not mee!). I don't watch/read much of it, though. I do think they can be good sources of vocabulary (and grammar, if one can separate what does and doesn't fit in normal life. But that's the hardest part..). I just posted a link as Reply to myself that I found which I'm somewhere between excited and suspicious about..
For reading now I'm mainly using a few blogs, news sites online and etc. which I can access easily and for free and are written by and for native Japanese speakers.
I think the best advice for the "how people say things" bit that I can give myself and anyone else is to just be constantly aware of just how differently everything is said. It's terrifying sometimes because I go to make a sentence only to realize I have no idea how to construct it in a logically Japanese way (I guess it's the same problem as when I read a sentence knowing all the parts and can't make sense of it). Being aware of it, though, makes me wary of constructing a sentence that sounds weird to Japanese native speakers. "Time consuming".. that's for sure!
That "Principles of Japanese Discourse" book looks interesting.. I may have to look into that!
Also, as for Hemingway's works in translation, where might I look for something like that..?
I'm not an Anime fanatic (which apparently makes me somewhat strange in this American Japanese study world) but I do like a few. One of those is Ghost in the Shell. It does involves robots and rough-tough-gruff-speaking characters so I'll have to be very careful in what I take away from this (mainly the oddest vocabulary I'll never need.. and perhaps some listening comprehension.) This anime does seem to be more reliable in its dialogue than many, though, considering the things they talk about and the long rants on government and ideals that it often gets into.
Anyway,. I found this:
http://gispki.myhome.cx/modules/bwiki/index.php?%B9%B6%B3%CC%B5%A1%C6%B0...
Which may or may not be the best thing ever made for people who like Ghost in the Shell and are studying Japanese.
The scripts from 2 movies and the episodes of both series written out, online, and free? Yes.. yes indeedy.
I'll probably not use it too heavily but it's a cool thing to have for when I can better pick out the odd from the ordinary.
Great post, drdunlap! Thank you for adding that! I think it sounds like you're doing a great job, and if you keep this up I promise that you'll end up fluent in Japanese (caveat: gotta' get to Japan ASAP, and try to stay for at least a couple of years) 
A few comments on individual items:
After a semester of Japanese I realized the class was moving slowly
Yes! For a dedicated learner, two years is way too long to take to learn the content of Genki I & II. If you were to just take the vocab & grammar content from those two books (removing the practice exercises, stereotyped cultural notes, and lame dialogs), there really wouldn't be a whole lot there. The fact that creating Japanese verb forms is so highly algorithmic, with few irregularities, is such a help... It's just ridiculous to think that learners shouldn't be learning, for example, the passive tense until after over a year (an entire year!) of study... Particles, too. Yeah, there's a fairly long list of them, but for most of them their use is very straightforward and can be learned literally in minutes. Agggh, don't get me started...
I really don't know what I'll do at this point other than read a lot
This is vital. I'm sure that I've written before about my love of manga as an excellent way of learning conversation. You do have to be careful in your selection, though—anything involving monsters, aliens, ninja, pirates, demons, or crime-fighting middle-school students is probably not a good choice. Try to find something that involves real people in real situations. There's lots out there, but they tend to not be the ones brought to the US for the general market.
Another approach that I had good results with was short stories written in translation. I did especially well using a translated collection of Hemingway's short stories. He has a very direct, no-nonsense writing style that lends itself to language learning. I got the stories in both Japanese and English, trying to stick with the Japanese as much as possible, but checking my comphrehension using the original English. Move to Japanese authors after you're pretty comfortable with most sentences that you come across.
I guess I'm just paranoid about making mistakes that I won't notice until they've etched themselves in my brain.
That's not paranoia, that's a good learning strategy. There's one problem with native speakers, though—if they understand what you're saying, they usually won't correct your mistakes. You have to be very clear that you want them to, because you will fall into bad habits that become very hard to break otherwise. The most important strategy is to focus on learning the speech patterns that you hear from them, not on being creative in making up new patterns yourself. When you do it yourself you're probably using your knowledge of English as a base, knowledge that probably doesn't carry over to Japanese.
I'm not in a position to say what the hardest thing to pick up in Japanese is...But if I had to pick something I'd say simply.. the way people actually say things.
Bingo! That is absolutely the hardest thing. Well, maybe not so much "hard" as "time consuming". Note that this is NOT a skill that you will learn from textbooks. (Possible limited exception: I've been wanting to read this book for a long time, but haven't found the time... Looks like it's in the UGA library, though.) This is exactly why I'm such a huge fan of studying conversation using manga—it's sitting there on the page for you to consider carefully, make notes, add to Anki, whatever. It's hard to do that with actual conversation. I think of manga as "study", and conversation as practice.
Anyway, thanks again for the post! I look forward to more comments and questions from other learners!
I practice by listening and picking out the new things I've learned, reading and picking out new things I've learned, and speaking with native speakers. I do produce my own sentences to practice but rarely without someone who knows what they're doing around to back me up. I guess I'm just paranoid about making mistakes that I won't notice until they've etched themselves in my brain. As for remembering the grammar/vocab/etc I rely heavily on Anki. I also don't really like translating things as I learn, even though I plan to be a translator sometime in the future. I just want to understand it in Japanese and then I figure I'll be able to come up with an English equivalent from that.
I'm not in a position to say what the hardest thing to pick up in Japanese is. :P I'm floating around in Intermediate land, after all. But if I had to pick something I'd say simply.. the way people actually say things. It's like the metaphor I desparately tried to use concerning the puzzle.. I have a lot of pieces now but knowing how to put them together is another problem entirely. You can know all the grammar and vocabulary in Japanese and still not know how to say things because it's a completely different thing from English... it has yet to stop baffling me to read a sentence knowing every part of it only to be unable to comprehend it as a whole.
Thank you for sharing this! I would love to dive right into the language but I'm kind of at a loss of where to begin so this is definitely a huge benefit for me. :)
How do you practice what you've learned, like the grammar or kanji? Do you create your own sample sentences or try translate different things or just use Anki? What would you say is the hardest thing to pick up in Japanese?
> probably some kind of OCD in which I can't bear using the way someone else has formatted their deck!
Scary how I so totally understand this... 笑