Going back to Japanese school

[Musa-Revived]

Hmm, I'm only "quarter"fluent. Man I gotta stop playing stuff and start hitting the books

[Skeletore has a boner]

Sept 4, 2008 20:34:11 GMT -5 kyouki said:

Have the books worked for you? If I could hear from someone (other than faceless Amazon reviewers) for whom the system worked it might be worth revisiting. Maybe I could jump in on the second kanji book since the first one was a little bit beneath my level.

I personally used his books and found them very helpful for myself and recommend them to all my students taking Japanese.

It took me about 9 months(ymmv, the author did it in even less time!) to study all 3 books but by the end I passed the JP Kanji fluency examine(which tests you from the entire pool of 2260 or whatever it is, even if only 700 are common). Which I think is pretty amazing considering most Japanese natives can barely do that after studying for *25* years.

As I said, like most things involving humans you can't apply it to everyone, but from a scientific perspective his approach is sound. Plus, in fairness I'm pretty sure at the start of the first book(least in the new edition) he addresses some of your concerns and plainly states that people who have already studied Kanji a lot in the "traditional" method will have trouble "unwiring" their brain from that method, since the way he stumbled upon it was by being ignorant of the traditional method.

So for most people I say least buy the first book and read the 15~ page introduction fully to make sure you have a solid grasp of the method, and worst that happens is you're out $20.

[Ascended Mermaid]

Same here, musa. Except I don't have even a quarter of that depth of understanding yet. I should hit the books, but I'm going to hold off until I get over this whole "the world is evil" thing I have going on.

[kyouki]

Sept 5, 2008 7:47:13 GMT -5 Skeletore has a boner said:

It took me about 9 months(ymmv, the author did it in even less time!) to study all 3 books but by the end I passed the JP Kanji fluency examine(which tests you from the entire pool of 2260 or whatever it is, even if only 700 are common). Which I think is pretty amazing considering most Japanese natives can barely do that after studying for *25* years.

Which test is this? Was it the Nihon Kanji Nouryaku Kentei test? If so that is really impressive! Which level is "fluent"? 2kyu?

[Skeletore has a boner]

It was the (more common for foreigners) JLPT. Level 4, which is equivalent give or take to the Kanji Kentei lvl2.

2000~ characters is considered "Fluent" in terms of ability to read the language, because it's about what the average college educated Japanese adult understands.

[Incog Neato]

Sigh. I have no will power. For a while there, I was subjecting myself to some conversational Japanese audio books as well as Rosetta Stone's annoying curriculum, but it's been several weeks since I did either. :P

I think I seriously need to be in a classroom setting and pay lots of money in order to stick with learning the language. =_=;

Ooh, I want to thank you guys for the suggestions on learning kanji. I just checked out samples of both Kenneth G Henshall's and James W. Heisig's books and they seem rather useful and informative!

Here are the links for all ye folks:

Henshall's A Guide to Remembering Japanese

Heisig's Remembering the Kanji (PDF -- you need Adobe Acrobat or some other app capable of displaying the format.)

[AllenSmithee]

lol I dropped outta Japanese school

Fell too hard behind. Just couldn't get them damned characters!