At the same time, I totally was on Kaz’s side when he said you don’t need a formal grammar. I learned English without any kind of formal grammar. And no, it’s not my native language. I just played video games and started reading and at some point I was just… well, there. I didn’t even speak English, yet I can speak it quite well these days. I’d consider myself to be at or above native level, even (Above native level meaning that I could probably write a novel in it if I set my mind to it. Well, I have written novels, but that was for NaNoWriMo, but I’d say I probably know the language well enough to produce something publishable, though I’d have to work at it more than I want to).

So I’d say everyone should just keep doing the things they like. I’ve found people who hug their copies of Minna No Nihongo. To me the book looks bulky and boring and I can’t imagine taking a course for two years to get through that one stupid book, but there you go, different strokes for different folks, ain’t it?

You want to learn Japanese, so you decide to immerse yourself. Now you have these manga and that copy of Japanese Harry Potter in front of you. And you really want to read them. You’re dying to read them. They’re awesome, you love them!

But you need to know Kanji to read them.

This doesn’t mean you don’t read them because it’s too hard. This means you *need* those Kanji, right now, or your life will be ruined because you can’t read those awesome things that are so fun that you’re just about to explode. Learning the Kanji is such a tiny price to pay that the small effort required to do it is pretty much negligible. Just get it done and then be happy forever with your googly-eyed manga people and your Japanese-speaking wizard high school students (Sometimes I still think J.K. Rowling is actually Japanese just because of that setting, the book freakin belongs there!)

Had I had the ‘skip boring things’ advice years ago, I think my Japanese would be a lot further along today.

If the stories are boring you to tears, you REALLY owe it to yourself to check this out.

Maybe try time boxing, where you do Kanji for like 3 minutes or however long you think you can take. Then take a break, which is up to you, maybe a 20min break, 1hr. The thing is, no need to rush, take it easy! Watch some japanese dramas, anime, read manga or just listen to music, podcasts^^

And then later, once you’re fluent at other points of Japanese, you can always go back to the Kanji and Heisig if you feel you need to. Some people will say you then have ‘bad habits’ or something, but I doubt it’ll be that hard to fix. Just learn the basics of proper stroke order at the beginning of your Japanese adventure and it should be fine. 🙂

of course, people HAVE learned Japanese to fluency without ever touching RtK or an SRS… though to be fair, everyone I know personally who has done that is either native to the kanjisphere, or has sloppy kanji skills 🙂 still I’m sure there are exceptions.

Just play with it… if your immersion environment is tight and you’re having fun in it, you’re pretty much on a collision course with success, but in my experience kanji will take orders of magnitude longer to learn through absorption. Learning them first means every time you see them afterwards will reinforce them, in some small way, in your memory. Makes learning them in their thousands very feasible and a lot easier than most people will have you believe.

I started timeboxing again lately, (on anki these days, I just set the review session time to two minutes) and I’m flying again… and enjoying it a whole lot.