Like, if the options are not doing anything, or doing things in a cumbersome way, I think the second option is the obvious solution 🙂

Anyway, ブライアン, I think I’m going to take your suggestion of glaming up my stories. Due to laziness, I just go with the default stories. This is fine for now; I don’t necessarily enjoy doing my reps, though I don’t think it’s a chore either. But at the same time, I think the best way to overcome burnout is to prevent it. :p

I started reading at about kanji 300. The first book I read was the 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 light novel, I chose that book because I liked the anime version and even though I understood almost nothing, when I did recognize some kanji, I usually was able to situate myself in the story and was able to somewhat guess the meaning of the surrounding text.

Little by little I have completed the first 4 涼宮ハルヒ books.

Heisig can be boring if you let it. The trick is not to let it. Fill your stories with pop culture references and dirty jokes that would get you suspended in high school. Innuendo, violence, puns. There are a lot of ways to make it more interesting.

When it comes down to it, kanji are the basis of all Japanese — spoken and written. They’re also one of the few parts of the language that lends itself to systematic study. 20 a day for 3 and a half months and you’ll be *done*. There’s no way you’ll pick up kanji that quickly and completely through immersion.

Thanks for the reply

And I don’t go on most sites like Twitter or Facebook or any of that. I rarely use my Livejournal account, and when I do it’s to find doujinshi. I don’t even go on Youtube that often. If I want to watch something it’ll usually be an anime. In that case I’ll either download it or use the DVDs I have and set the language to Japanese with no subtitles (funi is awesome like that). The Japanese sites I do go on are either art sites are fanfic sites. Videogames are the best thing for me to do in Japanese I guess 😉

I already go to mostly Japanese websites. There’s just the odd one that isn’t I still go to. like deviantART, because if I didn’t go there everyday I’d have piles of messages everyday. I’ll go to more and more Japanese sites when I can understand more. I know the whole ‘point’ of AJATT is to go to them even when you know nothing, but I’m putting my own twist on it. I’m sure Khatz won’t strike me with lightening just because I’m trying to make it a little more fun for myself. After all, that’s the real point of AJATT.

If you’ve done Heisig, you’ve got no real reason *not* to read Japanese. Go to a site, open up your dictionary in another tab. Find a sentence you want to understand. Parse it, look it up, try to understand. Move on if you get bored or stop caring. Rinse and repeat. It’s slow going at first, but it’ll get quicker the more you do it.

Find a topic you care about. Got a favorite anime? Look it up on the JP Wikipedia. Are you a musician? Find a Japanese blogger who plays your instrument (I personally follow a few guitarists’ blogs.) Other ideas: go read a manga you read in English. Get a ニコニコ動画 account. Play through a visual novel. Follow random/famous Japanese people on Twitter.

(And for what it’s worth, you don’t have to completely abandon English; just get as close as possible.)

Also, I very much agree with 魔法少女☆かなたん’s (nice handle, btw) suggestion. For me, Facebook, last.fm, and Youtube were in Japanese from day one. (And I have, in fact, picked things up as a result of this.)

Providing a varying aural stimuli seems to counteract the constant stimuli of the tinnitus.

That is a txt of the Kanji in Heisig order, with stories! (Note that the stories aren’t the same as Heisig’s, but they serve the same purpose.)

I’m only 300 deep into RTK, so really, I’m in the same boat. So I think at this stage, time management is what you should be worrying about. Like, if you’re talking about Facebook and Perez Hilton, then just press alt-f4 (Mac: command-Q) and go from there. But if you’re talking about places that will directly benefit your Japanese study, then it’s okay, but keep your time there at a minimum.

If that’s the case, then I still think it’s a good idea to stay surrounded by Japanese whether it be text or audio. Even if you’re skeptical of it, you -will- pick things up as you go along. Besides, how do you ever expect to learn something if you’re not exposed to it, right?

Though, I do understand–it can get a little boring/tedious when you don’t understand much of what’s going on. In that case, I suggest watching a lot of fun shows, not just anime, but variety shows and dramas. They tend to be very entertaining and you’ll likely hear some words over and over again and learn them. The same goes with reading–if you keep coming across certain words or kanji, look them up.

If you use the Firefox browser, why don’t you try the Rikaichan add-on if you haven’t already? Very handy!

Sorry if that was a little long-winded. Good luck!

After reading through my post again, I realize that I sound a little combative in it. I don’t mean to be the parent saying, “You better take your medicine and you better like it!”

You’re right about kids. So copy their behavior. Avoid reading and go play a video game. The only difference between you and them is that even if they don’t consciously look at it, their surroundings are all in their target language. They may not care about reading, but the books in their house are all in their target language. When they do start reading, they have tons of material at their fingertips. And they’ve been exposed to it frequently already.

To be more succinct: don’t read. Play. Have fun. Just make sure it’s in Japanese. While you’re having fun, learn the kanji. Once you’ve got a large number of kanji under your belt, then try reading again.

They don’t. Studies of children’s language, especially in cases where their school and parents use different dialects, show that children overwhelmingly learn language from listening to their peers, not their schools or parents. There’s nothing like the shame of peer pressure to get kids to do something!

Or when reading an English Wikipedia page, take a look at the Japanese one for a few seconds, too. Just take a look. You don’t have to try to read the whole thing.

These are immediate attainable goals (and they’re fun, too, if you love Japanese language), better than jumping right into a big wall of text you can’t read and worrying about whether something is total immersion. You’ll get to complete immersion through the little things.

I just need to figure out a way to go through Heising’s book without inputting the stories into SRS seem like a hassle…