And it’s hard to admit… but I lost all I have learned. “Use it or lose it”. But meh; whatever. I knew that would happen. And once I achieve what I want to achieve, I will re-start, from scratch, from the very beginning, from 一, from あ. But the thing is that I already knew what lies ahead… so it’s kind of an advantage.

It’s like when you borrow a game from a friend, and you get to a cetain point of it, then you return the game to your friend, and he deletes your save file just so he can see your horror face… but once you buy that game for yourself, you know what lies ahead, so you can complete it faster and arrive to the point where you were initially, but in less time.

For me it’s kind of exciting re-starting something, so the process of re-reviewing 3030 kanji again doesn’t seem painful or unfair. It’s just what it is. Don’t use it… restart the game, dude. Then… keep playing, and play it the most that you can!

So yeah, my point is: If you have a long hiatus, restart. For some it’s exciting, for others might be painful… but that’s the only option you have.

Also, it’s my most searched/read article 😛 Probably need to do that more, right?

Secondly, I’ve been on a break too…I’ve been not liking Japanese. However, reading this article has really made me want to get back on it…so…yeah. I’m changing my XBawks stuff into Japanese. I’ll just play Blazblue in Japanese lol

But because I donated all my old English books to my old secondary school last year, have nothing but manga and Japanese personal development books in my room and my computer/ipod, etc, are all set to Japanese, I have still being taking it in. You can absorb Japanese even when you don’t want to. If you build the right environment it stops becoming a choice about whether or not you learn Japanese today.

Otherwise, I like to reignite my passion for Japanese by occasionally searching the net for ‘the 100 best Japanese films/comics/superheroes/computer games/comedians/blogs/podcasts Ever’. This kind of searching opens up huge areas of new fun material to splash around in.

A Japanese friend directed me to this legendary resource for free anime/films and tv kimamaniyoutube.blog78.fc2.com/

Last fm is a great lazy way to find new Japanese bands without too much effort. Just put in a band you know and the playlist will automatically skip around to similar Japanese bands. Awesome.

So what kind of advice to you give someone whose rock has fallen down? Push the rock up the hill. But why did they stop pushing in the first place? Does it even matter?

Heres to cool part:
By stepping away from the language and coming back and seeing where you left off, you really get a outside perspective of how much you’ve done. I don’t care if its 5 sentences or 3000, you get a new view on how much you’ve achieved.

It’s not something I’d recommend, but it also isn’t the end of the world. As people have said make it fun again, and don’t try and force it all back. Take your time, enjoy yourself. Also heres one tip of what I did if you have a SRS deck piled up and are afraid of it. First, ignore the number, you owe your computer nothing, you only have to do as many as you want (atleast for now). Second, if your like me this may help, set the time for the SRS sessions to something like 60 seconds and leave the program always running, and then when ever you’re waiting for a page to load, or commercials or just bored or willing SRS for those 60 second intervals. If you want to keep going, most programs let you. You’ll be surprised at a) how much more willing you are to SRS when you only have to do it for [reasonable amount of time here] and b) how quickly the deck seems to disappear even using this method.

Thats my 2 yen, good luck and have fun.

I am almost done with my reboot of RTK, and doing much better this second time around than my first. So why did I fail the first time? First when I started out I wanted to get over RTK as soon as possible, to get on with the real stuff. Doing this lead to a situation where my waking time ended up being split between work and doing RTK, until I finally grew sick of it.

Instead of being fixated on how many sentences I have to add each day, I should make sure that I keep the time spent on the SRS each down so that even if I skip a day or two, it won’t feel like a chore when I catch up. Which will actually give me time for the important stuff, listening and reading.

Before I got started in RTK again though, I had to overcome those, “Oh nooo I don’t know anything again I need to start from the beginning!!!” feelings I got. I had gotten over that one day by rereading one of my favorite comics which is in Japanese only and really wishing I knew what was being said. (It’s already funny without knowing what’s being said. It’s probably hilarious knowing!) The few characters I still remembered that I could pick out every once in a while as primitives really made me want to go back and restart from the beginning, so next time I could pick out just a few more at least! It really reminded me of why I wanted to learn to read and every step closer is a step closer to being able to read those comics, not to mention everything else!

I don’t know if any of this comment gave any advice which was helpful to you at all, but as long as you’re exposing yourself to Japanese (and not hating it!), you’re on the right track!

I remember the first time I wanted to learn Japanese because I wanted to live there. I HAD to do it because I was being too hardcore and destroying everything english but not replacing it at all. These bouts of feeling not too hardcore led to me going back to a certain English channel on youtube to relieve the stress. This seemed to continued for 2 years until I finally realized in a post Khatz write to destroy EVERYTHING in enlgish but I at least replaced it with Japanese things.

Now my reasoning for learning Japanese is like a child’s thinking. “I will learn Japanese just for the cartoons and video games” was my reasoning and it worked properly. I had never had to go back to the certain channel and it’s actually been fun. Like Khatz said begin with the basics. Repeat the basics because they will come back to you. Remember you don’t have to follow Khatz advice of Japanese at all. There’s no point arguing just DO it. Do it because it’s fun and remember why your doing it. If you can’t remember just do it because it’s there simple.

Now if only I could go back to my SRS deck. I’ve been lazy to start it but I believe I will start now instead of later because I could make it fun. I don’t know how work and play could be the same thing. For language it works but I don’t know about anything else. Do whatever you like hell you could even give this up altogether but just remember have fun. It’s going to be long and you’ll have to restart but it’s a GAME. A game where you can put as many tokens into because you’ll never run out. That kind of game.

First of all, excuse me for any mistakes in my english. I’m not a native speaker so when I write too much in english (as in japanese) it’s very easy for me to get excited and start making mistakes.

Khatz, I hope I can help you a bit with your burden through this comment.

This is ONLY to all the “smart, serious, perfectionistic people” out there who try to follow EVERY concrete advice from Khatz.
Hopefully this will also prevent people from becoming like that in the future, in particular, Amphy who is just starting (again). 🙂

If we all had the same lifestyle and “genes” (not necessarily talent-related ones if there’s any such a thing. I prefer to call it environment instead of genes) as Khatz does, then we could follow his advice to the most detailed of the details. But WE DON’T. Each person has his own life (environment), his own problems. Khatz’s advices apply as long as the problems have (mostly) the same properties (e.g: how to learn to write kanji and not forget them). This should be pretty obvious so I don’t really know why there’s such a group of people trying to do everything the Khatz (not AJATT) way.

I prefer high-level/general advices because they can be easily applied to a lot of (apparently) different situations. Of course, some concrete advices show better the real nature of the thing but they’ll never give the benefit of flexibility that the general advice gives. So let’s consult Khatz’s general and concrete advices with care looking at how they apply to our own specific problems rather than taking them as rules that a god up in the sky named Khatzumoto wrote. It would simply be unfair to consider Khatz to be a god or genius without scientific proof. 🙂

In much the same way I no longer consider Newton, Einstein, Wilhelm Steinitz and many other so-called geniuses to be really geniuses. It’s enough to look at their historical background and see that their environment simply CAUSED them to have great ideas. In short, everyone is a genius if that’s the word but I prefer not to use it as it’s not real. Don’t know what else to say so 以上。

Also, get the kanji poster, and hang it up where it’s in your peripheral vision at work. Just glancing at it for a couple seconds every now and then seems to be a big help. (Maybe it’s like micro-SRS’ing: instead of repeating things with depth every few days, it’s repeating things very shallowly but every few minutes. Or maybe not. Who knows. I’m not a neuroscientist, I’m just some random guy on the internet.) And train your coworkers to quiz you on it!

P.S., One of my favorite American TV shows, Law & Order, doesn’t appear to have ever been dubbed into Japanese (only subtitled), so if anybody knows who I have to bribe to make that happen, please let me know. 🙂

It’s funny – when I first decided to learn Japanese, I was actually thinking that I’d only learn the spoken language, since I assumed it would be impossible for me to learn that many “symbols”. Now I won’t settle for anything less full literacy 😉

So there – everyone sucks/is doubting themselves at first. Just don’t let that doubt get the best of you, and you’re good to go 🙂

2) Open up RTK to the index section. Now write out all of the primitives one by one. Do this for a week everyday in conjunction with SRSing them. (It doesn’t take long.)

3) Go get one movie you really liked in Japanese, grab some popcorn and let it wash over you. (Just don’t care if you understand anything or something.)

Why?
# Primitives are the basis of RTK. Recognizing and writing them means you can write all of the RTK Kanji.
# Get your sea legs back by doing some enjoyable listening.
# It’s going to take ages to re-remember your deck if you have a lot of items. Just delete and refresh.

Side note:
Thanks for the good article Khatz. I think that going back to basics is something I also need to take on as I’ve found myself stressing about not being good enough to talk yet. Your article really helped me and so thank you!

When I went back to Chinese after being away from it, I felt stupid. It was harder to read books, harder to understand the sitcoms I leave running all day (丑女无敌!), harder to read the more obtuse characters and idioms I had been SRSing. But I kept at it. I left a stopwatch running all day that I started and stopped whenever I listened to Chinese and every day I wrote down my time and tried to beat it. And after a while, mysteriously, it was all easy again. I just knew what they were saying, and I LOVED it again. How could I not keep learning when it’s *the* fun thing in my day? I read martial arts novels at my break (天龙八部), listen to stupid sitcoms with my tiny iPod and tiny timer (SportCount’s ring timer), and do my SRSs on Anki for iPhone. It’s all gadgets and goofy fun. Honestly, I don’t even care if I’m learning–I’m just enjoying.

But I’m totally learning.

I’m slowly starting to get back on track. I set up 20 minutes per day dedicated to just RTK and however many reviews I go through, that’s that for the day. The pile is getting smaller (very slowly) and I noticed it helped if I kept switching the order in which I review (i.e. shortest interval, longest interval, order due) in Anki. This gives it some variety and lets me make sure I push the old cards as far back as I can while still getting a chance to review the ones I learned more recently.

This is probably easier than going through RTK from scratch, because even though my retention rate dropped it’s still around 70% which is much better than what I expected.