(blog pimpin’: franticfrenchmission.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-works-for-learning-another.html)

I’m Aron. I don’t have Hindi (yet), but there might be something for it in the future. I have some additional stuff in mind for the future that I’m pretty sure you’ll all love. Plus it might be free. We’ll see.

Aron

Thanks

To keep a short story short, my programs spend a few hours downloading webpages, delimiting them into sentences, and cross-referencing that aggregate with my sentence and kanji databases to produce a list that is sorted primarily by the number of new words and secondarily by the number of new kanji and it’s all presented in a nice html page so I can use RikaiChan. : )

Python is cool. C is cool. Japanese is cool. ; )

For instance, I have a friend who’s learning Japanese basically so he can read OnePiece (a comic about pirates). To him, learning the word 海賊 かいぞく [pirate] is probably more important than learning the word 経済 けいざい [economy], despite the latter being more common in Japanese, generally. The reason you should learn a word is not simply because it’s common, but because it is interesting to you. The reason you learn a sentence is not just because it is in Japanese, but because the content and meaning of the sentence is interesting.

One of the great things about AJATT and using native media as a primary study tool, imo, is the opportunity to discover Japanese for yourself, which gives the language intrinsic value and meaning to you. This opportunity cannot be engendered by a set of words and grammar structures spoon-fed to you out of context from a textbook or a teacher that merely is there to study “because it is Japanese.” In other words, the search for words and grammar that have meaning to you, parsing the wheat from the chaff, is an important part of learning how to read. Using and reading real Japanese is not only the end goal, it is also the means to achieving that goal.

In practice, though, the majority of the first several hundred words will be in high usage regardless of the media, and in fact using native media can quite difficult at the beginning of the sentence phase. (Or maybe I should say, it’s tough to find good media that is appropriate for beginners) I would guess that a resource such as this could be helpful for people in the under-500 ish sentence range, but I would encourage people to wean themselves off bland lists of words, sentences and characters (i’m lookin at you, Heisig) as early as possible and start learning to read things that are fun to you regardless of how unacademic or useless they might seem. (pokemon anyone?) Its about the journey not the destination!

In brief, I worry that people will use a book like this less as a reference and more as a “heisig for words” learning every one religiously until they reach the end. This may achieve some literacy, but at what cost? The cost of the fun that comes with engaging with native media.

fwiw,
Tommy

www.manythings.org/japanese/words/leeds/

Sorry, I’ll stop typing. I don’t know why but it just pieved me with all the negativity. Sometime negativity is very good.

If this book handled compounds, or contained example sentences, it would be more useful in the context of AJATT. It can still be used, as Branden pointed out upthread, but I don’t think that’s worth $30. Were I learning any other language this series covers (especially one without Roman script) it’d be quite useful though.