sureyoucanthisisperfectlyunderstandable
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Should I change the title of this thread to “Should we Use Capitalization or not”
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But as for capitalization not being useful at all… have you not ever wished that Japanese had some means of identifying proper nouns? Like, you’re reading an article and suddenly there’s a block of kanji you can’t read and it slows you down, and you realize it’s a name or a place or something, and it’s not important to be able to read it so much as to recognize that’s a name or place. In those cases, I wish there was something that identified it quicker as a proper noun. Obviously learning more proper nouns eventually solves the problem to some extent, but eh.
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NHK News Easy started colorizing proper nouns recently. I imagine that made a lot of people happy.
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It does make a difference, though. When speeding through a paragraph it really helps to parse when the sentences end, since the full stop is quite small. And lowercase text just looks bad typographically.
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I mean that’s fine and all. Just be aware that it may look very casual and informal, even childish for most people. Not the best when writing argumentative text.
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Boy did this thread take a while to go through. It sure started off as something and I thought it was going to devolve completely but thankfully it didn’t. Very well resolved to the people involved. I also learnt a few new things and resources.
Man there sure was a lot of cognitive dissonance.
About the comprehensible input thing. I’m going to end it right now with this. The truth is it’s not so polarised as “there’s comprehensible input and incomprehensible input, everything falls into one of those two categories”, most things are in fact partially comprehensible. Everything lies on a spectrum where 100% comprehension (comprehensible) is at one extreme while 0% comprehension (incomprehensible) is at the other, everything between that can be regarded as partially comprehensible and that’s where you want your input to lie. Doesn’t matter if it’s 5% or 95% comprehension as it beats the hell out of 0% (no holds to grab onto) and at 100% comprehension you don’t learn anything anyway (no gaps to fill, everything is understood).
The argument above in this thread lies in the definition of comprehensible input or incomprehensible input being mistaken as partially comprehensible input. Everyone was arguing about the same thing, they just didn’t clearly define what they were talking about and so others misinterpreted it and the debating began. I’m sure however, that everyone was really on the same side of the wall the whole time on comprehensible input, they just didn’t realise it.
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I didn’t have time to read through the entire thread and I’m not aware of what conclusions were made or where the conversation was headed.
However, I just wanted to affirm that the result of doing WaniKani is the ability to read ~97% (or more?) of texts you will encounter. WaniKani takes minimum ~1 year, which is fantastic.
Whether WaniKani is considered the most effective or least effective way to learn kanji, that doesn’t change the result which is, by working moderately and consistently, being able to successfully read japanese in 1 year.
There’s no doubt you will find learners who have achieved the same results using a different method in a shorter amount of time or with better retention, but it no doubt came at a cost of working harder and spending more hours studying kanji.
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In my opinion I think it just comes down to the person who is learning. I like to move at a much faster pace, which WK doesn’t really allow that too much. Doing RRTK to learn kanji I was able to finish learning 1000 meanings in 23 days, and I’m learning their readings through vocab. I’ve only learned around 300-400 vocab words so far, but when kanji comes up that I’ve already learned the reading to, I can start to already figure out what reading it uses based on the context and where it’s placed at in the sentence.
WK is a great learning source, but for the way I’m trying to learn Japanese I don’t think it would fit well in with my studies, which is why I decided to go a different route.
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I’m pretty sure this only refers to kanji and maybe vocabulary in text, because without seperate grammar studying a lot of texts will still be incomprehensible
That’s completely fine! Even though WaniKani doesn’t allow you to progress as fast as you want, I can’t imagine putting more time in kanji learning than WaniKani allows you to.
You have to remember that japanese is comprised of much more than kanji; there’s also grammar, listening comprehension, speaking, writing, kana-only vocabulary, reading comprehension, pitch accent and intonation, homonyms, vocabulary synonym nuances, grammar nuances etc.
I think if I dedicated more time in kanji, I would lack the skill in other arguably more important aspects of the language. Obviously these are only my thoughts, everyone is different and able to handle work in different ways 
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Yes that’s correct, that’s why I only wrote “read” and not “understand”. I would argue that grammar is much more important than kanji when it comes to reading comprehension.
You could know 10000+ vocabulary words, but they would be useless without grammar knowledge.
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This is really where MIA/AJATT as well as Dr. Krashen’s input hypothesis (and probably Noam Chomsky’s theories as well but I haven’t looked into his work in detail yet) deviate from traditional methods, since we don’t give care much about learning grammar apart from skimming through a beginner textbook.
Glad you’re still on here keeping us updated with your experience. What does your reading consist of so far? Is it example sentences? Stories?
I’ve finally looked into the Heisig books and they seem pretty wordy at the start–does it include a lot of writing?
I think my starting method (1st 700 until I had a kid and much less time) I used the Basic Kanji Books Then I used WK, WK drove me crazy and I dropped it until I could adapt it for myself…it’s going ok, but I still use all the methods from the basic kanji book.
Heisig does remind me of WK a little bit, with the large english descriptions of kanji, but I haven’t “done” it. It seems to break things down differently, and of course there’s no limit/stop on reviews. (WK limits can be really frustrating for people who are in a season of life where they can crush a lot of study hours.) There’s a lot of “english” to read, though, at least from the first few dozen pages I go to preview.
How is grammar coming along? Sorry if you already posted that. I know from immersion my vocab was great (as long as I had furigana, ha ha) and comprehension was decent, too. I’ve always been able to read 3rd, 4th grade books without much trouble (although when I do have trouble I’m totally lost!!)…BUT I just couldn’t make any sentences, it’s ok, I learned to try (and it made my friends laugh a lot). So I’m using bunpro and it’s been awesome.
It’d be really cool if you could join a book club so early in the game. That is great.
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LOL I didn’t understand that nuance but I promise I did read the words
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My weekly log link is somewhere here if you didn’t see it, but I’ll answer your questions here still since I don’t think I have them answered very well in my log quite yet.
As of now I don’t read too much becasue I’m a lot more focused on improving my listening, the reason being because I am horrible at listening. So, right now my only reading is coming from my vocab deck, which introduces one new vocab word in a sentence or two that I can already read. As a result, I’m learning kanji readings along with vocab. I’ll pick up reading more once I have a stronger vocab bank and my listening ability improves.
Joining a book club would be pretty cool, I’d love to do that, but right now in my studies I would need to wait because my focus is on other things at the moment.
An example of the reading I’m getting in is little sentences like this: 
and I do 20 new vocab words a day. I also just got introduced this sentence today, so it takes me about 5-10 seconds to read.
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Totally didn’t your log before, but it was easy to find by searching the words you used josh weekly log I will for sure keep up with checking it. Thanks for sharing it!
5-10 seconds for a sentence like in the first month is awesome! 
Hopefully a book club is in your future, but yeah, for now sounds like your focus is doing you good!
I wish you luck on your listening skills, it makes learning so easy: even years post-immersion those words that I knew by ear make vocab much easier.
I’ll bookmark your log. As I teach my son Japanese (and my husband catches up–He used to know a lot more than me) I’ve found WK doesn’t work for them at all right now, even with my adaptations/methods. 
But that’s why I love these forums: all the info/updates from different learners. I may try RTK with them 
Thanks for sharing your journey.
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Update
I finished RRTK in 23 days with a 97% retention rate. As reviews continued on my retention rated started to go down on the harder kanji. I did some messing around with the deck, redid the full deck, and I ended up completely restarting the deck. Keep in mind that me messing around with the deck didn’t take much time out of my studying, I knew all the kanji so I never spent more than 30 minutes on the deck after finishing it the first time. I’m now to the point where I know about 600-700 with almost 100% accuracy. I can review the first 400 cards in less than 20 minutes, and the rest (200-300 in about 20 minutes). As for the other ~300, I’m still relearning them (20 every 2-3 days since I wait until I get 100% accuracy on the last 20). However, as I relearn them they are sticking a lot more easily.
My conclusion after doing RRTK (the 1000 most common kanji) is that I do not recommend doing it. For someone like me, well go for it if you want. However, I spent a lot of time reviewing each kanji. I followed WK’s intervals and I spent close to 2 hours a day learning 30 new kanji. Maybe if I had learned less I would have kept my high retention rate. But ultimately, I think that RRTK is not an effective way to learn kanji.
That leaves me with this question: should I have continued with WK? My answer is… well, no. As much as I love WK, I think that the way I’m learning Japanese right now is the right way for me. You might ask how are you going to learn kanji then? My answer is basically to just learn the kanji while I learn the vocab. I have a solid base of 700 kanji (soon to be 1000), and I’ve learned a few kanji through my sentence decks. Since I’ll be using audio decks from now on this will make learning new kanji easier as well.
Anyways, that’s what I have to say about this. I’m somewhat content with my choice to do RRTK, but I don’t recommend doing it. However, I wouldn’t do it if I were me in the past knowing all of this now. Additionally, from the few people that I’ved talked to that have done RRTK have either quit mid-way through, or had horrible retention rates. If someone wants to go this route I think they’d be better off just learning the N5 vocab first, and then learning the kanji through the vocab’s kanji. Something like that.
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You…learned 1000 kanji in three weeks and actually know all of them? Not to discount your abilities, as rote memorization of 1000 characters in less than a month seems doable if you’re aggressive!
However, there is something to be said about long-term retention. If you are not continuously beating down those kanji at regular intervals, whether through SRS or more expansive language study, the characters will start to form a dense fog that’s hard to break down. Absorbing them is not a one-off experience; it’s a continuous battle to get towards second-nature comprehension and recall.
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