I hate to sound like a fag and answer differently than you intended, but, 0.

The best way to learn Japanese is to just turn off the subs and start paying attention to what's being said. You'll find you'll be able to follow it much sooner than you thought.

It's fucking exhausting though paying hard attention to an episode for 24 minutes while trying to pick up what they're saying, just as a warning.

>>11540

This guy is sort of right, I guess. It's fairly easy to listen and understand Japanese. After a while, you're able to piece it together, though much of it is lost in context.

On the other hand, trying to learn Japanese language to read and write is fucking insane. Hope you're dedicated.

One thing I noticed is that so many sentences go unfinished.

It's like...

If you could speak like...

You will surely find it out...

You know, that's not really...

>>11556

Mostly because the JP you learn in class is almost always formal, and the JP you hear in anime is always informal/casual speak. Really big difference.

>>11540
I used to do this, but then when I began to legitimately study Japanese, I discovered that I was misunderstanding/misinterpreting a ton of things. Trying to learn from anime is just a bad idea all around.

It took me 3 years. I learned Kanji / kana first, then read LOTS of voiced VNs to learn onyomi / kunyomi. It was pretty painless, i learned about 20 Kanji /day until I finished the joyo Kanji, and whenever I encountered a new character I just looked it up.

>>11564
I think the main problem is that most subs out there localise and parts of the language, for it to make sense and change things up for their own interpretation.

Do you find Heisig’s RTK1 method helpful? For me, I find it more confusing than helpful and I seem to be relying more on rote memorization and repetition in my notebook. Would it not make more sense to learn the joyo Kanji by grade, rather than learn the Kanji sequentially as shown in RTK1?

How many hours do you study a day? I try to get 4 hours on weekdays and 12-15 on the weekends.

Here's how I do it:

I don't force myself to learn it. I went over Tae Kim, Genki I&II, Introduction to Intermediate Japanese and then I started playing games on Japanese and watching unsubbed anime. Spent a lot of time searching kanjis and mishearing stuff, but hey, I understand 90% of games/animes now, I need to look up stuff less and less.

Oh yeah, and I used to translate pictures on danbooru. That also helped some.

Oh, and reading raw manga. GL.

Post edited on 18th Nov 2011, 12:45pm

>>11572
I tried that, learning Jouyou by grade. Gave up on it because it really isn't functional for a foreigner adult learning a second (or third, fourth...) language.
Up until the 3rd grade there are some kanji mostly used for geographical features, a couple for some japanese plants and I think there was one for an old japanese measure of length. And I heard further on there are more of these and some kanji pratically only used in names. Some of those may come in handy some day, but they are completely non-essential for a beginner .
Tae Kim wrote an article on it during the 2008 revision of the list, I think it's still sort of up to date in terms of "Why the jouyou are crap for foreign students". http://www.guidetojapanese.org/blog/2008/08/14/the-new-joyo-kanj-and-why-we-shouldnt-give-a-damn/
Just to conclude. I've never touched RTK, but I don't think it could be worse than trying to follow the Jouyou alone.

Post edited on 18th Nov 2011, 1:30pm

>>11574
I had no idea the jouyou kanji list was so bad. I'm glad I learned the majority of them with Kanjidamage, given Schultz cut out a number of them and even went to the trouble of marking the ones he still left in by how commonly they're used with 1 to 5 stars.