To be honest, I can't see anything particularly offensive about the way I worded that. I try to avoid offending people when it is costless to do so, but if the cost of not offending people is never offering an opinion, I guess I will go ahead and offend them. Honi soit qui mal y pense and all that. I'm much more interested in talking about how one can effectively learn Japanese than I am interested in being offended by comments in that vein.




I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, tbh. You laid out a study plan, and I offered an opinion about it. I should add that the study plan you laid out implied that your Japanese was not as good as mine (my issues with Japanese are not much about grammar these days.) I offered you some friendly advice. You are free to take it, or not take it. You're free to be offended by it too, I guess, but I'm not sure I'm obligated to care.



No, I haven't. I'm not sure why I would bother, tbh- I guess if I had passed the JLPT 1 I could wave that in your face now, but that's not enough incentive. I can read "souroubun" style Japanese, and, given enough time, I can even decode kanbun (assuming I do a lot of research into its subjects, but that is a given.) I'm mostly interested in getting better at that, and I'm not sure how taking the JLPT would help me there.



People might learn in different ways, to some extent, but I tend to get skeptical when I hear that phrase. I think there are certain ways of learning things that are generally better, for pretty much everyone. I'm inclined to argue for what I think those ways are. I understand that you might disagree with me, and argue back. I guess I don't understand why you would be offended. And, tbh, no matter what I say someone might be offended- unless I understand why they are offended, and agree that they are justified in being offended, I am not able to care much that they are offended.

As for the order of learning things, I also tend to follow the idea that grammar is more important. You can always drill more vocab, and it's easier to pick up vocab from watching things than it is grammar. As for learning desu/masu first, I think it's for the best. If you were going to be sent to the hyperbolic time chamber to learn japanese for a few years, then I would agree that learning direct style first makes more sense for obvious reasons. But if you were to do that in school, you would have two problems. First, the vast majority of people who stop after one or two semesters would never be able to use their too informal japanese. Second, even those who stuck with it would have to wait a while before actually being able to talk to a Japanese person without seeming too forward.

The textbook that I used at first in college was one called Japanese the Spoken Language. It's pretty controversial for several reasons. First of all, the entire thing is in romaji, and a weird form of it at that ( mount huzi, siturei simasu) The book expects that you will be taught reading/ writing elsewhere, which is what the teachers did. The idea is for beginning students not to be distracted by struggling to read the kana, and being able to focus all their energy on the grammar/vocab. The other thing about JSL was that it stressed grammar over vocab; there wouldn't be all that much new vocab for every chapter/ but there would be pages of new grammatical structures.

While this book garners as much disdain as it does praise, I was thankful to it for receiving a strong foundation in grammar and speaking ability. While my vocab was generally more limited, this was much easier to fix than fundamental problems in grammatical understanding would have been.

_________________
"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." -- Bruce Lee

First, about me...
I speak Japanese rather fluently (in the technical sense... i.e. smoothly with a good accent). I do not have an extremely wide vocabulary of technical words. I do not have a large Kanji vocabulary for reading. I get by with average day-to-day activities, but I cannot read most longer texts or articles.
In terms of learning languages, I really think it is important to define the purpose first. There are different ways to teach/learn depending on the purpose.
For example, most Japanese students learn English through wrote memorization and vocabulary and grammar training in texts. They rarely use the languages. This is because they are being trained to pass tests and to read texts in English. They are not being taught to communicate with foreigners through conversation. If you ever taught English in Japan, you know what I mean. When I was a teacher, we had to separate "beginners" from "true beginners" because almost all the students were "beginners" (knew vocab and grammar but couldn't create a sentence verbally). I had one MD who could read journal articles from the AMA, but could not get through customs at the airport.
I started learning Japanese in College. We used two techniques: one is through grammar and vocabulary memorization by a Ph.D. in Japanese linguistics 3 days a week, and 2 days a week we had situational-functional education provided by a Japanese native speaker. This was intended to balance the communication/fluency aspect with the technical grammar/vocab/kanji aspect.
In the end, after moving to Japan, I completely stopped studying on my own. This meant a huge increase in my communication fluency (because I had to speak every day), and a severe reduction in my ability to read and write.

Depending on your goals with Japanese, there are probably a variety of teachers and textbooks that will suit your needs.
IMHO

Here are some word frequency lists for different types of go-related texts. The "Game Commentaries" frequencies are probably the most useful.

There is a little bit of documentation here and if you want to play with the code it can be found here.

Gustav, the frequency lists are really cool. I may turn the more frequent words into Anki files (ankisrs.com), my favorite way to learn vocab and kanji.

I'm an intermediate Japanese student (have taken evening classes for a little over 6 years, 2 longish trips to Japan). For me, I need a class, so I recommend Japan-American Society or other classes (in DC, I took ILI classes for a long time; we used "Japanese for Busy People"). I used the online JOI classes at japonin.com to prepare for the N3 JLPT classes (failed, alas, but passed all parts, even listening), and liked them as a good chance to speak (all in Japanese, usually 2-3 people, sometimes just yourself for an individual lesson, good nice teachers). I'm terrible at conversation, but in my JASW and JOI classes, I was strangely enough one of the best readers, I think because of using Anki files a lot (a spaced repetition computer flashcard system).

Right now my goal is reading 10 Japanese books this year, but I changed from "real books" like Soseki's to anything, so I've read 7 Hikaru no Go mangas, and have started a tesuji problem book 「ポケット手筋２００」 put out by Nihon Kiin. I use the "Termes de Go" list of Jerome Hubert which I printed out. Hikaru is great fun, and is all furigana, so I just need to use my Canon Wordtank. The tesuji book really doesn't require reading at all, so I have 2 placemarks, for go and for Japanese, but to read the Japanese without furigana I need to use a Nintendo DS with dictionary software that recognizes written kanji. Good practice for writing, too.

I found excellent advice somewhere about learning Japanese, that when you are stuck, return to the things you love, and I'm really enjoying Hikaru and studying go, which I haven't looked at in 5 years or more.

Good luck, everyone, on learning Japanese!

Just one more thing: some nice basic Anki files are jlpt4, jlpt34, and jlpt2, which you can download by File->Download->Shared deck, and then searching for "jasw", which gives you the files I've uploaded, called that since most were for classes I've taken at the Japan-American Society of Washington. The 3 files mentioned aren't mine; several years ago they were standard intro files on Anki, but they seem to have disappeared. Jlpt2 isn't really that high, even the old jlpt2, but it was tough for me as a beginner! Set your "max failed cards" to 10, not 20! Heh.

Here's a link to an effective and fun approach to leqarning Japanese online: http://www.japanesepod101.com/