If I want to listen to Japanese, great I rent a movie, buy a DVD, watch TV, listen to Internet radio or podcasts. If I want to practice reading, I grab a book, a manga, a newspaper, a website.

Now, I want a bunch of sentences with some commonly used vocab and some simple grammar, well surely I could go buy that somewhere? Perhaps there are some textbooks with attached CDs, or maybe an educational website with some spreadsheets or something.

Well there’re not any of those things. There is no commercial outlet to acquire them, so we have to get them ourselves. That’s why most of the forum topics revolve around getting sentences, making sentences, sharing sentences. Now we know we need them, and we plan to get them.

Tae Kim is an upstanding dude, and Khatz a fine fellow, but they are sounding like old fuddie duddies. ‘I ain’t used no srs in my day, I had to make do with stone flashcards and a chisel. No sentence collection can ever match my hand culled collection from Pokemon manga and Trick.’ Rubbish.

If they were learning now, I suspect they would use what’s available. I remember Tae Kim didn’t even like Heisig, I mean that’s his opinion, but it’s not a good one, is it? I mean it’s obvious now that Heisig is the way to go for most people.

I liken it to learning math. You should definitely know how to do it. And that means you have to do it yourself, with your own little brain. After a time, after you know it, then you can save some time and effort by using a calculator.

I agree that “merely” importing a sentence collection is probably a bad idea. However some of these “sentence collection teams” are merely sharing the drudgery of entering/keying the sentences from a context that they’re simultaneously immersing themselves in. It does sound tempting to join in the effort and lose the relatively non-productive time spent merely re-typing something.

OTOH, I don’t type enough Japanese now, and without knowing the reading of a sentence (say, from a novel) it’s a chore to type it in. I’m reading Harry Potter, and I use JWPce as a tool, to look up kanji, and the dictionary, and stuff. I’m quite a bit closer to having a sentence for the SRS (though I usually don’t capture the entire sentence, I’m just keying the word or two (to look up in the dictionary) or the kanji that I can’t read (and which has no furigana).

Just a thought…

Absolutely. The point was not really that he collected sentences, but that he collected them from the stuff he was immersing himself with.

I don’t know about everyone else, when a sentence I took from a textbook, manga, or where ever I tend to remember where I got it from and what I thought about when I first read it, and that seems to help my learning process. That’s why I don’t think it’s useful to import other people’s lists. You learn from building your content yourself.

To begin with, I hardly think that anybody’s using Heisig’s method properly. Heisig himself mentions that most (I take that to be above 70% at the very least) of the kanji are embedded into the mind after learning them just once. If that be so, why do people use an SRS for reviewing the kanji….and STILL forget over 10% of the daily quota?!?!? Heck, isn’t it just easier to get the names of your favourite manga characters and put them into your SRS?!?

Khatzumoto was really wise in NOT starting a forum. You see for yourself what the RTK forums have turned into (not meaning to criticize individuals of course, just the “sentence-kanji-srs” fad).

BTW, the number of “sentences” one’s SRS contains you nothing about your Japanese ability I believe. I have forgotten most of my kanji I learnt through Heisig (around 50% or so) since I gave up “SRSing” kanji within 1 month of completing the book. It amazes me that I can write words like 龍,燕、蛙、蓮、蜘蛛、蜥蜴 without ever having SRSed them (I never even learnt them using RTK). ポケモン and 魔法先生ネギま！ really rubbed off on me

Hearing a word being used on TV or reading a sentence in a manga that uses a grammatical pattern we’ve just learned is worth a dozen SRS revisions.

Like losing weight, I think people are drawn easily to shortcuts and “quick” methods. I can’t help but wonder how well it all works really.