You should start to have fun with japanese. Give watching native material a try. There’s J-Drama, Movies and Anime with japanese subtitles.
You don’t have to understand a lot or anything. It’s getting used to the language and having fun with it. You may wanna avoid english subs for the purpose of learning, but it would still be better than nothing at all in this direction.

Here you shall find a lot of inspiration:

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/all-japanese-all-the-time-ajatt-how-to-learn-japanese-on-your-own-having-fun-and-to-fluency

Keep up reviewing and studying at your pace tho! Don’t get overwhelmed by the vast possibilities.

If you wanna learn the meaning and how to write all the relevant kanji (3020 currently, but only 2100 is required), I can only recommend remembering the kanji by james heisig.
PM me if you’re interested and I could tell you the differences to textfugus approach.

Yes, apparently there is no such feature available just yet.

What RTK does is taking the smallest possible elements that make up kanji, much like the radicals, and make “primitives” out of them. Primitives are similar but not the same as radicals. Depending on their position in a particular kanji they can take on different nuances of meaning. For example the kanji for month 月 can (when used as a primitive) be “flesh” or “part of the body”, depending on where it is positioned.

You then take apart a new kanji to be learned and create a story around it, which can be as small as a little pun. This story always contains all the primitives used in the kanji, which itself is given a meaning here called “keyword”, because this meaning is not always 100% what the kanji really is used for. This is due to having over 2000 kanji, and to keep every keyword unique.

These stories are as vivid and weird as it gets, so your brain will remember which primitives to assemble when seeing a particular keyword. If you see the kanji for near for example, you could use this story (or your own, or one of many others provided in the community which formed around this book) “The end is near. The *axe*-murderer is waiting for you on the *road*…” where *axe* and *road* are the two primitives making up the kanji for near. You will be able to perfectly write this out correctly without a second thought.

The only thing RTK doesn’t do is teaching any readings. You won’t learn on or kun yomi!

This is to be picked up later, when you learn vocabulary by learning whole sentences using a word with a kanji in it. You then learn how to read it in context, as doing this will be much more easier than ever before: All the kanji will be something for you. No scribbles, you know all the forms, plus a vague meaning.

RTK does only what it claims: Teaching the writing and meaning of some 2100 kanji characters (all the yoyo-kanji!). FInishing this book means you’ll never see an unfamiliar kanji within reason (newspaper, official texts; not necessarly fiction).

• This reply was modified 13 years, 5 months ago by  Revenant.

It took me about 2 months or so, but it depends how much time in the day you have (I’m unemployed XD).

Yes, all the emphasis is on drawing the characters. Memorising stroke order is no big deal – there are a few set rules like left->right then top->bottom, and Heisig walks you through all new stroke order patterns as you come to them. After a while, the stroke order rules become second nature. While there are obviously a few kanji with irregular stroke orders (which Heisig points out anyway), you should soon be able to guess a radical’s/primitive’s stroke order without actually looking it up :P

While I halted all my other studying to get it out of the way, it’s entirely up to you. It can get a little tedious after a while, but I was seeing the results appear so rapidly that I was pretty determined to keep going :) Also, Koichi was being/still is slow with lesson updates, so I had to do SOMETHING ;)

What I’m doing just now is learning the readings through TextFugu’s kanji section. They aren’t TOTALLY necessary, but can sometimes be handy in remembering vocab. Sometimes you can just pick up readings from seeing enough words that contain them. Basically, don’t worry about the readings – the benefits from learning how to recognise kanji outweigh not learning readings COMPLETELY haha Also, don’t bother with RTK 2 – it’s the one that deals with readings, but has had some pretty bad reviews.

Definitely get squared paper for practising kanji – I find squares a little bit bigger than English letters to be good, but you might wanna go bigger as you are just starting out. I started off slow, but by the end, I was doing 60 kanji most days. One time, I did 100 kanji/day for a couple of days but then the reviews became unbearable haha.

@Revenant: I’ve always been a little confused by the AJATT “sentence mining” method, even after reading his site haha. If there’s to be no proper grammar learning, how will you make any sense of the sentences? I think I’d like to get a little more intermediate on the grammar front before I use that method for getting new vocab.

The way he writes kinda puts me off his method a bit, whether it’s useful or not haha – it’s like he’s saying “if you don’t live and die for Japanese, you are worthless, will never learn *anything* and don’t deserve to be here”. A bit of an exaggeration, I guess, but he’s not that tolerant of people that aren’t as engrossed in the language as he is/was.

IT’S OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry Revenant, I just had to.