As for the main question, I have no idea because I can’t remember haha But I would highly recommend RTK 1 (not 2 or (at the moment) 3). It seems counter-intuitive to not learn readings, but you can just do that some other way (I’m using TextFugu’s section for readings, but there are others). Doing RTK 1 has made *everything* I can think of about Japanese much much easier, but I guess it’s hard to see that until you have done at least a chunk of the book. You still have to learn to recognise and write kanji, right? You can’t just ignore it forever hehe. Have a look at Tofugu’s review of it (I’ve been over how good it is so many times with so many different people already haha I just can’t be bothered going in-depth any more :P). In a nutshell, RTK is a divide-and-conquer approach – learn one part of kanji first (meaning and writing (and thus “familiarity” and “recognition”), then learn the next part… next :P. Makes it easier if you break it down into chunks.

@Cassandra: Finished Ultimate Verbs and Nouns (#1), just over halfway through Adjectives. I’m getting through adjectives a lot faster because I’ve decided to do 2 new groups mostly every night (before, I’d have a few days wait in between, but with adjectives there seems to be a little bit more of them I know already so I can go faster).

Once I’ve finished adjectives… I guess there’s more kanji readings to learn through TextFugu and I’m gonna start a TextFugu Vocab deck where the question is the audio (already got Jap>Eng and Eng>Jap decks). I don’t see Koichi getting the new lessons up very quickly so thankfully there is other stuff for me to do :P

@Cassandra: ULTIMATE high-five! :D

That has nothing to do with you starting Season 3. Ultimate high-fives are just better than standard ones.
:3

I actually saw him comment once, yesterday. It was on someone’s intro thread.

I still don’t think you’ll make it all the way through, but I’ll wish you luck and leave you to it hehe :)
Also, proving me wrong should give you EXTRA drive to finish it :P

That thing about “97.315%” was just made up :P It did actually remind me of a stats table that I think Sheepy posted here not too long ago detailing number of words and/or number of kanji and… damn it, I can’t remember exactly what it contained but I think it was relevant to the discussion and I can’t find it XD Can’t even remember if it was on the old or new forum. Do you remember seeing that, Kaona? You read every post, right? :P

EDIT: God, I’m an idiot. It’s just on the second page of the old forum. A cursory glance and a search didn’t prove fruitful the first time, though. Here it is (it isn’t of much relevance to the topic after all :/): Interesting Stats

I KNEW the discussion would tail off into niceness and joy, just like last time XD It’s the sign of a nice, civil debate, methinks :D Not generally what you see in other parts of the internet.

• This reply was modified 13 years, 7 months ago by  MisterM2402 [Michael].

EDIT: Holy crap, I hadn’t realised how much I’d actually written till I clicked “Submit” XD

There’s the bare minimum, then there’s a stupidly large amount. Would you not rather use your time more productively by say, mastering the REST of the Japanese language or maybe a few other languages? Learn every word in the regular Japanese dictionaries before undertaking such a task? Is it really worth spending what could be years of your life learning a pointless myriad of characters just because you don’t want to spend a few seconds flicking (or clicking) through a dictionary to find the word(s) for “ulcerative colitis”? That’s what dictionaries are for.

Of course I’ve read of other areas of science; going to school for 13 years, it would kinda hard not to :P Of course you have to know what terms mean if you want to read through technical texts, but you don’t have to learn the characters for every technical term in existence just to read through one document. Would it not be more worthwhile to learn words as you study through the fields that utilise them? Maybe one day I’ll have an interest in stone masonry but there’s no point in me learning all the technical terms NOW, is there? It would just be useless information floating around in my head for the next 20 years until I crave to carve some stone :P

Of course some things “just interest me”; I wouldn’t be learning Japanese outside of classes on my own if there weren’t :D By all means, go ahead and study things you find interesting, but what I’m saying is that your task is a little too big and you could be using your time much more productively.

LOTS of knowledege IS useless (I think I’ve already said this; sorry that my post isn’t very coherent, I’m just not with it today :S): if you just casually support your local football team, do you really need to know the names and life stories of every player who has ever played the game since it was invented? Do you really need to know the technical names of every variety of rock if you have no interest in Geology? Do you need to learn how to be a Blacksmith if you have no interest in it? I think my point has been made there… sorry for rambling….

You don’t seem to know of the term “happy medium”: you can’t JUST have knowledge of everything in existence OR the bare minimum – there is a LOT of space in between.

I have a feeling you’ll give up your goal before you finish. At some point you’ll grow to hate Kanji and you’ll wish you’d spent your time on things that are actually worthwhile. I would bet money on you not learning 6000+ Kanji. Well-educated Japanese/Chinese natives only tend to know around 4000-5000 and they have a massive headstart on you.

• This reply was modified 13 years, 7 months ago by  MisterM2402 [Michael].

Sorry, I’m a bot.

*beepboopbeep*