I’m not here to try and start a flame war. But honestly, if you want to be speaking and understanding real Japanese, then its a must to experience Native-created materials for Natives, as a Native would.

All I can say to help you in books, is to look at a whole section as a sentence and break it down. From what I’ve come to understand, Japanese is a minimalist language, and repeated words are 95% not said again, unless to convey an understanding or misunderstanding, just like in our language.

Basically in my many years of language study so far, everything I have done has been heavily visually biased, in part because it is the only productive thing since with audio I will just start day dreaming almost immediately. This has a really bad effect with all my languages my listening comprehension is wayyyyyy below my reading and really unreasonably low to the point of being embarrassing for the years I’ve put in. Thus, the fact that Pimsleur is the only thing I know of so good that it can actually ‘force’ someone as liable to daydream while hearing audio as me to actually pay attention for a full 30 mins makes it nothing short of amazing in my books.

I’ve seen smart.fm references in other posts, so thanks for the idea, but I don’t know if there would be any sentences of a level to be of any use in adding? Previously I was working on typing in sentences from the Kanji in Context books when I realized that if I know every word in any sentence in that book, I can 100% understand the sentence. Thus I consider the sentences worthless and quit that project. You see, the problem I am having is that while reading an actual book, I often know all the words or look up the missing ones but then still totally misunderstand the meaning when I look at a parallel translation to English to check my understanding. Sentences that stand in isolation seem to always be easy to understand just knowing the vocab, while ones in books are the ones that kill me. I’m not sure how to remedy this, if there is a specific way, except to keep working through books and comparing the translation until I’m making better guesses. I didn’t have this problem at all learning to read Chinese, so that’s partly why I’m baffled about it.

I recommend attacking both skills at the same time with the resources I mentioned above – Run through your reps at home with full sentences imported from smart.fm, and load all of the audio onto a CD and listen to it on the go in nothing but the target language.

Meanwhile when I was prepping for JLPT 2 I popped in 3,000 cards in Supermemo and used ~2 hours/day to chow those suckers down in 30 days 6 months in advance of the test. That’s 60 hours. Yeah — okay right there you could say at day 30 I was ahead of Pimsleur. Fast forward 6 months I was STILL doing 1 hour a day just maintenance, that’s like in the neighborhood of (2 hours/day the 2nd month too) 240 hours just to supposedly “keep” 3,000 crappy words in my brain.

Needless to say I got ticked off at some point and just quit the reps. I did Pimsleur German for a few lessons 4 years ago and it is still in my brain somewhere, but show me a medium-sized Supermemo collection I worked with just 30 hours 4 years ago and a lot of those suckers are permanently lost as if I’d never before seen them in my life.

So I think what I’m saying is that anyone who says Pimsleur is a large investment of time… is doing some weird calculations. Everything in language learning takes a lot of time, and doing 3 levels of Pimsleur (the most they have for any language) is really a trivial amount of time on the road to acquisition and hopeful fluency. Time used up, in my mind, is the LAST thing in the world to criticize it for.

グードー　タイムス　

：D