Fellow RTK and Anki User. I finished RTK around 16 months ago, and I have to tell you, It kicks ass. I can a Kanjiophile(I guess you could say). I hate when words that have kanji are written in Kana, sometimes to the point when my sentences might end up looking closer to chinese with some hiragana thrown in.

What I do is I listen to as much Japanese a day as possible (hours and hours) and read as much as possible. I always carry a book in my pocket (Most japanese books are around the size of a samsung galaxy 3)

If you have an android phone, there are tons of news apps etc which you can use for reading Japanese news (It isn't that bad, but requires a STRONG sense of Kanji. Most news will shove a bunch of Kanji together, so you need to make sure you know the meanings or else good luck)

Welcome along the train to Japanese fluency.

I currently have an RTK deck with all the 常用漢字 plus some more, and I have a deck with 5400 sentences currently. My understanding is essentially 90% for video games.

Another thing about video games, emulators are the way to go. Importing books alone costs around 15 dollars (in america), And game consoles and games sometimes take like 4 months for regular shipping, which is already around 80 dollars.

So yeah, Emulators. If you're like me and Don't like playing games hunched over a keyboard, I use my Wii with Homebrew channel. If you have a softmodded wii with Neogamma or whatever, you can torrent japanese wii games, use a program to move them to a USB2 harddrive, and it works wonderfully.

Books tend to cost 15 dollars a pop to ship to america, but if you are lucky(unlike me) you could have a Japanese book store in your area. Usually New York, California, Hawaii.

Movies and Anime, I just say torrent that stuff, you're gonna need A LOT of media. Unless, you have a Japanese store that sells used movies and stuff cheap on VHS or something. If you buy it all it could cost you on extreme levels.

For hearing, try to listen to it all the time when you are at home, and if not, try using headphones and phone/mp3 player. Of course music, but also I like to convert some TV shows to mp3s and listen to those.

Writing. Write a lot. A LOT. Write every Kanji rep you do (trust me on this one, it saves time later one), and especially write them after you finish RTK. I write a lot of compounds to help remember which Kanji is used.

I can answer your questions if you have any.

>>160
if you can make it to midtown Manhattan, there's a japanese book store called Book Off. They sell used books too

>>160

Ha, I'm the same man. I look at written Chinese now and yearn for that shit. Nothing but Kanji/Hanzi looks awesome as fuck. Get yee behind me kana!

A year or so ago when I was without internet, I requested someone send me a book and ended up with Japanese Demystified, by McGraw Hill.

It ended up being better than expected, and I've gotten a lot more out of it than I have from other books. I also liked how it shows kaji/kana for everything, while still having the romaji. It shows everything in both versions, unlike many beginner books I found that start you off with just romaji and throw kanji/kana at the end as an afterthought.

I've got a question which doesn't deserve its own thread, and it's kanji-related so I suppose this is as good a place as any:

When I've been using websites to learn some basic kanji I've experienced that - more often than not - the kanji I am supposed to learn is followed by hiragana or katakana characters, in order to form a meaningful word. My question is this; are these kanji used outside of those words? Am I to memorise the kanji as the sound which isn't expressed by the katakana/hiragana?
Example: 良い (ii) - good
Is "良" a usable character in other contexts as well, expressing the "i"-sound, or is it ONLY used to express this particular word?
Thanks in advance.

>>265
I'm pretty new to Japanese myself, so I might be a bit off track, but...

The root (given pronunciation not in kana) is what you should memorize, and the character will always conceptually mean the same thing. That said, kanji seem to often have multiple roots depending on suffixes and when in conjunction with other kanji. To use your example, 良 can also be pronounced よ (ex. 良し). A dictionary is your best friend for all these shenanigans.

>>266
This clarified things quite a bit - appreciate it!

A word of advice, which might seem obvious but made a huge difference for me: keep your anki cards as simple as possible. I'm not kidding, it makes the difference between mountains of piled up cards and flying through your reviews. So keep it retardedly simple, I have separate cards just for reading, or meaning, or recognition, and it's actually easier than trying to cram everything up in the same card.

Also, if you want materials maybe check up this monster pack:
http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/6672792/Japanese_Language_Learning_Pack

I got this... you want this guy to teach you.. and to yell / motivate you to learn this shit.
The torrent for all his youtube video is still on 4chan if you dig... or just look up: Namasenei's Japanese Course 2.72 gigs of goodness.