If I only stick to the "Renshuu Recommended" Schedule for lessons, is that going to be good enough to be able to survive in Japan alone with no food or water? Should I be doing other lessons on the side to go with it? I am trying to figure out a gameplan and stick to it. I am not looking to write best selling novels in Japanese but I would love to watch anime without subtitles or be able to read almost any sign in Japanese or understand conversations and give simple answers back. Thanks!
The Renshuu recommended schedules are mostly based on jlpt, which is not always necessary based on what is most common/useful. To learn basic Japanese the kanji and grammar schedules should be pretty good, but there is so much basic vocabulary in a language that you can learn 3000 and still come across a basic word you don't know, if you don't know about it already, you can go to the dictionary, find a word, and then add it to the studypad, or a list of your own. Lists don't work the same as schedules but you can study them whenever you want to review words you see around.
If you're looking to learn the most frequently used words maybe start with the Core 1000, someone made a community list with those. You can find more Core x000 lists by googling, as far as I understand they are all based on the x thousand most frequent words, but I think except for the first noone made complete community lists for those in renshuu yet. Then you could use a helper schedule to learn the kanji from those words
Anime often makes use of some fairly obscure vocabulary, for humor value or other reasons. You basically need to be able to follow any non-specialist conversation. I’d guess that means learning at least ten thousand words, maybe as many as fifty thousand, depending on how you count.
Reading signs requires mastery of grade-school kanji plus a few outliers, probably about 1000–1200 characters in all.
The recommended schedules are a good start, but if you are expecting them to give you full mastery of the language you are going to be disappointed.
If you think about surviving on Japan, maybe create your own study list with the words you knows you will need, but you dont see it on recommended list? For example, if you know you will be asking for a black tea, look for a specyfic word for it (if i remember corectly, on recommended lists is only green tea)
The survival level is a lot lower than people think. I got offered a job in Japan randomly, said yes without ever thinking about learning Japanese, was in my new job a month later. You can get by in Tokyo with no Japanese imo, but I live in a small town so hardly anymore speaks English.
I think, survival level, Renshuu recommended is perfectly fine in my anecdotal experience. I've been here a little over a year now, and I can get by but no where near conversion level, whixh is my goal! Anime without subtitles is also a goal of mine, but that is quite advanced imo.
They may not speak English, but every single person in that village received years of government mandated English instruction. That’s one reason why survival-level Japanese is a much less ambitious goal than understanding anime without subtitles.
