Although I have only started “studying” Japanese around 20 Days ago, I had wanted to learn the language for a while, and was fortunate to have already acquired Katakana and Hiragana through “osmosis”. Thus, leveraging this benefit and realizing the unavoidable challenge ahead of me, I decided to download Anki and jump straight into the Kanji. Since I currently have at least 7 Hours of Free Time that I can commit to Japanese, I figured that learning Japanese would be as simple as pressing Buttons in Anki for 7 Hours a Day until I “clocked” in the 2200+ required hours to become fluent in the language…
But I was wrong. I was so, very wrong.
Firstly, every Kanji seemingly has an unlimited number of different readings, and each reading has its own manifold of definitions. I know that words aren’t supposed to be learned in their totality like this, however Dictionaries alone have not been very good indicators of what readings/definitions are the most common, and while some words do have example sentences: Since I am basically at N-Nothing right now (Even if there was an N7, I would not make the cut), I obviously cannot profit from them.
Even still, I managed to create and nearly memorize close to 300 Kanji since I began, however, despite having spent the majority of my time inside of Anki, I still occasionally find myself forgetting some readings
Nonetheless, I was still managing to trudge along, and figured that since Anki Fatigue was beginning to manifest, that it would be a good time to stop adding Kanji Cards and focus on building my Grammar, Vocab, and Pitch Accent skills…
*Pitch Accent…*
I already knew that Japanese Words did not utilize stress like with English, however I was told that the pronunciation is always flat. Despite this, I was beginning to notice that the Audio Entries in the Dictionary didn’t sound particularly monotonous, and had heard murmurings about how some Native Japanese would become confused when a foreign speaker used the wrong pitch, so I decided to download a Pitch Accent resource…
Each word has its own Accent, and they aren’t always predictable… Sometimes, even the same exact word can “switch” the way its supposed to be pronounced depending on what follows (e.g. According to one Dictionary, “論” seemingly follows 頭高型, but “論文” is listed as having an upward pitch starting from ん, despite using the same Kanji).
I apologize if this post comes across as pretentious, since I’ve only been studying for a short while, but all of these factors together are very overwhelming. Despite dilligently studying all of those Kanji for over 2 Weeks, I feel as though all of my “progress”(?) up to this point has been meaningless, since I was not even pronouncing any of them correctly.
I do not want to quit, but I do want to cry; Despite my young age, I fear that my body would sooner return to dust before I even reach N5.
Bonus: I tried constructing a sentence, is it grammatically correct, and how can I improve it? 日本語を大好きけど漢字が楽しい無いと思う