I started studying Japanese towards the end of last year. Prior to that, I learned hiragana and katakana like a year or so before. In essence, it was kind of like starting on a blank slate. Anyway, my main goal is to be able to read Japanese comfortably. I don’t really care much for writing or speaking at the moment since it might come to me eventually anyway (or correct me if I’m wrong?)
I just made this post to share my reading progress so far because I’m surprised with how much I improved within a few months. For reference, I can comfortably read the passages on this site: [https://thejapanesepage.com/jlpt-n5-reading/](https://thejapanesepage.com/jlpt-n5-reading/) . It’s a bunch of N5 level texts. I remember trying to read these probably a month into learning and understanding only a couple of sentences. But now, I can read all of the passages in the N5 menu perfectly. By that I just mean that I can read them faster now and I can understand the entire thing without translating every bit into English in my head. I’m not sure if my progress is considered fast or just normal. But regardless, I’m quite proud of myself and it has motivated me to study more.
For my fellow beginners, I found the MoeWay Tango decks to be super helpful for reading and vocab. I finished the N5 deck within a month (I think?) and I’m currently going through the N4 deck. Additionally, before discovering Anki and those decks, I mostly studied vocab and kanji separately. Basically, I just memorized them. I was able to, more or less, memorize the N5 and N4 level lists of vocab and kanji (around 3k vocab and 300 kanji I believe) which probably helped a lot with getting through the decks faster.
As of now, along with the tango decks, I supplemented them with the Core 2k/6k deck (which I find quite fun to memorize) and some grammar from Game Gengo on YouTube since it’s the only grammar learning method I can stomach.
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by Sevi_Pie