I am a complete beginner to learning Japanese and I decided to join and reach out for some help. Basically, I want to study Japanese because I love Japanese music, mostly Visual Kei and Math Rock bands. I listen to music daily and I’d love to be able to sing covers in Japanese as well as understand my favourite songs and interact with the scene (understand interviews and streams, talk and comment on my favourite artists’ social media, discover new artists, etc.).
I am already learning Hiragana, but I’d like to set some more specific goals right away that will get me to be able to do these things and have a clear game plan as well as track and organize my studying with a bullet journal. I realize my dreams are very broad and that’s what’s overwhelming me. I’d also like to know a way to incorporate my listening habits into my studying since I have these bands playing all the time. I figure I won’t be fluent any time soon but I’d like to have fun practicing while I consume content. Any advice and guidance is really appreciated!
4 comments
What are you using to study?
You can probably go by something like “go through 1 chapter a month.”
anki, it forces daily habit
For learning kanji, people usually recommend either WaniKani, Anki, and/or RTK style book. WK and Anki are good in that they’ll both give you a daily goal and habit – and can cover kanji + vocab. WK is free for the first 3 levels, and Anki is free for life – so give them a try and see what works for you.
Otherwise, since music is your thing, pick a song and learn the lyrics. You can paste the lyrics into something like https://nihongodera.com/tools/furigana-maker to get the furigana (kana spellings for the kanji) or just full hiragana. It also has a kanji analyzer, so you can learn/connect the kanji meanings
what’s worked for me was first nailing hiragana, learning katakana, then.starting Genki for grammar. You’ll be in a good spot of you can read hiragana and katakana