Trying to keep this short. Also hopefully not against the rules, I don’t think it’s covered in the wiki.
Context: I studied Japanese at university 16 years ago, but stopped due to dropping out of my course.
Flash forward to 2020, and a colleague was starting his own study via Wanikani. So I started with him.
He had to pause just over a year ago, but I kept on going, and added Bunpro to the list of things I was studying with.
Now, at L53 in Wanikani and with the end in sight, I’m absolutely losing the will.
Grammar is excruciatingly hard to learn “academically”, a fact I realised after spinning my wheels in upper N5 for a year. Tae Kim’s was too hard for me, so I reset and did Bunpro’s order. Then reset again and went back to the Tae Kim order.
Originally Wanikani was a competition between myself and the colleague, but he stalled out on kanji in the 30s on WK, so I’ve been going it alone for a year and 23 levels now. I don’t know what I’m studying for, now.
I think that to fix that, I need inspiration on materials to practice with.
I don’t watch anime. I don’t read manga. I don’t want to do either of those things.
Those are the most common recommendations for practice and immersion, and I just have 0 interest!
No real interest in Japanese TV or novels either.
I’ve got Todai on my phone, the colleague recommended it – I don’t look at it, I don’t really read the news (not normal news, anyway).
I play and work in video games, so I tried loading up [famitsu.com](https://famitsu.com) \- was quickly reminded that my katakana needs work, and also I’ll just reach for the Google Translate button rather than get stuck. It didn’t work.
He’s playing through Link’s Awakening in Japanese – I’d get frustrated by that, no thank you!
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I appreciate I’m asking for the impossible here:- diagnose my personality from one Reddit post and tell me what will work for me. But has anyone else been in this situation, or know someone who has?
On days like today (when I hit 54% success on 71 reviews and feel like I’ve forgotten everything) it’s especially obvious that I need to find the practice, or get used to trudging through treacle.
5 comments
You could try playing games in japanese
You listed things that you don’t enjoy, like anime and manga, but what _do_ you like? Skiing? Cars? Basket weaving?
I’d say look for things you’d want to read or watch regardless of what language they’re in, and look for them in Japanese. If social motivation is helpful for you, like the competition with your coworker, look for Japanese-based discussion groups on those topics. And if Google Translate is too big of a temptation for you, uninstall it.
It seems like you’re thinking of Japanese as some separate, other thing that you need to engage with differently than you’d engage with your native language. Just find stuff that would motivate you in your native tongue, and go from there.
You could read novels written in English and translated to Japanese like Harry Potter? If you don’t like manga, anime, Japanese TV, or Japanese Novels then why are you trying to learn Japanese anyway?
I took Japanese in college for 3 years and then forgot about it for 20 years so we’re on the same frequency
I just picked up materials starting from scratch and worked thru them. I found that I picked up most of what I learned 2 decades previous pretty quickly, like a couple weeks, and when I got to near the end of the material I had caught up with where I left off
At that point I just continued from there as if I had started a couple years previous, nothing special to speak of
Definitely do get involved with native materials as early as possible, so go read some Japanese Twitter and what not. But also don’t kill yourself trying to shove something unwieldy down your gullet just to consume things you like either… I read a full shosetsu probably a year early for where I was and it was a big forehead-brickwall process that I don’t recommend unless you’re a masochist of a learner like I can be
Take things in bite size chunks. Pick something around your level, read it (or a bite size piece of it like a page or a chapter), pick it apart for grammar and words you need to learn, study them a bit, maybe even read the same thing in english just to check your comprehension, then REread the native material to use what you studied. Consider iterating a few times on the same material but also don’t overdo it to try to be perfect. In the end, total consumed material counts for a lot so even if you only get 50% of something, 50% of a lot of new material is more learning than 100% of one piece of media over and over
Do some hobbies you normally do but include Japanese, i.e. download some recipes and bake in Japanese, play some games in Japanese, write some poetry in Japanese, etc. Try to flip your internal mental dialog to Japanese as much as possible
Hope some of these give you some ideas
> I don’t watch anime. I don’t read manga. I don’t want to do either of those things.
> No real interest in Japanese TV or novels either.
> He’s playing through Link’s Awakening in Japanese – I’d get frustrated by that, no thank you!
are you willing to do anything at all? if so, what? do that.