I’ve been on and off of practicing Japanese lately and I feel like I’ve been stuck for a while. I have a close friend who taught my how to read all of Hiragana since I didn’t know how to read anything that wasn’t Katakana until we met, and they advised me to find Japanese youtube videos to get used to how people speak and see if I can pick up on things. And they also introduced me to Jisho.
so far, I’m generally aware of how to conjugate verbs and what particles mean what. But when it comes to Kanji that I do not know, I’ve been handwriting them into google translate and getting what they sound like and then working them into my sentences.
However, I’ve been consistently hitting walls when trying to converse with this friend since they’re a native and a lot of what they say goes over my head and my responses are often delayed. I feel like I should either commit to only watching Japanese videos until I HAVE to learn or getting more resources and giving more time to it.
I got my start being interested in reading things outside of English, and I guess I’m something of an otaku. Is there any advice you guys got for me?
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When you say learning kanji, are you refering to learning each kanji separately by readings or are you learning them as part of vocabulary?
I personally only started to actually remember and process the language by doing the latter.
When I got to that point, I focused on drilling the vocab and grammar up to N3. By then the amount of grammar and vocab I had was enough to start reading easy manga and NHK News.
I honestly ignored dedicating time to Kanji since it was faster to progress in the other areas I mentioned. And then that progress made Kanji feel easier by the time I was ready.
Also that app HelloTalk helped a lot since I’m not huge on Japanese media, learning conversational Japanese came from there.