1. Is genki bad for self study? I saw that it’s best used in a classroom study but I don’t really plan to take a Japanese class anytime soon. Is it ok to use it in self study?
2. How often do you feel like you are truly making progress while learning? Daily? Weekly?
3. How long before you were comfortable playing any game and watching any anime without subs and looking up words every line?
2 comments
I’ve used Genki, and I’d probably prefer it outside of a classroom setting. I’d probably prefer it in a one on one/tutor setting if you get me.
For self study, I couldn’t make it work. The way things were explained to me, it didn’t make sense.
And the way vocab wasn’t taught in correlation to the kanji. It was just difficult for me to use. And the seperate teacher’s key, I hate that it’s seperate. It’s not something I recommend, I prefer other textbooks. But it all depends who’s using it, so it may work really well for you! Explore your options
If I studied everyday, or at the very least, 5 times a day, I felt like I made my most progress,
But it can easy to get learners block sometimes
1. You can supplement Genki with the TokiniAndy Youtube lessons to make it more accessible for self study. There are also lots of supplements available like online exercises, Anki decks, etc etc. If you are looking for an easier/slower alternative to Genki, more directly meant for self-study, I can recommend Japanese From Zero.
2. If you start from zero you can learn an important new thing every single day. Once you are 1-2 years in, your progress will feel **very** slow.
3. “Comfortable” is not very well defined, but the truth is that even easy native material requires you to know well over 10K words to read it without a lot of lookups. At a typical speed of learning 10-15 words/day this means 2-3 years. And even that might not feel exactly “comfortable”.