I know hiragana and katakana but that’s it. I was wondering how stupid it would be to sit there with a dictionary and look up every single word to piece together what’s happening. I only want to learn to read so I’m not worried about my listening, speaking, or writing skills. I figured that I would eventually come to understand grammar and stuff with enough exposure to the language.
I did start wanikani but I don’t really know if learning a ton of stand alone kanji is helpful when I could be immersing myself in Japanese media. I also tried anki but I have never enjoyed flash cards.
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Interested in this, I think it would be pretty difficult because of Kanji and how the meanings change depending on context…
That’s basically what AJATT/Refold/Migaku Method is
You won’t be able to look up the words in a dictionary. Try to look up every word in a batman comic book for example. If you want to do this approach, I suggest you get both the english and japanese version. Even then, good luck.
You definitely want to study a bit of basic grammar (and have an idea of how kanji work even if you know very few) first.
Yes. Incredibly.
Languages, basically any language, is not just English with the words in a different order. The grammar of Japanese is fundamentally different to English, and going in blind will make things *very* slow.
Do you at least have a basic grasp on how particles work?
I think it might be frustrating, depending on the manga. There are often no spaces between words in written Japanese, so with no kanji knowledge whatsoever (or very little exposure), it might be difficult to determine where one word ends and the next one begins. It might also be rather tedious trying to actually look the words up.
That’s a very brute-force approach. It does work, but you won’t like the time-table. Anki-grinding the most common 1-2k words and reading through a grammar guide is a massive shortcut that I would NOT recommend skipping.
But if you also want to read raw manga for 30 minutes a day or whatever, you will learn a lot from that. That’s not stupid at all.
yes
immersion with zero comprehension is borderline useless
you can immerse as you go, but if you’re not training comprehension, it’s not going to magically click on it’s own with zero studying
Not exactly stupid, but incredibly boring.
You could try [this](https://youtu.be/dbnbSikg-Pk?list=PLNvL1DnM9hiweHR76rA8auoRUhv9oVs2R&t=5)?
You just waste a lot of time because you don’t even have the basic knowledge you need to start understanding how the system works
I’m in a similar boat. I’m a master of kana at this point, but i’m struggling on next steps. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to begin learning Kanji? I downloaded Benkyo, but don’t really understand how to go about learning Kanji. Each one has multiple readings and meanings.
I only have a (currently rusty) foundation so obviously I can’t speak to all the difficulties, but even just reading something where you **do** know all the pieces can be hard to understand when you’re starting out because the word order and grammar is **very** different to what it would be in English. It can take a *lot* of reframing and breaking things down to understand them and actually **stick**, which if you’re starting from nothing, you don’t really *have* the foundation to do that. You’d also likely run across colloquialisms that might not *be* in most dictionaries, or that don’t give you the full scope of meanings to *fully* understand.
Everything starts with what you hear.
Children can understand language without using a dictionary.
Yes, extremely. Because I did the exact same thing except I joined a japanese only kik group
It didn’t work very well for me. The problem was grammar, if you translate even very basic particle like から, you will see something like 7 definitions here:
[https://jisho.org/word/から](https://jisho.org/word/から)
From (time, place, numerical quantity), since, by, because, out of, through, after and so on. I simply got lost with it, like what I need to pick and how I should interpret the whole sentence. Vocabulary by itself usually is simple, like if you have something like 車, then it’s a car/vehicle and there is no much vagueness here, but a huge amount of grammar elements usually have at least several meanings, so if you don’t know how it works, you have to string something vague with something vague in attempt to find something that sounds reasonable. It’s possible, but slow and frustrating.
Yes.
If you have dedication and enough of a manga addiction, I believe it’s more than possible.
That’s exactly how I got to learn english
If your one and only goal is to read, it wouldn’t be a particularly bad idea to learn at least some of the basics (i.e., common kanji and foundational grammar) more conventionally. It’ll expedite the process of making it more “play” than “work.”