I’ve been living in Japan for the past 6 months as an exchange student here in Japan, and have just under 4 months left. I’ve been off and on studying for the past 2-3 years or so, but VERY minimal and never had a plan of any sort (teaching myself hiragana and watching japanese vtubers for hours and HOURS on end with no subtitles was basically the extent of it) except for taking a beginner Japanese highschool course for about 3 hours a week, but the teacher was incredibly slow, so I ended up learned everything (by accident without even thinking about it…) by myself, before he even had the chance to teach it to us. So basically, haven’t really had a study plan before.
When I came to Japan, I started using anki again which I had tried using before but eventually gave up on, and I did about 10 new vocab words a day for a solid 2 months or so, but eventually gave up again and now i’m back to doing nothing…
In terms of my current level, its very all over the place. I can comfortably hold a (simple) conversation with my teachers, host parents, friends, ect. for hours (most i’ve done of non-stop talking is like 2 and a half or so but I didn’t struggle with that much), so i’m decent at speaking. When it comes to listening, I would say thats my strong suit. I’m pretty good at picking up new languages through listening alone and I can easily understand the majority of the Japanese I hear in my daily life, aside from the occasional, more specific or less common words. Luckily, I can practice all these things everyday since i’m constantly living with, going to school with, and being surrounded by Japanese people, so I can increase these skills without too much extra effort.
But the problem is with my other skills, aka things you can’t just learn through listening or talking alone. Basically, the things I want to start actually studying. I want to work on my reading skills, but my kanji knowledge isnt great (mind you, I can read basic stuff but not anywhere close enough to read manga without out furigana or anything) so I want to study that somehow. Also, I need to work on my writing. I don’t mean output/talking practice, I mean like physically writing out kanji/hiragana/katakana, so things like stroke order are also important to me. (please don’t reply to this with something like “you dont have to learn writing!” cause i know a lot of people on this sub seem to think its completely pointless, but it’s not. for me, at least)
TLDR: Never studied seriously before, living in Japan with Japanese host family and friends, need to improve writing, vocabulary, kanji, reading, stuff like that, but don’t know where to start because my level is kinda all over the place and i’m also a very logical person so just vaguely doing stuff doesn’t work for me, I need a strict and specific study plan or I won’t stick to it. Lots of free time cause no homework from my Japanese school and can basically just do whatever during class time as well.
Sorry for the long message, anyone got any tips? Resources or just general advice, anything is fine. I wanna use this opportunity to its fullest, and learn as much as I can, but i’m stupid and haven’t really studied much yet lmao. Thanks in advance.
3 comments
Since you’re in Japan, I’d think to look for resources meant for kids learning to write. Workbooks that have those four square boxes where they show how to space the characters and then practice it. The biggest part of learning the characters early on is repetition but once you get the hang of identifying and recognizing the parts of the character, speaking to kanji in particular, the better you’ll get at remembering without so much repetition.
Not sure I can give any advice, you are my complete opposite in terms of ability, but if your weakness is the written language then something like Heisig’s RTK would be probably useful because you should already know the readings and just need to be able to recognize and write them. RTK made learning Japanese a breeze for me, but it takes about 2-3 months to go through normally. You should have a huge advantage though.
If I were in Japan I’d rep mad vocabulary cards and then go out and talk to people