Hello, I am in high school and have been learning the language since primary school. Obviously I have been learning for awhile but I still can’t seem to make any progress, I haven’t stopped taking classes at school, using duolingo, and reading textbooks but nothing works. Should I cut my losses and give up? Please let me know how I can get better.
Edit: I should add that I have been doing stuff outside of class but it all leads to the same results
5 comments
So what’s your current skill? You ranted about your frustration, but to give you constructive advice going forward, you need to elaborate the textbooks you used, what material you can read, how many kanji you covered, etc.etc.
All of the things you listed are effectively beginner material, regardless of whatever level they might be labeled as. That‘s roughly the first 10% of learning the language: the other 90% comes from engaging with native material, ideally with Japanese subtitles. You use that material to learn new words and grammar every day until there‘s nothing left.
Choose listening material appropriate for your level and do your listening right. If you are making an effort to decode everything you hear bit by bit and comprehend plenty of full sentences, you will improve fast; but if you are letting minutes of dialogue pass you by while only understanding a word here and there and hoping it will just magically start to make sense one day, you‘ll never improve. That‘s what it all comes down to.
I just want to point out that it’s hard to give advice to you since a lot of learning success comes from being able to self study, but because you’re young you don’t have as much experience with that as many others do. Self studying isn’t just opening a grammar book and working through it, it’s being able to study without anyone telling you what you should be doing and when you should be doing it. How should you revise material? How fast should you be moving? Where do you get your information from? How do you search for new information? Personally I didn’t figure that all out until I was like … 21?
The basic advice is to work through Genki, review new words with an SRS like Anki or jpdb, and be ready to Google a lot and watch a lot of YouTube videos. That advice should work for 99% of people all the way until the lower intermediate level, including you. If it isn’t working, you need to work on your discipline. We all fundamentally learn in the same way, so if we can do it, you can do it.
But also, don’t overwhelm yourself with your studies. Play video games, get fit, have fun with your mates. You’ve got plenty of time before you need to be worrying about things like the best method to learn all of the jouyou kanji.
Check out https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/ and see if that’s a method you could follow.
If you’re learning but not remembering things, you should check out Spaced Repetition Systems. I’d recommend you find an anime movie (less vocab than a series) you like on jpdb.io and try to learn all the vocab in it. Depending on the anime and the number of cards you study a day (10-30 is a reasonable number, depending on the amount of time you have), you will be able to do that in somewhere between 3 weeks and 5 months. Once you’re done, watch the anime with Japanese subs, and see how much you understand. If there are significant portions you don’t, try to go through individual lines and figure them out, maybe with the help of English translation.
In the meantime, watch Cure Dolly videos to get a better grasp of grammar.
Here’s some [guidance & resources](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). Good luck.