If you were to start learning Japanese all over again, from scratch, would you do anything different? Or would you just repeat the same process that got you here?

7 comments

1. When i started, i disconnected myself (on purpose) from the language learning community as I didnt want anyone to influence my path… Meaning I read nothing about what people were doing to make it easier on themselves…and i never really study a language before…not in a fast paced way…

   There are only a couple of things i’d change….mainly just busuu (took a month of my life….that i will never get back) and the first app I used to learn kanji (which took almost 6 months progress….had to restart with another srs app) I feel like the rest I would not change…honestly turned out pretty ok for me I think🙂

2. Learn proper pronunciation. Learn how to produce the correct sounds in the Japanese language, don’t just substitute the closest sounds in your native language. Listen for short/long vowels and geminate consonants. It’s easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones. (One problem I’ve discovered about my listening skills is that if I don’t concentrate, I don’t hear long vowels and geminate consonants. I usually rely on context, but if there’s a word I don’t know, I have to repeat the audio to transcribe it.)

   Not everyone will be interested in pitch accent, but you decide to learn it eventually, a little time in the beginning will save a lot of effort in the long run. (I still occasionally find words that I’ve internalized the wrong accent for.)

3. mostly same

4. I completely ditched Kanji and wrote everything in hiragana.

   Man how stupid I was…

   Also, if I could turn back time I think I would take some sort of guideline like Genki. Now my knowledge is completely random

5. watch CureDolly sooner rather then later, a real eye opener to the language structure.

6. I researched my path before starting. If I had to do it again I would SRS grind faster and harder rather than trying intensive reading after doing the core 2K. Intensive reading may have made me more familiar with various words, but I retained little without SRSing them. This is what I would do if I had to do it again.

   1. Hiragana + Katakana
   2. RTK 1 + use Kanji Koohei website for SRS.
   3. JPDB to do SRS by Corpus Frequency until 5k words then switch to specific works you like
   4. Read and repeat step 3 until 10k+ words and beyond.
   5. Start listening and output.

   I am primarily a reader, but I’ve picked up listening skills fairly quick because I know quite literally 97%-99% of all the words being said so a late audio input and language output makes sense if you primarily want to consume written material. I began to enjoy reading manga at 6k words (few look ups) and at about 12k words stopped the dictionary except for harder novels but even that dropped significantly by the time I hit 15k words (depends on subject).

   I’ve been studying Japanese since late Sept/early October 2021 and I sucked at Japanese for about a year, but I got to familiarize myself with the language by reading dozens of manga before renewing my vocab grinds that took me out of the intermediate doldrums before I completely gave up Japanese. Time spent reading put into an insane SRS grind was well worth it… two months of RTK-level grinding completely has changed my Japanese ability. I strongly believe you should start reading post-5k vocab, not 2k. The more vocab you know the easier it becomes, so the longer you hold out the more you will be shocked at how easy things are to read.

7. DO MORE WRITING PRACTICE!

   I mean I still can start, but my writing ability is basically nonexistent lol