basically i started learning japanese during the pandemic, maybe late 2020-early 2021. it was all going well, i was becoming familiar with grammar and everything and i ended up learning all of the hiragana. however, i simply could not manage learning the hardest language in the world at that time because of these three big reasons:
1. had to take big exam at that time (didn’t study but i spent time doing nothing and stressing you know)
2. i was *incredibly* disorganized in pretty much every aspect of my life
3. i was discouraged because of some unsupportive native speaker who was close to me at that time and being put down by a native speaker in whichever language you’re learning is a *really* devastating blow
and for these three reasons and some other factors, my learning did not move forward too much from learning hiragana and some attempts at learning some vocabulary without flashcards or SRS or anything so naturally, i forgot it all
and in february this year after so much time of literally no progress i decided that i could have literally been fluent have i studied properly, which was actually the goal that i had! so this is why i consider it a failure
and then i downloaded duolingo and i *used* the shit out of it. and after a while i started even more serious and i began using plenty of resources, such as wanikani, kanjigarden (my favourite so far), kanji teacher, japanesepod101 videos on youtube, tae kim’s apps etc. basically i tried every single resource that i could find that has a significant amount of material to actually get you somewhere should u use it properly.
and that kind of worked pretty well. i know around 50 kanji now, all of the kana and maybe around 100 vocab words? rough estimation.
basically like that other post said its alright to fail. it’s literally a big deal to learn japanese, and just the fact that you want to try is so admirable. in some places expressions like “(i don’t understand), this is like (language)” and the most commonly used in this expression are either chinese, japanese or korean so if you are willing to learn a language so hard that there’s expressions about it that’s a very good start lol
5 comments
That’s cool , but I think you are still very early in it XD
i know that the other person made a snarky comment about how you’re still “very early” into it, but your post is very inspirational to me because im in a similar situation and once you get back into it, it’s easy to feel like you’ll just fail again. but clearly you have made a lot of progress and as someone who has just barely started learning the kanji, 50 seems like a LOT! so keep going!!!
I think the difficult nature of learning Japanese, allow most of us a lot of introspection on who we are, the goals we have, the life we live, how we spend time, and who knows what else. And this happens whether we are successful or not.
Don’t let others decide what is good for you.
Sorry to break it, but Japanese, while having is difficulties, is far from being the hardest language in the world.
Anyway, kudos to you for getting back on track with your learning!
https://learnjapanese.moe