How to get back into learning after a long hiatus?

5 comments

1. i took off 18 years and when i restarted i picked up a from-scratch book and blew through it as fast as i felt i knew things. i caught a handful of things that i forgot, but i remembered basically everything in genki 1 and 2 and was more or less back up to speed within a month, minus some vocab and kanji writing.

2. this kinda happened to me

   I started learning JP around 3rd century or so. They didn’t really have written language then and they were kinda in the stone age.

   Believe it or not keigo was already a thing! They mostly used it to talk to 神様 though. Another thing I remember from them times was they were definitely a land of song and dance, much much much more than now, it isn’t even comparable.

   Real life got in in the way blah blah blah and I had to take a while off. I tried to get into it around the late 1600s but they had this whole “isolationist” thing going on and I couldn’t get back into it.

   Anyway after that I learned a bit of JP but ended up forgetting it and now here I am picking it back up.

   Basically you haveta review what you already did before and see what you remember, and see what you forgot, and go over what you forgot if you need a refresher.

3. I would just jump back in where you left off. I took a long break too and while a I forgot a lot, most of it came back to me pretty quickly. Maybe spend a bit of time going over your old study materials if you still have them.

4. Was in the same situtation as you, studied JP in uni and took like 2 years to settle into working. Uni covered Genki 1 and 2 and a few chapters of Tobira.

   I downloaded an anki deck that covered all the kanji in genki 1 and 2 as review. I did increase the card amount to like 80 a day until that was all done.

   Looked online and reread the texts for a few grammar point refreshers and started Tobira again while mining for words from manga and NHK easy news using the method on https://animecards.site/.

   The Tobira site itself also has some anki decks avilable for download that I also use. I start those a few days before starting a new Tobira chapter

5. I don’t know which N level you were at before. But you can focus on becoming 100% confident in the n5 and n4 vocabulary and grammar then move on to the Quartet book series alongside a YouTuber who has made lessons for people who’ve made it that far.

   Tobira has people on YouTube who have studied and taught the books chapter by chapter as well.

   Tokini andi is highly recommended for genki 1 and 2 as well as quartet onward.

   N5 is so small that it shouldn’t take you more than a month. N4 a couple of months of carefully following lessons alongside a book and making sure you are 100% confident in grammar and vocabulary BEFORE moving on the each chapter.

   Moving ahead chapters without understanding and memorizing everything from the previous chapters only slows your learning process by making you less proficient in more things at once.

   Tobira is good.

   Tobira is the better “textbook”. It actually has a great structure and teaches some natural Japanese points you don’t get in genki. It has longer and less childish dialogue in the reading points, which can be tough for a solo learner without feedback. But genki is an easier book to teach beginners from because it makes Japanese a little more accessible.

   There’s other points of debate. And I’m not invested in either emotionally. Some people have done both and took immediately to tobira. But I usually recommend genki merely because there’s more resources easily available for it. But they both do the same thing.

   Whichever you use, there should be video lessons available.

   You got this.