Hey!! I am interested in learning japanese. I was wondering, what mistakes did you make when you started learning japanese? What was the most helpful tip that you received that you are still implementing in your japanese study?
I did way too much pointless planning and “optimization” before I even really started learning. In what order I should learn kanji, the best Anki deck to learn vocabulary from, what resources I will be using once I am intermediate, etc etc. The most helpful tip in hindsight: Just get started with one of the standard beginner resources and then see how it goes.
I spent so much times, learning how to write every single kanji instead of learning the reading and how to write full word. That is waste of time in my point of view. I wish i spent those times for reading and listening comprehension…
Tried to learn the kanji by the individual readings, learn vocabulary through hirigana. Not reading and understanding it in Japanese(what I mean is trying to Translate everything I see in English and not understanding it for what it is)
Signing up for lessons. i tried to learn on and off by myself for years, but signing up for 10 weeks of zoom lessons at the community college really made a huge difference. Not even because the lessons were that good, but because I didnt have to worry about *how* to learn anymore. I just had to show up and do my homework. So it made me stop looking for a better way to learn, a better app for Kanji or whatever.
Those 10 weeks showed me that being consistent is the most important thing. And that having a study group is super motivating.
I gave up the first time. That is the only cardinal sin.
not really a “mistake” but more of a regret from my side almost a year ago I had learnt kana and 100-ish kanji from RRTK 1250 anki deck but I never continued my learning I dont think motivation is the issue for me here bcoz again after a year I have started its been a month of me being consistently learning japanese (now i am at 670-ish vocab words and I am increasing my immersion time as well) but I wish i’d have continued my learning journey a year ago….
Not learning vocabulary and kanji in tandem. Treating them as a single unit made studying both so much easier. Without kanji, the vocab all blended into each other and the words all sounded so similar. Without vocab, the kanji felt kinda pointless and arbitrary. It’s obvious to me now, but when I realised that the vocab was mostly made up of combinations of kanji with different readings, it made everything seem much more logical.
I remember a time where repeating the SRS system stuff would have piled up beyond 4 hours … soon after I just did a hard reset and changed some approaches.
SRS can be “too slow” if you really want to go fast. Well, maybe those apps today have more options for people that want to go faster, but ~10 years ago, it didn’t work so well :3
Its best to learn by ear than by the book. I had good marks before i came to Japan, but i can hardly ever understand what they’re saying.
Train your listening skills from the beginning. I was reading a lot, doing grammar and kanjis, but too few listening. But when you’re really a beginner, you need to do it with a teacher, otherwise you won’t have many understandable resources. And that will make you train your speaking too, so double bonus!
Studying too much from textbooks + flashcards and not reading/listening enough. Once you get a grasp on kana and some basic kanji, start watching Japanese shows with Japanese subtitles or play a simple game/visual novel that is voiced. At first you will not understand 90% of it but that’s okay. You will pick up the language so much faster when you immerse yourself in it.
I would highly recommend the Genki series to start. I found that to be much better designed than Minna no nihongo, which really helped to process the information.
Perhaps there’s a better textbook though …
Not really when I started, but I should’ve started reading manga in Japanese and watching anime with JP subs sooner. Overestimating the difficulty without trying led to me losing a decent amount of stufy time using methods I had outgrown.
I definitely spent too much time trying different things.
Duolingo for a couple months, not really feeling it so I move on to just youtube series, feels a little too disjointed so I try out a textbook, find it really boring so I try a different app, etc. etc.
Feels like I spent at least a year just trying different things and never really making any progress since I was essentially just starting over each time.
I wish I had just picked something and stuck with it long enough to be able to consume native material.
[deleted]
When looking for recommended resources, I saw “Cure Dolly” and thought it was a weird name, probably too weird to bother with. When I later decided to actually take a look at the videos, I was kicking myself at why I hadn’t simply used them from the start instead of trying to find logic in the logic-less sentence/grammar lessons elsewhere.
I was revisiting topics I knew too often and not making progress. Revisiting is not bad, but is easy to find yourself only practicing stuff you know and not progressing your studies.
As for tips: keep somewhat of a schedule. Don’t worry if you keep making mistakes. If you are aiming for fluency practice listening AND speaking (reading text out loud, repeating what you hear).
I’m still a beginner but my biggest mistake has been not speaking alongside the reading/listening. I met a Japanese friend on a language exchange site and the first time I met him my brain just gave up lol.
using anki
I spent too much time forcing myself to watch anime without subtitles.
There was this chain restaurant in the town I lived in called まるまつ and I asked my partner at the time if we could go to kirukiru. We’re still friends and reference this funny little reading error from time to time.
Edit: I just realised you were asking about mistakes in study approaches, I’m still a ditz!
visiting this subreddit and taking advice from here
What I’ve been doing recently that really wouldve helped me in the past is watching in depth grammar explanation videos along with my textbook grammar studies. The videos can get lengthy, maybe 30-45 minutes at times but trust me its a lot easier than trying to grasp a complex grammar point with a paragraph and example that most textbooks provide.
Another thing thats common that I don’t recommend is studying with resources that use romaji instead of kana and kanji. (Ex: ‘benkyou suru’ instead of ‘勉強する’) They are easier at first but in the long run you’ll be glad you used to spend 10 minutes trying to read a short story in hiragana rather than short cutting with romaji.
As for vocab theres really no shortcut around it. Its just a case of repetition, and discovering your own way of memorizing things. In my experience pairing each vocab word with a few example sentences made remembering it significantly easier for me. But yea, label your house with japanese vocab, write it on a piece paper and stare at it while you shower, write in on yourself and study it when ever you have a quick moment. Doesn’t matter how just make sure you get those reps in.
Finally make sure you consume Japanese content, both beginner stuff and stuff out of your league. Truth be told you’ll probably hear mostly gibberish at first but over time your ears will become more accustomed. You’ll go from picking out certain syllables, to words, to phrases, to then understand more or less what they’re trying to say with context.
I failed starting Japanese like 10 times because I kept forgetting vocabulary and trying to figure out grammar while constantly forgetting vocab was too much of an uphill battle. I installed Renshuu and it was a complete game changer!
Aside from the classic “trying to individually memorize every kanji and every reading”, I put off linguistic inmersion for the longest time and only recently started consuming media in Japanese, which is being super helpful.
For me personally it was RTK. It gets recommended a lot so I can only assume it works for a lot of people but I absolutely hated it, so much so that it almost made me quit learning Japanese. Looking back at it now, it really was just a waste of almost 2 months. Eventually I just gave up on RTK, deleted the Anki deck and picked up a deck that actually taught real words, which was definitely the right decision.
Confuse め with ぬ
Making sure I knew how to write every single kanji that I learned in a day by memory and not progressing until I did (also with the correct stroke order). Not saying knowing how to write kanji/stroke order isn’t important, but I think I put too much emphasis on it in the beginning and it stunted my growth, eventually causing me to stop altogether.
Edit: also not knowing kanji particles to make memorizing them easier
i questioned things too much when a lot of it would just come more natural from exposure and continuous studying. be patient, get the foundations strong (especially for grammar) and enjoy
Using cripple shit apps like duolingo,wanikani,memrise
Not practicing every day.
For the first 6 months or so, I would practice about once a week for a couple of hours, and maybe a second time every few weeks for another hour or so. I wanted to practice more, but I just never made the time to do it. As a result, by the time I sat down the next week, I forgot so much and was making almost no progress.
Then I set an alarm on my phone in the evening and started sticking to it; I practice every day on something. Whether it’s new vocab, kanji, learning/reviewing grammar lessons, or reading/writing, I always aim for at least 30 minutes a day. Since then I have made significant gains, and I am now well on-track to my current learning goals, and getting a little better each day.
Even if it’s just a quick 15-minute session, just sit down and do at least a little bit every day. Try your very best not to skip days unless you absolutely must. Language learning is a marathon, and like a marathon, you have to do it by running at a steady pace for a very long time; small sprints and stops aren’t going to work.
Not allowing myself to make mistakes
Been attempting to learn languages a few times and I always repeat the same mistake, including Japanese at least at the beginning. I treated language learning as knowledge instead of skill. Only after I started living in Japan do I understand that language is a skill and learning vocabs and grammars is not the same as memorizing it — instead they need to be internalized such that they are recognized immediately when seen. As a result I obsessed over memorizing as many kanjis as possible in a day.
What instead was effective at least for me was encountering words in different contexts through reading, watching, hearing, typing, etc. — works that are made much easier when I live in Japan.
– I started to learn kanji without a mnemonic method and Anki. After using RTK, Kanji Koohii and Anki it turned from nightmare to fun, nowadays I would choose a method that includes the most important onyomi in its mnemonics though, RTK doesn’t do that. – Using mnemonics for vocabulary. It works excellent for the first 400 words and then it backfires massively because Japanese has only around 100 sounds you combine for words, so your mnemonic will create a lot of confusion for very similar or identical words – and there are A LOT similar words in Japanese. I made a lot of mnemonics in the beginning because it worked so well with kanji and I can’t express how much I regret that, it caused major problems and I nearly quit learning the language therefore. Using mnemonics for kanji, hiragana and katakana is absolutely fine though. – Postponing consuming native content too much. It’s the only key to get fluent while learning from home after my experience. And the start is hard, really hard, extremely hard. And it stays hard for weeks. You just have to grind through and then everythings gets easier fast. I’d say that’s the worst part of learning Japanese. I also learned five other languages and none came close to Japanese in this regard. – Not learning to write Japanese. Even if you never handwrite, writing kana and kanji helps a lot to differentiate very similar characters. I’d recommend to learn writing hiragana, katakana and the most important kanji radicals. It’s not really necessary to learn writing all 2136 jouyou kanji if you don’t handwrite at all (and don’t want to read a lot of handwritten Japanese texts). The radicals will still help a lot. – Watching videos with subs in my native language. My brain ignores a lot of the Japanese part then. A good workaround is the Chrome addon Language Reactor where you can show two subtitle languages for Netflix and Youtube and blur one of it. When moving the mouse over the blurred text it gets normal. That way you focus on Japanese but you still can check what it meant. – Listening to people online too much (for me personally: especially when it came to Romaji, I avoided it completely and later on I noticed that writing down grammar stuff in Romaji helped me memorizing it significantly faster). Learning is not the same for everybody. Some people need constantly small success experiences, other can grind for weeks, others are extremely bored by textbooks… there is no single way that works for everybody the same way. The experience of native English speakers can also vary massively to other languages (in my case that Romaji thing, my native language is very regular and similar to Japanese romaji pronunciation, so it has no negative effects like in English). – Sentence mining with Anki – maybe it’s just me but there was nearly no effect and it costs a lot of time. I now use the time for watching more videos and that is much more effective for me. – Not blocking toxic people in this sub immediately, no matter how much knowledge they have. After filtering out the worst maybe eight, this sub is so much better. From all the language boards I used over many years it is by far the most toxic one but it comes from only a few people. If you don’t like a posting, check the posting history of that person. Sometimes somebody just had a bad day. But if all postings are similar, just block them. Also ignore downvotes here, they are often very childish, it’s not worth the time to think about them usually. People here will downvote a very thorough posting about a kanji method just because they used a different one for instance. Just laugh about the people behind these downvotes. 🙂
Rosetta Stone.
Thought anime Japanese and real Japanese are same things , turns out you need to be more polite
My biggest mistake was not starting sooner.
In the very beginning, I tried memorizing the stroke order of hiragana and katakana, and if I couldn’t write them from memory, I’d consider that as not having learnt them yet.
It’s much quicker to learn to recognize them. Think of it like this: you probably can’t draw everything on the front and back of a nickel or a quarter from memory, right? But you can tell them apart if I showed you a nickel and a quarter, right?
Use a website like [https://realkana.com/](https://realkana.com/), come up with some mnemonics, and learn to read hiragana and katakana as quickly as possible. You can worry about handwriting later, especially when you can type Japanese instead of handwrite it.
What has worked for me may not necessarily work for everyone, but if I was doing my time over again I’d do this:
* Commit to studying every single day (even if some days are as short as 10 minutes). Having consistency and discipline to make a contribution to this goal really helps keep me on track. I spent about 6 years on and off again from learning and got overwhelmed. Finally I made this daily commitment and definitely saw the impact. Almost 800 days in a row now.
* Don’t put off hiragana and katakana. I did because I thought my priority was only to have conversations and it wasn’t important. It is essential imo and will hold back your learning without it. Plus it’s simple to learn.
* Learn kanji early in your process. I know for some people learn kanji independently works, for me it hasn’t. Best to learn with vocabulary and see it in use.
* I personally like and use WaniKani and NativShark. If you stick to the everyday commitment, WK works, just be careful not to overload yourself, it’s okay to delay taking on new lessons if your reviews are piling up. NS is great for going from zero to decent level grammar and vocabulary. I don’t like their kanji (hence using WK) but you can do NS and not use their kanji system. NativShark has a structured approach and goes well beyond many other resources, and the benefit is you just need to show up everyday and it will guide you through what you need to do.
* Find a language partner to talk with fairly early. In the early stages it’s probably more listening to them than talking yourself very much, but I think asking them questions and letting them speak allows you to have exposure to natural language context and allows you to control the topic and pace. And little by little you get more confident carrying more of the conversation.
39 comments
I did way too much pointless planning and “optimization” before I even really started learning. In what order I should learn kanji, the best Anki deck to learn vocabulary from, what resources I will be using once I am intermediate, etc etc. The most helpful tip in hindsight: Just get started with one of the standard beginner resources and then see how it goes.
I spent so much times, learning how to write every single kanji instead of learning the reading and how to write full word. That is waste of time in my point of view. I wish i spent those times for reading and listening comprehension…
Tried to learn the kanji by the individual readings, learn vocabulary through hirigana. Not reading and understanding it in Japanese(what I mean is trying to Translate everything I see in English and not understanding it for what it is)
Signing up for lessons. i tried to learn on and off by myself for years, but signing up for 10 weeks of zoom lessons at the community college really made a huge difference. Not even because the lessons were that good, but because I didnt have to worry about *how* to learn anymore. I just had to show up and do my homework. So it made me stop looking for a better way to learn, a better app for Kanji or whatever.
Those 10 weeks showed me that being consistent is the most important thing. And that having a study group is super motivating.
I gave up the first time. That is the only cardinal sin.
not really a “mistake” but more of a regret from my side
almost a year ago I had learnt kana and 100-ish kanji from RRTK 1250 anki deck but I never continued my learning
I dont think motivation is the issue for me here bcoz again after a year I have started
its been a month of me being consistently learning japanese (now i am at 670-ish vocab words and I am increasing my immersion time as well)
but I wish i’d have continued my learning journey a year ago….
Not learning vocabulary and kanji in tandem. Treating them as a single unit made studying both so much easier. Without kanji, the vocab all blended into each other and the words all sounded so similar. Without vocab, the kanji felt kinda pointless and arbitrary. It’s obvious to me now, but when I realised that the vocab was mostly made up of combinations of kanji with different readings, it made everything seem much more logical.
I remember a time where repeating the SRS system stuff would have piled up beyond 4 hours … soon after I just did a hard reset and changed some approaches.
SRS can be “too slow” if you really want to go fast. Well, maybe those apps today have more options for people that want to go faster, but ~10 years ago, it didn’t work so well :3
Its best to learn by ear than by the book. I had good marks before i came to Japan, but i can hardly ever understand what they’re saying.
Train your listening skills from the beginning. I was reading a lot, doing grammar and kanjis, but too few listening. But when you’re really a beginner, you need to do it with a teacher, otherwise you won’t have many understandable resources. And that will make you train your speaking too, so double bonus!
Studying too much from textbooks + flashcards and not reading/listening enough. Once you get a grasp on kana and some basic kanji, start watching Japanese shows with Japanese subtitles or play a simple game/visual novel that is voiced. At first you will not understand 90% of it but that’s okay. You will pick up the language so much faster when you immerse yourself in it.
I would highly recommend the Genki series to start. I found that to be much better designed than Minna no nihongo, which really helped to process the information.
Perhaps there’s a better textbook though …
Not really when I started, but I should’ve started reading manga in Japanese and watching anime with JP subs sooner. Overestimating the difficulty without trying led to me losing a decent amount of stufy time using methods I had outgrown.
I definitely spent too much time trying different things.
Duolingo for a couple months, not really feeling it so I move on to just youtube series, feels a little too disjointed so I try out a textbook, find it really boring so I try a different app, etc. etc.
Feels like I spent at least a year just trying different things and never really making any progress since I was essentially just starting over each time.
I wish I had just picked something and stuck with it long enough to be able to consume native material.
[deleted]
When looking for recommended resources, I saw “Cure Dolly” and thought it was a weird name, probably too weird to bother with. When I later decided to actually take a look at the videos, I was kicking myself at why I hadn’t simply used them from the start instead of trying to find logic in the logic-less sentence/grammar lessons elsewhere.
I was revisiting topics I knew too often and not making progress. Revisiting is not bad, but is easy to find yourself only practicing stuff you know and not progressing your studies.
As for tips: keep somewhat of a schedule. Don’t worry if you keep making mistakes. If you are aiming for fluency practice listening AND speaking (reading text out loud, repeating what you hear).
I’m still a beginner but my biggest mistake has been not speaking alongside the reading/listening. I met a Japanese friend on a language exchange site and the first time I met him my brain just gave up lol.
using anki
I spent too much time forcing myself to watch anime without subtitles.
There was this chain restaurant in the town I lived in called まるまつ and I asked my partner at the time if we could go to kirukiru. We’re still friends and reference this funny little reading error from time to time.
Edit: I just realised you were asking about mistakes in study approaches, I’m still a ditz!
visiting this subreddit and taking advice from here
What I’ve been doing recently that really wouldve helped me in the past is watching in depth grammar explanation videos along with my textbook grammar studies. The videos can get lengthy, maybe 30-45 minutes at times but trust me its a lot easier than trying to grasp a complex grammar point with a paragraph and example that most textbooks provide.
Another thing thats common that I don’t recommend is studying with resources that use romaji instead of kana and kanji. (Ex: ‘benkyou suru’ instead of ‘勉強する’) They are easier at first but in the long run you’ll be glad you used to spend 10 minutes trying to read a short story in hiragana rather than short cutting with romaji.
As for vocab theres really no shortcut around it. Its just a case of repetition, and discovering your own way of memorizing things. In my experience pairing each vocab word with a few example sentences made remembering it significantly easier for me. But yea, label your house with japanese vocab, write it on a piece paper and stare at it while you shower, write in on yourself and study it when ever you have a quick moment. Doesn’t matter how just make sure you get those reps in.
Finally make sure you consume Japanese content, both beginner stuff and stuff out of your league. Truth be told you’ll probably hear mostly gibberish at first but over time your ears will become more accustomed. You’ll go from picking out certain syllables, to words, to phrases, to then understand more or less what they’re trying to say with context.
I failed starting Japanese like 10 times because I kept forgetting vocabulary and trying to figure out grammar while constantly forgetting vocab was too much of an uphill battle. I installed Renshuu and it was a complete game changer!
Aside from the classic “trying to individually memorize every kanji and every reading”, I put off linguistic inmersion for the longest time and only recently started consuming media in Japanese, which is being super helpful.
For me personally it was RTK. It gets recommended a lot so I can only assume it works for a lot of people but I absolutely hated it, so much so that it almost made me quit learning Japanese. Looking back at it now, it really was just a waste of almost 2 months. Eventually I just gave up on RTK, deleted the Anki deck and picked up a deck that actually taught real words, which was definitely the right decision.
Confuse め with ぬ
Making sure I knew how to write every single kanji that I learned in a day by memory and not progressing until I did (also with the correct stroke order). Not saying knowing how to write kanji/stroke order isn’t important, but I think I put too much emphasis on it in the beginning and it stunted my growth, eventually causing me to stop altogether.
Edit: also not knowing kanji particles to make memorizing them easier
i questioned things too much when a lot of it would just come more natural from exposure and continuous studying. be patient, get the foundations strong (especially for grammar) and enjoy
Using cripple shit apps like duolingo,wanikani,memrise
Not practicing every day.
For the first 6 months or so, I would practice about once a week for a couple of hours, and maybe a second time every few weeks for another hour or so. I wanted to practice more, but I just never made the time to do it. As a result, by the time I sat down the next week, I forgot so much and was making almost no progress.
Then I set an alarm on my phone in the evening and started sticking to it; I practice every day on something. Whether it’s new vocab, kanji, learning/reviewing grammar lessons, or reading/writing, I always aim for at least 30 minutes a day. Since then I have made significant gains, and I am now well on-track to my current learning goals, and getting a little better each day.
Even if it’s just a quick 15-minute session, just sit down and do at least a little bit every day. Try your very best not to skip days unless you absolutely must. Language learning is a marathon, and like a marathon, you have to do it by running at a steady pace for a very long time; small sprints and stops aren’t going to work.
Not allowing myself to make mistakes
Been attempting to learn languages a few times and I always repeat the same mistake, including Japanese at least at the beginning. I treated language learning as knowledge instead of skill. Only after I started living in Japan do I understand that language is a skill and learning vocabs and grammars is not the same as memorizing it — instead they need to be internalized such that they are recognized immediately when seen. As a result I obsessed over memorizing as many kanjis as possible in a day.
What instead was effective at least for me was encountering words in different contexts through reading, watching, hearing, typing, etc. — works that are made much easier when I live in Japan.
– I started to learn kanji without a mnemonic method and Anki. After using RTK, Kanji Koohii and Anki it turned from nightmare to fun, nowadays I would choose a method that includes the most important onyomi in its mnemonics though, RTK doesn’t do that.
– Using mnemonics for vocabulary. It works excellent for the first 400 words and then it backfires massively because Japanese has only around 100 sounds you combine for words, so your mnemonic will create a lot of confusion for very similar or identical words – and there are A LOT similar words in Japanese. I made a lot of mnemonics in the beginning because it worked so well with kanji and I can’t express how much I regret that, it caused major problems and I nearly quit learning the language therefore. Using mnemonics for kanji, hiragana and katakana is absolutely fine though.
– Postponing consuming native content too much. It’s the only key to get fluent while learning from home after my experience. And the start is hard, really hard, extremely hard. And it stays hard for weeks. You just have to grind through and then everythings gets easier fast. I’d say that’s the worst part of learning Japanese. I also learned five other languages and none came close to Japanese in this regard.
– Not learning to write Japanese. Even if you never handwrite, writing kana and kanji helps a lot to differentiate very similar characters. I’d recommend to learn writing hiragana, katakana and the most important kanji radicals. It’s not really necessary to learn writing all 2136 jouyou kanji if you don’t handwrite at all (and don’t want to read a lot of handwritten Japanese texts). The radicals will still help a lot.
– Watching videos with subs in my native language. My brain ignores a lot of the Japanese part then. A good workaround is the Chrome addon Language Reactor where you can show two subtitle languages for Netflix and Youtube and blur one of it. When moving the mouse over the blurred text it gets normal. That way you focus on Japanese but you still can check what it meant.
– Listening to people online too much (for me personally: especially when it came to Romaji, I avoided it completely and later on I noticed that writing down grammar stuff in Romaji helped me memorizing it significantly faster). Learning is not the same for everybody. Some people need constantly small success experiences, other can grind for weeks, others are extremely bored by textbooks… there is no single way that works for everybody the same way. The experience of native English speakers can also vary massively to other languages (in my case that Romaji thing, my native language is very regular and similar to Japanese romaji pronunciation, so it has no negative effects like in English).
– Sentence mining with Anki – maybe it’s just me but there was nearly no effect and it costs a lot of time. I now use the time for watching more videos and that is much more effective for me.
– Not blocking toxic people in this sub immediately, no matter how much knowledge they have. After filtering out the worst maybe eight, this sub is so much better. From all the language boards I used over many years it is by far the most toxic one but it comes from only a few people. If you don’t like a posting, check the posting history of that person. Sometimes somebody just had a bad day. But if all postings are similar, just block them. Also ignore downvotes here, they are often very childish, it’s not worth the time to think about them usually. People here will downvote a very thorough posting about a kanji method just because they used a different one for instance. Just laugh about the people behind these downvotes. 🙂
Rosetta Stone.
Thought anime Japanese and real Japanese are same things , turns out you need to be more polite
My biggest mistake was not starting sooner.
In the very beginning, I tried memorizing the stroke order of hiragana and katakana, and if I couldn’t write them from memory, I’d consider that as not having learnt them yet.
It’s much quicker to learn to recognize them. Think of it like this: you probably can’t draw everything on the front and back of a nickel or a quarter from memory, right? But you can tell them apart if I showed you a nickel and a quarter, right?
Use a website like [https://realkana.com/](https://realkana.com/), come up with some mnemonics, and learn to read hiragana and katakana as quickly as possible. You can worry about handwriting later, especially when you can type Japanese instead of handwrite it.
What has worked for me may not necessarily work for everyone, but if I was doing my time over again I’d do this:
* Commit to studying every single day (even if some days are as short as 10 minutes). Having consistency and discipline to make a contribution to this goal really helps keep me on track. I spent about 6 years on and off again from learning and got overwhelmed. Finally I made this daily commitment and definitely saw the impact. Almost 800 days in a row now.
* Don’t put off hiragana and katakana. I did because I thought my priority was only to have conversations and it wasn’t important. It is essential imo and will hold back your learning without it. Plus it’s simple to learn.
* Learn kanji early in your process. I know for some people learn kanji independently works, for me it hasn’t. Best to learn with vocabulary and see it in use.
* I personally like and use WaniKani and NativShark. If you stick to the everyday commitment, WK works, just be careful not to overload yourself, it’s okay to delay taking on new lessons if your reviews are piling up. NS is great for going from zero to decent level grammar and vocabulary. I don’t like their kanji (hence using WK) but you can do NS and not use their kanji system. NativShark has a structured approach and goes well beyond many other resources, and the benefit is you just need to show up everyday and it will guide you through what you need to do.
* Find a language partner to talk with fairly early. In the early stages it’s probably more listening to them than talking yourself very much, but I think asking them questions and letting them speak allows you to have exposure to natural language context and allows you to control the topic and pace. And little by little you get more confident carrying more of the conversation.
* Know your reason and motivation to learn.