Hey yall! Im just starting to attempt to learn Japanese once again (did about a semester in highschool plus a little when I was young) and was curious on the answers yall would give to some questions.
For some context, im learning Japanese through the Adventures in Japanese textbooks and being tutored through it by my mother (who is a native speaker and a japanese teacher at a highschool). Ive been going at it for a couple weeks now and ive been using anki as well.
The questions and concerns are:
1. How would you recommend a study plan for both 4hrs a day and then something more like 1-2 hrs a day (for busy school days) and how often should I sit down with my teacher every week.
2. Anki has been helping me recognize words but im really struggling to recall them. Should I try creating two flash cards for each vocab, one from japanese to english and vise versa?
3.Are there ways you guys recommend learning to speak the language better than just creating conversations with myself?
4. Ive chosen my method of language immersion to be through music and subtitled tv shows, but are there better methods and should I be powering through media without subtitles instead?
Ofc, if there is anything else, I would greatly appreciate it, thank you so much in advance!
1 comment
First, some questions:
What are your goals in learning Japanese? What excites you about Japanese, and what motivates you to study? Have you learned another language before? When you learned as a kid, what was that like? Realistically, how much time and commitment do you have? Are you a student or working full time? (I’m assuming you’re in HS because you’re using Adventures, but that might just be what your mother has on hand.)
Also, what are you doing in your tutoring sessions? What’s your mother’s teaching style and approach? Is she pretty ‘language classroom traditional’ or into TPRS, etc? How far are you in Adventures and how are you making your Anki cards- are these the basic vocab from the textbook or words you meet in the wild?
Have you already mastered reading and writing all the kana? How comfortable are you with reading? (I’m not a fan of how long Adventures keeps using romaji- I recommend you start using Tadoku asap!)