I’ve been trying to learn Japanese mostly self-taught (cramming rules and vocab) for the past year and a half now and I have hit a bit of a roadblock. I was looking for a better (and more efficient) way of studying after Quizlet finally hit me with a paywall after constant practice quizzes every day and after reading some of what people have said on here and other websites, I have realized that over this entire time I have been learning completely wrong.
I started with hiragana and katakana (as usual) and went straight to kanji, but went the route of getting a kanji book and making a quizlet for the definitions, on’yomi, and kun’yomi readings. After months of that I realized that I had made absolutely no practical progress and started going for vocab words up until this point. I started aimlessly with verbs before finding out about the JLPT and starting with an N5 study guide, from there I have been learning non-stop nouns (planning to go in order through all vocab in N5, to grammar, to practicing making sentences, then N4, etc.).
I have made it to about 159 Nouns successfully learned without knowing the actual kanji readings or radicals in any official sense (I say that because while not knowing the radical names I recognize that the left side radicals are the same in 姉 and 妹 and tell the difference based off of the right-hand side). Without knowing the actual readings, I mostly made sense to myself out of words having the same kanji in them but different readings by comparing them to English words like “rough”, “through”, and “though” that similarly look similar but are pronounced differently, and just learned them based on their own pronunciations.
Back to the present, however, I am starting a Genki book due to my quizlet method giving me a paywall to keep studying, and I have realized I may now have a ton of borderline useless information and that I have to basically start over from square one. Does anyone have any advice on this? I realize this is my fault for being stubborn and not just looking up the conventional ways of learning the language, but I am really hoping I am not entirely restarted as I had already had some essentials mostly down such as some of the more basic particles and most verb conjugations.
4 comments
>I am really hoping I am not entirely restarted
What’s the harm in seeing information you already know? IMO just go through Genki normally and thanks to your previous experience you will be able to go faster and/or skip things you already know here and there. A major benefit of using a textbook is that it provides you with an organised study plan that covers all your bases and makes sure you are not missing anything important. It sounds to me like that is exactly what you need right now.
>I was looking for a better (and more efficient) way of studying after Quizlet finally hit me with a paywall
That was a blessing in disguise.
I think the way you are learning is fine; in fact it’s what I suggest doing. Don’t “learn readings”, learn words. Once you’ve built up a large vocabulary that way, you’ll have developed a good intuition on readings to build upon, and you can start focusing on that more if you want.
You might want to do a little studying on radicals, however, if you find yourself often mistaking similar kanji or writing them incorrectly.
I don’t quite understand what information you think is borderline useless?