Anyone tried The Moe Way’s 30 day routine?

7 comments

1. I wouldn’t disagree with anything the moe way provides per se, although their methods can be a bit hardcore sometimes… but again they do know what they’re talking about. Join their discord and ask them

2. Just reading through it, I wish this was what I had done in my first 30 days. I even had the time for it. Instead I did Duolingo …

   Anyway, the MoeWay discord has a channel for people to discuss this routine and provide feedback and ask questions. You could take a look there.

3. I did do something similar in my first month, which was grammar, anki, and immersion based learning.

   I think immersion is great, but watching stuff with english subtitles before you even learn grammar is pointless, or every weeb would be fluent. Cure dolly is also amazing, but her videos are a mish-mash of random explanations without a solid general framework, so I can really only recommend her as a supplement.

   But I think if you follow this, then you’ll do well just because any kind of immersion based learning is so good.

4. It sounds exhausting 🙁

   I don’t disagree with the method as such, but the pace seems to be too great for anyone with a life outside of learning Japanese. Maybe if you have a month’s holiday with no DIY backlog nagging at you…

   Personally I preferred to study a little more sequentially than this – [here’s basically what I did](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) in the first few months of studying.

5. I’m in a bit of doubt about that. Generally there is nothing wrong with such approach, it’s mostly SRS (which works the best for vocabulary), grammar lessons and practice. But such approach is usually said by people who already was learning for a while and forgot how hard it was initially. Or people who assume they could do something earlier, ignoring that they needed to acquire some skills first.

   From my personal experience, I’ve tried to use content several times. It wasn’t easy until around 500 hours of learning. If you don’t know core grammar like particles, conjunctions, conjugation, passive, causative, relative clauses, sentence patterns and bunch of similar stuff, you have a very tough time. All of it is much harder to translate and when you still aren’t sure about the meaning of any basic sentence even after a minute of puzzle solving, it’s quite frustrating. I did several attempts, figured out that I would rather do something useful instead of trying to select one translation our of 10-30 possible variations and ditched it for a while. But then it really become easier, I became able to read anything I want, there wasn’t even much difference between reading comics for kids or research papers, mostly just speed and in just 100 hours my reading speed improved from 50 to 100 words/minute. It was already very decent level, like a whole book in 10-15 hours. And speaking honestly, I also think that maybe I could start earlier, if someone really wants to use content and ready for hardship, I advice to start somewhere around 300 hours of learning. But I’m not delusional enough to say that content from the very beginning is a good approach. Everything has efficiency, white noising has around 0% efficiency, while something like SRS can be 100% efficiency (every second is spend on intentional learning of new information). When I had to spend 90% of time on trying to connect one word with 5-7-10 translations with another word that has another 5-7-10 translations, it wasn’t useful at all and I understood that it’s better to spend 20 minutes on SRS to learn 20 new words and 1-2 hours reading grammar books, so I can actually understand why and how people do it this way. Most of learning in that guide will come from SRS, which is done in the lest amount of time, grammar lessons are going to be useful too, but speaking honestly, spending hours on content when we don’t understand much at all will give close to zero result. If we compare person who did it with a person who didn’t, there will be either small difference or no difference at all.

   I’m not sure I’ve seen someone who spent only 100 hours on Japanese learning and would be able to read books or watch anime with little amount of efforts. I’m not sure it’s even possible to understand the meaning properly at such stage. And if we compare people who did it for 300-500 hours, then even people without much of practice become able to do it anyway. Thus I would advice to look at personal preference. There is some amount you will need to force, it’s definitely good to use SRS and learn grammar. You need to know at least basics. But if you find using content frustrating, because you don’t understand anything at all, just don’t do it for a while, it will become much easier with time. It’s not some kind of more advanced learning method or secret key to success. Content is simply slightly different approach to learning, maybe not the most time efficient, but interesting and fun.

6. Why do I feel like this sub is being squatted by djters ever since the eroge post? Is it the new accounts name dropping anime cards and their Discord, singing about the joys of immersion? Hmm.

7. When I first read it I was kind of pumped for it. But when I stepped back I felt more unsure. Essentially its not wrong, but its more like “this thing that you could do in a few months, lets cram it into 30 days”. Which obviously has its positives and negatives (especially getting less return on learning by over doing it).

   End of the day one of the hardest part of learning Japapese is figuring out how “you” like to learn. For some, a guide for 30 days to follow non-stop could be an awesome way of learning.

   I would say though, its probably not the 30 days that makes you learn Japanese. But the habit you form for the next 2.5 years you do after it (as in continued practice).

   The rest of the guide is basically “learn/mine/practice vocab, learn/mine/practice grammer, learn/mine/practice kanji, immerse, immerse, immerse”.