Hey guys,
I’ve been studying Japanese seriously ever since ~April 2022? (with a one month break in June, and then again in October) Anyway, that’s around the time I got a tutor from italki to work through Genki 1 with me, which we pretty much finished this week. Besides that, I was using Wanikani frequently until around October, got to around level 9 or 10 and then got lowkey burnt out, so I dropped it. I did pick it back up in January, but I decided resetting my level back to 0 would be better.
Anyway, with all that out of the way, here’s my question: besides keeping up with WaniKani and starting Genki2, is there anything I can do for now? I tried reading Higurashi with a texthooker and yomichan, but it’s still a bit (quite a bit) too difficult for me at my current level.
Despite having [passed a mock N5 exam](https://i.gyazo.com/24360717f88f370b489a74e7b493445c.png), I would have preferred a higher score and it just made me somewhat realize that surely there’s more I could be doing..
This post is probably a jumbled mess, but it is 3:00 am and I haven’t slept yet, so please excuse that.
Either way, any and all suggestions are very much appreciated it.
3 comments
The answer is unfortunately just “do the work”. You can start forcing through vns with a text hooker, but you’ll have to look up and learn a lot every single sentence, or you can keep going with genki. Either path is a lot of work as you’ve noticed.
I’d also recommenced using an srs for vocab no matter what you choose.
The fastest way to acquire a language is to consume it a lot. At some point, you’ll have to abandon the textbooks and jump into reading native stuff for real. It’ll be extremely hard at first, but even if you can’t do it for more than 10 minutes a day, it tells you exactly what your weaknesses are and what you need to work on. Having that said, you don’t have to jump into the most difficult stuff right away. I have never read Higurashi but according to [JPDB](https://jpdb.io/visual-novel/8/higurashi-no-naku-koro-ni) it’s a 6/10 difficulty rating, which is extremely difficult for beginners. If you’re just starting out I recommend sticking to the 3 or 4 difficulty VNs on that site. You’ll still have to yomichan like 3 or more words every sentence or so, but as long as you keep doing it every day, your Japanese will improve rapidly.
as other people said, unfortunately the repetitiveness (and sometimes quite boringness) of studying japanese is just.. how it is. anki and other srs programs are pretty sweet too (as in use em!) essentially your gonna have to put a LOT LOT LOT of time and effort into it, sometimes it will be fun and other times it’s gonna be as boring as watching paint dry. but in the end youll always be more ahead than you were yesterday. you got this 🙂