So, for some background – almost exactly one year from now I will be going to Japan on a WHV, taking a year beforehand so I can build a solid baseline of the language and maximize benefit of being there.
I am currently enrolled in Akamonkai’s 12 week online beginner course, I have hiragana, about 50% of katakana, a bit of kanji, and 250 words memorized so I am majorly a beginner, I will have 4-5 hours a day to allocate to studying which I fully intend to do, but it is a lot of time to spend if I am not doing it optimally so I wanted to get some advice here.
I’ve found the course easy to memorize since the vocab day to day tends to lapse often with only a few new words added, since I have not struggled to memorize any of it thus far I have not bothered to use anki for it, however I want to elevate my studying since in a week I will go from having an hour per day to study to 4-5, after some looking into it I figure genki 1+2 would be good to build a solid base of grammar, additional vocab to my course, and I do plan to use anki for that at 20 words per day + 5 each day from the core 2k/6k deck, and 3 kanji from the best deck I can find as well as writing it
for immersion I will be exclusively listening to beginner friendly japanese podcasts throughout work, watching anime instead of youtube like I do now, only listening to japanese music
I will also be talking to a tutor on iTalki for 2-3 hours per week, and doing my best to make japanese friends so I can use the language while playing games
Assuming I do 1 chapter per week of genki I should be done after 6 months, afterwards I will be upping the cards per day on the core 2k/6k deck to 15, and maintaining 3 kanji per day which theoretically should have me at just shy of 4k words, and 1,200 kanji
to make up for the extra time after lowing the cards down to 12 I will be putting more of a focus on reading/writing practice and immersion
I’d say I have fairly good memory as I have sustained an estimated 90% retention rate out of my course thus far, but I will lowball it and say I get 70% after a year – I would have 830 kanji and just passed 3000 words memorized
If I were able to sustain this, do you think I would be at around an N3 level by the time I go?
3 comments
I highly recommend adding easy reading to your routine.
First, I recommend that you don’t stop on Genki 1, since Genki 2 and Tobira are also must-do imo. Second, you got to decide how much words from 2k/6k you want to do, because the downside of this deck is that you get common words until the first 1000, and after that more and more of the words that are pretty useless (if you want to know why – google how the deck was made), so it maybe more effective to start your own mining deck after that first thousand words
Look up “Refold”