Hey peeps! It’s been a few years since I actively studied. To clarify what that means, I self studied for a while and then blazed through all of genki under a private tutor. That was about 2 years ago. My partner is Japanese and we frequently speak in only Japanese around the house, but I basically have not done a single moment of actual study since genki 2 (sorry, I actually did the first chapter of Tobira)
My question is, am I dumb, did I forget stuff or is there a somewhat wide gap between genki and tobira? I know it’s not fair to expect 1-1 changing books but coming back I feel like there’s plenty of unexplained vocab I haven’t seen with a (rare) grammar point I don’t know.
My main problem is frequently seeing words not listed as vocab I don’t recognize, should I just bunker down in Anki and go hard for a while?
3 comments
The transition from Genki to Tobira is notorious for being rough at first due to the big jump in difficulty. At least based on what people say on this sub. I don’t think additional work in Genki is going to help much, but perseverance with Tobira will.
I chose not to go that route and instead went with the newer Quartet books after finishing Genki. That route provides a much smoother jump.
There is a gap between Genki and Tobira. The transition between Genki and Quartet is much smoother. If you insisted on using them all:
Genki>Q1>Tobira>Q2.
Genki is like a comprehensive pre-Japanese course. It gives you the framework to start seriously learning Japanese, but will probably not grant you Japanese literacy on its own. It’s not out of the ordinary to work through Genki material, jump into Tobira, and be like…holy crap. The jump from cookie cutter grammar constructions to actual Japanese is a big one.