How I'm Learning Japanese
| An average Japanese learner | |
|---|---|
| |
| Japanese is a hard language to learn. Who knew? | |
| Sociology | |
| Number of Kanji known | 3 |
| Anime seen | 293,487,234 |
| Study Characteristics | |
| Attempts to watch Terrace House | 2 |
| Money spent on textbooks | a lot |
| Gone to Japan? | obviously |
| Skills | |
| Katakana reading speed | 0.5 katakana per second |
| Confidence level | honestly too low |
I chose to learn Japanese because I'm a weeaboo. This has been a helpful base, because there's always SOMETHING I could be using Japanese for: googling on Japanese wikipedia, watching raws of unsubbed tokusatsu, that sort of thing. And it's a good thing I'm so invested because I've spent quite a lot of money on learning Japanese...
My journey so far has been as follows: (While doing Wanikani the entire time, mind you)
Marugoto online learning -> Genki 1 -> Genki 2 -> Quartet 1 -> Quartet 2 -> Shin Kanzen Master Dokusho N2
I really like using textbooks so this was a good (if slow) pathway. I couldn't have done it without Wanikani, though - the ability to read kanji is totally necessary. I don't bother with correct stroke order beyond a couple of basic radicals, though.
Shifting from textbooks to native content is really hard. I read basically everything on tadoku but they're not even close to being like 'real' Japanese content. I found it helpful to start with manga, then move on to novels written for eight-ten year olds, and then nonfiction (which has simpler sentence structures but harder vocabulary). Now I'm fighting my way through my second adult fiction book, and it's still slow going.
Listening and speaking are really hard. I've found that after listening to ~250 episodes of Learn Japanese With Noriko, I've become way better at understanding spoken Japanese without translating in my head.
Some helpful links
- Tadoku - Free graded readers.
- Natively - Find manga that's challenging, but, you know. Not TOO challenging.
- Half-a Net - Walkthroughs for visual novels!!!! This doesn't have full scripts but if you're like me and want to play Japanese VNs but hate having to make choices, now you can find the perfect yaoi pairing with ease.