Damn, you are so right. Giving myself permission to suck is so important. I’m going to have that in mind.
Thank you!
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The reason I stand by the textbook is because it provides a direction for a learner to practice their skills.
I think a real teacher is the ideal situation to have as they can not only give direction but also personalise for each individual learner, but that gets expensive very quickly so I understand why people don’t necessarily want to do that, so short of that I do stand by what I say about a textbook being helpful.
Out of interest, why do you disagree about textbooks? I’m genuinely interested as I’ve always felt them to be useful even if they aren’t perfect.
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know exactly what you mean!
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I’m the master of chunking, most of my spoken Japanese is through sentences I just learned because I either used them very frequently or I heard them enough that they wormed their way into my lexicon.
It’s a great thing, but it also makes people assume my Japanese is way better than it actually is so I regularly get flashbanged with native level Japanese, which is not so great lol.
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username checks out 
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I personally use the same with Bunpro & Wanikani. Instead of textbooks though (which I cannot tolerate) I use Tokini Andy videos to get through the Genki series. Once I’m through that I’ll find other N4-N3 content. I just personally burn out working through textbooks.
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You can also check out themoeway’s guide online for a bit of a different take on studying the language. Applying these concepts and restructuring my daily study boosted my japanese skills incredibly fast. The foundation is still valuable to have though. But if you want it to happen very fast, check it out, although faster progress = more time investment, can’t really optimize your way out of it that much. But removing what’s inefficient helps a lot.
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That’s one thing I hadn’t really considered, having textbook content deliver it in a way that makes it more accessible (I get how textbooks can be a total drag).
My only care is in adding some form of structure to study, the way to achieve that should always be whatever works best for you be it a textbook, teacher, or something somewhere in between*.
(* Except AI! It really is no good, and I’m not saying this because I’m anti-AI or anything, I’ve really tried with it but even with heavy guidance it gets stuff wrong all the time, and because it’s so confident about it, you may never know)
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I agree! Whatever works for you is 100% the way to do it.
On AI I only ever use to for potential clarification or testing my sentence building. I never ask it to teach me concepts, grammar or vocab. I always use Tokini Andy, WK & Bunpro
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Seconded, language learning is solved and it’s called the moe way.
The tools available for language learning these days blow my mind.
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Yeah, after I posted I was thinking about it, using it to help clarify a point is fine, trying to use it to make lessons and tasks for you on the other hand is extremely hit or miss.
Even when clarifying things I try to speak to a proficient speaker where possible though, because they’ve made AI extremely pandering that it will sometimes just agree or hedge its clarifications when you’re obviously completely wrong about something.
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100% agree with you there
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Helps a lot to read you guys discuss about this. I’m currently holding onto Bunpro + Wani Kani and looking to go through Dragon Quest Remake 1+2+3 to do some serious reading immersion haha.
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Free llms are one thing but I’ve seen some impressive breakdowns from chatgpt 5.6 in the JP learners discord I frequent. If you can afford it the latest models are incredibly smart and give highly detailed responses these days. Gpt 5.6 is rumoured to have over 3 trillion parameters and sends most of your prompts to expert sub networks with over 150 billion parameters each. The next iteration, chat gpt 6, supposedly will have over 10 trillion parameters. I’ve seen it give detailed breakdowns of writing samples from other learners with astonishing accuracy and insight. Even veteran JP learners agree that the latest models are worlds apart from the early/free models. Obviously you shouldn’t only be outputting with an llm but if you’re paying for tokens from the better models I’d say it’s probably worthwhile
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If it took you 6 years to speak like a six year-old in Spanish, why the pressure in learning any language faster? Enjoy the process. Have I been learning this god-forsaken language for too long? Yes. Do I care? No. And it’s fine. You will feel progressing, look back to how much you’ve learnt and how much easier difficult tasks have become.
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