I need your help

Japanese
#21

Thank you for your answer. I gave up Wanikani a year ago, so I’m left with pretty much nothing since I haven’t practiced. I tried reading manga and could understand a lot of kanji and words, but my grammar was so bad that I couldn’t grasp the meaning of the sentences. My mistake was neglecting grammar; I won’t do that again.

I think I will study Genki 1 (pass N5), then Genki 2 and JLPT 4 while using the Kanji Damage‑reordered Genki deck and a Genki vocab deck to learn vocabulary and kanji. After that I’ll use Satori (which someone mentioned in this topic) to immerse myself while starting the Core 2.3k deck. I’m still missing a textbook for grammar after Genki 2, but I have time before reaching that point. My aim is to pass N3, and I’ll decide what to do afterward.

I really think Satori can help me with immersion (both reading and comprehension), so a huge thanks to VineBerry for mentioning it. I’d also like to thank you for your answer, as you provided rough word counts, which is exactly what I need (otherwise I just tell myself “I need a bit more kanji/vocab before putting them to use”). The fact that you used the same deck and found it good also makes me sure of my decision.

It feels weird to start all over again since wanikani got me so good with kanji/vocab knowledge (and i still practiced talking during 3 months so I had a certain level). However I learnt from my mistakes and I feel like this time is the good one. I belive that most people experince this kind of restart also and i guess it was my turn.

#22

I did actually do this using Memento (instant word lookups, use jimaku.cc for subs) for maybe even as many as 1000 anime+drama episodes to build a massive portfolio of reading+listening sentences with words I wanted to learn from shows that seemed to have a good portfolio of diverse and increasingly difficult vocabulary (start with romance/slice of life to get the most common daily words first, build up to fantasy, historical, scifi, military etc).

Initially the first episodes of a new show had a tendency to take 40-60 minutes instead of 20 minutes, and by the end of the show around 30-40 minutes depending on the difficulty (now fortunately my base is big enough that it usually only takes a few minutes longer than otherwise). The first show I ever did probably took way more than this though, but eventually you got the most common vocab so most shows will be faster and faster.

I didn’t look up much grammar though, focused more on the vocabulary and just kept doing a few grammar points a day on bunpro at a steady pace.

Whether I would recommend it to other people I don’t know since a lot of people aren’t willing to pause every other sentence in a difficult show to look up a new word, but in the end I have 10k+ personal sentences with all kinds of speech to read and listen to while doing word reviews which is pretty neat so it probably pays off in the long run.

I think it’s worth considering it as an option though even if it seems pretty unpleasant in the beginning. Could always change your mind and do it later, or change your mind after starting and do something else instead. There’s so many approaches to learning it’s worth touching all of them a little bit before making up your mind. I didn’t understand half of what I was watching when I started doing this and felt a bit of despair, but I just kept going.

It feels weird to start all over again since wanikani got me so good with kanji/vocab knowledge (and i still practiced talking during 3 months so I had a certain level). However I learnt from my mistakes and I feel like this time is the good one. I belive that most people experince this kind of restart also and i guess it was my turn.

Your effort is not in vain so if it makes you feel better, one step back two step forward. Definitely not starting from scratch even if it may feel like it.

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#23

I find manga to be a really great source for immersion. Pictures help you a lot with grasping the meaning + may help you with remembering the context of new words/grammar. However I think it will not be that effective if you read manga much above your knowledge level.

Thus I would recommend you Natively for checking approximate difficulty level of a given manga and then trying to read those. If you’re at the very beginning manga like チーズスイートホーム can be appropriate. At a slightly higher level よつばと！is very popular choice that I can also recommend.

Also what I would recommend is not trying to understand 100% you’re reading. I think best way is to tolerate some ambiguity, as long as you kind of get the point its enough. If I don’t get the situation at all I just put the sentence into chatgpt and get nice explanation with separation for words/grammar points that I use for later study.

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#24

I find that writing sentences down using the new grammar points I’ve learned helps solidify it a little better for me. For example, occasionally I like to write a short journal entry about my day. Even when keeping it simple, you’d be surprised how fast you’ll need to use the grammar you’ve learned… It also shows what grammar you haven’t learned either.

Another thing I like to do is to join a Discord that has a channel where only Japanese is spoken/written. It’s great reading and writing practice, and you can learn some neat tidbits there (doesn’t have to be about Japanese!).

In short, the answer for me just boils down to practicing what you’ve learned, because that is how we all learned our first language. The journal entries and chats is an easy non-committal way for me to practice without being bored out of my mind from trying to read… lol

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#25

Cure Dolly :trophy:

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#26

This is definitely the definition of madness to do that for me. But congratulations on succeeding ,the payoff should have been huge. I won’t probably do that but I will think about it thank you.

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#27

This is what I will do for sure. Thank you :slight_smile:

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