I’d say my path was kind of similar to the OP, but uh maybe worse and way less efficient haha
My initial major exposure to Japanese was TV and music, so I was familiar with some words and basic pronunciations. Tried to learn using Duolingo several times (gamified learning works a lot better than textbook learning, for me - bunpro so far has been a nice happy medium of the informative nature of a textbook and the gamification!) but always ended up falling off somewhere in the late-beginner phase.
Duolingo gets pretty boring after a few weeks, I find, and few of its example sentences were things I could find any use for, and its instruction on grammar was limited enough that I was legit learning more just via casual exposure watching TV shows and movies.
I also tried Anki many years ago, but didn’t really have any other inputs at the time, and no understanding of how to make the most of it as a tool, so I ended up having a poor experience with it.
Anyway, multiple rounds of failed Duolingo led to a mostly-decent comprehension of hiragana and an honestly very subpar understanding of katakana, which is where I’m still sort of “at” with literacy. I really struggle with katakana to this day. The problem I run into is that a lot of the beginner resources that cover things that fundamental are also too easy in terms of vocab and grammar to be interesting enough for me to stick with, so now I’m working mostly on grammar and vocab and sort of filling in the kana blanks through trial and error when reading graded readers and bunpro vocab example sentences. Todaii daily news has also been helpful on this for me - both Todaii and bunpro’s example sentences have a listening feature on a lot of things, so I can read it and then listen through to sort of “check my answers”.
I consider myself fairly literate and eloquent in English (my first language) and I credit that to the fact that I’ve always been an avid reader, so I guess my approach is partly trying to retrace that pathway, just in a different language this time.
I don’t think I’d recommend my pathway to this point to others interested in learning Japanese lol it’s been a long and winding path that’s only recently begun to bear fruit (I finally have a learning setup and combination of tools that’s working for me, for now, I think), but I was never on a deadline with learning this language, I’m just doing it because it’s fun and I think it’s a language that sounds nice, so maybe it’s fine not to be speedrunning it.
(found out my reading was bad!)
)
My problem currently is that I can read and listen but my comprehension is lagging a lot behind. So by the time I finished reading a sentence/paragraph or listened to a convo, I lost track of what I read/listened to, which cost me a lot of time during JLPT. So this is what I will be working on.
