Let me add to this, watch learning content for subjects you enjoy! Love astronomy? there are two robot sounding girls to explain it to you. Love cats? there’s millions of robot sounding girls on youtube talking about cats in japanese! Love history about World war 2? Well, maybe can’t help with that.
I jest. But really, watch content you enjoy watching and have interest in already, that isn’t just mother’s basement jp. this is really helpful for learning more specialized language too. My wife recommends VAIENCE for science stuff, and I agree.
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Lots of great advice here. The one that resonated the most with me was about pacing and building a solid foundation.
In my case, I had to come around to the idea that it’s fine moving through a textbook slowly as long as I’m still getting something out of it and supplementing that with other ways to study and immerse. At first I felt like my teachers weren’t moving fast enough. But now I actually prefer this because I can do a first pass on something advanced and then shore it up in class later. Not saying it’s the most efficient way for everyone, but it’s worked for me.
Somebody said on these forums before that one way to approach language learning is as a messy, non-linear process. I wouldn’t have thought that described me, but I’m finding out that it does.
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This massively depends on when andhow you used Duo. I’m currently on section 4 of 5 and it’s an amazing complement to BunPro at mid N3 level as it shares a huge chunk of vocab and grammar. I also use it mostly as a series of Japanese language puzzles as a warm-up/down 15 minute chunk around BunPro and/or actual study, which I usually do before I watch/listen to an hour or so of Japanese content. Which is a pretty effective way to use it I think.
As with most tools:
- It’s constantly evolving and changing
- It’s useful in its right place
- Everybody is different and DL has a very gentle on-ramp for new learners that gets steeper much more gradually than traditional study routes, or even BunPro does
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“Learning channels in English with TONS of sample sentences of varying difficulty, especially with Japanese subtitles included.”
I think I’ve got the other areas covered. Do you happen to have any recommendations for channels like this?
I wish I practiced listening more much earlier on when I was around N5 level. I also wish I went straight to vocab instead of kanji. I can learn the kanji in context that way.
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Beginner:
Intermediate:
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@xeyk1 these two are great examples
One thing you have to avoid is rolling around in N5/N4 suggestions forever. Sometimes hearing it a different way helps, but if you’re listening to the explanation of あなた for the 100th time, stop yourself and get back to your SRS 
If you like video games, https://www.youtube.com/c/GameGengo is another option, and though not fully inclusive of all material, he covers N2/N1 points.
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Game Gengo is great! He has a… let’s say less than stellar accent, but the content is top notch, the videos are well made, informative and entertaining.
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Satori Reader. I love it. I was going to say that maybe you couldn’t use it really early on in your journey… but I think you could actually, as long as you can read hiragana, you could turn furigana on for everything.
Anyway, I was getting very bored of studying and Satori Reader has made ‘studying’ enjoyable (the inverted commas are because you’re not really studying like you would with a textbook, you’re reading story).
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THanks for this!!! x
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That you can start again. I’ve re-started Bunpro over four times, and I don’t mean from scratch, just picking up from where I left off. Surprised how much stuck since its been over three months since the last time I’ve used the site, yet I mastered over 100 words today alone, which means it’s been months since I’ve since seen those words, yet Bunpro’s method works for actually learning the site’s content. You can stop when life gets hectic and continue when life eases up, there’s no reason to punish yourself or feel like you somehow failed and need to get a fresh start learning from scratch.
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Agreed. There is so much you retain. Yes we beat ourselves for what we are always missing, but you never really start from zero.
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Japanese Ammo no Misa is probably one of the main reasons I continued learning Japanese as more than just a ‘learn a few phrases’ thing. I remember google returning one of her videos as a result to my query about how to say something in Japanese. It was, coincidentally, the original X は Y です video. Honestly her videos were good back then, but she has improved by leaps and bounds since then. I can’t recall with absolute certainty, but I’m sure her older videos didn’t have much by way of the subtitles including Kanji and color coding.
edit: I just went back to check and good gracious that was 9 years ago! I didn’t start serious study until much later, but watching those few vids definitely planted a seed that would eventually bloom. Thanks for unlocking that core memory.
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