And greetings from Poland 8D
My name’s Alicja (yes, that’s how it’s spelled), just started the second grade of high school (the 11th year of my education, so 11th grade I guess?) and obviously I wanna learn Japanese (why else would I be here?). A few years ago I got hooked on anime and manga, but it gradually changed into an obsession with Japan overall, especially the language, as I’m kinda fascinated with foreign languages anyway. But I didn’t believe it was actually possible to learn Japanese all by myself, or even if it was, it would take like 10 years or something (especially kanji, ooh). So I thought I’d wait until I go to university and then rely on it to teach me the language.

Then I found AJATT (nope, not TextFugu yet!).

Now, not everyone may like the AJATT method, but if there’s one thing this site does right, then that’s motivation. It made me feel that it’s actually possible for me to learn Japanese now, on my own. It also taught me about RtK and Anki. Not only that, it practically changed my outlook on life (not all at once though, lol). Before I was a rather pessimistic person, thought of myself as a loser that was only good at one thing – English. Now I believe in myself a bit more, at the very least.

So I just recently finished RtK, it took me a bit longer than it should, around 6 months, finally learned hiragana and was wondering what to do next. That’s when I found Tofugu (through a link on AJATT, no less). I didn’t think I would actually be able to use TextFugu, but fortunately I got nice parents and they’re paying for it and here I am! Hopefully it’ll assist me well on the journey through Japanese, and hey, I already managed to learn English, Japanese can’t be THAT much harder, can it (although it did take me 9 years to get to this level and I still don’t talk like a native – most if it were school classes though…)? And I’m looking forward to studying Japanese Philology which will probably render me jobless but hey, at least it’ll be fun. I have this ambitious plan to get at least decent at Japanese before I go to uni (2 years from now), which will make my life easier there xD.

So, sorry for this wall of text and kudos to anyone who bothered to read this all. To those who didn’t (and those who did as well), here are two short questions you may still be able to answer:

1. I went through RtK, but shortly afterwards I was gone for 2 weeks which resulted in me ending up with 1500 reviews which is a little disheartening and the meanings of a lot of the kanji seem to be slipping my mind (often when seeing a character I will know I’d learned it, will be able to recognize the primitive elements, sometimes even recall the story, but not the keyword…) – I’m wondering if I should try out Koichi’s kanji lessons or just try to pick up the readings as I’m learning new vocab as must people suggest doing after RtK.

2. Now this doesn’t really have anything to do with Japanese, but it is damaging my studies – does anyone know a method to get up early in the morning and still feel rested thorough the day? It seems no matter how early I sleep, if I have to get up at 6:30 I’m going to wake up exhausted. I’m one of these people who would be glad to go to sleep at 3-4 AM and wake up around noon, but obviously I can’t do that with school around. Getting up early is such a chore for me I started skipping school because of it last year and I really wouldn’t want it to happen again.

Oh, and my reason for learaning Japanese? I wanna go to Japan and work with SquareEnix on awesome video games!

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. Hey, I can dream, right? :p

I really, really write too much.