I feel this way but I’m only in season 3

I know this is a really long post, but please read it all if you are having trouble, as it will help you a lot. I say this confidently as someone who has studied linguistics and taught English to non-native speakers. It works.

There are two ways you could deal with this. That said, Option 2 is best.

Option 1: Stop doing lessons and focus only on doing your vocab and Kanji for now. Once you have a grip on these and the number of reviews you have each day becomes fairly breezy, then you start your lessons again. If they start to become overwhelming again, stop your lessons and repeat as needed.

Option 2: Keep doing Anki every day, maybe skipping a day occasionally if you must. Continue with your lessons and keep adding new decks to Anki as they show up. The big key to this option is making a conscious decision to stop caring how many items in Anki you get wrong. Take on a ‘whatever’ attitude with your Anki deck. This makes a huge difference and is key to this option.

Option 1 is the slow methodical method, which suits some people just fine. Where as others will feel like killing themselves to make it stop. If you really like Option 1, go for it, but otherwise stick to Option 2, as it’s actually more effective.

That said, you should use Option 1 regardless of which way you prefer until you hit Season 3. As the content in Seasons 1-2, including vocabulary, needs to be learned well, which requires you to be thorough and methodical.

Once you hit Season 3, switch to Option 2, unless you really like Option 1 (and don’t care how long it takes for you to become fluent).

Now to fully explain Option 2 and how it works:

As I said before, the key is to keep doing Anki regularly, but to quit caring about your results. Don’t spend much time on it at all. Don’t stare at a card until you can remember what it means, as that tells you that you don’t know it well enough yet. So if it doesn’t come to you immediately, mark it as wrong and move on. When they come back up, don’t mark them as wrong again, mark them as hard so they’ll show up again tomorrow. If it comes to you immediately, always hit Easy. Don’t worry about how many you get wrong, at all. Set a certain time for Anki review, say 10-15 mins, and then stop. Focus on going through as many as you can, rather than getting them correct.

What this is doing is simulating immersion, to a degree. If you were in Japan, you would be bombarded by heaps of words and would have no idea what most of them meant, but eventually as you see/hear them over and over they will start to stick. Once again, don’t worry about how many do or don’t. It’s not important at this stage. As for Kanji, focus more on the meanings than the readings, but still don’t worry too much about them.

Your main focus should be the grammar that’s being taught in the lessons. That’s the important stuff. This is what you focus on.

You don’t need to know many words (or any Kanji) to be able to practice grammar. As long as you know 5 nouns, 5 adjectives, and 5 verbs, you’re all set. Write them down in a list and learn them extremely well (Might want to use your passion list to choose the words).

If you know grammar well, you can speak or write anything you want, you’ll just have to look up the specific words you need for the situation to fill in the blanks, which is really easy to do, and something you’ll still be doing occasionally even after you become fluent. Grammar is key.

Even if you learn every single vocab word available on TF, they won’t do you any good, unless you can string them together to form functional sentences. So focus on this part first and when you can say anything you want using what limited vocab you have, then you can start focusing on expanding your vocab and will be able to actually use all the new words you are learning, so you won’t forget them and should be very confident in practicing with them.

I don’t know if Koichi actually says any of this, as most of my time is currently being spent focusing on WaniKani (as I’m paying by month) rather than doing the lessons here, but I believe this is similar to what he has in mind when he starts adding so many vocab. He’s not expecting you to remember it all, but wants you to start being exposed to a lot of vocab so your brain will start to slowly absorb it through exposure as you go.

You will never become fluent if you spend all your time perfecting a relatively short list of words (2,000 is short when compared to every word in a language). You need to get to the point that you can start reading or listening to native Japanese. At that point you will be blown away by how many words you start learning with little effort, as you come across them time and again and your brain realizes there’s actually a practical reason to remember them. The key to getting there is grammar.

In the mean time, make sure you download Rikaisama (firefox) or Rikaikun (Chrome) as this will translate any words you can’t remember that are in the lessons, by mousing over them. Once again, don’t focus on the word, focus on how it’s being used, and practice the usage by inserting your own nouns, adjectives, and verbs.

Once you have grammar down well, you’ll need to focus your attention on Kanji next.

If you’ve been focusing mostly on Kanji meanings in Anki, while learning your grammar, you’ll find that your brain will store meanings much easier than readings, so you should have been able to absorb a lot of meanings for a lot of Kanji, just through the constant quick reviews I described earlier.

You won’t know most of the readings very well, but that doesn’t matter. If you know their meanings, you will still be able to understand Japanese sentences that use them (just can’t read them out loud yet :P).

So now that grammar is solid for the most part, you can start focusing on the readings of the Kanji. If you know grammar and the meanings of a lot of Kanji, you can start reading actual sentences, which will help you retain the readings so much more than simply using Anki or even WaniKani.

Nouns, adjectives, and verbs are mostly wrote in Kanji, so as you learn your Kanji, you are expanding your vocab as well. The rest is mostly particles and grammar stuff, which you should already know by now.

So keep learning more Kanji at this point and continue looking things up in native sentences or while constructing your own on Lang-8. Get on Skype and start talking to native speakers, or find them in your own town. If you do these things and keep with it, you will become fluent! ^_^

Although I agree with the gist of what Aikibujin has said, I’d caution against getting too hung up on studying grammar. There are so many different ways to say things, each with its own different nuances and implications, that the study of grammar can (especially to those prone to obsession) amount stamp collecting. It doesn’t do you any good to know 15 ways to say something if you don’t have anything to say in the first place.

Learn two or three ways to say “If A then B” or “Whether or not A, B” or whatever relationship between two clauses you wish to represent, and then move on. You are better off studying obscure vocabulary than perfect grammar.

thisiskyle wrote:

Although I agree with the gist of what Aikibujin has said, I’d caution against getting too hung up on studying grammar. There are so many different ways to say things, each with its own different nuances and implications, that the study of grammar can (especially to those prone to obsession) amount stamp collecting. It doesn’t do you any good to know 15 ways to say something if you don’t have anything to say in the first place.

Learn two or three ways to say “If A then B” or “Whether or not A, B” or whatever relationship between two clauses you wish to represent, and then move on. You are better off studying obscure vocabulary than perfect grammar.

Oh I definitely agree. To clarify, I’m being TextFugu specific here. So I mean focus on the grammar first as in the lessons provided here in TextFugu and completing all of them, before you start obsessing over the vocab and Kanji provided here. Because yeah, TextFugu is not going to get you anywhere near perfect grammar, but by the time you complete it, you should have a good enough handle on the basics to be able to start intuitively absorbing other aspects of grammar as you start to “consume” native materials, or at least know enough to able to look up things that you don’t understand. As I said, the key is getting to the point that you can start using native materials without feeling completely overwhelmed. As that’s when the magic really happens and you start to feel like you actually know something about the language. ^_^

PS: I would recommend using http://www.imabi.net/ after you are finished with TF, for any of your grammar needs.

While you’re focusing on lessons, don’t sit and think about it. Wait maybe 3 seconds tops if you think you almost have it, but still hit Again if it takes that long. If nothing’s happening just hit Show Answer. That said, make sure you do properly read the answer once it comes up, and repeat the meaning a few times quickly in your head, while looking at the Japanese.

The key to this is signaling to your brain that it doesn’t have time to go pull it out of the backroom, it needs to be able to access the data quickly. If your brain knows this is needed, it will generally start behaving accordingly.

This is one of the reasons that songs are easier to remember. A song has a temporal and rhythmic structure to it. If you break this structure, the song doesn’t work and it’s ruined. You brain is keyed into that. If you had to stop and think about the right words every time, you wouldn’t ever be able to sing a song without going through it in your mind beforehand. So your brain knows that in order to do it properly, you have to be able to access that info quickly without contemplation, and thus it complies. You may need a key to trigger it first, which might be a tune or a few words of the song, but then your brain goes BAM and spews the rest out, often times even if you don’t want it to. :P

There’s a lot more things that make songs easier to remember, but this is a big part of that near auto-recall, which is what you want to harness when listening to and speaking common words.