Hello hello and welcome! I’m really loving this flood of new people we’ve had :D Always great to see new faces!

I, too, look forward to the day when I can turn off the subtitles and know what the hell they’re on about. Ken Cannon over at Japanese Through Anime has some pretty good stuff that may be worth taking a look at as well (just don’t leave us!!!) if you’re pretty big into anime.

Enjoy your stay!!

EDIT: Also, I’m very much in favour of calling each other “Textonian Fugunites” :)

• This reply was modified 10 years, 4 months ago by  Justin.

Hey Warren! Welcome back! Hope you can find it within yourself to stick with it this time. I was gonna say chicks dig Japanese, but I’m completely just making that up to give you something to look forward to. Out of kindness though, I promise. If you find yourself wavering in terms of dedication, you can always drop a post asking for encouragement. It works.

Welcome, Bahanur!

Wow, double major – good job! Guess you already know a thing or two about studying then, eh? :)

My kanji study (although it may not be the best method, I’ll admit) involves a book called Remembering the Kanji (by James W Heisig, RTK for short), a preposterous number of pens, a notebook, graph paper, and Anki. I do have to ask before I continue, how far are you into the Textfugu course? Koichi does a pretty solid job explaining how to study. I have twisted and modified things to make my studying more effective for me, and I’m sure you’ll wind up doing the same.

Of course, as I’m sure literally every learning resource will tell you, go ahead and learn AT LEAST hiragana (but ideally hiragana and katakana) first because, if nothing else, it gets you in the right mindset for learning a new writing system. It will also just be better for your learning in pretty well every other way imaginable. So yeah, those two first. Or, as I said, at least hiragana first. You will find katakana shapes in kanji though, so to me it seems right to learn those first.

So, what I do is I aim to learn 20/day, but honestly I tend to mess up and right now my average in only about 10. I tried 50 once, and that was a horrendous error and I can not advise against that more emphatically. Seriously what a soul-crushing day that turned out to be. Anyways, I have a book in which I write kanji mnemonics (little ‘stories’ to remember the elements in each kanji) along with the meaning or ‘keyword’ as Heisig calls it. After 20 of those, I do my best to write the kanji out 3 or 4 times without looking in RTK. If I have to look it isn’t the end of the world. But being able to read the mnemonic and then write the kanji is far more effective, at least for me. After I’ve done that, I write it on a sort of “master list” that has corresponding numbers for fast lookup. Then I jam over to Anki, run through that with my review and my 20 new cards, write everything out at least 3 times, and then winge about how my hand hurts. That last step is critical.

This, however, is just how I do it. There are many, many different ways to study, and none of them are wrong as long as it works for you. Just keep trying things until you come up with a method that works.

I’m fairly sure other people will have other suggestions. People with slightly more um… street cred? than I.

Ahoy and welcome good sir!

A sporadic learning style can definitely make it kind of interesting for something as time-intensive as Japanese, but it’s super rewarding when you can manage to get yourself to focus on something long enough to learn stuff. I can be kind of ADD (for example, I’m currently 3/4s of the way through a pretty hefty Anki session and I’m stopping to write this) when it comes to studying and studying CONSISTENTLY so I can definitely understand the difficulty you find in concentrating.

I’ve found that going to Starbucks (or, you know, any other coffee shop, but Sbux for me) can be a pretty good way of making yourself concentrate. That isn’t obviously for everyone, but being a bit crap financially speaking, I can only afford to go a couple times a week so when I’m there I sort of end up working pretty efficiently. Also it’s fun when people are looking at you pound kanji into a notebook. Feels good.

Anyways, enjoy your time here!

Welcome! And congrats on making it through the first season!

Best of luck on your language learning journey. If you have questions, there’s a reasonable chance somebody here has an answer. We’re a pretty ballin’ community.

I’m not sure there is a right or wrong answer for this.

I’ve been following Remembering The Kanji which, if you’re not aware, only teaches you the meanings of and how to remember the joyo kanji. I do my best to get in 20/day – I tried 50 once and dear jesus don’t do that unless you have superpowers – and that seems to be pretty good progress-wise. 340 and counting, which feels pretty good.

The way I study, I do practise writing the kanji out; both because I’d like to be faster at it and because currently my kanji writing looks like an armless, PCP-riddled, drunk, blind guy using his mouth to write with a pen made of butter. Many imagery, such silly, wow. Anyways, by doing this I am able to write a bit faster. Basically what I’m saying is it comes down to practise. I’m constantly in a battle with myself of “why aren’t I better yet?” and I always have to remind myself that I *am* better than I was a month ago, and that it’s a slow thing to learn an entire language. It’s definitely a challenge, especially if you’re very much results-based like me, but it’s very very worth it if you can manage to keep your self-judgement in check. Some days are harder than others, but I can’t really advise on how to overcome that.

In terms of finding what will work and what won’t, you may wish to employ what I am now calling Justin’s Razor – when you don’t know how to do something, start by trying everything. In the span of two days using that, I discovered which studying methods worked for me and what didn’t. Maybe that’s just me, you might have a different experience, but when I tried all of the options, I very quickly figured out what felt “right” and what didn’t.

Have you gone back and looked over season 1? There’s a lot of good stuff that may help you get to a point where you don’t feel that your studies are “less than adequate” with “no consistency.” Here’s what I would do: go watch some TEDx stuff about language learning (the creator of http://www.fluentin3months.com/ has a good one), watch some jvlog videos (I recommend the Abroad In Japan ones if you don’t know where to start), jam on some J-Pop (since all of these list items are getting subtext, throw down to some きゃり ぱみゅ ぱみゅ), and generally just get yourself totally pumped about Japanese. Then, while still high on motivation, go back to season one. Follow it through and do all of the steps – including writing out why you want to learn Japanese, setting up a study area, and another one that I wanted to list but have forgotten about. Just do them all, is the point. Even if you’ve done this before, it sounds to me like what you really need is to re-focus.

Then create, if not a schedule, then a ritual. There is a difference. A schedule adheres you to a time frame. That doesn’t work for me, personally. Scheduled things are easy to miss, and that can completely screw you up. What I do instead is have an outline of what I’m going to do when I study, and then follow that every day. I think it’s the beginning of season 3 or possibly 4, or maybe the end of 3? I don’t know. One of those. It has some studying tips. Try all of them, except maybe the sleeping and napping one because that’s brutal. When I’m having a hard time studying, I always just do the 30/30 one, where I work for a bit, watch half an hour of anime to keep myself in the spirit of Japan, and then back to work, and repeat until my eyes hurt.

I don’t think I’ve really answered your question, have I?

If you’re going to separate kanji and vocab, I’d recommend doing kanji first, solely because of the multiple readings. If you already know the kanji meaning/writing, it’s much easier to associate the vocab to it, I would think. If you really hammer down on kanji, you can have it finished in relatively short order (at 20 per day, it should be less than 4 months). Personally I think it’s best to separate them because it’s a lot of information to learn how to write the kanji, what it means, what the readings are, and the different vocab associated with it.

It must be repeated though that there isn’t a correct answer here, it’s whatever works for you. What works for me is taking it a step at a time, with lots of encouragement sprinkled throughout.

This was shared with me a little while back when I was having motivational issues, and it’s surprisingly effective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxGRhd_iWuE

It might help you when you’re feeling like you’ve dug yourself into a hole. Cause remember, no matter how deep a hole you think you’ve dug, if you had the utilities to dig that hole in the first place, you have the utilities to make hand-holds with which you may climb out. (The less metaphorical version of that is like this: periodically I feel overwhelmed by my anki study because I’ll have 100 kanji show up at once. But the only way I could get to the point where 100 show up was by learning how to write and understand those 100 in the first place. So I stop learning new ones for a day or two, and I just use the exact same process to get myself on top of the ones I already know. I don’t increase my study time or anything, I just apply the time more specifically at review, but using the same methods I use to learn).

I hope this novella has been of at least a bit of value. At least a chuckle or two would be enough for me to feel validated ;) (I don’t actually need validation)

Wow really!? I just had a feeling that it was the right thing to say. LOL awesome!