>>12430969Japanese learning is boring. It's just memorizing words and learning "grammar points". Even though it can become a means to a end to understanding raw Japanese media (some of which can include fun anime, manga, light novels, and games), it in itself doesn't really lead to much discussion.
As somebody who spent 2 years on DJT, I can attest that there's not really a lot to talk about learning Japanese or even about meta-language learning in general. Sure, one can learn to write characters with mnemonics and there's books and sites full of them, but there's no point in learning to write by hand these days, since most communication takes place through text messages, e-mails, comments, etc. Even Chinese people sometimes forget how to write characters that are not that common, so they gotta look them up on their cell phone before they write them.
There's no real secrets to learning to speak other than using words and phrases you already know the meaning and usage of. Many things can't be literally translated from English to Japanese or vice-versa, so it's often necessary to substitute one idiom for another.
From my experience, it seems like almost everybody who learns Japanese has said that at the beginning they've got trouble understanding stuff they read and listen to, but the more they practice those two things, the better they start getting at them, even though reading is almost always easier than listening, because if you come across an unknown word while reading, you can just look it up in the dictionary, whereas looking up an unknown word by ear requires hearing well enough to recognize the phonemes being used, typing in the word in kana and then sifting through a list of homophones till you come across something that seeems like it might fit).
I think there's not much to say besides that.
