>>72570452coincidentally, I've had a similar discussion with our resident repGOD
>>72563057 a couple of weeks ago and I've manage to keep up with the daily grind ever since.
Thanks again for giving me that push btwI think the most important lessons I learned are that you shouldn't shy away from trying different approaches as well as keep it slow and steady. Rather decrease the learning volume and do it daily, or else the revisions pile will burn you.
I'm currently doing two Anki decks with 5 daily new cards each (started with 15, reduced to 10 - both is too much for me).
One is an anime oriented deck called "Jlabs beginner course" (you can DL it for free on the Anki website under the "Japanese" section) which is very fun. It has pictures and voice lines ripped from anime and J-Dramas.
Downside is that in the standard configuration, you'll get the picture, sentence and voice line on the front side of the card, so it can happen that you just learn the meaning of the sentence by associating it with the picture - without actually "learning the words", if that makes sense. You could change up the layout of the cards to make it more challenging, but I've been kinda lazing on that. Definitely get rid of the Romaji though!
The second deck is a TheMoeWay Tango N5/N4 deck from the reps pastebin. It can get horribly boring because it's very business-oriented and no-nonsense. Numbers. Shachou. Kachou. Pencil. Eraser. A necessary evil, really.
It also frustrated me the most, almost to the point of giving up, because it just throws Kanji at you in the hope that they will stick. It didn't work for me at all. Most of the time, I just guessed the Kanji from context without feeling like I recognised anything, which I don't think is the point of the whole thing.
So I went to WaniKani for Kanji. It's a subscription based website, kinda expensive. They split up the Kanji into radicals and give you little stories to help with memorisation. The first three levels are free and give you a whole bunch of content to see if it works for you. I'm sure there are sources that use similar techniques if you sail the high seas though.
At this point, even if I look at Kanji I don't know (in a tweet or something), I can already recognise a lot of the radicals it consists of, so it feels like it's only a matter of time before the words will show up in my lessons tab.
I'm also feeling like I understand more and more during streams - still far from "fluency" but it's almost like the learning curve is exponential, with a very slow and frustrating start and higher and faster rewards once your base vocabulary and understanding of the language increases.
Point is, repAnon put it very well. The best time to start is right fucking now. Do it in digestible bites, do it daily, make it a habit and make it fun.
Follow your oshi on twitter
(your oshi is friend and you are following, of course), pick one or two short tweets of hers a day and hold yourself from pressing the "translate" button immediately. Instead, see what you can understand already. Use the browser extension dictionary described in the reps pastebin to look up the missing words. Then paste the whole thing into deepL or whatever to see if your translation made sense. No better way of learning than having actual, personal motivation to understand something.
And don't cuck yourself with the "I have no time" argument. Make time. Every day. I sometimes work up to 55 hrs a week (not remote) and there IS time if you want to. Do your vocab on the shitter, between sets at the gym, on the train - whatever. You (like me) have obviously entertained the thought of learning Japanese for years. Do it right now. For friend and for yourself.
