>>181491
This is my second, and by far more successful, try at learning Japanese. I was a latecomer to it having only started learning the first time in 2018 and the second time only this year. The day you decide to do something is the day you regret not doing it sooner and that was certainly true for me. I was, of course, not starting from complete scratch. Years of watching anime meant I knew a bit of vocab, kanji and some of the basic particles and grammar. I also already knew how to write the kana. Another way of looking at it is that everything I learned in the years up to that point could probably be learned in a week of moderate study. So it was helpful but not that helpful. This is what I did...
My first attempt was towards the end of 2018. I downloaded the Japanese Learner Anki Package, read the readme and set up my stuff. I used the reversible kanji (recognition + production) deck and the core 2/6/10k vocab deck that came with the package. With the kanji deck, the first time I looked at the answer cards I was overwhelmed. Why is there so much crap on it? How are you supposed to remember all of that for each card? In particular the multitudes of readings each kanji has. There was just no way I would be able to remember these random readings for every kanji so I decided to only give the first keyword for each. I didn't realise at the time that this is all you were supposed to do. I thought I was doing it wrong. I just left the anki settings for the decks on the defaults so that was 30 new cards a day or 40 if you count the reverse of the kanji cards. I kind of read some of Japanese the Manga Way but got bored. After a short while (less than a month), I downloaded Yotsuba and started reading. I had to look up most words. Worse, Yotsuba doesn't speak in kanji and I didn't know where one word ended and another began. I was entering combinations of kana into jisho until it spat out a word. This was exactly as grueling as it sounds. Eventually I kind of got a sense for which kana tend to end words but I was still looking up pretty much all the words. My grammar was also shit. I knew the basic present and past forms and their negatives and that was it.
After three months, I remember I had something like 850 kanji in anki so I would have had something like 1700 words as well. I was on volume two or three of Yotsuba. This is where I gave up. Mainly it was because of the ballooning anki reviews. I was spending over an hour a day. Furthermore, I didn't think I was really learning very much in those reviews. Yeah, I could give the keyword for hundreds of kanji but I had no idea what words with those kanji meant or how to pronounce them. Kanji words usually have meanings that you would never guess in a million years from just knowing the kanji themselves. So it was pointless. I was also starting to forget a lot of kanji and words because I was learning them as arbitrary question:answer pairs rather than really understanding them. I was also still struggling through Yotsuba with only a dim awareness of what was going on.
I spent a lot of time after giving up thinking about what went wrong. I cam up with a list of things I would do differently if I ever happened to try again.
>Learning a kanji by just learning its keyword is pointless
It would have been better to learn the meanings of words that share a common kanji together and thereby gain an intuitive understanding of their meanings. In a sense, doing the reverse of kanji recognition study.
>I didn't know how to read kanji
I thought this was because of my own inadequacy and laziness at the time. But like the first point, it would have been better to learn words that share a kanji together so that you get a sense of how the kanji are read.
>I was learning the kanji in isolation making them hard to remember
I did use mnemonics for the difficult ones (as your brain is apt to do automatically). I recognised the radicals (as anyone who has to look up kanji on jisho does) but the fact is that, even with all the memory tools available, remembering a large collection of independent facts is difficult. Instead, I thought it would be better to learn them in context. To be able to say, "I recognise that kanji. It's the kanji from such and such word."
>A lot of kanji have similar meanings and I was writing the wrong one in the production cards.
Prime example: 屋 vs 室. I needed a way to distinguish between kanji with similar keywords.
>I was getting overloaded on anki and this was making me not want to do any reading
I had too many new reviews per day. Next time I would lower the number.
Fast forward to around March-ish of 2022. I had an internet outage and I didn't feel like playing any games. I stumbled across my old Japanese folder and opened up Yotsuba. It was just as brutally painful but somehow I could still remember a surprising amount of stuff. I had a kind of an instinct for what many kanji meant. I wasn't planning to restart learning Japanese, I just needed something to kill time. The thing is I went back to read more the next day. And the day after that. After a couple of weeks of this, I thought, "Fuck it. Let's do this." This time I was going to put my plan into action. First thing I did was look for an anki deck that grouped vocab by kanji and I found one based off a textbook called Kanji in Context. This goes through the kanji and introduces words that cover the common uses of each kanji and makes sure to cover all the readings. The textbook has an explanation justifying the order of kanji they use which includes consideration for frequency. Unfortunately, the deck and textbook do this thing where they introduce one word per reading for all the kanji and then go back through a second time to fill out the vocab. This was fixable by suspending everything and unsuspending the cards one grade at a time (the kanji are divided into seven grades). This new deck, I was sure, would solve most of the problems I had had the first time. One downside of this deck though is that it only does kanji based vocab. You need to already know hiragana words. The textbook says it's for an intermediate learner but I certainly wasn't when I started. Nevertheless, because I had made a previous attempt and so recognised many kanji already, that helped a lot. Another nice thing about the textbook is that it's completely in Japanese apart from the introduction. I don't use the textbook though because I hate doing exercises and reading those isolated sentences textbooks have.
I also picked up a 教育 ordered kanji deck for production only and suspended the recognition cards. In the kanji deck, I deleted all the useless crap cluttering the cards and added one important new field. A Japanese word field. The question side has the English keyword and then one or more Japanese words written in hiragana that I chose myself because I know the kanji in question is from those words. The answer side has the kanji only. The point of this was to remember the kanji as "that's the kanji from that word." For example, I remember 屋 as the kanji from 部屋 and 屋上 and also as a suffix as in 花屋. This also helps me remember some readings. The important thing is that I tried to pick a word that I already knew because that would help me remember which kanji I'm supposed to be writing and also it helped me recall the general shape of the kanji (because I know the general shape of the word) which makes filling in the details easier. Finally, I lowered the number of new cards per day to ten vocab and five kanji production. I also changed the order cards are presented so I could do reviews first and hold off on new cards if the number of reviews per day was getting too large.
Regarding grammar. Grammar was my favourite part about learning French at school but in Japanese not so much. I get too bored by grammar guides to even skim through them so most of my grammar has come from looking it up when I come across it in reading. Mostly what is considered grammar in Japanese isn't even grammar. It's vocab. Take ばっかり for instance. It's a word yet it's classified as grammar. I don't like Tae Kim. His book is laid out as if you wanted to know how to express a concept in Japanese. That is, it's made for production rather than input. It's not laid out well if you want to look something up. The best book for that I've found are the three Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar. Two bad things about them: 1) The Basic volume has fucking romaji sentences. All three have the English translations right next to the Japanese which sucks if you're a beginner and can't switch between the two. You get locked into English-brain. 2) It's in English alphabetical order rather than gojuon kana order.
The difference between my new method and my old method was like night and day. I was able to easily remember the meanings and readings of kanji by inferring them from the vocab I was presented with because that vocab was presented in a systematic order. Today I have over 90% success rate on mature cards. As an added bonus, I can often picture the right kanji when I'm listening to Japanese which has given me a boost in that area too. I can do this because I know the readings for the kanji and then it's just guessing from the context. I focused far more on reading than on anki this time. About volume six of Yotsuba was when it clicked for me. I still had to look up a lot of words but the structure of Japanese sentences started to make sense. From that point on, I really read. My anki for both decks takes under half an hour each day. On the other hand, there was a period of two or three months earlier this year where I was reading easily five to ten hours per day. I started reading other manga and VNs. I was able to read a whole manga chapter in one sitting. Then multiple chapters. Then a whole tankoubon volume in one day. More importantly, I could understand the plot with a dictionary. I started to practice not using a dictionary by having no-dictionary stories. A few months ago, I stopped using a dictionary almost entirely. My comprehension took a hit of course but it's since been on the rise again and I can generally understand what's going on most of the time.
Some general precepts to take from my story.
>Have a long hard think about which parts of your methods aren't working and why that is
This was really the key to getting to where I am today. I was able to identify what wasn't working and come up with solutions.
>Input is paramount
I didn't start to really comprehend Japanese until I made reading the number one priority. You can't get good at X without practising X. Are you trying to learn how to comprehend Japanese or are you training to give the right answer to an anki prompt? Make sure your study method reflects what you are actually trying to do. If you want to comprehend Japanese, you must practise comprehending Japanese. This is the ONLY way. I once read some batshit insane woman's language blog where she tried to claim that you don't learn to drive by going out driving and, therefore, classroom study is more important than input. Don't be like her. Another point to consider is that input is fun while anki is not. The times I have let anki start to take over are the times I started to not want to do any Japanese. The times I started the day with input are the times I felt motivated even to do my anki reviews.
>Isolated kanji recognition
It seems difficult to make a hard statement against this when so many people have had success by doing dedicated kanji study. These people are wrong. I would say that there are a number of reasons why isolated kanji recognition is not a good idea. Some of them I've hinted at above. I have learned more about kanji by not studying them than I ever did studying them. This does not apply to kanji production which I think you should do isolated. And you should do it. You can't say you know Japanese until you can do all four language skills and it only takes me five to ten minutes per day. Less if you're only doing reviews and no new cards. It's a trifling amount of time spent and the payoff is large. Especially since doing production study helps you recognise the kanji as well and tell similar kanji apart.
If you want to follow what I did, a note of caution. What I have done worked because I had made a previous attempt and had a (weak as it was) foundation to work off. Grab the list of grade 1 kanji (there are 80 of them) and try to give a word for each one from memory. Do the same thing for grades 2 and 3. If you can give a word for most of the grade 1 kanji and maybe half of the grades 2-3 kanji, then go ahead. Since I already knew basic words like これ and みんな etc, it was really just the kanji based vocab that I needed to focus on. If you're a total beginner, you'll need to do the core 2k deck instead. Because of the method I use, I am very weak at onomatopoeia and rarer hiragana words. Regardless of the exact method you use, as long as your method is input-centric, it is absolutely possible to get to the point where you stop using a dictionary in under a year. You could probably do it faster than I did. Also I neglected listening for too long. Don't do that. It'll kill your motivation to start because you're going back to "I don't know what the fuck is going on" territory. The most important thing is to keep your morale up by reading stuff that you find interesting.
Specific answers to your questions.
1) The hardest part of Japanese is not the kanji or vocab or complex grammar. It's the basic structure of Japanese and the underlying structure of thinking. This shit is as alien as it gets. And there is no resource for learning it. No matter what you do, your first manga is going to be horrible. You just have to power through and eventually it will click for you. You can't skimp on this process; it takes time.
2) I read nearly from the beginning. On my second attempt, I was reading again even before I took up anki again. I read Yotsuba first because that's what everyone says to do. I'd recommend it. It has some problems as a first manga but I think they're overblown and there are many more good points about it than bad. I also read Hanahira because it's given as a beginner VN. This one was a mistake. It's boring as shit. I did learn lots from it and, at some point during, I started being able to instantly comprehend a lot of the voiced dialogue so it wasn't all bad. It was also one of my no-dictionary things so that made it harder. Pick a voiced VN that's actually interesting though. Other than that, I just read whatever. Pick something with furigana to begin with. It makes looking up words much easier if your scan is high enough resolution that you can actually read them. At the moment I have several things running at once. Some of them are much easier than others.