掲示板 Forums - Anyone got a good study method?

There are tonnes of great methods, and each one will work better for different people. The one thing they all have in common is consistency.

You're at the beginner phase, where you've only got a few things to learn each day, and that's fine. If I were you, I'd spend the majority of my time doing listening immersion, because listening is a hard skill and starting early will help you with pronunciation and with creating a solid foundation for later.

I'd probably split my time something like:

~30 minutes of Hiragana and Katakana practice/vocabulary practice. (Learning to write and read them, probably with some kind of flash card system to help the process).

~30 minutes - 1 hour of reading practice (Reading is where I spend most of my time now, but it's hard at the beginning and you don't want to overwhelm yourself and give up. Add more time here if you can, and take time off if you need to for your mental).

~30 minutes - 2 hours of listening practice (It can be anime, JDrama, anything is fine. At the start you're going to understand barely anything, and that's fine. You can watch kids TV shows to lower the level a bit, but the important thing is that you're really trying to understand. Don't put on a movie and then sit on your phone for an hour, that's not the point).

Truthfully, no matter what advice I give (or anyone else gives you), we're all going to disagree with each other. We're all at different points in our studies, lives and different things have worked and not worked for each of us. The only thing we'll all agree on is "if you can't do it for a long period of time, it's not the best method". Focus on consistency over most other things and you'll be fine (as long as you're doing more than a 5 minute lesson a day).

I do the silly thing and just read about a certain thing and if it's a lesson I needed to learn, I try to take condensed notes out of it. With some of the nuance, I try to summarize that so that the ideas connect. After that, I just practice how it applies by reading or doing Renshuu schedules for it.

Japanese is pretty comprehensible, but much of it hinges on getting used to it, and getting used to it requires some memorization, which is the bulk of the work needed to know about it. That's really the hard part once you get things. I don't memorize every single thing, but I try to do some of it. Sometimes I don't think much of it and do fine. Other times I might forget, so I'll have to review my notes if they make sense. It's not been so bad so far. That should at least get you started in recognizing the pattern even if you aren't familiar with some vocabulary.

Yeah, because it's not effective and there is a hard limit on how much you can learn per day.
And that limit is really low for beginners. There is not a lot of things you can do and even if you find something, it will not be a game changer.

But don't worry too much, later, you will be able to learn more once you are more used to the kana. And when you will get used to some kanji, it will be even faster.

Honnestly, my best advice here is "don't fight back what is normal". Forgetting what look like "too much words" is just... well, the beginner stage. Don't be disapointed or frustrated because you're "normal".

Also, "reading" is HARD. It's not an ability that you should train when you've just started. Especially in the case of Japanese which has 3 system. If you really think about, reading is similar to doing a math exercise. Right now, we are communicating through abstract symbol that we piece together into words. Then, we compute those words (which are also abstract) into sentences. It's not that different from solving an equation. Most people don't think about that because they are used to the alphabet and expect similar result when they start japanese. But no. It's hard. Just try russian which has a closer system and see how it is already hard. Then come back to japanese which is a completely different system. It won't improve your japanese but at least you won't be as frustrated.

Lastly, no native in the world start with reading. We can do it but that doesn't mean it's the best way, or even a good way, to learn japanese at beginner level. It's not a bad way but it's the easiest way. Manga are easier because the image give some context (and I guess it's one of the reason why they are so popular in Japan) but still. Watching short on youtube is even easier and closer to how native learn (a video is closer to reality than a book). Because the context is even richer (sound, face expression, scene, tone of the voice, etc). That what immersion is about originally (the reading thing come from intermediate and advance learners).

So, I'm not here to say that you shoudln't read. But please don't be disapointed or frustrated for being "slow" while doing it. You're already doing far better than a native speaker. Compared to other japanese learners too, it's normal.

Anyway, just keep up the good work and just trust the process x)
The main point is... It just takes time =p
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