I’m a beginner to learning Japanese, just finding my feet and am feeling a little lost on how to approach my studies, all and any advice welcome! I used a couple of drilling apps and nailed hiragana and katakana so that I can now read them pretty well (albeit very slowly). I then stumbled upon Renshuu very soon after and love the community aspect and thought I’d base my whole initial learning journey around it and Pimsleur (the Genki books I have don’t seem great for self- study). The Pimsleur is going well and while the format is clearly limited it’s so cool to be able to recall and speak phases relatively quickly.
On the Renshuu side, I’ve been doing the Japanese Basics and Words for Japanese Basics schedules but am finding it challenging as it’s teaching me a seemingly very random selection of words. I’m up to only 114 words now and these include moron, stinginess, complex, bustling and worry whereas I’ve learnt no numbers and only Saturday and Sunday.
I understand that there’s a value in not just studying lists of related terms but this feels too far the other way and I’m worried that having to wade through so many relatively complex adjectives before I learn simple things like days of the week etc I’ll loose motivation.
Does anyone have any tips for this situation? I was wondering if I just pause Renshuu as I’m asking for too much from it and go do something more beginner friendly first (Japanese from zero, for example) or if there’s a bunch of engaging basic lists/schedules lurking somewhere on Renshuu that folks recommend for an absolute beginner looking for the sugar-hit of feeling they’ve made progress on a discreet small hill while climbing the mountain that is learning Japanese rather than just seeing a uniform mountain ahead for years!
The "Words for japanese basics" are the upcoming words that happen to be in the next "Japanese basics" grammar lessons. It's not that "bustling" is important to know in general, but it's important that YOU learn it now because you're about to learn japanese sentence structure using a sentence that happens to have the word "bustling" in it.
In a way it's pretty arbitrary, but you'll learn a lot more useful language immediately than you would if you were to try to learn all the days of the week first. They're useful and you'll get to them, but they aren't as useful to a beginner as learning just "Wednesday" and "bustling" and "town" and doing your grammar lesson where you build a sentence about how busy it was in town on Wednesday.
I started with Pimsleur too. I think it was a great way to start. Around lesson 20 of Japanese 1 I started getting frustrated that they were using new grammar with no explanation, and I wasn't understanding why verbs were changing the way they were. I started learning how the grammar works using Renshuu, then I'd go back to Pimsleur. Pimsleur kept using new grammar without explanation, and Renshuu has audio to go with their grammar lessons. I eventually stopped my subscription to Pimsleur.
