Start Learning Japanese

Very late Week 4 update:

• Stayed strong until the end with the daily Kanji study. Haven’t skipped a day since I started. I’m pretty proud of that.
• Got through most of the second lesson in my textbook. (just finished the second lesson a couple days after the DK30 ended)
• Kept reviewing vocab and grammar from the first lesson and the first part of lesson two that I had started. I’m pretty comfortable with the grammar and vocab from those parts so at least I made progress there.

Overall thoughts on the DK30, I’m really proud of the progress that I have made. Not only just with studying Japanese, but also with the study habits that I made along the way. I ended up spending 1.5 - 2 hours per day on studying, and that is more than I thought I would ever spend learning another language for fun. I learned a lot about myself from this month of studying, like what motivates me the most and how to approach different study activities that will work well for me. A couple things I learned that seem obvious to me now, but weren’t at the beginning of the month include:

• Trying to get around half of my total study time done during the day in a couple minute chunks so I don’t spend too long when I sit down to study later in the day. This makes the longer study session later in the day shorter and makes me more likely to start that study session earlier and not procrastinate.
• Mix up how and where I do my studying. This made it less boring to study and made the studying seem a bit fresher since I could be in different environments while studying. I started going for walks and study vocab at the same time and it makes me want to go for walks more, so that is a win-win.
• Learn something new before doing review instead of review then new stuff. Since the goal was to try to be consistent with my review. If I finished my review for the day, then I met my goal. So I tended to put off learning new things way longer than I should. So if I focused on learning new things first, then I would still need to put in the work to meet my daily goal instead of saying “good enough” and not learning anything new that day.

3 week update:

• Staying strong on the daily Kanji study. This includes learning new Kanji and vocabulary and reviewing older Kanji and vocab that I learned before.
• Only got through 1 lesson in the Genki textbook. I way underestimated the amount of work going through the lessons would be. The lesson dumps a bunch of vocabulary that I needed to learn and it has taken a couple days to learn most of it. Moving on to the next lesson when I barely knew the first lesson just wasn’t going to happen.

2 week update:

• Can write most Hiragana. Took a break from learning to write to focus on learning the Katakana first.
• Can recognize most Katakana. Haven’t tried to learn to write them yet.
• Kanji and vocabulary learning has started. Learning 15 kanji/vocab per day. Reviewing every day with Anki.
• Bought the Genki 1 and 2 books to start learning more vocab/pronunciation/grammar. Haven’t started learning from them yet.

Feeling really good about my progress and consistency. It’s really rewarding watching anime and seeing Japanese text that I can read for the first time.

~1 week update:

• With the help of a friend that is also starting to learn Japanese, found a bunch of resources to learn from. Links to a lot of the resources I’m using below (or ones that would be useful, but I am not using yet) in case you are wanting to learn but don’t know where to start.
• Learned the pronunciations of all of the Hiragana (one of the syllabaries used to write Japanese)
• I can write about half of the Hiragana with some proficiency (It is hard writing the symbols that my hand isn’t used to writing. It feels more like drawing a picture right now than writing a letter from a language. and I’m not good at drawing pictures)
• Started learning Kanji. I have around 10 memorized, so only 2000-6000 to go

Things I’m using to learn:

• A guide someone from reddit wrote that gives a ton of information on the process they took to learn Japanese: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10bRzVblKVOsQJjTc2PIi1Gbj_LrsJCkMkh0SutXCZdI/edit#
• Anki - your tool to memorizing ANYTHING with flashcards and SRS (spaced repetition system): https://apps.ankiweb.net/ (there are a lot of shared flashcard decks that others have created, or you can create your own for the things you are specifically trying to learn)
• Human Japanese android app - app based around teaching you to speak japanese and giving context to certain parts of Japanese to keep you interested in learning: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.braksoftware.HumanJapanese&hl=en_US&gl=US

Tools I’m not using, but plan to:

• Genki books - some of the most commonly used textbooks to start learning Japanese: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Japanese-Beginners-Integrated-Elementary/dp/B01M3STG9N/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=genki&qid=1615226750&sr=8-3
• Remember the Kanji book - another very common book people use, specifically for learning Kanji: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2TMFNEF96OELH&dchild=1&keywords=remember+the+kanji&qid=1615226844&sprefix=rememb%2Caps%2C258&sr=8-2
• Kanji Study android app- tons of features for studying Kanji including teaching and quizing how to write Kanji: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindtwisted.kanjistudy&hl=en_US&gl=US