how come you started over? just curious
The Tuttle book is all right. I got it because it was what was available at my local library and I stuck with it, but for the first six chapters it basically just dishes out vocabulary or canned phrases without any word on syntax/grammar, verbs, or adjectives. Of course it‘s the authors’/editors‘ right to approach it that way, but I don’t find the learning very compelling when I can‘t at least begin to construct basic sentences for myself, so I wanted something that would give me the tools to do that a bit quicker. The Tuttle book was also obviously designed for high school students and was just focusing on teaching the reader how to talk about going to high school to a greater extent than I’m currently interested.
I haven't learned any kind of language similar to Japanese before, but the table of contents on the Genki book already shows mention of a verb conjugation table. There are certainly different and perfectly valid approaches to language learning but I'm getting kind of tired of learning the Tuttle way.
The more important reason is @"recorder"#635 and I decided to learn together (we are IRL buddies) and this book seemed better suited to our goals, at least from what we can tell.
今日は蒸し暑いです。
I did very well in Spanish and German, even while I was flunking out of HS. I never had the privilege to take Japanese courses, and I would have been all over it. It was my dream as early as age 11. I taught myself the Korean alphabet in middle school, and have picked up enough Japanese over the years but now that I‘m pushing thirty, I’m more interested in improving my English language skills and writing than I am picking up an all-new language…
@“Syzygy”#p34234 Thanks for the recs there. I am intent on being strict with myself about learning/memorizing kanji. I did have (what seemed like) a pretty good system going with the last book, which thankfully didn‘t treat the reader with kid gloves w/r/t stroke order, and it dropps furigana for a given kanji character shortly after it’s introduced.
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/irMf1CI.jpeg]
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@“treefroggy”#p34237 more interested in improving my English language skills and writing than I am picking up an all-new language…
As they say in that taco shell ad,
Warum nicht beide?
(i am kidding, it's a huge commitment and focusing on perfecting one is a noble pursuit)
I‘m kind of curious how my previous experience with Mandarin Chinese will be useful (or not) as I’m starting out. I took a couple of years of Chinese in high-school and a year in college, but I feel like I hardly remember any of it.
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@“Syzygy”#p34234 My first edition does start using kanji from about chapter four
In the 3rd edition we're using they start using kanji in the vocab section in chapter 3, though in the introduction the authors state that they don't expect students to try and memorize them. Are they wrong? Are all these kanji important?
@“recorder”#p34243 this might not be too useful at this point, but i want to mention that what i eventually realized is that there’s no such thing as “memorizing” a character, especially not the characters you’d find in an introductory textbook. almost every common character has dozens of meanings beyond the basic one that your textbook might say it has when you first see it. so it’s not like you just master one character then move on to the next one. you’re going to be spending perhaps the next decade of your life relearning every character over and over again. so because of the time scales involved and sheer amount there is to learn, i think it’s fine to not get things perfect the first time. you (hopefully) have a long life ahead of you. as long as you keep learning, you’ll get around to it eventually. obviously thoroughness can be helpful — and when you’re in the mood to be thorough you should take advantage of that — but it’s fine to not be thorough some of the time. it will always be clear what you need to learn, since it’s simply what you have trouble understanding or trouble expressing.
(but also, to answer your question, yes: every character you’d find in an introductory textbook is extremely important.)
i have fond memories of Genki and even tutored out of it with some success at one point. the silliness to the presentation alluded to by @“Syzygy”#279 recalls, like, a quickly translated PS1 RPG. i think it's a good match for a new student learning in their spare time. i remember one exercise in particular that involved barely concealed references to japanese companies like BAMASONIC. want to say PONY was also in there but not sure
on learning kanji, just want to echo what others have said in that radicals are important, but for someone whose ultimate goal is something like playing an RPG or reading manga in Japanese, they might be most useful in just helping you make sense of what you're looking at. i spent hours rotely copying kanji out by hand and i now consider that to have been mostly wasted time. in reading game text or even a novel, it will almost never be the case that you misunderstand something because you mistake one kanji for another. you are much more likely to not understand because you don't know a vocabulary word being used.
and actually radicals and stroke order are important at that point because they're still the only way, as far as i know, to look up a character whose reading you don't know! but just want to emphasize that at a certain point it's all about vocabulary. so i can't recommend enough, as syzygy mentioned, getting set up with some kind of daily flashcard routine, ordered by frequency of use. the JLPT lists are good enough for this, and there are apps that handle all of the scheduling for you.
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@“saddleblasters”#p34248 but it’s fine to not be thorough some of the time.
I'm sure I'll try in vain to be thorough all the time, but this is helpful to hear. It will become overwhelming otherwise.
Interesting to see so many language learners on here 
I've been self studying Japanese for about a year now. I study every day for about 2-3 hours. I work a job with a lot of spare time so I study/review whenever I have a spare moment. My brain feels like it will explode sometimes. It has been an interesting journey. I've been using WaniKani (kanji and some vocab) and Bunpro (grammar). They are a bit pricey, but they sure do work.
My goal is to be able to read it well enough to play Japanese language games. I bought a JP copy of Persona 4 The Golden a while ago. Every now and then I boot it up as a confidence builder, I can read and understand more and more of it as time passes. Feels good man.
@“マット”#p34454 your experience sounds exactly like mine about ten years ago, when i was a JET. that progress does feel real good, and i wish you continued success! don't give up.
edit: what's wild is that i also chose persona 4 as one of my first games to try and play in japanese. for me, the professor layton and ace attorney games were also a huge help, as was the first danganronpa. the japanese used in battle systems tends to be confusing and off-putting for me, so i always tended to avoid it as much as possible. none of this is intended as advice! just sharing my nostalgic thoughts lol.
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@“マット”#p34454 WaniKani
Wanikani rules!!! I have adhd and dyslexia so it's very hard to me to focus on learning something in the traditional way, but wanikani works like a charm for me.
I have tried Bunpo and it's great too but I can't afford both of them at the same time right now
@“穴”#p34456 Yeah WaniKani has been amazing. I learnt hiragana in primary school using mnemonics, so it really works for me.
Btw I'm talking about Bun**pro** (wordplay on 文法 as 分プロ) different from the app Bunpo.
https://www.bunpro.jp/
Couple of awesome things Bunpro does for those interested:
@“マット”#p34458
@"マット"#p34458 oh, I was also thinking about bunpro but I often confuse them lol
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@“whatsarobot”#p34455 edit: what’s wild is that i also chose persona 4 as one of my first games to try and play in japanese.
Ah cool. Yeah I love Persona games. I figured they'd be good to learn with since the games have a lot of dialogue with a pause and button press continue. Plus dialogue choices too.
Kind of wish it had furigana, but that is quickly becoming less of a problem. Finding that I can actually read vocab words I haven't seen before because WaniKani has drummed thousands of on'yomi readings into my brain. Makes it a lot easier to look up words.
I too am in this big learner‘s bucket we have here. I’m significantly less dedicated, unfortunately. I‘ve tried learning Japanese multiple times so far: originally very ineffectively at school (5 years of study and they presented exactly zero kanji, I’d wager we covered about 1 semester worth of real content over those 5 years), then a few times over the years on my own in different ways. I seem to always fall off for any of a variety of reasons, and then 5 or 10 years later look back and think “If I only would have stuck to it I'd have learned so much by now” and then try again.
My current iteration also includes WaniKani, which I'll add to the above comments in that it also seems rather good to me. I haven't tried Bunpro but I have seen it.
I have now purchased Rosetta Stone for myself, which is a stonking big huge expense: I am trying to game myself in to not giving up. I've spent this pile of cash on it so I _can't_ just stop this time, right?
A big problem I have with my multi-decade stop-start pattern is that whenever I restart, I get flashes of memory of things I've learned before and fall in to the "oh I already know this" when I very much do not know it. I really need to just make myself go through everything properly and with the care and attention it deserves.
I've said it publicly here now also so this is another way I'm gaming myself: I've spent money on it and I've said I'm doing it so I've just gotta do it now.
@“マット”#p34460 yeah not too many games have furigana, unfortunately. needless to say, games that present a lot of text onscreen and also have that same text spoken aloud by voice actors are great tools for learning a lot of vocab. but that's basically only visual novels, for the most part.
@“Syzygy”#p34482 Yeah I've been playing a bit of DQ11 for practice on my 3DS as well. Decent text resolution and furigana.
This only very loosely relates to this thread but I saw this pop up on Twitter just now, and I thought to myself, “have I been mispronouncing Neo Geo all this time?”. This magazine title suggest “Neh-oh ji-oh” rather than “ni-oh ji-oh”.
https://twitter.com/JapaneseMagScan/status/1407789506556796931?s=19
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@“Syzygy”#p35279 “Hercules” is really “Herakles”
Never knew these each have [complete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules), [distinct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracles) Wikipedia pages in English