It’s been a while since my last post. I had to slow down a bit on my WaniKani speed, but I’m being consistent again and I’m currently at level 10. Yay!
I’m trying to put together a well-structured self-study plan and I was wondering if any experienced self-students here could give me some advice in regards to that. It’s worth mentioning that I’m currently above an N5 level, but not at an N4 level yet. After many years of trying different academies, my knowledge is patchy and my trust in academies is low (they’re usually too slow for me, which leads to demotivation, plus I end up being unable to do much speaking practice).
After doing some research, here’s the resources I would like to try:
Grammar
Minna no nihongo + Nihongoal’s lessons on YT. The main reason for this is that I already own the 2nd book of the series, so the plan would be to go through all the videos focused on the lessons up until then in order to review what I know and fill in the gaps, and then use the book I own together with the YT lessons.
Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. My plan would be to read through all the entries in order.
Excel sheet to track the new grammar items I learn in a visual way (I really love organisation hahah).
Vocabulary
Honestly I’m a bit at loss when it comes to vocabulary practice on its own. I’m a little intimidated by Anki and I don’t see myself using it on the daily, but I’m not sure it would be effective if I don’t use it every day… Any tips?
Writing
Journalling, even if it’s a short entry once a week or a sentence a day, something like that.
Kanji
WK on the daily, from 5 to 15 lessons per day.
Listening
I’d like to find some podcasts that I enjoy and listen to them several times a week.
Japanese shows (e.g. I really enjoyed Midnight Diner). I think I’d try to listen to it either without subtitles or with Japanese ones, just to get used to hearing the language, which is something I’ve been neglecting.
Reading
Satori Reader. Haven’t tried it out yet, but I’ve heard good things.
ABBC here in the WK forums. Same, haven’t tried it yet, but I’d like to look into it! It’s just a bit intimidating to research and try out new resources.
NHK Easy News. Might be a bit too advanced for me, but I’d like to try at some point.
Playing video games in Japanese (probably when I’m more advanced).
Speaking
I plan on getting a private tutor once a week to get some speaking practice in.
Shadowing. I’ve heard it’s very good to improve speaking skills, I’m just not sure which resource to do it with. NHK Easy News? A podcast?
That would be the bulk of it. To avoid getting overwhelmed by all this, I plan on tracking my progress and keeping it manageable through Ari no Yume’s journalling method.
Does this make sense? Do you see any obvious blind spots? Do you have recommendations?
Any advice would be appreciated, as it’s my first time trying to self study. I’d ideally like to attempt the N4 in December, but I’d like to find a routine that works for me before doing more research into the contents of the exam.
Anki is like Wanikani and indeed any SRS system in this – if you don’t do your reviews daily then you’ll rapidly find yourself with a mountain of reviews and the whole thing falls over. You can make it just a small part of your day (by being careful about how many new items you add, and using its default “just rate yourself on how well you remembered” mode rather than any kind of “type the answer” setup). I do feel that if you don’t think you can commit to doing reviews every day then it’s not likely to be worth the time in starting down that path. Also if you already have one SRS system demanding daily reviews from you I would suggest being cautious about adding another one on top – my view is that SRS is deadly dull and if you let it expand so it’s most or all of your study routine you’re liable to just quit. (Different people seem to have different degrees of tolerance to "I need to sit down for X minutes every day without fail to just power through my reviews”, though.)
(Anki in my experience is easy to use if you are just working through somebody else’s premade deck – there’s a lot of optional configurability but you can ignore that part.)
I was intrigued by the possibility that maybe this might help me to organize my ‘restart’ of my Japanese learning journey, but…
While I appreciate your bringing her video to my attention, I’ve watched the first seven minutes of her twenty minute presentation - and I must admit that, at least so far, never before in my life have I listened to anyone else speak so much while communicating nearly nothing.
Does she ever get to the point?
I haven’t wanted to skip ahead for, you know, FOMO reasons - but listening to her content-free rambling so far has been excruciatingly painful for me. I’m nearly at my wits’ end…
Maybe it’s an ‘acquired taste’ - or maybe you need to be familiar with the rest of her life’s work in order to make heads or tails out of this video.
Help!
(end of minor rant - apologies for disrupting your thread)
Thank you very much! The post about the ABBC helped a lot, I feel less overwhelmed now
I did read Akashelia’s post a while ago and I found it fantastic! However, if I remember right, it was lacking the speaking aspect of it, as her goals were focused mainly on being able to read. But I 100% agree, it’s an amazing post and I will definitely go back to it for ideas on resources.
In terms of my goals, I’ve basically been stuck at my current level for ages and academies don’t seem to work… I just want to be able to take the N4 in December, which would definitely feel like progress, while also improving my speaking skills as I go. I kind of want to get better in all the different areas of the language after so many years of virtually no progress ^^’
And thank you, flexibility is something I sometimes struggle with, so I always appreciate a reminder that change is good
Ah yes, this is exactly what I feared might happen hahaha. Thank you so much for the insight, I can almost guarantee this is how it would have gone down and I would have ended up rage quitting. I’ll have to keep researching the best way for me to remember vocabulary. Thank you!!
Hahahaha, I completely get what you mean. I found this video and I could not believe she would spend so long just to say “bear in mind this works for me personally and changes based on my needs”. However, when she finally does get to the point, she shows what her system is and I found it extremely intuitive. It seems easy to prep week to week (not too much time taken doing it) and you can easily see how much you’ve accomplished at a glance.
I know nothing about this person other than this video, I just think that her self-study planning skills will be very useful for me personally (even if she does start the video by saying a bunch of nothing).
Anyway – sorry to have caused frustration, let me know if you find an organisation system you like! ^^
If you didn’t try it yet https://jpdb.io/ is a great SRS tool to learn some vocab targeted on a material you are working on it.
Beware however to not overwhelm yourself with the pre-build decks.
What I would recommend is to create smaller custom decks from your future reading practices (you can copy paste text to extract the vocab from in a custom deck) and to work on it bit by bit.
Is the important part “to take the N4” or to “feel like progress” ?
Are you able to define your core motivation ?
I think this may be a root cause of why you’re feeling little progress, dividing your efforts in all the areas at once makes progress in each rather slow until you’ve reached at certain level of proficiency.
Depending on how much time you can allocate to practice this can be disheartening (as learners we want to see tangible progress).
Could you prioritize one or two areas to focus on for a few weeks / months ? If so which one ? Within it could you have an achievable goal to work toward to ?
