Advice on Study Routine

[Torao92]

Hey guys,

After a long break I’m finally doing my reviews again. I’m still on lvl 18 but I hope to level up soon.
My plan is to start reading children books when I reach lvl 20, to practice reading and to solidify the kanji I learned into my brain.
As for grammar; I’m watching Japanese Ammo with Misa. I figured that Genki isn’t for me and I wanted to start Japanese the Manga Way once I finished Japanese Ammo.
My current resources are : Billingual News, Japanese Ammo, Wanikani and Kitsun (Core 10k Deck) and watching Terrace House /Anime (Terrace house helps my listening alot)
Since I don’t want to use too much Recourses I want to leave it at that.

Do have any advice how I can optimize my study routine?
And what are using?

P. S: I’m not practicing speaking that much because lack the grammar and it’s still hard Form sentences.

[Sharpevil]

I world definitely begin working on speaking. Never too early. See if your local library has any audio lessons. My personal favorite is the Ultimate Pimsleur’s Japanese series.

[ooooo]

From what you have written, if there is one thing I would recommend it would be to get a teacher on italki.com and spend 1 hour a week going through a textbook. If you are not able to say much, that indicates that you don’t have the basic grammar down. forcing yourself to go through a text (doing the exercises and having them checked, speaking all the dialogs, having a teacher ask you questions and forcing you to respond) is going to really help you identify what you need to work on as well as helping your speaking ability.

If you do a chapter a week you can be through a textbook in 4-6 months.

If you really don’t want to do that, and you don’t want to use a textbook, I would recommend just starting to read young adult / adult native content and get a copy of DBJG. You are going to suffer doing it that way (its going to be painfully slow at first), but you will eventually get the grammar. Childrens books are good but the are written in hiragana mainly. That being said I love the アニメ絵本 series, and think it is great practice for getting a much better feel of how japanese is really written and spoken. It just isn’t going to reinforce your kanji learing.

[Rowena]

@Torao92

My plan is to start reading children books when I reach lvl 20, to practice reading and to solidify the kanji I learned into my brain.

Unfortunately, most children’s books are written in hiragana - graded readers might be a better bet, or NHK News Easy and the like.

[Torao92]

I’m using Pimsleur too sometimes but I have to admit that it’s not regularly. I’m currently on level 2.

[Ncastaneda]

I will disagree with people saying that most chilidren books are written in hiragana (only).
While I haven’t looked into that many series, most of the books I’ve bumped with have kanji, and actually progressively they kind of encourage kids to use the kanjis that are suppose the be known at their level (they will wean off furigana gradually).

I have several books from the 10分で読める series. And yeah, the ones aimed at １年生 have more hiragana than the rest. But they do have kanji (with furigana) and the parsing it’s quite good. Believe me I’ve faced some terrible full hiragana text too (those are nothing alike).

If trouble is content, the 10分で読める伝記 series are biographies. So there’re not plagued with super fauna and magical creatures (if that’s not your cup ot tea ).

Overall mixing this reading with graded readers aimed at japanese learners it’s a great mix. The native content (aimed at kids) will be basic in content but will have more grammar been used, and vocab will be much more than graded readers. Graded readers for japanese learners will have controlled grammar and vocab (much less new words than children books), but usually will try to tell a more complex tale and eventually they become more dense than children books.

As for the rest, conversation it’s nothing I’ve tried too much; I’l be spending my first weeks in Japan after a year or so of studying, so I only hope for the best … anyway, I think listening it’s like the main thing even before getting too chatty, bacausel… it’s a two sided thing … so you might get accustomed to hearing whatever they will say you first. Probably you could notice this by yourself if you start with a tutor, so there’s that.

Anyway about adult or even young-adult readings… I understand that content wise some people will prefer to dive into that… for me the main issue with going that route it’s vocab … even in a children book I bump into 2-3 new words per page (and I’m suppose to know already a bit more than 4K words by now), and those books aren’t too dense in word count. So do the math and you might get the idea of how much your nose will be in th dictionary with a more adult aimed material … Japanese books can be made into a very gradual immersion material, as they are very well tagged regarding audience, that will help to increasingly test your new skills.
I posted some examples of progressively nore difficult text in another post, you may check it to see an overall picture of the difficulty presented in material aimed successively at older audiences.

ps: about the Japanese the Manga Way. It’s a great reading, but I wouldn’t depend on it as a systematic grammar tool. More like a cover to cover reading, to get some nuances that more systematic approaches might ommit. That and Kawajapa yt channel do a similar thing regarding grammar. A good reference gammar book it’s a must if you are not too much into textbook learning

[Torao92]

This post is golden!!! Thank you so much. I’ll give you feedback as soon as I can.

[Torao92]

Another thing I was thinking of is that I could use the transcripts of Billingual News.
But since there are many vocabulary I still don’t know, I would have to put some sentences into my anki deck

[smarcks]

Start speaking ASAP! Even if you don’t have much grammar yet, it only gets harder to speak the later you start. The only way to be able to actually use Japanese is if you don’t put yourself in a position where you’re constantly translating from English.