Hi. It’s been a really long time since I’ve written a post on a forum, but I’ve been thinking about finally diving into the community a lot lately so… here we are!
A small preface about me. I minored in Japanese back in college nearly a decade ago. So I was steeped in the language for 4 years, but after graduating I dropped my studies completely. I was only able to utilize in a snippets when I was watching an anime or playing a game, but I never really got as serious about it as I was back in school.
Fast forward a few years and I discover Wanikani. Dived right in, but chipped away at it very slowly. To put that in perspective, it’s been a couple years since I started using the site but I’m still at level 7. I still have the basic stuff drilled into my head from studying Japanese years ago, but you can imagine how slow my progress was despite that.
Anyway, onto my main point. Thank you for sitting through that! I’d like to finally get serious about studying Japanese in its entirety but I haven’t a clue where to start. I remember some basic grammar, but the details are blurry. Should I just start over? Any tips for staying disciplined?
It sounds like you have more experience with studying Japanese than I do so I won’t venture to give any advice on how to proceed beyond saying that starting to read early has been beneficial to me. As for staying disciplined: just focus on showing up every day to do your reviews, even if it’s just 1 single review a day when life gets tough/motivation lacks, that way you can’t “forget” that you’re studying Japanese and it’ll be that much easier ramp your studying back up again once you’re ready to do so (compared to trying to always meet a higher minimum of studying and then stopping entirely once that proves unsustainable). Speaking from experience
You’re still early level, I would reset just to get the routine again.
Speaking as someone who dropped studying Japanese for 10 years (oh the regret) and when I found wanikani I realized it was the tool I have been waiting for a long time. Since you studied for 4 years later, I guess you are N3 or N2 level?
You could as well start bunpro as a way to check what grammar points you already know and you could go on together with WK. I used it for a year, it helped me a lot until N3 level.