Thank you for the questions!! It was very fun to go down memory lane and I’m super happy if it can be useful!
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CONGRATULATIONS!!! 
omg I can’t believe I missed your level 60 post. I had been waiting to read your post for so long, and I can’t believe I missed it lol. I hate that I don’t get notifications for things like this T_T
I read through the entire thing and love all the resources. Super inspiring to see your progress because my goals are pretty much the same! Thank you so much for sharing your experience and helping us! 
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Hi, I’m new here and I just wanted to tell you how amazing and useful this post is.
I started studying Japanese at university as part of my minor one year ago. Due to some bureaucratic bullshit (got to love the German university system…) and some scheduling issues I am now unable to visit my Japanese classes for a whole year. Well, 6 months actually, last semester was very busy and I had no motivation to continue my Japanese studies.
So, during my semester break I thought now would be the perfect time to start again, but as soon as I did that I noticed three very obvious yet important problems.
The first one is, Japanese classes are not to be used in isolation. You need to study material outside of your class if you plan on making some serious process. Leaning completely on a guided course will help you to learn some Japanese but it’s not enough.
The second problem is, not studying for a long period during the beginner stages of language learning will cause you to forget a lot. I was half-way through Genki 2 and now I only remember a couple of kanji and the first few chapters of Genki 1…
The third and most important problem is that taking these lessons made me kind of lazy. I never bothered to learn how exactly you learn Japanese. I have some basic knowledge about language acquisition due to my major but none of this goes into detail about how you actually apply these methods to a specific language. Especially in the beginner stage.
Save to say, your post is a big help. I’ll be sure to come back here in the future throughout my Japanese learning journey. Thanks a bunch and I wish you all the best! 
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No worries, it’s very nice to see friends here, doesn’t matter if it’s sooner or later 
Thank you for your kind words!! Good luck with your studies too!!
Hey! Thank you so much for stopping by and writing your story 
makes me very happy to read that it has inspired you! Would love to hear from you in the future with how it goes for you, please visit us again
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Hi! I’m here once again haha where do you buy your .epub Japanese books that you load on ttsu? Are those like novel type? Or you can also read manga on ttsu? The only epub I know is the extension used by apple app, iBooks.
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Hehe you are always welcome to ask
I buy all novels and light novels on https://books.rakuten.co.jp/ . Making an account requires a Japanese postal address. (mine is a 7/11 somewhere in Aomori). [1]
Never tried for manga! I buy all my manga on Bookwalker, and then use Mokuro on them, which gives an html file that I open in my browser (so not in a particular website)
This doesn’t give you .epub file, you need the software Calibre and a plug in to get to the epub file, it’s a bit of a gray area so I avoid posting the step by step here but it’s been discussed before, hopefully you can figure it out by searching for “DeDRM plugin” on the forum or on Internet ↩︎
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And this allows easy sentence mining? I intend to read Chi’s Sweet Home after I finish Tadoku so would need to set up manga sentence mining by then.
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Yes it makes the text selectable. I use the Yomichan / Yomitan plugin with makes for easy lookups. There is an option in Yomitan that you can turn on, so that there is a + button and you can send words directly to Anki. I guess technically that’s word mining, but should be easy enough to do sentence mining when you can select the text!
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Ahaha I’ll take note of that
That jpn link for epub books + Yomitan and then Bookwalker + Mokuro for manga. Got it! Thanks for this info. I’ll check out the links this weekend. i checked out the Yomitan today and I wished some sort of app existed for iOS haha
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I don’t have any iOS device but I would be surprised if there is nothing for them! Here’s what I found with a quick search on the forum: Yomitan (or similar dictionaries) on Safari - #2 by brenty
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I do this already so if Mokuro makes that possible it’s quite nice.
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I was just about to search the forum when I got home. You’re too kind! 
Thank you very much~
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When I have visited Japan in the past I have definitely enjoyed checking out real-life locations that I originally discovered by watching anime - and hope to use that to inform my future travels.
For example, I visited Otaru in Hokkaido as a result of watching Golden Kamuy - and I trekked up Mt. Takao (day trip from Tokyo) as a result of watching Encouragement of Climb.
So, yes, it was a highlight of my visit(s) to Akihabara to check out the Radio Kaikan building that played such a prominent role in Steins; Gate (even though the original building featured in SG was replaced by a newer structure - it still has the same vibe as the original, and carries the iconic title of the building in large letters, and that’s good enough for me).
(Have I mentioned that I have a white lab coat, inspired by Okarin? I don’t have the nerve to actually wear it, though - as I’m nowhere near as tall or thin as the original to be able to carry that off successfully.)
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Cool that you did that! I found a site which lists all the S;G locations (in total it’s only a 1.5 hour walk) so that makes things easy. I also saw a popup S;G store will open in october in Kaikan to celebrate the 15th anniversary so I hope that’s still open when I get there in November.
I don’t have a lab coat, I do have a couple of Kurisu figurines though 
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If I ever go to Japan, I’d like to go to Shirakawa-Go to take some pictures to troll my friends with lol.
It’s so out of the way even if I got to Japan considering I’d most likely start in Tokyo though.
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I admire you guy’s realistic goals.
I personally only want to go:
- To Zanarkand
- To the Macalania Woods
- To the Besaid Island
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Present day, or 1000 years ago? 
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Let me see if I got it correctly: even if you quite didn’t remember the radicals/kanji, you still passed them as right until they’re guru? Asking because I have trouble remembering the readings
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Yes that’s what I did! Didn’t want to end up in a situation where I had no available lessons. Then learning the vocabulary alongside the kanji helped with remembering the readings.
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I think it’s viable to Radical intro => Kanji intro => Vocab SRS => Kanji SRS. (I am not sure about the worth of Radical SRS.) But WaniKani wants to simplify to just memorize, with mnemonics or with repetition, and reduce redundancy, and that results in vocabularies being delayed from Kanji for at least 3 days.
Personally, I started with some vocab and grammar knowledge, and want to reduce fruitless memorization, so I kinda avoid mnemonics, and rather use examples or cross-references (easy ones like ALC or Goo JE), and those are more meaningful with vocabularies.
Kanji readings, in particular, are less impactful, if not with composed vocabularies in mind. But vocabularies with unknown Kanji are kinda hard to read and memorize. So, pick your poison.
At some point, I realized that the workflow can be done in Anki as well (with custom vocab and suspend).
(I did Core 10k too, and kinda oversold to vocabularies.)
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