I’m pretty new to Japanese. I’ve decided on using Genki 1 as a main grammar ressource, just to get familiar enough with the grammar so that I’ll be able to recognize it once I start reading. My question is however, what’s a reasonable speed to do Genki at? Say I did a chapter every 2-3 days, would I be shooting myself in the foot?
So far all the grammar has made a lot of sense to me, although that’s probably mostly due to the fact that I’ve learned Korean to a high intermediate level. I don’t know whether that’ll continue however, so I don’t know what the optimal course here would be. I’m not a fan of straight up grammar study, so I’d rather not spend more time on it than I need, but then again if I end up going too fast and having to redo everything back from the start, that wouldn’t be productive either.
I’d recommend dividing you time evenly between grammar and WaniKani.
Then at around level 15 – 20, you would be able to start reading some simple resources like
I think if the grammar is making a lot of sense to you, then you can go as fast as you want. If it starts getting tricky, then slow down. Getting through at least Genki 1 (and Genki 2, you really do need both) will be hugely beneficial in starting to read native material (ABBC here on the forums) or graded reader content like Satori Reader.
Also, I recommend Tokini Andy’s video series as a complement to each Genki chapter.
You can also go through the exercises at this website.
Just for a point of reference, my university language classes went through one Genki II chapter per week. This wasn’t set, however, and longer chapters rightfully became 1.5 to 2 weeks. This is a slow pace for people who study for several hours of the day, and a fast pace for people who have less than an hour per day to study.
Thank you! Currently, I’m doing Wanikani, and I went through the first 2 chapters of Genki pretty fast . I have also started reading some Tadoku graded readers (that was actually a few months ago, but then my health took a turn for the worse so I was pretty much forced to drop most of my language learning until I got better). I am definitely looking up to being able to read NHK easy along with simple manga and children’s books. For now however, I’ve been trying to decipher N5 articles from https://watanoc.com/ , to get used to sentence structure and mine some of those kana words I won’t get from Wanikani.
I am definitely one for reading over anything else (although with kanji and grammar knowledge being necessary for that, it can’t be my only activity unfortunately ). I actually decided to start Japanese through Natively, I’ve been enticed by all the books.
Thank you! This is telling me that my speed isn’t as crazy as I feared. I think I’ll be continuing like this, and definitely slow down if things start getting harder.
If your objective is just to rush through the basics and then go head-first into reading, I’d recommend something like Cure Dolly or Tae Kim (maybe both, they’re free after all) over Genki. Bunpro can be a good resource too, albeit not free if you want to use SRS.
I basically had the same approach when I started and I did go through a good chunk of Genki I but skipping most exercises because they seemed tedious and not really useful to me at that point, and while overall I wouldn’t say that I wasted my time doing that, it was just very inefficient in my opinion.
IMO Genki is better suited for people who are looking for a more “school-like” programe that tries to be an all-rounder and teach you a bit of everything in a very incremental manner. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that but if you want a “I want to reach the point where I can read Japanese as fast as possible” crash course then I would recommend a fairly strong emphasis on WaniKani until around level ~30 + Cure Dolly videos on the side and some Tae Kim/Bunpro to drill the grammar further.
I’ll second @simias’ recommendation, with an asterisk:
I breezed through Genki 1+2 at a pace of 2 lessons/week this summer, skipping the exercises but combining the textbooks with the corresponding BunPro paths (including Genki vocab) and TokiniAndy’s videos.
For input-only (no output), I think the pace was absolutely fine and one could likely go even faster.
These two books really only cover basic grammar, and are enough to get you going with reading. Whatever I find now in Satori is understandable as far as grammar goes, vocab is the main issue (for me) - I might not know/recall “why” a certain grammar point is used, but it just… “makes sense”
I did end up resetting progress on BunPro a couple of months later, but that was due to vocab SRS overload, grammar was okay.
(The other day I started N3 grammar on BP and I seriously doubt I’ll be dipping for Quartet… but that’s just me )
Do check out CureDolly on YT if you have time… if you can get on with the style, it’s a nice complement to Genki. Just… try to ignore the snarky comments at textbooks
Bunpro I don’t think I’ll be using for grammar. I’ve tried SRSing grammar in the past and it’s always turned out disastrous, I’ll learn the one example sentence but not how the grammar point is actually used.
I have checked out Cure Dolly, but while the explanations are nice, I don’t think they’re enough for me to switch to using it exclusively. Maybe I should use all three then Genki, Tokini Andy and Cure Dolly? I don’t want to unnecessarily overload myself with too many ressources at the same time either though.
Weirdly that’s usually not my style at all. For Korean I ended up switching from grammar ressource to grammar ressource for a while, because I couldn’t find one I liked. Now I can just get grammar through reading and the occasional lookup (and a grammar dictionnary to patch any important grammar I might’ve missed), but it took me a year and a half to start reading, so I don’t want to go the same path for Japanese.
I am definitely planning on going strong for Wanikani however. I’m at 20 lessons a day for now, that was fine last time as well (until my health stopped everything, but that was unrelated and shouldn’t happen again anytime soon, if ever hopefully).
I am curious about this. I was wondering whether I should SRS Genki vocab, or wait until I learn it through Wanikani/encounter it in the wild and mine it.
After going through the lessons, I use it in “reading+grading” mode, just checking my knowledge - it’s basically additional reading material It’d be pretty frustrating to have to write in answers to questions, especially when the hints about what it askes for are… ambiguous.
Three concurrently is a little overkill, methinks. Perhaps… pick the one you like best, and refer to other sources whenever something isn’t clear. Genki and TokiniAndy overlap (obviously), you might have trouble finding the corresponding video in the CureDolly playlist - this may (or may not ) help. What’s nice about BP is that for each grammar point it’ll have info on where you can find it in other sources.
Weeell…
I have found out the hard way that I have a very, very low tolerance for ambiguity. Early on, if I didn’t know any one word in a sentence, I’d look it up. So going through the Genki vocab was quite useful to me, as most of it is high-frequency, and a lot were not coming up in WK anytime soon.
Nowadays (in truth, I’m not much more advanced… my spreadsheet says ~2700 words+expressions) I find I can guess the one word I won’t know in a sentence. Two or more… I gotta look’em up, no way around it
What I’m doing now: whenever I run into something new, I’ll check its WK-level (Yomitan can show this on the fly) and frequency (via BunPro, probably Yomitan can too) - if it’s decently high-freq and not in the next 4-5 WK levels, I’ll add it to SRS.
But it seems I am lousy at simply learning from context and need a preset repetition. You’d know best what works for you from your Korean studies, I imagine with Japanese it wouldn’t be any different.
For what it’s worth, Satori Reader stories intentionally repeat some vocab across chapters, however they’re careful to avoid overload so it doesn’t become annoying.
I hadn’t realized that a lot of Genki vocab was late in Wanikani. I might just learn it now then, I don’t want to be missing that basic vocab when I start seriously reading.
I do seem to have a pretty high tolerance for ambiguity. Nowadays I don’t do more than 5 lookups per page for Korean, any more than that is just annoying, and I know I’ll get the vocab eventually without looking it up as long as it shows up enough (and if it doesn’t because it’s extremely uncommon, where I’m at there are a lot more words that are more common that I’ll remember instead). What I usually do is SRS as a beginner, and then drop it when I’m intermediate and my reading volume surpasses how much daily SRS I’m willing to do.
Now that is interesting, I have Yomitan set up but it doesn’t show WK levels. Is it a matter of dictionary set-up? Or do you have an API for that?
Though, I think it’s generally ok to go fast, and redo sometime later. Even before redo, reading would already have enough basis.
Nonetheless, I would balance between reading and listening comprehension, as long as I don’t truly care about production. This could be a good consideration for managing speed, maybe 1 chapter a week, and adjust as you go. Maybe 1 major grammar resource to keep the pace stable, so that the course could end someday.
. I have also started reading some Tadoku graded readers (that was actually a few months ago, but then my health took a turn for the worse so I was pretty much forced to drop most of my language learning until I got better). I am definitely looking up to being able to read NHK easy along with simple manga and children’s books. For now however, I’ve been trying to decipher N5 articles from 
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