JFZero books, need some advice!

Hello fellow WaniKanians! :slight_smile:

First of all I have pretty much knowledge of most of the grammar in the books, but I desperetely needed some kind of workbook, since I have used Genki for a while but I can’t get into it as well as I wish.
So I recently bought book 1 and 2 from the Japanese from Zero series, and so far I totally love them! I just have some questions on how I should progress with everything, and I guess that people with some knowledge about the books are better off with responds.

So I thought that starting with book1 would be really good for reviewing and then take a step into book2 and learn more from it. The thing is though, that I know all of the Hiragana/Katakana (and several kanjis obviously) but I have never learned how to write them (as the book also teaches you). Now I’m about half way through book1 and I feel that my writing skill in Hiragana is still pretty much terrible, so should I stop for a while with progressing in the book and practice more of writing Hiragana outside of it?, or should I just keep moving on and write everything in the book (even though my hiragana is a total mess?).

It feels a bit demotivating for me to do all the excercises in the book, trying to write all the hiragana that I have learned, when my writing looks like crap. But do you think that going through the book will advance my writing skills to a better and better level just on Its own?

What was your experience when using a textbook where you write everything in Hiragana/Katakana or even your experience with the Japanase from Zero book series?

I would love to hear! :slight_smile:

Are you trying to write at the same speed you write in English?

Of course at the beginning writing will seem awful because of lack of practice, but I also found out that trying to write fast made it even worse.

We are not Japanese, we have not had 12+ years of writing experience, so taking our time to write in in a clean and readable way is very important.

But otherwise, I don’t think stopping to just practice hiragana is going to do you any good.

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Ah. neat. I started off with the JFZ books. They’re the books that taught me Hiragana and Katakana. I got around halfway through the third book before switching to Genki II and Memrise.
I think you shouldn’t worry too much about if it doesn’t look so good (mine sucked so hard for a while). Just keep givin’ er. If it looks atrocious, so be it. As long as it’s somewhat legible, the books will definitely improve your writing. If I recall… I saw some decent improvement around a third of the way through the second book.

However, I would suggest grabbing a notebook and creating/writing random, simple sentences and vocabulary on the side.

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