Hey, thanks for writing back and glad you’re still here.
In case it helps inspire/motivate you, I’ll write a bit more about my story, which is some ways may be similar to yours. I’ve been “learning” Japanese since 1989. I think I still have a Kanji workbook I bought back then, with probably the first 10 pages filled in. Typical kanji learning book: write the same kanji over and over again, and hope that one day you’ll memorize it. That didn’t work. My Japanese learning has been sporadic over the years, and because I don’t live there, the motivation dropped. (Though even if I did live there, experience tells me that that alone isn’t necessarily motivation enough.)
The six months or so that I did live there in 1990, I had grand plans to really get somewhere with Japanese. I bought a brand new text book with audio cassettes and everything! I lived with my wife’s family and I worked in a Japanese-only environment, a restaurant kitchen. Yet that textbook was soon put to the side, and I learned what I had to learn to survive, which frankly wasn’t very much. I’m not very fluent, but my comprehension is decent for day-to-day conversations.
Anyway, (and i think this isn’t a unique to me or you) if I see writing in Japanese, and English, my eyes will jump to the English, and trying to read the Japanese is very difficult. If I see kanji with furigana, my eyes will jump to the safe haven of the furigana.
When I first joined WaniKani, I really didn’t have a great grasp on kanji, although I had in the previous year tried various iPhone apps to learn more, and I did, in a very temporary way. I remember looking at a few posts on this forum where people wrote a few of the more complicated kanji, and wondering if I’d ever get to the point where I could recognize them.
Now, I’ve been going through WaniKani at pretty close to max speed, at least since about level 11. But honestly, I can now read so much more than I could eight short months ago. Even my wife (who kind of thought this was a waste of time and money because kanji should be learned by repetitive writing) has lately been impressed by what I can read.
It does take a lot of time and effort, but like you, I’ve been many years in the wilderness unable to understand the meaty part of the written language. This is the first system where I can finally see the light at the end of the mixed metaphor.
So the bad news for you is that you are approaching this as a chore rather than like a 20 year old who just wants to read manga and everything about Japan is wonderful for them and they can’t wait to go. It’s not such bad news, though. If you’re able to make some progress, that in itself can be motivating. And the fact that you’re treating this as something you have to do means that it’s not just a temporary distraction. One way or another, you’re going to learn kanji or die trying, right? Might as well do it here and now because this is a pretty good system. とおもいます。
The really good news is that you already speak Japanese! That’s a huge advantage to learning kanji. You’ll learn the kanji of words you already know, and it’s so much easier to memorize those than the ones that are completely new. There will be a lot of those as well. If you’re anything like me, on certain levels, most of the words will be new to you, and you’ll realize how limited your vocabulary has been. (In that case, I recommend kaniwani.com or the newer site kamesame.com which is like this site, but backwards: they give you an English word and you write the Japanese translation. Useful because just because you learn J to E doesn’t mean it’s easy to go from E to J, or to put it another way, just because you can recognize a word doesn’t mean you can produce it unless you practice.) And you won’t need to worry so much about learning grammar right away.
Anyway, I hope that’s encouragement enough for a bit. I’m sure you’ll find many things in WaniKani frustrating. Most people do to a degree, but it’s a very extensible system and you can add scripts that smooth out what some might consider to be rough edges, or otherwise add functionality that the creators didn’t want to add themselves. The first three levels are free as you know, and they don’t encourage you to subscribe before you finish them so you get your money’s worth, and to give it a decent evaluation. But if and when you do subscribe, even if it’s only for a month, you’ll be able to see all the content for all the levels. It can be a bit overwhelming, but also it’s interesting to see how it’s spaced out, and to see if you recognize any kanji in levels further up. Personally, I think by my current level I’ve overtaken my existing kanji knowledge completely, in that almost every single one is now completely new to me.
OK, one last thing to leave you with. This post helped me a lot when I started here. I’ve tried to remember the salient advice: that your brain really does have the ability to absorb all this information fairly quickly as long as it’s reasonably well organized.