Lol what anime is that from. I did Track & Field for most of my childhood and specifically a good bit of high jump so this gif is great to me XD
I’ve been told the Manga is fairly easy to read.
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Just picked up the textbook for the local Japanese class I’m going to be starting (online due to covid) this month and it’s ‘Japanese for Busy People’ (luckily the kana version, not the romanji version, if it was that I’d be running for the hills)
It doesn’t use kanji at all which is slightly annoying, but I guess it makes sense for a community class where they might not want to overwhelm people immediately. I’m trying to see it as a plus as:
-
I’ve actually found that when reading Haikyu etc
that one of the things I find hardest is figuring out what things are where kanji isn’t used, should give me more practice, & -
I’m just going to do the exercises using kanji anyway (If things are getting handed in I might check whether the teacher will accept that, if not I’ll just do 2 versions)
From flicking through the book I don’t think there will really be much that I haven’t covered myself yet - but actually using the language with real people will be new and that’s what I want to build confidence in! If it’s bad then no worries, can switch to iTalki afterwards - if it’s good then that will be great in post covid times as the school is on the street that I live and fairly inexpensive (it’s also a social enterprise that also does language learning to older people with dementia/Alzheimer’s as a therapeutic tool/memory aid so feels like something worth supporting!)
This is my long rambly update lol. @trombonekun91 - I also tried out some of japanesepod101 (got a deal for 1 month for $1) and have been really liking it so far! Think I will get to the end of Pimsleur 2 as I only have a few more lessons and then switch over. Thanks for the recommendation!
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Love listening to Nihongo con Teppei as well! I put it on the few times I’m commuting somewhere or when doing the dishes.
I feel like I understand most of what’s being said, but I have to focus on it. Especially if I’m listening to it while doing the dishes I might repeat an episode because I can’t passively listen and understand it, I definitely need to actively focus. Listening is definitely not my strong suit, which is why I started trying to find some podcasts, so thank you to all the other ones mentioned, I’ll definitely be checking some of those out as well!
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A bit of an unsolicited opinion, but i hope you’ll forgive me… 
I often am tempted to enroll in the Japanese class here at my university, but I’m pretty sure the only benefit I’d get is feeling smug about what I’ve already learned.
The ratio of (active speaking time)/(time you’re in class) is pretty bad here and it’s really slow. They don’t even cover Genki 1 in a year.
Of course, as you said, you don’t have to continue going if you realize you’re not actually learning much. Just some words of caution so you don’t continue going only because it feels good knowing stuffz 
Someone on these forums actually linked me a “Students in Japanese class: Stereotypes”-video and one of them was a dude that went even though he already knew everything. Made me realize that’s 100% me :'D
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lol, yeah if the school wasn’t on my street, inexpensive etc then I’d probably not have gone for it - given those things it at least seems worth a shot.
The way I’m seeing it is that this is mainly a stepping stone/way of gaining confidence because my silly brain is still terrified at the idea of working with a native speaker 1 on 1 on iTalki. If I can come out of this class feeling able to do that then I’ll count it as a success. I think the class sizes are pretty limited though so hopefully may be more speaking time than a uni class, fingers crossed! Will have to try my hardest not to be that guy lol.
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Thanks for the update. I feel so invested in everyone’s progress. I love the camaraderie. 
VANISHMENT…THIS…WORLD!!! (Rikka/Chunibyo reference, sorry if you haven’t seen it lol)
Thank goodness that it’s Kana. Get that Romaji outta here haha!! 
I don’t know if you feel this way too, but I find it difficult to read kana only passages where there should be kanji included. Genki has reading practice, but some, if not all of it so far is kana only, and it’s not so tough to read, but there is an extra step in comprehension, especially when I know the kanji they should be using. I would much rather see the Kanji with furigana. Curious to hear if you feel the same way.
Do it! I hope the teacher sees it as initiative.
This is incredible. So glad you are supporting the school!
You’re learning a language so your desire to communicate with others is definitely inside of you, it’s only a matter of time before you take the leap, I think. 
Glad you like it! There is a lot to learn from Jpod101, when you can find the right material from the ocean of content haha.
Damn, you’re really good at this @trombonekun91 . Ever considered a career in advertising?
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Just wanna input my 2 cents here as well since I’ve actually been going to my local Japanese classes for 3 years or so (in total but not uninterrupted).
I enrolled into an evening class in my city when I first wanted to learn. I didn’t actually do much other than go to the classes for maybe the first year and a half or so. Eventually I started picking up some real motivation and started to study a lot more on my own. After a while I started to self study Genki on my own time. (These evening classes are 2 hours once a week and we spent about a year and a half on Genki 1 and then a year and a half on Genki II. It should also be mentioned a lot/most of the other students don’t seem to study at all between classes, so that’s why the pace was so slow, so you can keep up even with only 2 hours a week).
I eventually stopped going as my self studying made me progress further than the class. But shortly after I stopped going to classes, I stopped studying Japanese completely.
I wanted to study I was just having a hard time keeping the motivation so I enrolled into the classes again a year later. It’s been a great motivator for me to keep going (even though at this point I’m pretty ahead of the class again and mainly study my own things. The class is now doing An Integrated approach to Intermediate Japanese and I wanted to do Tobira). I definitely don’t feel like I’m getting anything out of the classes anymore other than the social aspect, which I’ve found out is an important motivator for me. But now that I am at a level where I can somewhat, albeit extremely badly, have short basic conversations in Japanese I will switch over to iTalki. I plan to stop going to classes once this semester ends in February and switch over to iTalki.
So from my experiences the pros are the social aspects and the community part of it which for me are also an important part of my motivation.
The cons are that it is way to slow paced to really get anywhere at a decent pace. I feel like my pace atm is slow compared to most and I’m going fast in relation to the class xD
I really hope (fingers crossed) that I wont fall off the horse again after I stop going to the classes. I feel like I’ve finally developed a great habit for self studying though, and my motivation is better than ever before. I will admit that Wanikani, the forums and the community have become my new great motivator. Finally a Japanese forum where I feel like everyone is super kind and supportive, and things like the bookclubs and this thread are also great for me to remind me to keep going and remember to study even if I’m super tired after work. So essentially, I’m replacing my class with you guys for my social aspects of the learning.
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Ha! It might be time for a career change. Currently, I’m a freelance musician and teacher and we all know how lucrative that career can be.
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Your name really makes sense now! I’m guessing you play the trombone as well? I do agree, you are amazing at marketing tho too xD
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haha yes! I have two degrees in trombone performance essentially sitting on my mantle right now due to covid-19 lol. I call my instrument trombone-kun now.
Agree 100%
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Thanks for sharing your experience @MinTako! I had some similar motivations for signing up to this class in that I was thinking “if I sign up to a ten week class then it’s another little thing keeping me motivated for those weeks” - so its interesting to know that it played that role for you!
This was so me when I did Dutch classes in university - I never studied outside the class at all and surprise surprise did not progress. I’m sure there were some frustrated people wanting to move faster in those classes too!
Yeah! I totally relate to this this thread has been great and the Haikyuu reading club has been really good for getting me out of my comfort zone as well (I am that person that will always feel the need to volunteer for things if spots need filled and as such have ended up reading parts and translating at the readalongs every week so far despite it being a real stretch!)
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I do feel this way and would much rather always have kanji however I have come across a few things so far where all kana is used as a stylistic thing (eg. when younger characters are speaking), or in games and media aimed at a younger audience - so I’m not too annoyed at getting the practice of reading more kanji free text as it does seem like something that will be useful!
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Yeah for me having friends or others to share the journey with makes all the difference! I’ve never felt the classes were a waste of money even though I definitely learned the majority of what I know of Japanese now outside of class. I’ve also been a bit scared to stop because my country is really small and its super rare for classes to progress this far without loosing too many students to form a class. So there is probably no going back to them after this. I hope you will enjoy your classes and possibly make some acquaintances to study with.
Should also be mentioned though that we never speak at all during class which was also part of the reason I wanted to move to iTalki. I’m pretty sure my speaking is still around N5, I can’t form any type of longer sentences and most of my ‘talking’ comes out as single words. My teacher isn’t Japanese though either and I haven’t heard her speak much.
I’m so sad I wasn’t able to attend last time! I am still a bit too scared to read or translate but have been contemplating signing myself up for a very small part xD
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You should go for it! Everyone is super kind and supportive. I’m not sure what parts are left this week - I signed up for Sugawara - if there’s not a small role left then happy to split that part, (even just for a page or a few pages if you want to just give it a shot without signing up to too much!)
Are you guys also trying to add in your own sentence mining while doing WK? We had kind of talked about this a bit before but in a different context, I think XD
I previously did a 3k core deck but stopped at around 2k before finding WK. I think my biggest issue was that I didn’t start going out and finding material to use the words I was learning so a lot of them didn’t stick later on. Currently, I’m trying to figure out how I best want to set up the rest of this year so I’m more efficient.
Some of my thoughts:
Find random new words like most would probably do in the wild Cons: Struggle to retain new random readings of kanji I’m not used to outside of WK.
Use Torii an srs program that you can change to only teach you 4500 extra words that relate to WK lvls, but you can also toggle to learn 1200 kana only words. Cons: Doesn’t have mnemonics and started to run into some other irregular readings and was worried this might confuse me on my normal WK studies.
Also, I should add that I thought about using Migaku browser extension to mine words through NetFlix. I figured out a way to add all the words that WK will teach us until lvl 60 and added those to my known words. You can then use a parse button to filter out all your known words so that your not doubling down. I think this could help to be more efficient but still I’ll have the issue of just finding a lot of words with kanji I’m not familiar with XD. Usually this leads me to start either purely memorizing words or guessing alot while reviewing.
Wondering how you guys are handling sentence/word mining outside of WK?
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I’m heavily biased by Adam (the Jalup guy), which is a little controversial around the WK forums… There’s plenty of people here that love grinding vocab decks 
Personally I studied vocab with J→E flashcards for a while (Back when I did Genki 1 and when I took the JLPT N5) and I didn’t like it. At all.
For now I’m going to focus on Kanji and Grammar. If I feel like I have too much time on my hands, I’ll go faster on WaniKani or Jalup/Bunpro/Tobira.
Because…
… I want to limit the amount of vocab I learn that contains kanji I haven’t learned on WaniKani yet. (Always felt pretty inefficient otherwise)
… I want to learn vocab as J ⟷ J (no english definitions) and from sentence cards. (You need a solid grammar basis for that, this is what Jalup was designed for)
… I don’t want yet another SRS system.
… there’s only so much time in a day. (I’m not even doing 8 days/level on WaniKani anymore.)
For immersion I’ve found that… I dont really need more vocab yet? For now, the N5 vocab + what I learn on WaniKani is plenty. Not knowing the grammar felt much worse when it comes to immersion.
I considered doing Kana only vocab via the sentences that come with the Core 10k deck, but I’d rather go a bit faster on WaniKani for now.
TL;DR: I’m pushing off vocab, hoping to learn it in a more natural, less tedious way through immersion and J ⟷ J sentence mining.
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I think most people agree that you should study in Japanese only at some point, but lots push it off because the transition is rough at first. Here’s two short’ish articles why Adam thinks you should transition sooner rather than later :3
6 Reasons why Learning Japanese with a Monolingual Dictionary is Amazing
Why Transition from Japanese-English to Japanese-Japanese
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@GrumpyPanda Thanks for linking these articles. I am going to spend some more time reading about his opinions, because they are really interesting! I wonder if burnout can be an issue if someone pursues J>J from the start? I can possibly foresee a scenario where you spend so much time trying to decide the meaning of words through a Japanese definition that your mind might fatigue when it comes to learning other aspects of the language.
From reading these articles, thinking about my journey, it might be advantageous to transition to J>J when comprehension is at a high level. I’m just having a hard time connecting the understanding of the nuance in your target language when you are struggling to understand what the words even mean because you have no other reference point. This theory flies directly in the face of comprehensible input and the idea of “+1”, but if Adam and others have found success in it, I am curious about how he overcame the monumental task of deciphering what is essentially incomprehensible in the beginning. How does Adam address that point? I may also be missing something crucial to the method itself.
Are you enjoying the process of deciphering everything in Japanese, and does it allow you the mental space to work on other things too?
@neversleep I am not mining my own sentences yet, so I don’t have too much to say on the topic. I do find the context sentences on Torii to be really valuable because many of them are at my level or just above, and I hide the English translations to test myself. I cannot say the same for WK’s context sentences. They are mostly complex and wacky lol.
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