My biggest mistake was learning the formal 〜ます forms of verbs first. As a result, when I first learned about て form it really broke my brain and took three times as long to understand it/master going from one from to the other. If I could do it again, I would start with the dictionary forms first and THEN learn that you can modify them to make the polite, since a lot of grammar is built on the dictionary form NOT the polite form.
@averynicebadguy Funny story about this book…when I first started studying Japanese (way before Wanikani existed), my now-husband-then-boyfriend fresh from his college Japanese course decided he would use it to teach me kanji. When he got to the idea of onyomi and kunyomi I literally burst into tears.
Mostly being too afraid to practice speaking because I would make mistakes. Can’t learn without messing up haha.
I have made some truly, truly embarrassing mistakes over the years. The funniest was when I got おっぱい （breast) and いっぱい (full) mixed up, so when a teacher at school asked me if I wanted seconds of lunch, I said, “no, my stomach is a breast.” Needless to say the preschoolers I taught thought that was the most hilarious thing ever and called me おっぱい先生 (Teacher Boobs) for a week.
That first trick is very nice! Katakana is my weak point and it shows more often than I like. I hope this is something I can recall quickly in the future.
I’m tired and I glanced at the title and thought it was “Milkshakes you made” and got a little excited because I like milkshakes
As for mistakes, my biggest one was dipping my toe in Japanese years ago then looking at kanji and noping right out of there, thinking I could never learn it. Once I decided to just go for it a couple years ago… I don’t consider any methods I’ve used a mistake, as long as I’m moving forward and making progress.
Then again, if I’d tried to learn kanji years ago without WaniKani I probably would have failed and been discouraged. Maybe it’s a good thing I waited
I did the same thing as your #7. I spent so long going through things trying to find something that suited me, but there isn’t just a one stop shop that says “If this is what you are interested in, and this is how you learn best, these are the things that you should be using to learn.” So I have currently settled on WaniKani, apparently using Bunpro once I hit level 10, because that’s when people recommend starting, and also going through Rosetta Stone, since I have already started it and I might as well finish.
I’m not expecting much from the Rosetta Stone though. People seem to have experiences leaving them with low intermediate levels of understanding, and not much speaking ability at all with that. I also bought Genki, but it’s hard for me to focus on that so much for some reason.
At the start, not putting proper research into more modern learning resources. I bought the textbook Japanese for Everyone at first, which I quickly realized was pretty much ancient at this point and doesn’t even bother trying to teach Hiragana or Katakana. It just says memorize them. Needless to say I haven’t cracked that one open in a long time. It’s been replaced with full sets of Japanese from Zero and Genki, The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji, and Remembering the Kana and Kanji 1…and a few phone apps, of which I use Lingodeer the most.
Attempting to learn the presented vocab in the textbooks I did end up getting as presented in kana rather than kanji, and undervaluing the learning of vocab in general in the early stages. If I’ve realized anything by using this website, it’s that knowing kanji makes learning vocab a heck of a lot easier, and there’s no real point knowing grammar if you don’t know enough words to use it. I stopped textbook work after getting through JFZ 1’s exercises until I got to level 10. But wait…I’m level 6 right now…
Thinking that having an “ignore answer” button on reviews was in any way, shape, or form, a good idea, on my PC (on mobile, sure, because screw on-screen keyboards). A reset from 12 to 1 was how I punished myself on that one.
Bad pacing / Trying to do too much too fast. You know the drill here - don’t do all lessons all at once. There was a time I would do my Wanikani work plus textbook work plus DuoLingo lessons plus Lingodeer lessons plus perhaps some Memrise content…all in one day. it’s was too much. After my level reset I’ve paced my WK lessons to even out daily reviews and am slowly working on textbook and Lingodeer lessons. Blitzing isn’t learning.
Not getting enough repetition / practice early on. Learning a language takes effort. Doing a few exercises from one book is not going to properly reinforce those concepts, especially if doing self-study. For me, this applies mainly to Katakana, as appears to be a somewhat common theme in this thread. Even after having gone through Remembering the Kana, Kana from Zero, and the same KFZ lessons in JFZ 2, I’m still having some issues. In the end, it’s going to be learning vocabulary using Katakana that will force me to fully learn it.
My biggest regret will always be not taking it seriously when I finally did formal classes in university. I had self studied on my own beforehand, so Japanese 101 was easy for me. But as I moved up into Jpn 102 and higher, I didn’t really put what I learnt into practice. I was definitely afraid of making mistakes, so I stuck with what I knew. As a result, sure, I passed all my classes and got good grades, but I couldn’t retain a lot of the information I’d learnt once I graduated.
My vocabulary ended up suffering, and I have to relearn A LOT of grammar points.
So it was always saddening to see the people who studied the same amount of years I did, basically fluent as I struggled.
But that was my fault and it certainly can’t change now, (unless someone has a time machine handy). So, I’m taking my studies (self-study) seriously and progressing step by step.
I’ve read that literally from cover to cover, using the example sentences as reading practice by covering over the translations with my hand. I started on the Intermediate book too, but I got stalled somewhere in the middle.
The great thing about mistakes though, especially big and embarrassing ones like that, is that 1) you will NEVER make that mistake again and 2) you have a really great story to tell later.
Mistakes make great stories (later) and stories are just another kind of mnemonic.
That’s easy enough in the earlier levels, but somewhere around Level 6 the number of lessons will sharply increase.
I still sometimes do all my lessons at once, but to learn them properly takes around 2 hours! That’s 1 hour for ~5 radicals and 25 kanji, which are the highest priority items and the ones where mnemonics are most important. Then, it takes me another hour just for getting through the piles and piles of vocab–and I do these fairly quickly.
Besides the time commitment, many people also find that their retention rates drop off the more they do, regardless of how much time is spent on each item. So you’ll hear a lot of “5 per day,” “10 per day,” etc.
The number of reviews to do at the same time end up becoming astronomically high, and everyone has a limit as to how many words they can cover at any one time before comprehension / accuracy begins to drop off.
I use the lesson cap script to force limits on the lessons I do. It uses a point-based system that looks at how many items you have at each level to determine how many lessons you are allowed to complete at any time. In the early levels, that’s usually enough to cover all the lessons. At level 6 right now, I only end up doing 3 sets of 5 lessons in the morning. The pace is about 2 weeks per level. My accuracy has skyrocketed, and my leeches are way down compared to before, though I’ll need to get back to level 12 to see completely new content and determine exactly how effective the pacing is.
I’m a bigger advocate for simply thinking up your own mnemonic, it means the memory links you’re making are to ideas more strongly ingrained in your brain instead of someone else’s, and you can more easily tie in the mnemonic to an imagined thing the kanji looks like to you.
As for my biggest mistake… I think would be trying to take on too many new lessons each day and eventually becoming overwhelmed by reviews, making it much harder to actually remember individual ones due to trying to remember so many new ones at once. It’s better to spread your new lessons out to a comfortable amount over the week, it’s not a race and can end up affecting your life (or else fall way behind on reviews).
edit: I see someone posted pretty much the same idea as me while I was writing this message haha, 一体！@OtakuShowboat
yeah, I’ve tried the make your own mnemonic thing, and it didn’t really work. The only time is works for me is when they want me to remember Hard Gay, who I still haven’t looked up, for the “sei” sound. Instead I imagine Dora the Explorer agressively yelling “SAY ___!” at me, while doing some kind of action related to the word.
I still haven’t looked him up, but his character is already well established in my imagination, so I do fine when he shows up on mnemonics. I’m afraid looking him up at this point will destroy that image.
I take Japanese classes and my biggest regret is coasting on the kanji. Don’t get me wrong - we learnt kanji, and I remember them really well. But it’s basically impossible to continue teaching kanji in a classroom setting past a certain level, so my teacher just gradually stopped explicitly teaching us kanji and we were just kind of expected to pick them up ourselves, I guess.
But once I didn’t know which kanji I was “supposed” to know, I just sort of stopped learning them. I let that go on for a while longer than I should, and I wish I’d found WK about 2 - 10 months earlier than I did. I’m certainly making up for it now!
And have also shown WK to my teacher, who is blown away and going to recommend it to our class when we start again this term
Unlike a lot of people here, I spent too much time getting stuck trying to memorize Katakana. Not because it’s useless, absolutely not. It’s just, it wasn’t until I started running into Katakana in the wild that I started learning the tougher characters.
Getting hung up on Genki. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, I’m not a super huge fan of genki as a first book. I don’t think it introduces the language particularly well due to it’s organization. What I do think it is excellent at is testing and reinforcing concepts you’ve already learned elsewhere, and filling in holes in that knowledge. We used this as our sole textbook in class and I didn’t feel it was particularly effective at giving me a decent understanding of how the language actually functions. I ended up getting further and further behind, and so much of my troubles would have been solved by looking up TaeKim’s guide, or Learn Japanese The Manga Way.
Not reading from the start. Once I asked a classmate how he was so good at japanese, and he told me he learned by reading stuff outside of class. I was surprised, because despite being 6 months into a Japanese course I didn’t feel I had any practical reading ability. Looking at a page of even easy reading material (like Yotsuba) seemed like gibberish to me, because I only knew a very small amount of vocab, and it was even worse if there was kanji. I didn’t realize that part of the point of learning by reading is that you don’t understand what’s on the page. It’s not only to reinforce what you know, but also to learn new material. And you don’t need to learn kanji (even if there’s no kanji), you only have to learn how to look up kanji. The only real block is grammar- you have to have an idea of how japanese sentences function or else it’s just a stream of random vocab (which again, I didn’t actually have, 6 months in, because Genki did a terrible job explaining the “why” of the language). So if I were to do it all again, I would have read a better japanese grammar guide than genki, and then leaped straight into translating sentences that in theory were above my level, but still excellent learning experiences.
EDIT:
One more. Not learning Kanji right away. But this wasn’t for lack of trying, so my real mistake here was trying to learn every element of each kanji at once. I was trying to learn the way it’s written, meaning, all of the readings, and examples of vocab words all at once. (I also tried Remembering the Kanji, but that was the opposite extreme- I found learning the generic meaning without understanding how it’s used absolutely useless.) This is where WaniKani was a revelation.
The single greatest thing WaniKani does, in my eyes, is use the vocab to teach the less common readings. I was trying to pack too many pieces of information all at once. Wanikani’s method allows me to, instead of remembering 1 kanji with 6 different pieces of information at once, learn 1 kanji with 3 pieces of information (kanji appearance + meaning + reading), and then later enhance that kanji with two new pieces of information (vocab + new reading). You wouldn’t think this would make a difference, but it does. It’s this single method that turned learning 2000 kanji from a herculean task into something within the realm of possibility.
Uh… that was a little longer than I intended. Ah well.
I started on the Intermediate book too, but I got stalled somewhere in the middle.
and my biggest regret is coasting on the kanji. Don’t get me wrong - we learnt kanji, and I remember them really well. But it’s basically impossible to continue teaching kanji in a classroom setting past a certain level, so my teacher just gradually stopped explicitly teaching us kanji and we were just kind of expected to pick them up ourselves, I guess.