I bookmarked this, then I put it off because I was still bouncing around the shiny forum, then I started last night… and fell asleep (in my defense, it was pretty late for me). These are some things that stood out to me personally, now that I’m a bit less sleepy (and because I was watching on 2x speed, almost none of these are verbatim).
*the first 75 minutes or so*
Pick up some basic grammar, learn some vocab, and just jump in was immediately apparent to me because my learning goals revolve around consumption, so I was happy to see that it was the conclusion you came to as well. Unfortunately Koohi won’t load anything for me, so I can’t give it a go, but it sounds like a cool system that I’ll try to find a way to mimic.
Read across authors and genres (after you have a foundation).
The latter part was really important for me. I’ve been attempting to vary my reading content to avoid having a strong knowledge of words that end up being more frequent with certain genres/authors and struggling once I start to diversity my reading. While this is important to work towards, sticking in a niche would help me feel a sense of progress as I read more, and I admittedly already have a niche in mind when it comes to my immediate reading goals.
Your tolerance for unknown words will grow, but as you learn more words it’ll dip again.
I used to consider the “married to a dictionary but can still work through the book” stage to be what my end goal would look like, since I thought being able to pick up a book and simply read would be too ambitious. The knowledge that it’s just one hill before I start to suffer again is somewhat comforting, in a weird way.
“I give a sh*t, I think it’s fun.”
The only verbatim quote here. I was surprised (and initially disappointed) to find that most people seemed to not only dislike but also actively discourage learning to handwrite kanji. I handwrite hanzi (Chinese characters) often, and I’ve found that I can easily break down and look up new hanzi as a result. I also rarely get similar-looking hanzi mixed up, simply because the strokes are different, and it’s rare for me to forget hanzi unless I somehow never see it again in reading. For a bit of a stranger use, I also like attempting to transcribe Chinese audio then comparing my notes to the transcript, and while this can be done easily with typing it’s fun trying to make sense of my rushed handwriting. “Ah, it’s fun.” So I’ll handwrite kanji, too.
If you wanna read difficult stuff, you’ll have a more difficult journey ahead.
*cries in Fire Emblem*
Reading manga is easy, move up as soon as you can.
I’m glad you mentioned this, because many of my “want to reads” are currently manga. I reeeeally want to read them, so I won’t be postponing them for the sake of sprinkling in some better reading material, but I’ll keep in mind that my reading ability is likely lower than it feels.
Set expectations low. It’s easy to miss how much people are struggling when they describe their progress, not because they’re being deceptive but because it’s harder to describe what you’re struggling with than what you can do.
I don’t really have anything to add, it’s just something I wanted to record and remember.
It may seem like I just cherry-picked a few things that I already agreed with, but I listened to everything you had to say and it completely shifted the way I’ve decided to approach reading, as well as my expectations with learning Japanese, so I’m glad I finally sat down to give your video a listen. Also, at the risk of sounding shallow, you’re nice to listen to even at 2x speed.
To others reading, I paraphrased a lot of things that might end up misconstruing the message, so please watch the actual video for the full context surrounding what’s been said!