this is the path I plan the take over the next couple of years. Does it seem reasonable. Would you change anything?
So far I’ve learned hiragana and katakana.
I will study these textbooks in this order:
Genki 1
Genki 2
All about particles
Tae kins guide to japanese grammar
tobira gateway to advanced japanese
remembering the kanji
From day one I will compliment these textbooks by listening to pimsleur and japanesepod101 and ofcourse doing my lessons and reviews on wanikani and drilling vocab using anki
After genki 2 I will also start watching terrace house without subs trying to follow along to the best of my ability
I will also try to find a conversation partner / 1 on 1 teacher for 1-2 hours a week at this point.
Once I’m approaching level 60 I’d also like to try and read some manga / children novels
I’d honestly recommend against Tae Kim’s guide in general, as it’s full of errors. Literally of the 5 articles I’ve read from it, 4 had errors.
The Genki to Tobira is a pretty standard path. Alternatively, or alongside them, you can use Bunpro for grammar.
For grammar, I recommend the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series, which is super helpful. Looking things up in there you see in Genki/Bunpro will be enlightening. It does take probably ebing like N5ish for the examples to be helpful though
There isn’t really much point for RtK if you are also doing WK. They use different radical memnoics, which will confuse you if you are using WK.
Genki 2 is nowhere near enough to be ready for listening to Terrace House, especially without subs. That can be tricky even for people that are pretty advanced. I’d at least have read first and listened to a decent amount and listened to a decent amount of stuff with subs.
You definitely don’t need to be level 60 before you do this. I’d actually recommend incorporating native material (such as manga) into your studies pretty early on. Maybe around WK level 10-20 and while you’re reading/when you finish Genki 2.
I don’t really mean to self-promote, but I wrote a guide that goes into detail on how to incorporate native material into your studies. It explains how to look up kanji you don’t know under the “Manga” section.
TL;DR, you’re going to use an OCR.
I second that. I have used RtK for a while years ago and it didn’t work for me. It uses different names for the radicals than Wanikani so you will end up with duplicate conflicting knowledge which is confusing… You will have to create your own mnemonics almost all the time because RtK doesn’t supply them. Moreover RtK covers only meanings, not readings. If you are doing Wanikani RtK is just not worth the trouble.
My plan regarding terrace house was to watch it expecting to understand maybe 10-20% and then hopefully start picking stuff up, but maybe that’s a silly idea
I agree with the comments to cut out Tae Kim’s, since it covers the same material as Genki I and II and does have accuracy problems.
It also probably makes more sense to use All About Particles as a reference even as you go through Genki, since Genki covers a number of particles as well. I agree with MegaZero that RtK is largely duplicative of WK, though perhaps having two sets of mnemonics could help if one proves to be more memorable.
I also will continue to preach the gospel of Imabi.net, which is not pretty to look at but is still the most comprehensive, in depth and accurate grammar resource on the web.
Lastly, if you’re keeping up with grammar, you can approach easier manga and children’s books around Level 30. Once you get to Level 40-60, you’re starting to get into kanji that still pop up from time to time, but many of them don’t appear that frequently in easy material.
I was gonna add a comment about this as I forgot it above. I always use it as a nice second reference along with Maggie Sensei for getting more examples when learning about something from another source. It’s an awesome reference.
Getting a nice breath of usage examples helps this stick much better for me. I don’t mind Genki, but I feel like I don’t get the depth of exposure to really get a good feel for stuff sometimes.
By my recollection, it includes mnemonics for remembering the meaning of characters, but does not supply them for readings. In fact, I don’t believe it addresses readings at all.
Did you do all the kanjis? I did. From my recollection it includes mnemonics for some meanings at first and after a while it stops giving mnemonics. Most meanings have no mnemonics. There are separate books for the readings and they supply no mnemonics.
I’m going to echo @TrinityBringer on this. Everyone has their own learning speed and style, so there are no absolutes, but I’m thinking you’ll want to start reading native material waaaaay before level 60.
Reading is one of the best ways to get used to grammar, and ultimately to be able to recognize it immediately on sight. Some people can read a textbook and understand the grammar and retain it. For someone like me, I can’t fully grasp it until I see it in something I’m reading, and I can’t retain it until I’ve encountered it multiple times.
Nope, I used WK to level 60 and dumped the rest of the kanji I learned while reading into Houhou. I only paged through RtK to see whether I thought it would be a useful resource and I concluded it wasn’t going to add much beyond my other study habits. I think it would add even less if it doesn’t include mnemonics for later kanji.
