I’m very much a beginner at japanese. I wouldn’t even say that I’m a beginner, I’m less than that.
The very beginning was quite fun, honestly. I learned to read hiragana in two days, then I started learning katakana but that was a bit slower because my resources weren’t as good as for hiragana.
Then I was advised to start learning some basic kanji early on so that getting through the intermediate wall would be easier later, so I started using WaniKani. The radicals were a breeze, they sticked with me immediately. When the actual kanji came up, I could only remember the meanings. I get 20-30% of the readings correct on the first try, the rest I struggle with even after seeing the reading three times in the last minute. I’ve read people on these forums saying that the first 30 kanji are a breeze, then it gets a bit more difficult. For me, the first 3 kanji were a breeze, then it got impossible. I don’t remember the readings no matter what. If I’m lucky, one reading sticks with me per day.
I’m natively finnish speaking, so pronounciation is quite easy and I have no problems there.
I also tried looking into some very basic grammar. Some other finnish people have told me that grammar is quite easy because it isn’t massively far off from finnish, so I thought I’d look into it just so that when I actually start grammar, it’d be a bit easier. I just don’t manage to wrap my head around how one word can have like 10 different meanings depending on the context, how the whole sentence’s meaning can change with just one particle etc. All I could understand was that the “ka” (I don’t have a japanese keyboard on my PC) particle in the end of a sentence makes it a question.
Long story short, I didn’t understand basically anything. Even if given every single word and particle, their meanings etc. I can’t form even the most basic sentence. I read the theory part over and over again, try forming a sentence, I get it wrong. I’m not that surprised because I’ve been learning japanese for about a week now, but I didn’t think that it wouldn’t be this impossible.
The only actual progress I’ve made is that now I can read (not kanji) and I can understand a very small amount of single words in anime.
So yeah, I’d just like to know how y’all managed to actually learn something and how long it took you. For me, this just doesn’t seem to work and I’m not learning really anything. With this pace, I’ll be 80 before I can reach fluency. I’m still very motivated to learn, but I just don’t know how to.