My Top 4 Mistakes in Learning Japanese (and What I Would Do Differently) | Vlog #31 

I'm happy to hear that you took a long time to learn things as well! I was really worried I was going super slow and I wasn't getting anywhere. And it was taking me hours just to recap or catch up like you talked about! Super important to know your limits, but at the same time don't be worried it's taking a bit longer.

The thing with stroke order is that it becomes a mechanism meaning once your start doing a character your muscular memorie will just do the resf by itself, however I do believe that that over-thinking stroke order will mess you up. As a Chinese language student, I think stroke order is definitely useful if you have bad kinetic memory (like me)

At the beginning I learned '歳' without knowing the radicals and had no idea how to memorize it😅

The problem with Anki flashcards is that if you have a schedule dedicated just not to learn the language on itself, but if you've divided your time to study each parts related to language acquirement, the Anki can take much time in a way which exhaustes you to do whatever other task related that you have planned.

4 hours? A week and a half? Skip a day?!! I swear I've gone through this in this summer!! I skip studying for a couple of weeks though, trying to get back to studying ^_^

Damn your teeth are so white

Stroke order is good to know in the beginning to understand how the language is written, but once you remember the basic characters, it's not necessary at all to continue. Definitely saved me some time. I write English *upside down,* *backwards,* in all kinds of ways. Sometimes I write Japanese in different stroke order but it's the same character at the end, and that's what matters.

I feel you on the heavy flashcard load! I've often had days where I really wanted to power through a bunch of flashcards but due to the heavily increased review load in the following days I've held myself back. You can limit the amount of reviews per day that might let you eventually catch up to those power-days but that just feels like ruining the space repetition

What do you think of this method to learn japanese ? (Am I not making too much mistakes ? ^^) (0) learn every hiragana and katakana and practice their pronunciation) 1) learn every kanji from the Hensig method + listen x times to podcast for japanese learners 2) learn some vocabulary (kanji, comprehension, pronunciation) from the core 2k/6k (at least 2k) 3) buy a/some grammar book with CDs, and learn+practice it all + keep learning vocabulary (at least 6k) 4) immersion (talking with japanese poeple, listen to japanese music, watch japanese movies, read news in japanese...)

The fluent forever app looks really interesting but unfortunately the stretch goal is actually very high for Japanese. It's the 3rd stretch goal, not the first as stated in the video.

I think it's less that there are more words being used and more that you get few words for free. With a language like Norwegian or Italian, once you learn the basic two thousand, most of the remaining 2-4,000 will actually be nearly identical to English and so you'll understand a lot of stuff without ever having to study it. I'm learning Icelandic at the moment, which is closely related to Norwegian, but due to cultural isolation they use almost zero of the common words used across languages in Europe, and so even though I've learned almost two thousand words, I feel like I can barely understand anything. Had I learned Norwegian instead, I'd already be at a fairly high level.

Is learning japanese if you only learn the words in hiragana usefull at all cuz im not planning on learning kanji

Hey Shawn, I also started learning Japanese about 2 months ago. Found your stuff by looking up fluent forever related things and actually use a modified version of your anki deck for learning. Was wondering from your anki study/review times that you mentioned in this video, if you have set a daily review limit in anki. Because i also had slows weeks with more free time, i learned 100 new cards ( not notes ) for the past 1 1/2 weeks. I have my daily review limit set to 300 and new card limit to 100 at the moment which takes me about 2 hours. Most of the new cards are buried cards from notes that were "new" in the last few days, so i pick them up pretty fast. I have around 4-6 cards for each note. But same as you, i am going to run out of new cards soon, because making new notes also takes up quiet a lot of time ( that is absolutely worth it, i can remember my own mnemonics way better than if i used someone elses). I agree that starting with sentences earlier is a good thing, it also gives you more motivation because you can actually express something without just naming things and you get a feel for the syntax of the language. I would recommend to others to get an tutor (either online(italki) or offline) to help you make sentences for your words when you have learned around 150 words, which should give you enough nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs to form several sentences that you can reuse for new vocab. Also makes it easier to remember if you made sentences that are relevant to yourself. Good luck for the final push of your japanese studies!

残りは、3か月です。がんばってください。

thats what i have found with srs systems, there needs to be a pause button that delays all your reviews.

Hello. I really enjoy your videos but want to learn Spanish or French before learning Japanese. Can you make a video about what you did to learn European languages? Learning a language in 6 months sounds great but I’m not sure what the best way to about it to be efficient. I’ve tried learning Spanish with Anki before but I don’t think I went about it in the best way.

Well, let’s see if the backing makes it. Japanese is the only language I am interested in learning and the stretch goal is quite a ways off still. Fingers crossed and money in the pot...

How much will you continue learning Japanese after this year?

I'm really excited about that app. Anki is way too confusing for me to use and as much as I love wanikani, they make us use english translations rather than pictures. I'm in with hopes they can help get Japanese flashcards with pictures and audio up and running. Thanks for the info, never heard of fluent forever before. I'm trying to learn within a year myself.

Nice! Good to know before I start, can I ask do you have the link for the core deck you mentioned?

How much time per day do you spend on reading Japanese? Writing Japanese (not handwriting)?, Speaking? Listening?

What's this core deck your talking about where did you get it

are you keen to do another reading video? now that you have more vocab? try something easy like a childs book or something haha

How long to just speak? I don't care about the characters.

As a Chinese person, seeing Americans learn kanji via mnemonics reminds me of learning English pronunciation via the IPA.

Man I'm a lazy bum when it comes to making my own mnemonics... Luckily for me KKLC takes care of that for me.

あなたのかわいい

wth is kaaaaaanjiiiiii

Unfortunately, You just wasted your precious time with try to learn kanji.

First of all, learning Japanese itself is a big mistake. I'm sorry.