Just wondering what people think are the things that slowed their progress or sped it up. Here's mine:

Worst:
+ Thinking that I had to take a class
+ Not knowing what to study and where to start studying.
+ Pimsleur
+ Studying vocabulary out of context

Best:
+ Nukemarine's guide laid out the roadmap that I've been more or less following since I read it.
+ Getting anki on my phone
+ Studying every day without fail
+ adding better learning steps
+ Suspending anki leeches

Worst:

-blindly following advice even if it doesn't work for me (e.g. "only go from the keyword to the kanji, not the other way around". I found that it was essential to sometimes test myself going from kanji to keyword).
-assuming that other people studying Japanese must be smarter than me (about learning Japanese). Each person has their own way that works best for them.
-trying to start learning Japanese from scratch with kana. Big mistake. It may be easy to "learn" hiragana and katakana so that you can recognize them and produce them, but it takes a lot of time before they are automatic.


Best:

-sticking with the same textbook all the way through to the end, rather than jumping around among different books (assuming of course that the textbook you stick with is reasonably good).
-installing the Microsoft Japanese language package onto my laptop so that I can type in Japanese. Sure, it may help your memory to write everything by hand, but being able to type on my computer saves a ton of time.
-ignoring the romaji "haters". Look, I know a lot of people think you have to jump right in with kana/kanji, but the teacher in me says "if using romaji in the earlier stages helps you learn the language, then by all means use romaji in the earlier stages."

Worst:
- Reading forums

Best:
- Not reading forums

Worst
Started listening all day 6 months after day one
Started using monolingual dictionaries 15 months after day one

Best
Ajatt
Anki every day
Rtk community (I love this site)

I think Core10k lays in the middle, nice way to practice listening and pronunciation at the same time but not cool as own-mined sentences.

Worst: I have not been magically able to learn production without ever doing any.
Best: using Ixrec's guide, with the slight modification of jumping straight into untranslated VNs intead of translated manga.

Most everything I've done has worked out great, even if there are a lot of optimizations I can think of:
Pick an easier VN to start with (I ended up switching a quarter of the way through)
Come up with good learning steps for Anki sooner
Memorize all the verb conjugations
Do RTK in Anki instead of Memrise (kanji to keyword was the right choice)
Write my AHK/JS thingy for EBWin4 sooner
Start memorizing phonetic radicals sooner

Nyanda Wrote:Worst:
- Reading forums

Best:
- Not reading forums

this this this this

[Zgarbas]

Best: Studied (almost) every day
Worst: Not studied at all.

Worst:
- Trying to listen to complicated Japanese before I was ready
- Worrying too much about finding the "right" method
- not actively studying vocab. For me, acquisition is MUCH slower without studying and using Anki
- Adding cards to Anki, but not actively studying them before/after adding
- Not speaking out of fear of sounding like an idiot.

Best:
- Studying Grammar, especially N2 and N1 grammar from the Kanzen Master series
- iTalki
- Using custom study sessions in Anki to study failed cards as well as upcoming cards
- Deleting my Facebook account

Worst:
- Obsessing over theories, cards, programs, etc. and spending more time on them than actually studying.
- Worrying about stuff like "when is the best time to start production?" (A: Now. Or there's always now. Or how about... NOW?)
- Too much stick, not enough carrot. (Boring as hell sentences, studying that feels like a chore.)

Best:
- TV Japan, because I can't ignore it if it's always on in the background.
- Kindle Paperwhite, because it makes reading easy and fun again. (When Amazon isn't a PITA.)
- Yamasa saved my butt twice. I wanna go back sometime.
- Online classes to find weak spots, and for general practice.
- http://shasetsu.ps.land.to/
- Fun. Have as much as I can while doing this. (Not always possible, but fun things are motivating.)

I do love me some TV Japan. It's a great way to connect with Japanese culture in general.

rich_f, what class(es) did you take at Yamasa? I'm planning for my much-delayed trip to Japan in April to last about a month. I'll have some extra money around that time, and have been toying with the idea of attending an immersion school for two weeks of my stay.

Worst :

- Asking unqualified people how to study Japanese
- Asking qualified people how to study Japanese
- Seeking validation

Best :

- Finding Book - Off in Paris, buying tons of cheap native stuff (2nd hand mangas at 1€ ? Novels and LN at 2€ ? Yes please).
- Getting a PS Vita (yay region free !)
- Filling a small notebook with vocabulary and grammatical tidbits, stuffing it in my pocket for easy referencing day in, day out.
- Setting a low leech threshold on Anki.

Best:
- "obsessing" over theories, methods, tools. What I learned will help me not only with Japanese, but any other languages I may want/need to learn in the future. It also allows me to help friends and family out with their language learning.
- seeking out both qualified and not entirely qualified (at least not formally qualified) advice on how to study Japanese
- always making sure to spend significantly more time on immersion than I do on studying.

Worst:
- ignoring some good advice I got in the past
- using materials that were too hard in the beginning
- not being able to find a balance between studying Japanese and other priorities, for the first couple of years (there were periods when I focused too much on Japanese, and then times when I stopped studying completely to focus on other things; now I finally found a good balance, that allows me to work a little bit on Japanese each day).
- thinking learning Japanese will work the same way learning European languages did. It didn't turn out to be that way, Japanese is sooooo much tougher than I imagined.

BEST
1. I do everything my own way. I don't ask anybody what I should do.
2. Cyber space ghosts - PMs (personal messages): Miss Rutracker, Uzbekistan, language fora, asiatorrents, and many more, some of them dead now
3. JW's site http://www.jw.org/en/publications. I'm into multilingual language learning, they are the closest to what I've been looking for.
4. I got a large collection of very good Asian movies from a friend of mine, more than 600 (six hundred) Japanese movies, I watched them all before I started learning Japanese
5. My idea of paradise: good books and movies + eternal learning

WORST
1. Shit happens (anime, manga, dorama, ranobe, Heisig, SRS, and so on and on and on)
2. No real Japanese audiobooks (Dorama CDs don't count).
3. No good pronunciation courses
4. No good audio dictionaries

WORST

- Trying to be too hardcore in the beginning. Prior to doing RTK I actually tried to do Core in dictation mode (audio -> written sentence), learning everything along the way. That didn't last long. Also started memorising 童話 from the 副娘 site. First one was easy. Second one ... wasn't. Total waste of time.

- Reviewing keyword -> kanji despite suspecting it was largely wasted effort but not having the confidence to switch sooner in the absence of any reading experience.

- Believing it was somehow possible to learn grammar in advance of vocabulary, or acquire comprehension skills purely by SRSing sentences. How naive!

- Learning *every word* in core no matter how obviously pointless it was, e.g. domain-specific words for festivals, equinoxes (ffs!), food, politics, 師走, etc, purely for a sense of completion.

- Doing the part of core10k past the first 6k. The time would almost certainly have been better spent reading & mining, though I guess it's hard to be sure.

- Doing all of RTK1 before starting anything else. Would have been much better to do RTK lite (at most) & add others on the fly. Probably.

- Constantly trying to compare Japanese to English and decide which is 'better'.

- Trying to read novels before manga.

BEST

- Doing RTK1. Kanji -> keyword from the outset would have been more immediately useful for reading, but keyword -> kanji was a useful exercise. Cramming it in 5 weeks didn't leave time for anything else but at least got it out of the way, and provided a crash-course in learning how to learn, which served as a valuable preparation for what followed.

- Continuing to review & add kanji (now at 3240 and counting, only possible/practical due to reviewing kanji -> meaning & not writing them out). Makes kanji study a kind of separate but complementary project.

- Doing Core6k. Good way to get started but soon cloys. Cramming it in a few months didn't leave time for much else though.

- Watching 1 - 2 eps of anime per day. I hate to admit it, but the reason I am able to breeze through slang contractions when reading is entirely due to having heard them 10000 times in anime.

- READING!!

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:I do love me some TV Japan. It's a great way to connect with Japanese culture in general.

Gatten! has a lot of useful vocab, and some useful science that I've picked up. Also love Tanken Bakumon. Oh, and that Kokoro no Tabi thing, where Hino Shouhei rides a bicycle all over Japan and goes to the "scenery of the heart" of people who send in letters. That's a pretty cool show, too. And NHK news is great Kango practice.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:rich_f, what class(es) did you take at Yamasa? I'm planning for my much-delayed trip to Japan in April to last about a month. I'll have some extra money around that time, and have been toying with the idea of attending an immersion school for two weeks of my stay.

Hmm... two weeks... I did something similar in 2007, when I was trying to restart learning Japanese all over again. It was good enough to get me in shape for my 3 week "all over Honshu" trip after and do pretty well. I basically did 2 weeks of private lessons at Yamasa, and some other lessons in the afternoons. It was a helpful jump-start for me.

When I went back in 2011, I did 3 months of AIJP (Accelerated Intermediate Japanese) and JBPP (Business). That was huge for me, because at that time, I had over-studied for the N2, and had thrown my speaking/writing skills all out of whack. 3 months there really helped me get things back in shape again.

It really depends on what you want to focus on when you're there. I'd get in touch with the admissions people (same goes for any school, really) and see what they can do. What's on the website is one thing, but if you talk to them, you'll find they have a certain amount of flexibility, but it all depends on what you want/need.

Okazaki for some people is going to be a dealbreaker. It's not "happenin'" like Tokyo. It has the castle, a museum or two, some malls, and... that's about it. It's close (29 minutes) to Nagoya, and that helps. I like Nagoya a lot. It's really easy to get around. Toyota is also nearby, if you're curious. Also, Toyohashi is kind of neat, and Gifu-ken is nearby, too. (Kinda.) From Nagoya, it's only 45 minutes by shinkansen to Kyoto, too.

Thanks for the detailed reply, rich_f. Proximity to Nagoya would be fine; one of my teachers lives there, and I want to see 名古屋城 at some point anyhow. I've also been considering Kudan, which is in Tokyo, and appears to have decent reviews online: http://www.kudan-japanese-school.com/

Sounds like it would be good to do a two week intensive conversation course, and THEN spend two weeks working out of my company's Meguro office :-D

I like kokoro no tabi as well. I forget the name, but there's also the show with the woman who packs up a truck of cooking supplies with a chef, interviews some locals about the food they grow or catch, and then helps the chef prepare a meal made from the local ingredients. Very interesting. I also love the 朝ドラ; TV Japan is what hooked me on 花子とアン.

Also, it's not very instructive in terms of Japanese learning, but I find ピタゴラスイッチ adorable.

I blathered at length about Okazaki, Yamasa, and Nagoya on my blog, stupidamericantourist.com. It goes all the way back to 2007, when I first went there for 5 weeks: 2 in Yamasa, 3 wandering around on a JR pass. Might be useful.

There are also some photos from my Flickr stream in there somewhere, too. I need to finish up adding all the photos from my trip then. I took too many-- I keep pushing off editing them, because I'm bad at whittling down the pile. It's fascinating to me, but probably boring as hell to anyone else looking at my Flickr. XD

Best:
* Leave anki open all day. When I get bored of something, or find myself wandering tumblr, or finish another task and have some transition time, I just do some reps. The daily reviews are over before I know it!
* Sentence mine. I resisted this a lot because it's a lot more effective to do core2k/6k and get the highest-usage words first. But vocab is boring. Sentence mining is fun. Especially with subs2srs decks where there's pictures and audio! I've reached a compromise where I have a small sentence mining deck from my books/games/anime, and add only reoccurring words that are hurting my understanding of the materiel. I try to add as few cards as I can so that 80% of my anki time is still spent on the very cost-effective core2k/6k deck, but I'm excited to get into anki every day to go through my sentence mining decks. It helps me ease into it.
*Get rid of those damn English subtitles on my anime!
*Get Japanese subtitles on my anime! This was huge, especially for starting to hear things like the explanatory の or ん, and ですわ and such. It's also a great transition into watching anime raw, which I can now do with some easier anime.

Worse
* Feel guilt for not studying, or falling behind on anki. Still do this a lot but I'm learning to forgive myself and move forward more and more quickly. Guilt doesn't help anybody!
* Small thing, but a while back I was in a city that had a Kinokuniya, and I bought a ton of what I thought were easy and intermediate books to use later on. But those "easy" books are mostly kana, and because of that they're harder to read and less rewarding, so I don't read them. Wasted purchase. Those "intermediate" books are actually super advanced and it'll probably be a couple years yet before I can read through them for fun, but they're motivating, so I don't mind having them around. I've spent a lot of money on books I thought I'd want to read later on but don't (including a $50 Murakami collection...who am I kidding?). Plus, I have like 10 books I want to read right now, so I tend to skip around and never finish anything. So I've learned to only buy what I want to use immediately. I think it'd be great to only own one unread book at any time, and have it at a level where you can start learning immediately.

Best:
1. Language school for 1 year. It's not the classes that were most valuable, but access to teachers. My classes ended at noon, but all of the teachers had to stay till 6pm, and some until 9. Even better, barely any other students took advantage of this. Mostly one-on-one, I spent hundreds of hours chatting, asking questions, getting feedback, getting materials, and so on. If I had spent my money on private tutors for the same number of hours, I'd be broke.
2. Drinking with Japanese friends and colleagues. The relaxed atmosphere and inhibition thanks to alcohol create a great environment for practicing (learning, not so much).
3. Watching TV shows and movies with subs (practice listening AND reading simultaneously!), and then re-watching them without subs.
4. The unofficial RevTK resources: RTK, Anki, Tae Kim, DoJG series, etc.
5. Working on pronunciation from the very beginning. When I first got started, I spent hours listening to Japanese media and hanging around Japanese friends even though I barely understood anything. It paid off, though, because now people often mistake me as Japanese (I'm half Asian).

Worst:
1. Wasting time (mostly due to browsing forums, news sites, and social networks).
2. Too much Anki, too little media. Once you've reached the N2 level, media becomes much more important than Anki.
3. Learning grammar unsystematically. I learned grammar on an as-needed basis. As a result, I have several gaps and weaknesses. For instance, I still haven't memorized the rules for conjugating verbs, even though they're incredibly simple. To this day, I conjugate everything by intuition. Usually I'm right, but I make mistakes every now and then, especially with rarer verb forms.
4. Not practicing grammar as soon as I learned it and making sure to keep using it. I've noticed that I have a strong command of the grammar I practiced right away after learning and kept using often. On the other hand, I can easily recognize and understand grammar that I didn't practice right away or have stopped using, but I usually struggle to use them.
5. Too much informal study. Solid grammatical knowledge is important. Even in English, grammatical knowledge separates the merely functional native speakers from the eloquent ones, or at least from the ones who can use "proper" English.

vileru Wrote:Worst:
1. Wasting time (mostly due to browsing forums, ......

Without language fora I wouldn't be able to meet hell of a lot of people (via PMs and then e-mails). I've never considered it a waste of time. A language forum is a meeting point, one of the best things under the cyber space sun. Homage to all the Admins.

I've never read anything new about learning languages, though - paradoxically.

The main reason I posted so many links and prepared so many parallel texts/novels (Japanese included) was to somehow show my gratitude to cyber space ghosts.

I must add that it's rather sad language fora are dying. Not only this one, everywhere the same thing: they're getting less and less active - everybody must have got somewhat tired.

Life is beautiful, anyway, so smile first thing in the morning. Or 'mourning' is the correct form?

buonaparte Wrote:The main reason I posted so many links and prepared so many parallel texts/novels (Japanese included) was to somehow show my gratitude to cyber space ghosts.

Thank you very much for your gracious contributions.

Best things:
- Read. A lot.
- Realize that, once I can read easily, Anki is my second study method instead of my main method.
- Used shared decks instead of making my own (I hate spending that much time to make cards, so when I make my own, they rarely have more than the word, a definition, and maybe one example sentence)
- Google things that I don't know in Japanese, since there's usually good usage examples floating around somewhere
- Tried production, because it made me realize how bad I am at producing the language.

Worst things:
- Spent time arguing over stupid things when I could have been doing some half-way enjoyable studying (adding cards in Anki has a satisfaction that internet fights don't give)
- Stopped reviews on my Core2k/6k deck; I'm going back through it and, from an aggravatingly small sample, found that I've forgotten somewhere between a third and a half of the cards in the deck; even common, non-political words that I should be seeing a lot.
- Procrastinated on reviewing/adding cards; it just made things harder when I finally reviewed at midnight or the next day and my ETC on my decks got pushed back by months (unless I decided to do [50, 100] a day, which didn't work out so well last time and almost guarantees greater frequency of procrastination)
- Not doing much of any group or tutored study over the past five years; I still haven't done much of any and my production skills show it. I'd like to take the N2 or N1 next year, but my production skills are so bad that I do poorly even on multiple choice questions.

Assuming any of that hasn't been said yet, hopefully it helps any new students get an idea of what they need to look out for.

As for browsing fora, I find it to be a gamble (though one with pretty good odds): often, you won't find anything particularly useful, but there always seems to be some surprising idea that pops up that just helps things click. For me, one of the big ones was extensive reading; before I read about it and was convinced of its effectiveness (beyond the randomized kana practice I did playing old Pokemon games), any time I tried to read, I'd look up every word and every grammar point I didn't know (too many of both); when I'd inevitably get burned out and aggravated, I'd quit, thinking that there was no point in reading if I didn't understand everything. After trying out extensive reading and sticking with it for a while (admittedly with a much larger vocabulary and a better understanding of grammar), I became much better at reading and was able to enjoy it like I wanted.
Most days I visit here (or any other language forum), however, I just see repeats of the same things I've read twenty times before. Granted, for new students, this is an important process, but it seems I've exhausted most of the riches available on these sites.

@buonaparte

I should clarify that I don't think spending time browsing forums has been a complete waste of time. I've had great discussions, learned about others' language learning experiences, received helpful explanations and guidance, and much more. I've definitely learned a lot about language acquisition, and that knowledge has proven to useful whenever someone asks me for advice.

However, I can't deny that, had I spent the time studying or immersing myself in the language, I would've made more progress in terms of Japanese language acquisition. Perhaps the knowledge I've gained about language acquisition will allow me to learn other languages more efficiently, thus saving me more time in the long run. But I won't find that out until I learn some other languages.

I've noticed that I usually browse forums when I'm tired and want a stimulating break. In fact, I do the same thing when I browse news sites and social networks. I generally skip the memes and photo uploads and look for interesting articles. As a result, I've gained a broad knowledge of business, politics, social issues, and scientific developments by reading stuff like the New York Times, the Economist, Slate, the MIT Tech Review, and so on. And while the knowledge I've acquired allows me to participate in a wide variety of conversations, I can't say whether this has amounted to anything significant. Perhaps dabbling in an array of subjects will eventually lead to some startling discovery. So far, it has just led me to draw some helpful comparisons and analogies, and maybe impressive a few people or make a few friends.

To somewhat digress, could someone explain to me the value of reading the news? For the most part, I never use the information from most of the articles I read. If something is important enough, I generally find out via word-of-mouth or social networks. Yes, the news may be helpful for providing information that raises awareness of social issues or inform how we vote, but I'd argue that other media are much better at that, e.g. long-form journalism. As far as I can tell, the news is, at best, a collection of abstracts regarding current events. At worst, it's a collection of trivia or propaganda. Either way, I think my time is better spent otherwise.

[Zgarbas]

The world is a big place, and the only realistic way to sort of keep up with it is via the news. I don't read them since I tend to be overwhelmed by information and suck at time management, and it sort of shows; I'm really behind on everything. I don't know anything about most countries. In everyday life it doesn't show as much, but generally having an idea of what goes on in the world tints your interaction with people. Also it gives you unspoken background on their general or current situation. Sometimes you meet people who have never heard the term LGBT or who make a really vague reference to 'trouble back home' and you can either shrug it off or you can understand the background to it because you read the news and know that their country is a totalitarian regime, or that their country is at war, or that their country has a really recent violent event which the person you're talking to has most likely witnessed.
It might not affect things much, but it's the little things. Like, maybe, knowing not to reference the 90s to someone since they were probably times of unstable politics and warfare and their memories might not be so fond, or not to assume that 20-year-olds from the former Eastern Bloc speak Russian, or to be sort of understanding towards a Chinese person who doesn't speak Mandarin*. Sure, they're used to these embarrassing assumptions, and they most likely won't instantly befriend you for knowing these things, but you can be sure that the absence of these topics in your conversation will offer an extra bit of relief.

Also, good topic of conversation at times, I guess. But yeah, awareness of the world is a pretty cool thing. Keep going at it .

*I'm aware that this is technically not news, but often those introductory paragraphs in the news which gives you the background for the situation is more important than the situation itself.

Best
-Actually reading.

Worst
-Thinking the AJATT method was good or useful.

[RawToast]

Quote:I must add that it's rather sad language fora are dying. Not only this one, everywhere the same thing: they're getting less and less active - everybody must have got somewhat tired.

I've found that to be the case across the board. Most of the places I used to visit have died out, whilst the reddit community grows and grows -- but I hate the reddit format!