I’m in japanese class right now writing this tweet lol!!!
it would seems so 
wrong website??
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I’m trying to learn 5 kanji a day at the moment. I’m finding it kind of difficult, i think it’s the lack of context. There seemed to be more context in Basic Kanji Book 1, my teacher photocopied the first lesson for us and i found that really helpful.
I will never forgive/forget 川 for sometimes being read がわ as otherwise i would have got 
on the test.
this is a good thread; thanks for un-axe-ing it!
my trajectory learning the language textbook-wise is similar to @bhendahu’s, although in 2016 i had to stop so i could study eight hours a day to pass the darn college-entrance exams and haven’t seriously gone back to japanese since!! 
a wildcat resource i remember brandon sheffield (of insert credit fame) sharing a few years ago somewhere is this one. i remember it being very useful in clarifying certain aspects of basic grammar when it comes to sentece-building. in the same category, tae kim’s guide proved to be a good supplement to genki I.
i’ve been going through some manga in order to pick vocabulary and stack some flashcards to memorize the terms / kanji / sentence structures. yotsuba&!, mokuyoubi no fruit and megumix (which sadly doesn’t have furigana) are all delightful reads! although maybe not that great as far as Serious Studies go . . .
this study program made by the japan foundation is filled with some quirky, stiff methods (there are little video-dramas with some weird-sounding sentences for every lesson that look like stuff made for dvd’s in the 90s lol) but the website is quite solid in terms of customizable learning experiences! very basic stuff, though.
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Learn about rendaku! This will trip you up much less once you do, and you’ll find yourself learning how some words work and what they mean without being taught, once you get a good handle on them
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i started feeding the last 700+whatever kanji into my flash card program as of december, i’m on schedule to be done next year whoo
that does sound slow, roughly 1.2 kanji/day, but also: readings, writings(i’m physically drawing them), meanings, common words/contextual uses, etc along with them. so it’s a practical mix.
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Assuming you aren’t in a class and especially not living in Japan: 2,000 in roughly a year, isn’t bad at all.
i’m not being as thorough as mauve, i’m just learning a couple of readings and no actual words or usage. i think my approach might be a bad idea, actual words make memorization easier i think.
for example
i was having trouble with remembering 先 but then i realised it is in 先生 (sensei) which made remember the on-yomi much easier.
but i was feeling overwhelmed by the number of readings and meanings and words associated with each kanji, so i decided to not worry about a lot of it and just try to learn the meanings and a couple of readings.
i’m not sure i could maintain 5/day for any length of time, i’m spending probably an hour a day on it, and i missed some days to review & relearn ones i’d already covered. i feel like that will take up a lot more time as i learn more kanji.
It’s good to try and memorize some of the common meanings of characters. That will help you figure out at least a guess at compound words, and that is often helpful for remembering weird readings or rendaku.
I read a lot of manga (not as much as I’ve bought, unfortunately) and that can be a fun way to help remember vocabulary. It’s not great for helping you learn how to read other forms of written Japanese, though. Not just because of “manga voice,” but because manga tends to be almost entirely dialog. So reading novels or other documents can feel like a very different kind of experience.
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However, Manga does seem to be one of the better ways to get Katakana exposure. I don’t read manga, so I could be wrong. But some encounters over the years seemed that way.
My Katakana suffered, until I took trips to Japan :\ not simply recognizing characters, but figuring out what the heck they are saying when strung together. I remember one particular moment, where I figured out the katakana on a sign said BOWLING ALLEY on the second floor.
There’s definitely An Art to learning how to interpret a mass of katakana as an approximation of a “foreign” word or phrase.
Manga are good practice not only because the language level is usually basic and they often have furigana, but also because all the visual context helps you grasp ambiguous phrases and keep the thread of the narrative even when you failed to understand a sentence. In my experience that’s the big leap when switching to novels. Even with a novel with adult-manga-comparable language level like Murakami, you need to fully construct your image of what’s going on from the text, and so misunderstanding a single sentence can leave you hopelessly lost. That’s demoralizing so I wouldn’t recommend trying one until you’re very comfortable with manga.
Videogames are good practice material too and should obviously appeal to most people here. I’ve noticed many people have the misconception that videogames are bad practice due to being overly focused on topics like wizards and monsters and ye olde words – that’s not the case, they’re 95% regular conversational or novelistic Japanese and perfectly fine practice.
I recommend FF5 especially. Its language level is more childish than any other kanji-using videogame (e.g. FF6 and Chrono Trigger are much more difficult). Avoid kana-only games like FF4, kana-only text is a trap that will not teach you to read properly.
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Wow 5 kanji a day. That’s way better than the 22 reading/writing/meaning words A day i have been doing. It’s also ahy i am quiting the school.
Kana-only is absolutely hellish, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. A few games in the DS/3DS era aimed at kids will have kanji with furigana, if you want something more accessible.
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Hey I am a moron but I am going to share my moronism with the rest of you. I was having difficulty with odd numbers 奇数 and even numbers 偶数.
Only when I actually sat down and studied I hit my damn head on my desk. Because I knew odd numbers the whole freaking time. The 奇 is the “ki” as in ジョジョの奇妙な冒険. Which you know is sometimes translated as JoJo’s Odd Adventure.
So Kisuu means odd numbers as kimyou can mean odd or strange.
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this also means even numbers in Chinese but it’s pronounced oushu (ou as in oh as in not entirely unlike the word “odd”) and i just
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It is astounding how far Chinese students coast on the kanji being the same. Like people that pass N1 and can’t say a complete thought that isn’t about the weather.
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That’s really a problem with what N1 tests more than anything else though.
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Visual context and utilizing the hiragana before or after some kanji are great at speeding things up, yeah. “I bet they’re saying X” and then I plug in the word with IME and a lot of times, yep, that’s what they’re saying.
One thing I’ve found about reading some one page dailies and short things off pixiv is the tendency of those to kind of revolve around particular subjects for the gag or whatever comes in handy as they keep talking about the thing(s) so you see the kanji repeated a lot.