Six months in. Hiragana and katakana are solid, I know maybe 400 words, grammar is going fine from a textbook. Kanji is where it falls apart - I'll learn twenty, come back a week later, and half are gone. About 40 minutes a day, and I'm willing to pay for one thing but not four. Is there an ordering or a system that stops this leaking, or am I just doing the reps wrong?
The one thing I'd actually pay for at your stage is a structured kanji course with a fixed order, because ordering is the genuinely hard part to do yourself. Vocabulary, listening and grammar you can assemble free from ten sources. Ordering two thousand characters sensibly is a job, and it's worth paying someone who has already done it.
Agreed on ordering. Frequency-ordered and radical-ordered both work, they just feel different - radical order feels slower for the first two months and pays it back later.
Pick one system and run it for six months before you evaluate it. The biggest single waste of time in Japanese is switching methods at month two, restarting from zero, then switching again at month four. Almost any of the mainstream approaches works if you don't abandon it. I lost a year to method shopping and I have nothing to show for that year.
Start reading earlier than feels reasonable, even badly. Graded readers exist at your 400 words and they're short. Twenty minutes of reading beats twenty minutes of flashcards the moment you can technically read anything at all, because you meet the same kanji in context repeatedly and for free.
Practical: turn off stroke order quizzes and handwriting drills if you don't plan to write by hand. I spent months on handwriting I have used exactly zero times since, and it felt productive the whole way.
@cors_error_cleo · last mo. · 3 replies
You're learning characters in isolation, which is the leak. A kanji with no word attached is a shape with nothing to hang on. Learn vocabulary that contains the kanji and let the character come along for the ride, the retention problem mostly evaporates. The other half is your interval: a week is far too long a first gap. You need it again the next day, then two days, then four.
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@back_of_envelope · 2mo ago
Mostly. Radicals are worth a couple of hours as a separate exercise so you can tell visually similar characters apart, and then never again in isolation.
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@mat_mira · last mo.
Words first, characters as a byproduct. That is the exact opposite of what I have been doing for six months.
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