I've got the 46 basic hiragana solid, and fairly decent on the dakuten. I'll need another day before those are locked down. But I can read a whole bunch more words now, which makes vocabulary much easier. In all I'm comfortably sitting on 71 hiragana, 25 words, and five kanji. At this rate I'll finish the hiragana this week, and by next week at this time katakana should be mine as well. Then I can forever leave romaji behind.
Realkana is an absolute godsend for this. It's like flashcards on speed. Because the kana follows such a regular pattern, it's like memorizing different first declension Latin nouns. Easy as hell. Then once I get confident, input the random format and master it again.
I've got Genki 1 and 2, and am debating whether to start it right after learning the kana or waiting until I dig into more of the top thousand vocabulary. Do I use it first or Tae Kim?
Similarly, do I start learning kanji now or do I wait? And how do I learn it? To be honest, brute-forcing my way through 3,000 kanji seems like a nightmare. English is terrible in its own way too, but at least phonics gets you through almost everything if you're careful enough. But phonics doesn't apply to kanji. Or so it would seem. Apparently the kanji radicals have names, and if you learn those you can often work out the pronunciation of the kanji. Supposedly.
Kanjidamage and James Heisig's approach seems to make the most sense - systemize these thousands of characters in order of complexity, and approach them with those patterns in mind. I have kanjidamage's 625 kanji deck in Anki already, and Heisig's book, so I might just start trying a lesson from the latter every couple of days and see how far I can get. Unfortunately, his book (at least volume 1) doesn't have the hiragana readings (why?!!?!!?!!), but those would be easy to find, since he's just using the list of jouyou kanji, and hell, even Wikipedia has a table of those, including kana readings. I could even make my own Anki deck as I go along - which is almost certainly what I'll do.
The plan is settled then:
Realkana is an absolute godsend for this. It's like flashcards on speed. Because the kana follows such a regular pattern, it's like memorizing different first declension Latin nouns. Easy as hell. Then once I get confident, input the random format and master it again.
I've got Genki 1 and 2, and am debating whether to start it right after learning the kana or waiting until I dig into more of the top thousand vocabulary. Do I use it first or Tae Kim?
Similarly, do I start learning kanji now or do I wait? And how do I learn it? To be honest, brute-forcing my way through 3,000 kanji seems like a nightmare. English is terrible in its own way too, but at least phonics gets you through almost everything if you're careful enough. But phonics doesn't apply to kanji. Or so it would seem. Apparently the kanji radicals have names, and if you learn those you can often work out the pronunciation of the kanji. Supposedly.
Kanjidamage and James Heisig's approach seems to make the most sense - systemize these thousands of characters in order of complexity, and approach them with those patterns in mind. I have kanjidamage's 625 kanji deck in Anki already, and Heisig's book, so I might just start trying a lesson from the latter every couple of days and see how far I can get. Unfortunately, his book (at least volume 1) doesn't have the hiragana readings (why?!!?!!?!!), but those would be easy to find, since he's just using the list of jouyou kanji, and hell, even Wikipedia has a table of those, including kana readings. I could even make my own Anki deck as I go along - which is almost certainly what I'll do.
The plan is settled then:
1. Finish learning the hiragana this week. Keep chipping away at the Memrise vocabulary.
2. Learn the katakana by next Friday
3. Start the first few lessons of Heisig now, and when the kana is yours, start making your Anki deck based off his system.
4. When the kana is yours, start seriously going through Tae Kim, and when you finish it, move on to Genki 1 and then Genki 2. Buy them if you hate studying on a screen - a reward you'll deserve, since by that point you'll have learnt the kana and probably more than a hundred vocabulary words.
The bulk of my time is just going to be spent learning the ~250 characters that are the kana until I can remember them in my sleep. After that, five minutes a day in review for three months should finish the kana for good.
This is going to be hard, but so far it's been a blast.
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