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I agree with most of this but I just wanted to emphasize: kanji is where most people fail. A lot of people think listening/speaking is the hard part (and it can be if you're learning a language with the same writing system as English, like French), and they put off learning kanji. Eventually they've gotten to a point where they can do trivial things in spoken Japanese but they can't read or write anything (except maybe in kana) and their vocabulary is minimal because they kept putting off learning kanji. And use Heisig - otherwise it really will take years to learn all the kanji, which isn't necessary at all. You can memorize the basic 2000 kanji in a few months. The first book I cannot recommend enough; the other two are kind of superfluous. Whatever you do, do not under any circumstances try to learn using romaji. Not sure why but it will cripple your pronunciation. It is easy to tell who started out using romaji... and it is very hard to keep from laughing at their accent. Don't bother memorizing grammatical rules. Languages don't really have rules, they have conventions. So you can use a grammar reference to figure out what a sentence means, but it will only take you through the basics as a lot of things that people say and write will not conform to any rule. Make sure you are learning using things you're interested in - comic books, novels, TV shows, music, whatever. Don't waste your time with textbooks (except for textbooks on some topic you're interested in that happen to be in Japanese). When it becomes a chore, you will find excuses to study "later". "Later" eventually becomes "never". To be honest, my knowledge of words commonly used in Japanese pornography is embarassingly good because of this approach though... The sooner you can switch to using a purely Japanese dictionary, rather than a Japanese-English dictionary, the better. It's very difficult at first (looking up a word, only to have to look up words in the definition of the first word, and so on) but you will find your comprehension skyrocket when you can ditch the J-E dictionary. |