[robotmay]

I started learning again last week. This is now attempt #3 to learn Japanese for me and this time I'm coming at it differently to before. I tried using WaniKani in the past, and although it was good it wasn't quite what I needed.

This time around I'm instead primarily using Anki, and I have 4 main decks. A hiragana/katakana deck, a WaniKani kanji deck, a KanjiDamage deck, and a custom deck for anything else I want to learn. I work through the first three decks each day, but I'm not great at learning through memorisation, so instead the third deck is where I put things I actually want to learn; useful phrases, text from manga that I didn't know, poetry, and regional dialect words. I've bought a moderate amount of Japanese-language manga (CDJapan ships internationally, and buyee.jp is great), and I'm trying to acquire more poetry books (send me recommendations if you have them!)

Ultimately this means I'm learning lots of fairly obscure stuff early on (like how nakagama is a billhook) but as that's what I'm interested in it's far more likely to hold my attention. And my short-term goal is to be able to write in the various Japanese poetry forms.

Kanji is still immensely frustrating to learn, no matter the techniques used. I am ultimately resigned to learning it though; in my lifetime I must learn a second language, and Japanese is one of the few that has ever held my interest.

[majewsky]

That's interesting. For me, it's the exact opposite way. Kanji are actually the easiest thing for me. Does the WK deck or the KanjiDamage deck include mnemonics? If not, I highly highly highly recommend you get something with mnemonics. If not WK or KD, then get yourself the RTK book (Remembering the Kanji) and study with it. There are Anki decks with Kanji in RTK order, too.

[robotmay]

It does actually have mnemonics! However they're mostly for remembering the onyomi/kunyomi rather than how to remember how to draw the kanji, which is something the hiragana/katakana decks have (they use the mnemonics from https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/). And I mostly remember the onyomi/kunyomi better by working through sentences that use that kanji I must admit.

I do quite like the KanjiDamage method so far, in that it teaches you lots of kanji that use the same radicals early on, even if they're obscure kanji. If I find I'm getting stuck on one repeatedly I just mute it if it's an obscure one rather than getting caught up on it.

I'll probably start on a RTK deck too because I'm not finding the numbers of cards overwhelming yet. And I have bought a book and pen for learning to write them out, as I figure that will help a lot too :D