[presentation]

Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper, and for that kind of challenge this stack seems OK so long as they index much harder on the NHK Easy News after getting a basic level of kanji and grammar knowledge (they already claim to know 1000 so they should be fine).

But if the author wants to have any chance of understanding spoken Japanese or speaking, this will never get the author there - much better off watching and listening to as much Japanese material as possible. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in it, the Mass Immersion Approach [1] gives a good overview of how one can reach a good level of fluency relatively quickly without being in Japan.

[1] https://massimmersionapproach.com/

[majewsky]

I leaned towards MIA at first when starting to study Japanese, but couldn't bring myself to work through it because I wouldn't have had the motivation to listen to Japanese content for hundreds of hours without understanding a whole lot of it. By contrast, WaniKani and BunPro are incredibly rewarding because you quickly know enough characters and basic grammar rules to be able to understand simple sentences and even form them with some effort. It's one of the few occasions that I"ve seen gamification applied to further the interest of the user instead of just the platform operator.

I do agree that immersion is important in reaching fluency, but I've decided for myself to build up a bigger foundation of kanji, vocabs and grammar than what MIA prescribes, so that the immersion will be more enjoyable.

[musicale]

> Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper

Newspapers? How boring. I would want to be able to read the text in video games and manga!

On a semi-related note, I heard of someone who learned English largely by playing Final Fantasy 7 with a dictionary in hand. [Also learned practical bonus vocabulary like "mako energy" and "materia" I assume. ;-) ]

[njacobs5074]

So being able to read a newspaper will enable you to chat with people whom you're not super close to.

Reading and understanding video games & manga is more challenging in that the way the people speak in these situations is much more informal, i.e. lots of slang.

You won't be able to get to the latter without spending some time on the former because the grammatical structures in idiomatic Japanese are full of contractions that arise from the spoken language.

Just as an aside, if you actually spoke like a manga/game character, you'd definitely raise some eyebrows. Probably not in a good way ;)

[presentation]

Though not verbally, as verbal communication is a separate skill altogether from reading comprehension, especially for a language like Japanese that uses Chinese characters. Your bang for the buck in terms of verbal progress will be very low with the approach the author describes.

[hackerman123469]

> Newspapers? How boring.

I think that's a matter of interest. I personally like reading the newspaper but I am more of a fan of online news than newspapers, my personal favorite being: https://news.tv-asahi.co.jp/