Learning japanese

I just stumbled upon Vera F. Birkenbihl and Ricardo Leppe. Apparently, our standard way of learning stuff is not very brain-friendly. They recommend: - to decode the language like Heinrich Schliemannhas done in order to understand its structure - to passively listen to the language while doing other stuff (Japanese listening showers and the like to subconsciously deal with the new language) - to actively listen to the language while reading it and speaking it out aloud I can recommend the Kanji Dojo app I found in the FDroid store. So handy!

Basically all of the advice people give for language learning is tactical: use these apps, learn this first, read this textbook, study this content, etc., etc. However, the most important thing for learning any language is understanding your own motivations and goals. Why do you want to learn Japanese? Maybe you have Japanese heritage and want to get closer to your extended family. Maybe you plan to visit Japan when you graduate from university. Maybe you're really into visual novels and the translated versions of the VNs you want to read just aren't coming. Maybe you don't actually care about Japanese specifically but you just like the idea of learning a language and Japanese seems cool. I'd recommend completely different strategies and tools for each of those situations and you need to be careful taking advice from anyone who doesn't know what YOU want from the language. You could be perfectly happy never learning kanji and focus entirely on speaking while I could read a novel a day and never speak a word of Japanese because we just want different things. To actually learn Japanese to a reasonably high level will take thousands of hours over years so if you don't have a north star to guide you you're just going to burn yourself out and quit. As a first step, pick the smallest language goal that aligns with your overall goal for Japanese that would make you feel proud if you accomplished it then study only the Japanese you need to do that one thing. Some common short-term goals are: - rewatch an episode of a children's anime like precure without subtitles - read a short manga like yotsubato and laugh at the jokes - learn all of the words and pronunciation so you can sing your favorite Japanese song well - read a Japanese picture book - write a reply to a Japanese tweet in Japanese - chat in a Japanese vtuber's livestream - order a meal at a Japanese restaurant in Japanese - introduce yourself to someone in Japanese in VRchat Once you've accomplished that thing, do some introspection and see how you feel about it. Did you like learning Japanese? Do you feel like it's worth it to learn more? Are you excited about setting an even harder language goal? If so then you now have some experience with the language and you can build off of what you've already done.