My only goal in learning Japanese has been to be be able to read visual novels that haven't been translated, and I think I'm doing pretty well, all things considered.
It's been 6 months since I've been learning Japanese, and to be honest, if I were to relearn it again from scratch, I don't think anything would change. Right now I know around 1800 kanji and over 4500 words, and I'm currently capable enough to begin reading harder media (beyond just like SOL, I'm playing where pretty much every sentence in battle scenes look like とどのつまりは、並み居る『召喚せし者』達を力でねじ伏せ魔力を強化し、この“ゲーム”を裏から操る黒幕を自らの手で討たなければならないという事……) with a texthooker without making a "mistake" with the grammar (i.e. misinterpreting the scope of a verb). For the first 3 months, I was able to get in around 3-4 hours a day of study, and from months 4-5 around 4-5 hours of study. This past month has been my worse yet, with only around 1.5 – 3 hours depending on how busy I am.
My process:
Day 1: Learned all the kana (took around 4 hours)
Days 2-16: Started using Anki and JPDB a bit for vocabulary, while also using Tokini Andy's grammar lessons.
Day 17-Now: Started reading VNs, continued to use Anki and JPDB to supplement my grammar/vocab.
For the first month reading VNs, it fucking sucked. Even though I was reading easier games, I was pretty much parsing through every single word and even then, I wasn't always able to ascertain the meaning of the sentence. Like it REALLY fucking sucked lol. So many skills were undeveloped, and I had started reading before I had a grasp on even basic things like the passive tense, the te form, etc. My vocab was also nonexistent at this time, so it was more common to find words I didn't know compared to words I did. But after about 2 weeks, I think reading VNs became more "enjoyable" than a chore.
The most helpful thing for me starting out was an anki deck by JLAB that pretty much taught me all the basic grammar rules using anime cards. I did try reading Tae Kim in the beginning, but I ended up forgetting a lot of it, so having an SRS deck for grammar really helped me commit these grammar points to memory (e.g. te + miru/oku/iku/kuru, causative, passive). I think it's both a good thing and a bad thing, but the pace of this anki deck was quite slow, so while I could REALLY get down the grammar points that it did cover, unfortunately it took quite a long time to get at other vocab points. I believe passive tense was covered 3 or so months in, with me doing around 15-20 cards in this anki deck a day. I started using this deck on day 2, and I instantly turned off the romaji / kana modes, so it displayed the full text with all the kanji and everything.
Around 3 months into learning Japanese was when I started implementing mining. Until then, I had previously been doing around 17 cards with JPDB and 20 vocabulary with Anki a day, but after I started mining, I switched exclusively to JPDB (for vocab) and did around 50 cards a day (though there have been some rough weeks where not many new cards have been done at all). It was also around the 3 month mark that I started watching anime (and by watching, I really mean downloading Japanese subtitles, and reading them, because of my slower input speed). Anime was actually quite radically different from VNs, and the conversational tone/departure from some grammar norms I had been used to seeing caused trouble for me starting out. Even now, I could still be better with more conversational Japanese, and I'm still watching anime to supplement this.
It wasn't until around 4 months that I started to get the sentence structure "correct" a lot of the time. Prior to this, I would sort of have to "guess" the scope of certain verbs AND the scope of clauses that served as modifiers (e.g. 奏汰に伝えた増岡の釈放日は嘘), but it was around here where I would be able to, if I spent enough time, to get this right with a reasonable degree of accuracy. These sort of things, I believe, came only with time spent actually reading Japanese text, and not with some grammar anki deck.
Now, a lot of the time that I would have to spent really figuring out the sentence structure has pretty much disappeared, and I have a lot more "intuitive" grasp of the grammar than I thought I had even just a month or so prior. I'm not sure exactly what caused it, but Japanese as a whole has gotten easier for me recently, and I'm not exactly sure why.
If I had any regrets, I probably could've gotten away with prioritizing vocab EVEN MORE than I already did, I would've liked to be around 6 thousand vocab words by now, but oh well, it can't be helped. I don't have an insane drive to be able to do 80-100 cards a day like some other people, as it does get a bit boring for me, even doing the 350 or so reviews I do every day. I've spent like 20 dollars on 4 months of JPDB premium, which was the only financial purchase I have related to Japanese.
by UntitledBridger