Everyone's always asking about what app to use and/or why Duolingo sucks. There are people who make their ideal apps after they are already proficient, basing their apps on what they wish they had when they were first starting out. You even have programmers who supposedly make their own apps to teach them kana before learning kana. Then there's the hunt for the perfect beginner Anki deck, as well as ways to automate sentence mining for personal decks. Let's not even go into the perfect prompts to ask ChatGPT to hallucineducate the user to fluency.
All of this jus got m curious about what people do to not get caught up in that stuff.
While I use bilingual and monolingual dictionary apps over paper dictionaries for convenience, as well as Anki to make sure I have some sort of consistency when reviewing words, I still have a softness for things some people might consider obsolete or just plain cumbersome, like typing all of my own cards (a good keyboard makes the process more fun, too), and pulling out my phone to look up something in a VN rather than setting up Textractor and Yomitan to automate things. I even find it easier to shut up, sit down, and just read as I normally would in English if I were using a physical book. It's too easy to get caught up in looking things up if the book was digital — especiallg when the better I get, the less I need to look up, making it seem like it's actually okay to interrupt the flow of reading every single time I don't know a word. I transcribed lines by ear to sentence-mine obscure anime that didn't have Japanese subs before Whisper AI was a thing. I even keep vocabulary lists in physical notebooks because I find handwriting therapeutic, especially with a fountain pen I don't have to fight with.
All of these little things are inherently more time-conuming than the alternatives, but aside from them being more enjoyable, what few words I can dedicate the time to learn actually sticks. I'm worried that if I got into the whole automated card creation thing, I'd bury myself in cards. As it stands, I spend an average of 10 minutes daily for up to 40 total cards daily. I appreciate how the time isn't diverting time away from content consumption, though all the writing and typing arguably do. But at least then I still exercise skills like being able to use written communication without electronic devices, as well as typing decently long passages smoothly rather than just quick texts. Namely, copying subs and VN texts from screenshots verbatim means that I'd need to be able to get through proper kanji conversions quickly, which no Japanese typing practice resource seems to bother with.
Anyway, these are just thoughts that have been floating around in my mind, and if you read through all of that jumbled mess, I applaud you and thank you for your patience. I would love to hear your thoughts.
by ignoremesenpie