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[Japanese] Language Learning Signup
So, I've been thinking about how to get around to starting language learning posts here with you all. It's been awesome seeing a general interest in getting back up with Japanese, but it is tricky when we are all at different levels of formal/informal education and exposure, have different learning styles, and have no native speaker to reference.
This post is going to be two things: a general braindump, because on weekdays my capacity for critical thinking gets expended in the office trying not to murder people whom I want to send to http://www.lmgtfy.com, and also a general signup to commit to some goals.
If years of academic Japanese have taught me anything, it is that critical mass is the most important part of acquisition. This guy over at All Japanese All The Time may sound quacky and weird, but the core of his ideas are right, IMHO: there is a time and place for rote repetition, and often picking up a new language is it.
The trick – I think – is that certain types of rote work better than other types of rote depending on who you are. I was very surprised, when I briefly stayed for more than just a holiday in Japan, to find that rote memorisation of vocabulary (literally going alphabetically)... worked. But that was because I was immediately exposed to usage, and there was a constant feedback active/passive loop.
I'm going to try to provide that exposure, but at the same time rote has got to work for the individual since – short of switching all your internet browsing over to JP – it's hard to get effective reinforcement. Picking a non-English/first-language aid/crutch to make rote effective might be the key here: visual people might go for picture flashcards, audio people might try to memorise a song, textual people a Japanese-to-Japanese definition or reading in general.
That's my meta on "picking stuff up" in general. But there are whole categories of stuff to "pick up" – reading comprehension, listening comprehension, writing fluency, speaking fluency. I'm going to focus almost entirely on reading and listening, with a side-step into writing to reinforce the two and copying spoken Japanese by natives to do the same. I'm nowhere near native, and will not pretend to be: I'm not going to teach or co-learn aspects that I'm not native in. It's fairly important to emphasis the "do not co-learn badness" part here: reinforcing bad and/or plain wrong ideas can be fundamentally terrible for you. Even then, it leaves a lot of stuff to cover, and a lot of ways which it can crossover into more intense practice in the writing/speaking domain.
So - goals! NYRs! Whatever you want to call what you want to achieve! I'm thinking we do this on a week-by-week basis, because long-term goals are hard to hit: it's easy to overpromise and even easier to underdeliver. Weekly checkins with others = peer pressure = good pressure. Even if a goal is dropped, rolling it over to the next week is easy. Then there can be big picture goals: things you want to achieve that you might not get 100% of the way through but that will guide weekly aims. These can go up to the end of the year.
Here are mine for the upcoming week:
And my bigger goals:
If you're interested in tagging along – whether you're seeing this post now, or at any time at all while I'm still updating my journal with the tag "Japanese" – leave a comment with yours. Depending on what people jot down, I'll plan for the next post!
Until the next post, here are some things you can do to get yourself prepared and/or excited.
Physical Study & Practice Materials
Don't even bother typing when you do any exercises – go straight to pen and paper, and then type in response to posts here. Muscle memory is your friend, and it's really nice to write things physically!
Get a nice writing implement while you're at it. Ballpoint and 0.5mm pencil will smudge the least; gel will be smudgier; nibs will be painful. Muji has great pens and Japanese writing supplies if you're lucky enough to live near one. You're going to be writing a lot: enjoy the experience! (I hated coming to America where most writing paper felt like sandpaper. It makes a difference when you're doing repetitive exercises, let's just say that.)
Then get good writing paper.
Cheap: get a notebook, preferably one without any lines, or at least faint ones, or one that's gridded. You want to not feel like you're cramping your kana and kanji. I'm a big fan of nice paper, so I'd be happy to send people notebooks!
Slightly more expensive: find and print grid paper online. Henceforth, we shall call it by its given name: 原稿用紙 genkouyoushi. One PDF source here. Prettier and better ones with kanji grids. Print a whole bunch for your weekly goals!
Expensive: Japanese stationary stores (and some Asian marts) in the US will have 原稿用紙 for sale in tear-off gum pads or in practice notebooks.
Japanese IMEs
I'll write a separate post on getting set up on this because this one is already the length of the moon, but you should get your computer set up to switch cleanly between English and Japanese IME inputs. Google has an IME that introduces crowdsourcing to typing: this is awesome, because suggestions that pop up are going to be the most-used ones. I default keyboard switching on all my systems to something like CMD-SPACE or WINDOWS-SPACE.
Dictionary/Grammar/Practice Books
If you're just starting out, resist the urge to buy anything just yet. I have tens of reference books I've never cracked open beyond an initial gleeful reference.
Books that are really useful in my experience: one good physical introduction-level book if you're just starting out. This can be Genki, Minna no Nihongo, or any equivalent. Make it a goal to go through each chapter. Write on every margin. Use the hell out of it: make it worth your money.
Other useful books are JLPT practice books. Stores like Kinokuniya will often have entire sections dedicated to them. They sometimes come in trilingual or quadrulingual mode, English/Korean/Mandarin/Japanese being the most common. If you have one of the other two (Korean/Mandarin), they provide a interesting triangulation onto certain grammatical or vocabulary contexts, though the quality isn't necessarily always 100%.
I'll grab some PDF'd materials that I'll put up into f-locked posts – those will get you through just about anything else.
For kanji, don't pick up a dictionary unless you plan on using it. I've got some recommendations if you do want one, but in the meantime sites like Jisho.org will get you through just about anything. On the iPhone side of things, imiwa? is an invaluable app.
Audio/Visual
This will be expanded further along, but now is a good time to figure out if you like listening to songs, or anime, or Netflix original series. Shows like 深夜食堂 (shinya shokudou/Midnight Diner) on Netflix have both English and Japanese subtitles in addition to being good introductions to aspects of Japanese culture and types of speech – I highly recommend watching them in English now, and then gradually trying to pick up things from the Japanese subtitles later.
My Old Posts
I did a short-lived and more disorganised equivalent of this last year: if you're starting from the kana or basic grammar level, it might be good to go back through those posts.
If you're interested in More Estorericer Stuff, I once wrote a post on classical Japanese and the opening lines of the Tale of Heike. It's written sort of terribly, but if it interests people I would love to do more of that – gotta keep in practice.
This post is going to be two things: a general braindump, because on weekdays my capacity for critical thinking gets expended in the office trying not to murder people whom I want to send to http://www.lmgtfy.com, and also a general signup to commit to some goals.
Braindump
If years of academic Japanese have taught me anything, it is that critical mass is the most important part of acquisition. This guy over at All Japanese All The Time may sound quacky and weird, but the core of his ideas are right, IMHO: there is a time and place for rote repetition, and often picking up a new language is it.
The trick – I think – is that certain types of rote work better than other types of rote depending on who you are. I was very surprised, when I briefly stayed for more than just a holiday in Japan, to find that rote memorisation of vocabulary (literally going alphabetically)... worked. But that was because I was immediately exposed to usage, and there was a constant feedback active/passive loop.
I'm going to try to provide that exposure, but at the same time rote has got to work for the individual since – short of switching all your internet browsing over to JP – it's hard to get effective reinforcement. Picking a non-English/first-language aid/crutch to make rote effective might be the key here: visual people might go for picture flashcards, audio people might try to memorise a song, textual people a Japanese-to-Japanese definition or reading in general.
That's my meta on "picking stuff up" in general. But there are whole categories of stuff to "pick up" – reading comprehension, listening comprehension, writing fluency, speaking fluency. I'm going to focus almost entirely on reading and listening, with a side-step into writing to reinforce the two and copying spoken Japanese by natives to do the same. I'm nowhere near native, and will not pretend to be: I'm not going to teach or co-learn aspects that I'm not native in. It's fairly important to emphasis the "do not co-learn badness" part here: reinforcing bad and/or plain wrong ideas can be fundamentally terrible for you. Even then, it leaves a lot of stuff to cover, and a lot of ways which it can crossover into more intense practice in the writing/speaking domain.
Goals
So - goals! NYRs! Whatever you want to call what you want to achieve! I'm thinking we do this on a week-by-week basis, because long-term goals are hard to hit: it's easy to overpromise and even easier to underdeliver. Weekly checkins with others = peer pressure = good pressure. Even if a goal is dropped, rolling it over to the next week is easy. Then there can be big picture goals: things you want to achieve that you might not get 100% of the way through but that will guide weekly aims. These can go up to the end of the year.
Here are mine for the upcoming week:
- Write a post a week with original material catered directly to people's questions or difficulties
- Work through, by rote, 10 常用漢字 per week including all phrase-words
- Translate at least half of a rakugo story and publish it here
And my bigger goals:
- Write a website or flashcard tool or GDocs thing so that people can have printable, submittable worksheets/exercises
- Get through my kanji book by doing the 10/week minimum by the end of the year
- Watch at least 12 episodes of something in Japanese with only Japanese subtitles by the end of the year
- Switch over to only using Japanese-to-Japanese dictionary lookups by March
If you're interested in tagging along – whether you're seeing this post now, or at any time at all while I'm still updating my journal with the tag "Japanese" – leave a comment with yours. Depending on what people jot down, I'll plan for the next post!
Prep
Until the next post, here are some things you can do to get yourself prepared and/or excited.
Physical Study & Practice Materials
Don't even bother typing when you do any exercises – go straight to pen and paper, and then type in response to posts here. Muscle memory is your friend, and it's really nice to write things physically!
Get a nice writing implement while you're at it. Ballpoint and 0.5mm pencil will smudge the least; gel will be smudgier; nibs will be painful. Muji has great pens and Japanese writing supplies if you're lucky enough to live near one. You're going to be writing a lot: enjoy the experience! (I hated coming to America where most writing paper felt like sandpaper. It makes a difference when you're doing repetitive exercises, let's just say that.)
Then get good writing paper.
Cheap: get a notebook, preferably one without any lines, or at least faint ones, or one that's gridded. You want to not feel like you're cramping your kana and kanji. I'm a big fan of nice paper, so I'd be happy to send people notebooks!
Slightly more expensive: find and print grid paper online. Henceforth, we shall call it by its given name: 原稿用紙 genkouyoushi. One PDF source here. Prettier and better ones with kanji grids. Print a whole bunch for your weekly goals!
Expensive: Japanese stationary stores (and some Asian marts) in the US will have 原稿用紙 for sale in tear-off gum pads or in practice notebooks.
Japanese IMEs
I'll write a separate post on getting set up on this because this one is already the length of the moon, but you should get your computer set up to switch cleanly between English and Japanese IME inputs. Google has an IME that introduces crowdsourcing to typing: this is awesome, because suggestions that pop up are going to be the most-used ones. I default keyboard switching on all my systems to something like CMD-SPACE or WINDOWS-SPACE.
Dictionary/Grammar/Practice Books
If you're just starting out, resist the urge to buy anything just yet. I have tens of reference books I've never cracked open beyond an initial gleeful reference.
Books that are really useful in my experience: one good physical introduction-level book if you're just starting out. This can be Genki, Minna no Nihongo, or any equivalent. Make it a goal to go through each chapter. Write on every margin. Use the hell out of it: make it worth your money.
Other useful books are JLPT practice books. Stores like Kinokuniya will often have entire sections dedicated to them. They sometimes come in trilingual or quadrulingual mode, English/Korean/Mandarin/Japanese being the most common. If you have one of the other two (Korean/Mandarin), they provide a interesting triangulation onto certain grammatical or vocabulary contexts, though the quality isn't necessarily always 100%.
I'll grab some PDF'd materials that I'll put up into f-locked posts – those will get you through just about anything else.
For kanji, don't pick up a dictionary unless you plan on using it. I've got some recommendations if you do want one, but in the meantime sites like Jisho.org will get you through just about anything. On the iPhone side of things, imiwa? is an invaluable app.
Audio/Visual
This will be expanded further along, but now is a good time to figure out if you like listening to songs, or anime, or Netflix original series. Shows like 深夜食堂 (shinya shokudou/Midnight Diner) on Netflix have both English and Japanese subtitles in addition to being good introductions to aspects of Japanese culture and types of speech – I highly recommend watching them in English now, and then gradually trying to pick up things from the Japanese subtitles later.
My Old Posts
I did a short-lived and more disorganised equivalent of this last year: if you're starting from the kana or basic grammar level, it might be good to go back through those posts.
If you're interested in More Estorericer Stuff, I once wrote a post on classical Japanese and the opening lines of the Tale of Heike. It's written sort of terribly, but if it interests people I would love to do more of that – gotta keep in practice.
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I'm a beginner; I have little scraps of vocabulary picked up from, um, anime--sometimes sheer repetition and sometimes from triangulating off words that sound very similar to the Korean versions and that, from English subtitles, have the right meaning. I once read an English-language grammar summary of Japanese that convinced me that acquaintance with how Korean works will help me here, structurally. (The phonology of Korean is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.)
Long-term I mainly want listening comprehension and to figure out some strategy for learning kanji. Kanji are going to be the biggest bottleneck for me. I have a lifetime membership to Wanikani so I could restart that, BUT the problem with Wanikani is that a lot of the mnemonics are visually based. I didn't realize it at the time I bought the subscription, but I have aphantasia (inability to visualize) so visual mnemonics just...do not do much for me. I find that pairing kanji with sound helps, because I do have a good memory for sound. Duolingo for Japanese is a bit quirky, but so far it has started to introduce kanji very quickly after introducing hiragana and a few katakana (mostly so they can spell out "America" and a couple names for sample sentences, I think) so that may be viable. Duolingo also says the words for you, which seems like a viable way of getting pronunciation including pitch accent. I can imitate it if I hear it but I've seen textbooks that notate it and I have real trouble figuring it out from the notation.
I have miraculously not blown my monthly allowance yet so I'm considering getting Genki. I find that it really helps me to have text in front of me at some point. I like doing exercises, including written exercises; I taught myself first-semester German and first-semester Latin that way before going on to take them as university courses. (Obvs. learning out of books did nothing for my pronunciation.)
(If I'm making an Amazon order anyway is there anything else I should also get?! I had the Heisig kanji-learning book at one point but flood, and I discovered that not having a SOUND to attach to the kanji and its meaning completely fucked me up, because my memory is very strongly auditory.)
The one Japanese language book I own right now is the classical Japanese one you mentioned to me a while back, because I impulse-bought it, so I'm definitely interested in that too if I ever get to a proficiency level in modern Japanese where I can even think about it. :] (Re: that post--when you list imperfective, etc. forms, these look like aspects or similar; are there also tenses, or not...?)
AND not Japanese but because I think you would find this fascinating, and I don't think I've thrown it at you yet (I eventually throw it at everyone): Translating Korean Poetry, which has several RADICALLY different English translations, each equally "true" in some way, of a very famous modern Korean poem--Kim Sowol's "Azaleas," one of my favorites, achingly beautiful in the original, and fucking impossible to render in English (or probably other languages, who knows).
tl;dr really excited for this sorry for the long comment...!
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Goals for this week:
- review the katakana (I'm all right on the hiragana, I think)
- continue exploring Duolingo: Japanese
- look into obtaining an introduction book, since I appear to be the beginner in the group...*squirm*
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What I really want to start doing is translating pieces of some nonfiction works that have English translations already, then comparing my translation with the "official" one to see how mine differs. I have a few books in mind, but they have some rather challenging concepts -- think Japanese economic policy in the 1980s -- so that's an ambitious goal. All of this is with an aim to possibly applying for a fellowship that would allow me to spend a paid year in Japan, working on translating and editing military history, so I have a good long way to go before I reach that point.
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I am somewhat academically related to this person - I also have the Routlege course, if it's that purple softcover one? It's very... dense. Certainly a good reference! But dense and somewhat demotivating if you're just getting starting at the N3-N4 level - it's definitely hovering around N2-N1. But very good read nonetheless.
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Are we looking at Kamakura and warring states type translation? I've got some classical stuff that will help there: it's very, very, very Chinese-heavy.
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The texts I'm looking at for practice translations are some of Ienaga Saburo's books on Japan in World War II, and revisiting the original text of The Japan That Can Say "No" ("NO" と言える日本), a 1980s bubble-economy treatise on Japanese economic power as a counterweight to the United States. Fun stuff. But that's still in the future for now.
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As a language learner, I'm an amateur linguist who's wandered through French (10 years), Russian (1 year), Japanese (1 year), and Irish (1 year) for fun. The educational materials I like the best are the ones that explain roots and connections between words and grammatical structures and language nerd things like that.
I will be interested to see what I pick up from your posts, and what vaguely rings bells. I will probably not do more study on my own to accompany that because if I start doing language study on my own right now it will probably be Hebrew and I shouldn't even do that given how overstretched I already am, so you needn't tailor anything to me.
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* Write out the hiragana and katakana syllabaries as a refresher (*badly* needed with katakana...), one genkoyoushi line per kana.
* Watch the zero episode of X: 1999 for listening comprehension practice, since I know it very well and Kakyou's lines are very clear and slowly-paced.
* Conversational practice with my sister.
Long-term:
* Work my way through 日本語 500 問 N4-N5 by the end of the year, one page per day with weekends off.
* Work my way through the kanji workbook from my first year of Japanese by the end of the year, one page per week.
Echoing rosefox on being in favor of stuff that digs into the underpinnings of the language: I need to go back and re-read your post on transitive vs intransitive verbs, for example, and desperately wish my classes had given me more information on kanji radicals and the types of characters they tend to appear in/the clues they sometimes give you to sound?/etc.
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原稿用紙を使ったら、これを読んでください。そして、カタカナで自分の名前を書いてみませんか。
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What you wrote reads to me as:
"If you use genkouyoushi, please read this. Having done that, can you try writing your name in katakana?"
My uncertainty comes from the fact that you linked to something first, so I'm not sure whether you're saying "please read this link" (which takes me to a page entirely in scribbles that is much too difficult for me to read, so if I'm supposed to be getting advice from there, it's too high-level for me), or whether you're saying "please read this sentence I've written [as a comprehension exercise]." Which one was it?
Either way, if I'm right about you wanting me to write my name in katakana, my pen name comes out to:
ブレンナン マリー
While my legal name produces a horror show that made every Japanese teacher I ever had, not to mention the sensei at my dojo, stare in blank incomprehension:
ノイエンシュワンダー ブリン
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That page is absolutely full of text, but I sent it along as a good target goal for reading and also for the actual picture of how to use a genkouyoushi - which if you're interested we can break down and dissect.
Hehe. Horror show or not, put writing to your katakana name of any variety into your kana practice! It's one of the surest ways of memorising katakana in particular.
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I have a tendency, left over from Latin, to translate that use of the -te form as if it were an ablative absolute. :-)
That page is absolutely full of text, but I sent it along as a good target goal for reading and also for the actual picture of how to use a genkouyoushi - which if you're interested we can break down and dissect.
I am interested! I used genkouyoushi in class, but that was years ago.
Horror show or not, put writing to your katakana name of any variety into your kana practice! It's one of the surest ways of memorising katakana in particular.
The katakana I am the least rusty on are the ones in my name. :-)
(True story: the day we learned hiragana -- yes, they dropped the whole syllabary on us in a single class -- Nelson Mandela also came to speak on campus. I waited in line something like two hours for that, and spent the whole time practicing hiragana, so I got it down cold right out of the gate. The day we learned katakana, nobody interesting was scheduled to speak, so I . . . didn't.)
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I'm a big fan of dropping the bomb of kana - both syllablaries - because you're never not going to use it. Swallow the bitter pill even if you don't retain it 100%: there's not much benefit learning only one line of the kana perfectly...
Your Latin training will likely make reading classic Japanese very enjoyable if you go that way! Many modern constructions are mutated or lazy forms of some strong grammar from the past - but I'm not a linguist or etymologist so I'll be learning lots from classically trained people like you along the way :3
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My goal for this week is to find and sort out my pre exisiting resources - I have various textbooks around the place, including Genki, Remembering the Kanji, and a book on learning kanji by radicals. I have a subscription to Skritter and need to sort out my learning deck there.
Secondary goal - practise hiragana and katakana, as I’ve defintiley forgotten st least some of the latter.
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My year-end goal, I think, would be to be able to read some of the doujinshi and manga I have.
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If you go ahead and scan a few pages of your favourites, they'd make great reference materials for me to help you with/the rest of the group if you're interested in contributing!
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I have actually already scanned complete versions of a bunch of them, to share with friends/make icons out of it - they're here. 'Welcome Oushuu Cooking School' might be a fun one to grab a few pages from, because it's got a lot of cameos in it and thus a lot of speaking styles. ひだりのきみえ ('To Your Left'?) would probably be the one I'm most interested in understanding because it's extra plotty.
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i have an experience with languages: native Russian and Tatar (the latter slowly rusting and forgotten for misuse), learnt modern Greek and Turkish (back in uni and school days respectively), and Ru-English combo by this point feels bilingual. I made a valiant attempt to study Georgian ~1.5 years ago but that didn't last long, because despite free lessons my original motivation didn't survive the basic fact that I didn't need to speak the language to get by in the country. I also found out that having a new script slows me down considerably: I'm used to processing things fast, and with an alphabet that hasn't been with me for many years (or grilled into me in intense academic way like Greek was) I am easily frustrated by slow speed of learning. ---> long story short, I think that explains why my previous attempts at Japanese failed, because coupled with lack of immersion, the slow-going of new script-based language is a factor for me.
so! i want to be more disciplined and patient with myself: give myself until the rest of the month to refresh my memory of hiragana by patient muscle memory exercises, and then start to kana refreshment (it's weaker than hiragana). to get inspired by everyone's progress :) also, to start Japanese duolingo while re-learning kanas. I'd be glad to have aid & guidance in the next steps:) I just thought that clearing this hurdle until I don't have to squint at a string of kana-letters would make sense before attempting anything else.
(oh, and my exposure to Japanese is years of anime dialogue, mostly XD no real-life contact otherwise, I don't need it/deal with it at work, sadly.)
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(I suppose that's what makes me good at writing series like these: I'm so used to suffering and grinding my way to comprehension D: D:)
For sure I feel you about script blockage. When I finally just BIT THE BULLET and committed to infinite dictionary lookup, my learning picked up - but BLANKING COMPLETELY on something and not being able to even ETYMOLOGICALLY GUESS WHERE IT COMES FROM FROM ROOTS is so fucking frustrating to start with.
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What are your other languages, outside English and Japanese? *curious*
i respect the grinding-my-way-to-comprehension approach a lot! here's to hoping i can stick to it here :)
YES NO ETYMOLOGIC GUESSING GAME SUPPORT and just. breathing through the humiliation of not being able to goddamn read what's on the page with a quick glance (more applicable to alphabet scripts not kanji ofc, but even with georgian squiggles which are straightforward to read I had this immense frustration that reading was an EFFORT. how dare they XD)
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Anyhow, my problem may be more that I have too many avenues of study already set up and sometimes it can be overwhelming having so many of them and maybe I have to decide what to focus my energy on when I do study. The things I've used the most are anki flashcards (I make my own decks from my other study materials), pimsleur language tapes (I left off halfway through Japanese 4 so I'm ALMOST done with all of those lol, which is kind of sad because I really like them), a kanji learning/etymology book (henshall), and a textbook (japanese for everyone). also a bunch of other books too (haha your advice about not going overboard on buying books is good b/c i've bought so many i have barely used, but oh well i like books anyway, and i have used most of them enough to justify buying them so that's good anyhow). but those 3 sources have proven the most useful for me so far. then i make flashcards from each of them and review those. in the past i also used various sites for conversing with japanese people learning english so we could correct each other. although sometimes those were less helpful for LEARNING because we'd just fall into everyday conversation haha. it was good for practicing communication though.
In light of my other live issues limiting my time I think I will make my goals:
-get back to doing a pimsleur lesson a day so I can finish those by the end of this month
-study from my textbook at least once this week and try to make it through 2 more lessons by the end of this month.
-I'm not going to set a goal for kanji because honestly I am further ahead than I need to be with kanji anyway. probably it'd be good for me to practice writing in my kanji review though, as I used to be more on top of doing both reading+writing but lately had gotten lazy and only been doing reading. Maybe do a writing quiz in the obenkyo app once a day.
Writing-wise, because of my arthritis I don't write by hand. So actually writing Japanese in general is not that useful in terms of like, future use, since I don't plan to ever write Japanese by hand (just as I don't write English), but it is helpful with memorizing as another way to review. I wanted to suggest on top of where you talk about computer IMEs, for people using a mobile device, well I can't speak to iphones but on android I have some recomendations. The keyboard I use as my main one on both my phone/tablet is SwiftKey, which supports both english and japanese. It's very easy to switch and predictive text is okay. Google also has a "Google Japanese input" keyboard which has superior predictive text but it's not as easy to switch between languages since that keyboard only supports japanese. Google recently made some other fancy keyboard that supports like multiple languages and translation within the keyboard itself but sadly that one doesn't include Japanese. Oh, that google has a pretty good Japanese handwriting input keyboard too, I think it's a separate app though. I used to have it installed but don't atm after getting a new phone.
Oh, I forgot to say my level. I'm probably somewhere around 1 semester of Japanese. Probably stronger in some areas and weaker in others. my textbook apparently is roughly equivalent to both Genki 1+2 combined and I'm halfway through it so that's why I think 1 semester. But I'm much further ahead than my textbook in kanji. (So many vocab words where it teaches them in kana and I'm like "uh but I already know the kanji for that and am used to seeing it written that way in manga so... that's how it's going on my flashcard" lol.) But then probably behind in speaking & all that, given that pimsleur has a pretty narrow focus and it's not the same as actually talking to another person. And I don't feel like I've got an ultra firm grasp on all the grammar concepts I've already "learned." My textbook is pretty weak on practice exercises, so though I've done the ones it includes I'm sure that if I were taking this as an actual class and the teacher used this book they'd make up like extra worksheets or something.
I just got further down in your post and you were mentioning iphone apps, so I assume you're on an iphone? Anyway, if there's anyone else who uses android and they're not already set with the types of apps they like to use, i could definitely compile a list of some of the apps I've found useful on there.
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Sadly, the anki flashcard app, which I absolutely ADORE, is free on pc, has a free android version (what I use) made by a third party... but the iphone app costs like $30 haha. (I discovered this the other day when I wanted to throw the dev some $ for making such a helpful free thing & then discovered the only way to support the main dev was to buy the iphone app & I don't own an iphone, and the people who make the android app don't want donations haha.)
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As for goals, I need to think through the short term ones to define them more concretely than "work through X pages in X study guide that looked so shiny in the store and I've never actually opened." Other goals will be watch an episode of 相棒 or マツコの知らない世界 every week (or whatever else is filling up my DVR) and read all the manga I have filling my bookshelves, one volume a week.
There are two long term goals: study for N1 *before* the JLPT sign up and finally read 火車. I adored the book in translation, and it's past time I try the original.
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