The first thing I did was learn hiragana and katakana.
For the last 2 months I’ve been mainly focusing on going through part one of James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji. This method focuses on learning the kanji by keyword, focusing on mnemonics and stories, and is not yet concerned with readings and compounds. I’m on Lesson 37 (1394 kanji studied), which means (sort of) that I can recognize that many kanji by keyword, or at least recognize that I have studied it and the components that make it up.
Since I am nearly completely braindead when it comes to creativity, I would be nowhere near as far as I am without the help of the Reviewing the Kanji site, which has a tool that allows you to look at stories that other users have submitted. I am eternally grateful for this site, I would have given up long ago without it. It also has a forum with an incredibly helpful community and lots of various threads to keep inspired/entertained. This site also consists of web-based SRS flashcard system which makes it infinitely easier than what I was doing last time I attempted to go through this book in 2008, when I would create handwritten flashcards and go through all of them every day. Basically when I get home from work I go through and review (writing each one) the cards I fucked up the night before, review any “new cards” I have from what I learned the previous night, then review the due cards for that day. On average I’d say I can recall about 80% of them, which is no where near where I want to be eventually (98% or so probably) but is great imo since I’m constantly adding new ones. I then (usually, unless I run out of time) study some new kanji. If it’s a smaller chapter (30-50ish kanji) I do the whole thing, but if it’s larger I try to break it into groups of about 30. I write out the kanji, look up a story for it, write out the story for it (this seems to help my memory of it, at least a bit), then move on. This takes about 3-5 minutes per kanji, so on a night where I learn 30 kanji it takes about 1.5-2 hours.
When I have time, or when I’m sitting around waiting for a ride at work, I also do core 2000 vocabulary on smart.fm. I am doing kana mode, meaning it doesn’t focus on the kanji at all (since I don’t know a lot of them yet), and I’ve only been focusing on the words themselves and not so much on the sentences, which I will focus more on later. I do not do anything yet with grammar (I know next to none), and I don’t often get much practice in listening to Japanese other than the sample sentences on smart.fm (which from what I hear are rather slowed down.) I watch anime once in a while when I have time, which for the most part is usually just the weekends.
I am EXTREMELY looking forward to finishing up the Remembering the Kanji book. While in its own way it is fun, it is also a bit tedious and VERY time-consuming. I spend pretty much all my study time reviewing and learning new kanji, which I’ve found sometimes wears on my motivation and for some reason gives me a sense of lack of real progress (though I hear when I finish it I will have a great appreciation for the time and effort I put into it). When I do finish, I will have some extra spare time to focus on grammar for a while, since I have for the most part neglected it up until now, as well as more vocab, but this time with a bit more focus on kanji. I want to do part 3 of Remembering the Kanji at some point, but I will likely take a bit of a break first before doing so. The whole time of course I’ll be keeping up with my RtK reviews, that’s sorta the whole point. I’m not sure yet if I’ll do part 2 or the reading parts of part 3, I may just learn as I go for those, or find a different method, but I’m not sure yet.
