kempokatt wrote:
Personally, I wasted time with these games, tried them both and it was just total frustration....not fun at all. Although, I am older than most people trying to learn so maybe that has something to do with it.
I'm 26.
princem wrote:
Attempting to learn a little here and a little there will get you nowhere.
Everyone's different. I pick a different method everyday because that's what does work best for me, else I feel like I am making no progress. I really need that sense of... accomplishment, and if I were just trying to get through a hundred kanji in a month or even two months, I wouldn't really -feel- like I was getting anywhere.
So, I study say, 7 kanji one day from my book. The next I will look up those kanji in my J-lookup program, and see what other compounds they're used in (even if I don't know the other kanji, I just like to read them as it helps cement it in my head). In the process, I will pick up several new words all together (my vocab is not very large yet). Then, I'll take a day to watch some anime, and see how many of the words I can pick out, and it makes me feel good when I can recognize some at the typical talking speed of a native speaker.
Watching Full Metal Alchemist yielded my first fully understood sentence, and god it felt great.
Ano hi, bokutachi wa ue o yaita.
That day, we burned our house.
I was so excited my heart nearly burst from my chest.
Then, sometimes I need a reminder that I still have a long way to go. So I pull out my extremely complex manga (I'm told it's a hard one to read because it's philsophical: Clamp's X) and attempt to read it. 20 kanji dictionary lookups and 3 hours later, I get through about 4 pages. Time to hit the books again... another 7 kanji! hehe
I guess the little-here little-there theory won't work for a lot of people, but since many people do struggle with japanese, it never hurts to try as many methods out there as possible until you find one that suits you. There's gotta be someone out there who will find some comfort in my method.... somewhere. :p