How I'm Learning Japanese

So at the beginning of the summer I had the idea and motivation to start to learn Japanese. It's mostly because I consume a lot of manga and anime that I really wanted to know more about the language, and thought it would be cool to self-teach myself over the summer mostly and a little over the later months.

First thing off. I am not taking Japanese classes online or real life. I have not been to Japan, though I would love to. My goal is to reach the JLPT N4 by December of this year and take the test. Whether I take it or not depends on how busy I will be when school starts back up again. But that is my goal that I'm trying extremely hard to gain.

So what have I been doing, self teaching myself? I first started off learning about how the Japanese language is constructed. That means the hiragana, katakana, and kanji writing systems. It took me about a month to get hiragana and katakana down pat, but that's just because I did not study everyday. A tip from me about learning those two writing systems is by using flashcards. I used quizlet.com and that was really helpful because it would pronounce the word and I would type it out and vice versa. It also has games and is really easy to use in my opinion. I spent probably in total 10 hours or so learning both of those writing systems.

Now I am progressively learning Kanji every week. I try to learn about 20 or so, but that fluctuates a lot because I have the bad habit of learning for five hours one day, and none the other. So I would learn 80 basic kanji all in one day using quizlet, and then the next two days are spent watching anime being an excuse that I'm practicing my listening skills. I use online websites to learn the basic Kanji, and I have an entire folder of bookmarks I use to learn japanese that I can share with you guys in another post.

I'm currently trying to build up my vocabulary and trying to find easy reads so I can use my kanji instead of memorizing them and then forgetting what they mean a week later. I would really appreciate it, if you guys would leave any tips and tricks in the comments below if you are also learning or have learnt Japanese. I hope this will be an ongoing series about the language and that it will motivate you to start learning!!