Learning Japanese.

[Ideofago]

Yeah, the problem with reading VNs as a beginner is that even 80% comprehension means looking up one of every five words, and that tanks your reading speed. If the novel tries at all to be slow? You're in for a rough time. Right now I'm kind of managing through Chaos;Head, that has its fair bit of technobabble in spurts, but that took Core2k and 150h of P5R, along with an (almost) complete review of Genki 1. I suggest trying any of those first, otherwise your reading speed will remain below 100 wpm.

[Maedhros]

I'm working on the core 2k deck but I'm only just past halfway through. I jumped into reading waaaay before I was ready because I figured putting all the grammar lessons and flashcards into practice would be the best way to truly internalize them, especially because picking up new vocabulary through reading is something I'm already very used to just from using my native language. It does seem to be working in that regard, the kanji I know best are the ones I have encountered regularly in native material, but what I'm doing is too slow and painstaking to really be called reading. It's more live-fire studying. Frankly, grammar comprehension is more of concern to me than vocabulary, which is always just a matter of continual exposure and use. I'm pretty sure my grasp of grammar/general reading comprehension is improving, but it's a lot harder to confirm than vocab, and I can't quite shake the feeling that I might be ingraining as many bad habits as good ones. I've been doing spot reviews based on what's giving me trouble in my reading, but at some point I think I'll do a big re-read of my textbooks for a fuller review.

[Ideofago]

Whatever your textbooks are, do the exercises. If you haven't already, that is.. They'll be a lot better practice for the topic in question than reading a VN, which might feature any given grammar point sporadically, if not at all.

[Cypher Attic]

It's been quite difficult to get out of the complete-beginner rut. Learning grammar is an intuitive process for me and Japanese pronunciation is mostly simple, but vocabulary has been a sticking point. It's hard to get enough useful vocabulary to understand even basic phrases. Going from

Spoiler:

"I *** * ***** cat ***** *** ******!"

to

Spoiler:

"I saw * white cat ***** *** bridge!"

, so to speak. The Core 2k Anki deck solution doesn't really work for me, at least not at my current level. Trying to identify a very complex symbol that I've never seen before, isolated from any context, doesn't help me learn new vocabulary. I don't know why, it worked so well for kana.
The good thing is I recently found a few good resources that, combined with my finally reading Tae Kim's guide, has helped a lot. I even had a moment yesterday where I casually understood a complete sentence that wasn't something like "XはYです" or "XがYだ".

[Maedhros]

For me, at least, brute-forcing flashcards doesn't properly teach me kanji, but it does take a sentence from (to borrow your example) "* *** * ***** *** ***** *** ******!" to "I saw * (?)white (?)cat (?)under *** (?)bridge/chopsticks!" which makes reading a lot more approachable, and then through reading I can learn kanji properly. But when it comes to a huge task like learning vocab in a new language, what works for one learner may not for another. There are a lot of different techniques/tools/schools of thought regarding learning the kanji, so experimenting to find the one that works for you is an option.

[Kotonoha]

Trying to identify a very complex symbol that I've never seen before, isolated from any context, doesn't help me learn new vocabulary. I don't know why, it worked so well for kana.

Yeah I tried out Anki a while back to fill in holes in my vocab but it turned out I can't memorize words in a vacuum, I need to have actually seen/heard them used somewhere before. The ones that actually stuck were the ones where I could think "oh right, I heard this word in a song once"

[Ideofago]

Anki isn't foolproof for me, and honestly there were many times I could recall that a word had been in Anki but couldn't recognize it without translation. One thing I've yet to try but really want to is memorizing all the radicals and remembering kanji by building them piece by piece. As long as you keep to learning 20~ radicals per time, you can get there whilst spending at most 2 study days on a stroke group. Like, half of all radicals are in the 3 to 5 stroke range.

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Still, redoing Anki 2k after I had already done it proved I could actually remember most of them in a vacuum, at least.

[Maedhros]

Oh yeah, I keep thinking that learning radicals/components would make kanji way easier, but I never actually get around to it. Writing can be a great way to reinforce memory too, but learning to write kanji is a lot of effort for a skill I'll likely never use and lose the minute I stop active practice.

[Cypher Attic]

I feel like Anki is probably best for reinforcing things that I've already been exposed to and looked up in a dictionary. Part of my problem with it is that it fails to capture all of the nuance and definitions assigned to a word, which is problematic because the words with the most meanings/irregularities in any language are the most basic ones. (Try defining "make" or "to" in a flashcard.)
It's probably not a big deal in practice, but it bothers me too much to ignore while using flashcards.

My current goal is to build up some fountational vocabulary and grammar, then specifically work toward being able to use Japanese-Japanese dictionaries. Back when I used to read books, the dictionary was a massive boon to my vocabulary, so I suspect the same will be true in Japanese. I decided to learn kanji in parallel with / slightly after vocabulary since the two are practically the same topic.

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What reading level is necessary to get started with a Japanese-Japanese dictionary?

[Comun]

What reading level is necessary to get started with a Japanese-Japanese dictionary?

As early as you're able to.

[Petrikow]

Yeah I tried out Anki a while back to fill in holes in my vocab but it turned out I can't memorize words in a vacuum, I need to have actually seen/heard them used somewhere before. The ones that actually stuck were the ones where I could think "oh right, I heard this word in a song once"

Back when I did Anki (I think I stopped 2 years ago), I used to import words I hadn't seen before whenever I encountered them and then used Anki to reinforce them. Seems to have worked well enough.

[koobs]

I haven't done Anki much (now I can't do it at all - thanks Apple) but then I study Japanese at university, where we did quite a lot of vocab practice. I think it depends on the person, but I learn best by just interacting with the language - be it speaking, listening, reading. To me, Anki is too much like trying to drill something in your head - like yeah, it worked for cramming for exams and tests but not much more for me. Or maybe I just used it wrong

[Maedhros]

星界の紋章 wasn't really good practice—which I expected, but I decided to try reading anyway, for whatever reason—and so, tiring of incesscant lookups for technobabble and military jargon, I've put it aside and started reading the first Boogiepop novel instead. Unsurprisingly, it's proving much more forgiving with the lookups, and the pace of my reading is much better. Comprehension is still not really comfortable, but practice makes perfect...or maybe it's time I take a second look at the textbooks or some other sort of dedicated practice.

Boogiepop is a series I've had a little contact with before, seen a bit of various anime adaptations, but never really gotten very far into. It mostly interests me in that it's supposedly an early and important example of that rash of urban fantasy (or should I say 新伝綺?) series from the late 90s and 2000s that Nasu's work also largely falls into. It's certainly chuuni, that's for sure.

[Cypher Attic]

I think I may have a better ear for Japanese than I do a tongue. Every time I try to pronounce a word out loud, my reaction is: "What? Where did that lisp come from?" It feels like trying to draw with a non-dominant hand.

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星界の紋章 wasn't really good practice—which I expected, but I decided to try reading anyway, for whatever reason—and so, tiring of incesscant lookups for technobabble and military jargon, I've put it aside and started reading the first Boogiepop novel instead. Unsurprisingly, it's proving much more forgiving with the lookups, and the pace of my reading is much better. Comprehension is still not really comfortable, but practice makes perfect...or maybe it's time I take a second look at the textbooks or some other sort of dedicated practice.

Boogiepop is a series I've had a little contact with before, seen a bit of various anime adaptations, but never really gotten very far into. It mostly interests me in that it's supposedly an early and important example of that rash of urban fantasy (or should I say 新伝綺?) series from the late 90s and 2000s that Nasu's work also largely falls into. It's certainly chuuni, that's for sure.

What is Boogiepop's reading level? Reading that series in Japanese is one of my goals.

[Maedhros]

What is Boogiepop's reading level? Reading that series in Japanese is one of my goals.

Hard to say, given that I don't have too much to compare it against. Since it's a modern day school setting, there aren't any extra vocab sets (i.e. no military/nautical/technical/magical vocab). There's an occasional bit of psychology talk, but never enough that the lookups kill my speed. The teenage slang isn't too thick either, and one picks the basics of that register up by osmosis pretty quick as a weeb anyway. Grammar is what it is; never easy, for me, but it hasn't seemed particularly easy or hard. In the end, native material is native material, though; most authors aren't conciously aiming for a certain reading level, so the difficulty isn't ever even across a work.

I'm not exactly coasting through. I'd put my comprehension at 60%-80%, depending on how generous I'm feeling and pretending that reading comprehension is something that can be measured in a percentage, and the pace is glacial. But I have to start somewhere. The reason I chose Boogiepop, and Crest of the Stars before it, is that I look for practice material that I am interested in enough to be motivated to read, but not invested in enough to care about the loss of comprehension. By that logic, if Boogiepop is a goal series of yours, I'd leave it for later. (Though if you're big fan, you could always dive right in, and if you think you missed something, go back later when you're better; I've done a bit of that with the Five Star Stories, a goal series of mine, and the only reason I haven't done more is that practicing on non-text hookable manga is a pain).

[kirien]

I haven't done Anki much (now I can't do it at all - thanks Apple) but then I study Japanese at university, where we did quite a lot of vocab practice. I think it depends on the person, but I learn best by just interacting with the language - be it speaking, listening, reading. To me, Anki is too much like trying to drill something in your head - like yeah, it worked for cramming for exams and tests but not much more for me. Or maybe I just used it wrong

You can actually use Anki on IOS without paying, you just need to access it through the website. Anki app is paywalled on IOS because keeping an app in the apple appstore is not free for the developers.
I still think it is an incredible tool and it becomes even better when you start making your own cards though mining (basically what Petrikow mentions above). In my experience it's way easier to remember something through Anki as it will comeback to me (in theory) when I'm right about to forget it so when I review the word that day it says in my head for longer. This is all in juxtaposition to trying to hammer the word into my head just once during a class, or after and hoping it stays there.

Somewhat unrelated to that, but if anyone is curious about estimated "difficulty" of a certain piece of Japanese media this site is somewhat helpful https://jpdb.io/. This is just an estimation so don't take everything at face value, it is still pretty decent if you want to check if you can pick up something for immersion.

[Maedhros]

What is Boogiepop's reading level? Reading that series in Japanese is one of my goals.

Re: Boogiepop, do you have any thoughts on the sequels? Are they worth it, and if so how far? I'm getting to the end of the first novel, and since I found it pretty enjoyable moving on to the sequel feels natural...but I must say, seeing dozens and dozens of sequels to a novel that feels relatively standalone (if open to continuation) makes me think that it has to jump the shark at some point.

[krool]

I've read the first 6 translated one so I can't say anything about what they would be like in the original Japanese text or the sequels, but if you enjoyed the first, I'd recommend reading more. I enjoyed Until Dawn and King of Distortions more than the first book personally. I didn't like the Towa organization as reoccurring antagonists though.

[Maedhros]

Right, I think I'll try the sequel. Appreciate the reply.