Consider this, we're all neets or neet-adjacent here I assume, and what neets need more than anything is interesting things to do and learn about to stave of boredom. Now learning an entire language is a lot of effort which not everyone wants to exert, but what you can do instead is watch a series like this
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj
which explains a lot of the basic concepts of japanese in a beginner friendly way but without dumbing them down by forcing them to correspond to english concepts. Just watching a few videos can give you huge insights into the language of your favorite media and then every time you watch anime and hear japanese sentences you will start making connections in your brain, you can't passively learn the entire language that way but even knowing a few basic grammar rules can change your entire understanding of the anime you like, so why not give it a try? Then again maybe everyone here is already N1 level and I'm preaching to the choir.

oh hell yeah my fav way to learn thanks

All otaku should learn japanese and if you're a NEET help fan-translators out

These videos are pretty dense broadly applicable and remarkably clear. Thanks for sharing!

I don't understand all of it myself but I think it's worth noting that there are arguments surrounding some of Cure Dolly's lessons and that while they are great for seeing the language in a more broken-down way they may not be universally applicable facts.

One thing I have never understood is people who watch a significant amount of anime but do not learn the language. If you watch 5 episodes a day, surely watching 4 episodes and learning Japanese for 24 minutes instead will give you much more enjoyment in the long run. You will more directly understand everything, no need to rely on accurate dub/sub as much, no need to wait before something gets dubbed for example, ability to enjoy unsubbed content, etc

>>6
To some people Japanese is too large and intimidating to start or even consider it an option

does anyone have a youtube video that isnt scary to watch? cure dolly freaks me out man, the voice is just awful

>>8

Can't go wrong with Namasensei. He'll teach you the basics, but so well you will remember them clearly even with your last breath.

https://redirect.invidious.io/playlist?list=PLhD7lo-8UQIb0uwNfm-nwkyjHovHU2wAK

>>9
oh man, this dude rocks. thank you for putting me onto this kino

so apparently cure dolly prosyletizes an organic immersion process to learn. she suggests using anime with japanese subtitles, going through line by line, looking up words and reasoning out the meaning of each sentance, helped by having gone through a fair amount of the structure lessons. then after finishing an episode, ripping the audio and putting it on your life's full time background sound track playlist. as you finish more episodes that playlist of anime audio grows. importantly it's anime you already worked through so you should have an understanding of it, even if you don't understand it fully on listen. This is quite different from AJATT which claims you just need to fully immerse without any understanding until your brain learns to decode (after heisig etc)

anyway. there are some good guides for making the process pretty seamless. key apps/extentions: Anki, Yomitan, absplayer
https://learnjapanese.moe/routine/ (day 6 for anime with subtitle setup)
decent site for streaming : https://animelon.com
kitsunekko.net for offline subs of many shows, but i suggest Xavier's Retimed JP Sub Pack - https://nya.iss.one/view/1044354 first since downloading everything all at once is easier (had to rename a bunch of the srt/ass files to match my already dowloaded stuff :/ )
also https://gist.github.com/tatsumoto-ren/78ba4e5b7c53c7ed2c987015fa05cc2b is a good hub for offline subtitle sources.

absplayer lets you use yomitan on your local media, since it wouldn't work in mpv or vlc.

learnjapanese.moe also has a VN guide to make yomitan useful, but i haven't read into it yet.

https://syosetu.com is the obvious choice for reading materials.
anyway.

>>11

going through line by line, looking up words and reasoning out the meaning of each sentance, helped by having gone through a fair amount of the structure lessons.

Doesnt sound like the most efficient way of doing things, and especially doesn't sound fun. I would say atleast do a series "deep dive" to pursue a full understanding of all the words in an anime series example, "deep dive" being what I have seen as referring to re-watching the series repeatedly. I think this would reinforce everything you learn from the series AND get you closer to comprehending most sentences without emphasis on hanging on certain sentences and their words for a long amount of time.

I like AJATT and I like some of the rethink Matt vs Japan has brought forward.

I think good initial textbook/theory learning, apart from kanji with heisig of course, would be on pronunciation things like pitch accent which enhances your comprehension at your novice level, then just stick to comprehension of media, spaced repetition, just mass immersion like ajatt is all about. Im not really sure if being strict about no output is that meaningful but input is definitely vastly more important of course.

the idea to go through the series like that is because it is the only place you get your vocab, kanji, and sentences from. cure dolly doesn't suggest heisig, or any other grammar or textbook. pronunciation is acquired through input of source material you have fully deciphered (as to "but you'll sound like an anime character" she says "so what?" )
you still do theory, but it's her breakdown of structure. and you still do spaced repetition, from vocab grabbed from the show. (spaced repition comes in the form of both anki and naturally by the tendency of a series to be temporally topical, along with the constant reinput of the series after going through it)
her logic for not liking ajatt is that it misses a fundamental point. The site that ajatt cribbed from was an esl site (written in english) for people who knew english enough to read it. the principles of ajatt can work, for people who already have acquired some amount of japanese (which is why ajatt doesn't actually follow through on the idea that you just need input), and the theory that "you learn like a child does" doesn't follow because a child isn't learning a language they are constructing their first world view which is impossible for a person who already knows a language.
cure dolly is just as zealous about "always be inputting" but she believes you have to have some comprehension of the input before doing it or you are just wasting your time. as for heisig it has the problem of temporal association of similar kanji, since you learn them by radical you might be like "oh that's either this or that" but can't remember which. (similar problem to learning several kanji that are all fruit words at the same time) with getting kanji from source only you associate the kanji to it's context only, you get the readings naturally as they appear in the source. The point isn't gamifying the language (ie who knows the most kanji, who has the most correct pitch accent, etc) it's to be able to use the language as a means of communication (be that input or output)

as for "fun" maybe. It does seem rather "boring" which is why it should be something you really want to consume. The upside she brings up is you spend a lot more time with the material and will have a deeper and richer bond with the characters. obviously as you get more proficient, you will recognize more, understand better and thus move faster through the work. I am considering what i want to actually go through this with this way

anecdotally, i did do about 4 months of ajatt. doing heisig, spaced rep(anki and wanikani) constant listening. i retained essentially nothing and saw essentially no improvement save the few kanji here and there. This way seems more sensible but im still working through structure at this point. the fact that going through media sentence by sentence does seem a bit mendokusai has me hesitating.

whatever works for you is best. and following anyone else's plan perfectly is rarely going to be that.

Heisig should distinguish the correct character since a very similar kanji should hopefully have you second guess yourself when ur not sure and u notice the primitives don't fit into the story you used for memorisation but I admit when I did it, mistaking some kanji (only very few) still happened. I would chalk that up to inevitability maybe though.

These methods sound similar and I can't say they sound all that bad, as you say we should do what works best for ourselves, we all have different ways of solving problems. Maybe sometimes having a light approach and missing out some words just leads to never-ending lack of progress, I'd be tempted to try it more your way. For now I'm off of JP learning

long running podcast that isn't unbearable : archive.org \ details \ hams-radio-japan

Shouts out to the AJATT blog. Guy believes a couple silly things and one should probably focus more on grammar than he recommends but overall, a very good guide to learning Japanese and any other language out there.

anki is so emotionally taxing...

every other day i get hit with the 自分 and my mind goes. yup i know that sure aint shiro-wa but fuck me if i know what it is.

If this is tripping you up I'm guessing you are at the start of your jp journey.
Just know that this is the type of thing that you will iron out pretty quickly once you learn more nouns that use 分, since 90+% of them are read ぶん or ふん, especially when 分 is the 2nd kanji.
わ is the standard kunyomi (comes from jp) reading and you tend to encounter it in verbs.
ぶん-ふん are the onyomi (comes from ch).
Some people find it helpful to devote some time to kunyomi-onyomi study, but personally I've just stuck to learning words and gaining the intuition for readings as my vocab increases.

>>19
in the past i tried learning kanji through wanikani, and i do think it was "helpful" but the understanding of what a "kunyomi" and "onyomi" were was never clear, but it did force a correct answer. in a contextless "is it the pink or purple version of this kanji?" i couldn't ever remember. and it still feels extremely arbitrary if i see "x is kunyomi". so i think i'm needing to undo some weird stuff that put in my head. but it is nice that i am starting out "seeing radicals" this time.
but ya, about week two of usagispoon(ish... actually following everything in usagispoon everyday started taking an obscene amount of time after about 5 days. had to lower new anki card amount, cut back episodes of precuredolly (3 20+ minute episodes in a row with the kind of notes i take can't be done in less than an ~120 minutes, even in the best case), because just those together were taking nearly 4 hours alone) but what im doing now is mostly maintainable even with the extra anki with mining. and i really have the feeling being consistent is the hardest and most important part.

Cool that you're getting some good results with UsagiSpoon. That was also my onramp to jp. I found it really helpful and I followed it exactly, but I would say that rinsing 3 Cure Dolly episodes a day while taking detailed notes can be a bit much. The videos are dense, and my experience was that with an early beginner vocabulary and likely 0 reading experience there is quite a lot of info that you won't retain. 2 months after finishing UsagiSpoon I started going back through some of the Cure Dolly videos 1-a-day, reading the notes I had taken during my first viewing of them before and after each video, and I found that I retained a lot more.

I have a couple of unsolicited suggestions on ways you can try to mitigate how much time it takes:

1. Watch the Cure Dolly videos sped up (she speaks so slowly) and instead of writing notes when there is a table or some important visual info, just take a screenshot and add it to your notes).

2. Leave the subtitle tutor-method as soon as you feel like you can attempt it. I waited maybe like 4 months to do this and once I stopped watching eps with english subs first, I regretted not doing so sooner.Sure, you lose some comprehensibility, but also, you gain double the immersion time. Also something about always watching the same ep twice can be quite demotivating. You can also try rewatching an anime that you've already seen or one where you've read the source material, which will boost the comprehensibility without having to watch it twice. If you can pick a series that you can find jp subs for, that also helps. Regardless, leaving the subtitle tutor method does feel very daunting at first, but just like starting reading, waiting until you feel completely "ready" to leave the subtitle tutor method can slow your growth. One way to ween yourself off of it is to read the english subtitles from the .srt or .ass file since really all you want from the english viewing of the ep is the dialogue. Another weening technique is to watch the first half of the ep with english subs, turn them off for the second half, and then watch the episode again but no subs in first half and eng subs in the second half (still takes as much time as sub-tutor but gets you used to exerperiencing the eps without any english reference and keeps you motivated throughout the 50 min since you save your fluent understanding of the 2nd half of the ep for the end).

>>21
thanks for the advice.
unfortunately i can't watch her videos fast. i normally watch at 3x on youtube except for experience type videos, but her mic is so bad combined with the her voice makes it very very hard to process at even 1.5x ;-;
also i have been taking notes in a paper and pen journal. I write a lot in english and want to keep that habit with japanese, so i take it for an opportunity to get writing practice and write down literally every example sentence she includes. so this makes this process /much/ longer than someone just doing it to familiarize with the grammar topics.

i don't use subtitle tutor method. I am picking shows that i am very familiar with and don't mind a 8th or 30th watch (log horizon, no game no life, k-on, inuyasha) with subtitles for mining, and for my free watching i'm doing shows that i am not familiar with but are more easy to parse (Hirogaru Sky! Precure currently).
japanese is my 3rd language and i've had to go through the process of deep ambiguity and clinging to the things i do grasp to fill in the picture and build understanding, so i don't really have much problem doing free watching for something like precure.