I’ve been studying japanese lately. I’m not very good at it yet, but I am getting somewhere, I think? I’m really good at falling down rabbitholes and learning random stuff and that’s more or less how I got here… I learned hiragana so I’d have a better time doing UTAU stuff and then was like… why not just keep going? learning hiragana is already the first hurdle in terms of learning japanese as an english speaker, so like? bit of a waste if I only used it on UTAU stuff ^^’
I started in duolingo, but eventually decided I don’t really like it - I don’t like how “specific” my answers have to be… for example, typing in an answer only to find that they wanted me to give them the other translation of the phrase when there’s more than one way of saying it. or making a typo even if the answer I gave indicates that I understood. I think these would be less of a problem if I was willing to pay for the subscription version, where you can make mistakes without being penalised.
it was ultimately an anki deck that was most effective at teaching me hiragana, so I ended up trying a sentence-based N5 anki deck I found and am slowly slowly working my way through it.
that said, it’d be silly to try and learn a language without listening to it, so I try to listen to something every day even if I don’t understand much. if I’m feeling braver I’ll try reading, either from a free/online graded reader, or by looking more closely at the lyrics of songs I like, depending on the mood I’m in.