I’ve had a fascination with learning Japanese since I was a really young kid.
In early primary school we had a few sessions of learning basic words and greetings in different languages along with a little of the culture for a few weeks. Japanese was one of these but since it was so different to English and other European languages it piqued my curiosity for learning. Being so young, it was difficult to find non-European language resources, so it took me many years until my late teens to find resources to even learn Hiragana and Katakana. After that, it was several more years until I found very basic materials for learning kanji but they weren’t geared towards self study and I really wanted to start with Radicals and build up from there.

I dabbled with the few beginner books and some games (My Japanese Coach - DS, Hiragana battle/ Katakana combat - pc RPG) learning very basic phrases and low level vocabulary on and off across several years until late 2020 when I managed to get a copy of Genki 1 but found it difficult to understand switching between Japanese and English with my understanding grinding to a halt part way through. Mid 2021, a friend suggested みんなの日本語 instead for a full immersion approach. I was skeptical at first (how can I learn a language I don’t know when only using that language, right?) but actually found it worked way better for me than Genki did once I figured out I learn best using immersion (not bashing Genki, great text book if it matches your learning style ).

Finding “Learn Natively” in 2022 allowed me to start reading properly and find books suited to my level to start working my way up to understand more complex grammar as time goes on. Although I still have a long way to go before I’ll be where I want to be regarding fluencey, I wouldn’t be as far on as I am without the help of the community here.