I don’t know if my progress is poor or average, but I do think I’m doing fine for a studious student in maintaining both my academic studies and social relationships.
Day 0 includes the old days when I read only up until where it’s practically “required” to memorize Katakana and Hiragana. I learned about particles although I wouldn’t want to get into details since I’ll probably learn them again in the future.
Days 1 to 3 are inclusions of my memorization in Katakana and Hiragana, not only for familiarity but direct recognition of which Japanese character it represents. Katakana was easy to learn; I could have done it in a day, although of course, it would take me a week to make direct recognition of it, so I took my time and eased it up to one more day. On Day 3, I started with Hiragana. Hiragana was a harder, and I hardly have started memorized the five letters: A, I, U, E, and O. I’ll try to put more effort at night, and continue with this regularly about a week as I learn a few Kanji characters when I’ve gotten the hang of the characters.
I usually learn characters by four or five (usually four). I write them repetitively, one line for each character. Initially, Katakana was foreign to me I had to do it twice or thrice to get the hang of it. The succeeding was better; I would do one line or even less. The hardest part for Katakana as the first, err, “language” to be learning is the similarity of its characters with the others. I then grouped them and learned them over again.
To supplement for the learning, I did flashcards through Obenkyo, a free Android app downloadable through the Play Store. They weren’t exactly “flashcards” but involved determining the romaji of the character with six choices. I’ll be honest, the choices don’t help if your goal is “direct recognition” so you’ll have to do it as the basic trick and proceed with other exercises like (1) given the romaji, you write the character yourself, (2) given the character, you write the romaji, and lastly, (3) given the romaji, you write its character.
So far, I’ve been doing well, and I hope I’ll succeed in learning Japanese in less than a year. The timeline represents the stretch of time I learn Japanese in order to pass the Japanese Proficiency Learning Test right after. Some learn in six months, enough to get them to understand anime, but I’m aiming for light novels. (Generally, light novels use easier words than novels so I think it would be enough to handle this foreign language I’m learning.)
What I Learned Today (as of writing): All characters of Katakana (gojoun) and five from Hiragana (gojoun)
Adrift Culture 