Do you know of a tool that can generate texts to read based on exactly your level?

I think that was Krashen’s input hypothesis. If I read a text in Vietnamese with more than one unknown word, it’s too much. Exactly one would do it.

Haven’t seen a tool doing that.

That matches my experience, too. I passed JLPT N1—then called 1-kyū—back in 1985 (!).

I did spend a lot of time memorizing vocabulary with flashcards, but I spent even more time on extensive reading—novels, newspapers, magazines, anything I was interested in, even if at first I understood little. The repeated exposure to vocabulary in real-world contexts really made a difference.

Funny thing is, these communities aren’t readily visible in real life. At the Japanese language school I attend people are mostly regular people with regular lives and regular limitations. Online, you’d believe that everybody did Wanikani on Adderall for several hours a day.

There's no real reason to learn Finnish other than curiosity, so I'm not surprised there's no community around learning it. You can move to Finland without knowing the language at all, since everyone else around you will happily speak English with you. Hell, you can even get Finnish citizenship as long as you learn Swedish instead. And when a language is spoken by around five million people, there's no large amount of creative works only unlocked by learning the language either.

(I'm a native Finnish speaker)

I also got a lot of value out of wanikani even without completing it.

I tried and failed several times to get started with Anki before having success with Wanikani. The key diffentiator for me was the learning step. Anki is great for remembering things you were taught or learned outside of it, but using Anki to learn new things is very much a learned skill that Wanikani holds your hand through.

I have N2 and am working on N1 now, and feel I still have a very long way to go before getting to CEFR C1. Now I only use Anki with the yomitan and takoboto integrations to quickly add any words I look up, which seems to be working well.

I agree with you, but Anki is a generalized flashcard SRS memorization tool, not specifically made for learning Japanese, so it's not within my area of critique; I'm thinking of apps similar to Duolingo. It works extremely well because it helps you memorize very efficiently. One of the few applications that will indeed boost your learning by a lot. Anything requiring manual input rather than a simple Again or Good button choice tends to be worse. Any Anki deck requiring manual input as an answer should not be used.

What's ridiculous about it? Long before AJATT was a site, I think most people would've told you that immersion is a good way to learn a second language.

You mention "result to efforts ratio," but I'm not sure I understand what this could me. In language learning, "results" and "efforts" are more or less the same thing. If you read a lot of books, you'll be good at reading books. It's not like there's some reading that is "effort" reading and other reading that is "results" reading; it's all just reading. For most people, the goal of learning Japanese is to be able to use Japanese in the real world. In which case I don’t see why any amount of time spent using Japanese should count as effort (but not results), since that’s the whole point.

I never paid any money to AJATT nor agree with everything on the site, but did find it inspirational in various ways early on in my studies. I'm fluent in written and spoken Japanese, and I do think living in Japan as well as immersing myself in Japanese media was a big part of that. I studied French in high school and college using traditional courses and I was never a great French speaker, I think in large part because I didn't do much with French outside the classroom.

I disagree with your disagreement.

I started off by memorising the hiragana table, then went hardcore. Got a simple manga (Hikaru no go) and a Japanese to English dictionary and just winged it.

Initially it took me a month to read an entire volume. It gets easier.

That was 20 years ago without any of the fancy tools people have today.

This is actually NOT recommended for a beginner.

Writing and speaking are effective at establishing long term memories, it's why we do it for other things, but a language learning beginner has no idea if what they're writing makes sense or if there's any subtle mistakes in how they're pronouncing words or how they're putting them together, etc.

Language learning experts don't recommend you start speaking/writing unless you have a coach or have reached an intermediate level so that you can discern when something sounds native or not. That way you can self evaluate with recordings, etc.

It is an effective tool for learning, but for self-learning you're gonna be shooting yourself in the foot long term. You should only do it if you have, say, a partner that speaks the language and doesn't mind correcting you all the time.

For Japanese I recommend that you do learn how to write kana/kanji from the start, and even some vocab if you want. But stop there. Don't write sentences, don't try to talk to japanese people on those apps/discord etc. and wait until you're at an intermediate level to do it, otherwise you'll form some very bad habits that are very hard to undo.

Writing is not that necessary of a skill in Japanese- even many native Japanese speakers no longer remember how to write many characters.

There's even a self-deprecating slang term: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%97...

If only there is a native speaker who is willing to correct your mistakes.

Output (writing and speaking) is a big beginner trap for language learners. If you can't afford a private tutor or moving to another country, my suggestion is just to skip it until you're able to understand daily conversation in the target language.

People are going to tell you making mistakes makes you improve. Which is true, if and only if you know what mistakes you made.

I think you are oversimplifying it. Thinking is output.