>>10922923To be clear, I never used the textbook approach.
I meant that I was part of the group reading native material but constantly breaking the flow with bilingual dictionary use and grammar book study.
It's somewhat analogous to trying to learn math or physics without working any problems out yourself, but just referring to examples and solution manuals.
>>10922755>>10922876So when I came back to it, I figured since I wasn't learning shit anyways I may as well give the tadoku bullshit an honest try.
Got some LN's and they were way too hard, gave up on them.
Found a culture/science book series aimed at elementary school children and got through those.
Then some easy manga, then a kid's novel, then some slightly more difficult manga. And so forth.
The only dictionary use was internet lookup if some word was still nagging me after I was done reading for the day.
The final result was I got really fast at reading, almost as fast as in English. Learning Japanese stopped being a shitty chore and started being fun.
Since I could read faster, I could read even more stuff faster; it's a positive feedback loop. Also, I could now read video captions in a TV show as fast as they appeared on screen and that opened up a new set of media for me. I could also now use a native japanese dictionary and understand the definitions it gave. When I went back to the LN's I'd bought and found I could follow them easily I was floored. And despite having done no conventional "study", when I took the J-CAT again, I scored 360, a huge increase.
I'm not going to say all the intensive study was worthless but at the very least I can say it has sharply diminishing returns beyond a certain point.
