You can do it!!

Has anybody here successfully learned to at least read/write Japanese? How long did it take you and how hard did you work?

I should be able to answer you in aboud a year. I assume this thread will still be here.
I can already read pretty good, just need to get my vocab up so I can break dependence on rikaichan.

Recently, I found motivation to start learning it. But I'm struggling with kana because I've bad handwriting...

>>5
Good luck. Kana is easy compared to vocabulary with kanji.
The quickest confidence booster you can do while learning is to learn the grammar. Japanese grammar is very simple compared to a lot of languages. It can still be confusing at first but it doesn't take too long to get a handle on it and you can atually start reading stuff (with a dictionary on hand, or rikaichan). It feels like you've made progress.

>>5
write slowly and deliberately. You are learning a brand new system now is the time to do it proper.

You dont need to write by hand except as a way to aid memorization. Its just 50 or so characters between both kana types, if its too hard for you to learn to write then dont, just read. You can learn to write later on if you'll need to.

do you follow the actual stroke order or write whatever way is easiest for you?

>>8
It really helps you memorize though, so I recommend it.
>>9
Actual stroke order. It generally is the same as what's easiest: the stroke order wasn't made to make things difficult. Do note though, it makes things easiest if you write in vertical lines, just like Japanese is meant to be written.

>>9
I don't see the point in inventing your own. Take ソ and ン for example. The short stroke goes first and the long one second. Try reversing that and see if it looks exactly the same. If I try it my short strokes seem to want bend the wrong way. When everyone writes in the same order and direction it helps make it look more familiar even if you have bad handwritting people will find it easier to read than if you have bad handwritting and also do things in the wrong direction or oder.

Another argument I could make in favor of proper strokes is to take a look at this:
https://jisho.org/#radical
That's a full list of all the radicals that go into making any Japanese characters. All you really have to do is know the stroke order of this list and that's it, it's not like you really have to memorize a special order for all the thousands of characters.

And finally, I would actually argue that you'll end up doing the right stroke order one way or the other because there's a sort of logical top-left to bottom-right flow to them that feels optimized for the language, and if you just go off inventing your own patterns they may feel good for one character but awkward for another, and I'd imagine you'll constantly be re-inventing your own patterns and having to almost re-learn how you write every so often (And I'm even saying this as a left handed writer which made me really want to do a lot of strokes in Japanese in the opposite direction but I'm glad I didn't).
Honestly just do the right stroke order. The amount of time you'll spend in this stage is like 1% of the total time you'll spend learning the language and once you're over it the stroke order will just feel like 2nd nature. You won't even need to look up the stroke order for brand new characters, you'll just "know" how it's done.

>>10
if they're having so much trouble writing that its preventing them from learning anything else they shold just stop trying and move on to more important things.

Never said it was a whole lot of trouble, just asked if I should follow stroke order or not....

>>13
We're just bored. 4taba too slow

How do we get more people and make it faster then

>>5
>>8
if you can't write, type, learn one of the many input systems or make your own. advising someone to not learn to write because they cannot write by hand is not good advice, unless you have some ideological reason that you did not make us aware of, like extremic humanism or luddism.

>>10
as an aid to memorizing a phrase, writing is about the slowest method available. understanding it is much more effective
>>12
since when does having trouble learning to handwrite a language prevent the learning of that langugage? i never learned to handwrite japanese, korean, and chinese, and i am learning them fine.

this is also the same with alphabets, i can't give you the list of all kana nor bopomofo nor hangul basic units, nor latin nor cyrrilic alphabets, but i know most of them, and, what's more, i know all the ones i use and have seen before: whenever i come across a symbol i am either familiar with it or not. if, in a context in which i care about it, i am not, i look it up and familiarize myself with it and it variants and its meanings, i don't care for what alphabets they are part of and what orders have been given to them. you know why? cause it's all just artificial fluff that detracts from the real experience of the language--that is, communication between people who have a good chance of knowing the forms, techniques, of communication that are usually grouped together into separate "languages". languages exist for sociological purposes, to see what people of a particular group could understand

>>14
>>15
make high quality posts about interesting and generally appealing topics like mathematics or philosophy, or something cultural and interesting, in which case you can be as specialized and peculiar as you want because you're adding to the culture, or on already extant topics

don't give up