/jp/ - Otaku Culture

So DJT I'm about one and a half months into my Japanese studies and I have been thinking. You know how you can visualize written words in your better languages but it's hard to do in Japanese? That is how it is for me at least and the way I have been learning seems to be the issue here. I can read a lot of words when I see them but reproducing them from memory is very hard. So far I have always learned from Japanese -> English but I will now reverse it and always write down the answer before revealing it. If I want to get anything close to fluency this seems to be inevitable which I suppose should be obvious. It is probably common knowledge here but this realization makes my previous studies look a bit like a waste of time as what I can produce is only a fraction of what I can "read". Even the stuff I can read comes only very slowly and only by thinking and digging hard. I have often read that reproduction is a waste of time but from what I have experienced so far it is the opposite. I'll get back to my studies now, sorry for blogposting.