ooh pitch accent is an important one!! I’d love to better learn it for sure, even if it seems like memorization might be a little hard. 😵‍💫 I’ve seen people use pitch accent maps to show the rise’s and falls through a word/sentence, which I find rather helpful. but, I also know that some forms of chinese romanization also make use of accents on latin vowels to mark rising, falling, or flat pitch (ex: á, à, ā), so that might also be an option to look into utilizing, even if it’s not very traditional for japanese learning. you could likely even make use of both with some time! if you wanted anyway.

as for me, I’m learning through a tutor and textbooks irl, and I’m using youtube videos, flashcards, and kanji learning apps on top of that to get a more well rounded scope. I also watch a good bit of anime, since it’s listening practice that I can follow along with easier than content by and for native speakers, but isn’t so slow and meticulous that it’s unrealistic like with textbook listening practice.

Including pitch accent in the course would be cool. I hope that it will be optional rather than mandatory. Otherwise there might be a risk of learners turning away from the course in search for an easier experience. But I’m not sure. Personally I’ve been wanting to learn more about Japanese pitch accent for a long time.

With Japanese, it seems that using mnemonics to remember kanji is popular. It can also be helpful when learning the kana. If you want people to get used to kana quickly instead of using romaji, then mnemonics will probably help a lot, at least for some people.

Textbooks and such tend to teach masu-form conjugations before short form ones, because it’s easier to get started that way and it’s “polite”. As someone who learned the basics casually through the internet, I feel like this resulted in me over-relying on using the masu stem and I’ve seen the same thing happen with others. It took a long time before I properly learned all the short form conjugations because I didn’t bother. So I’ve been wondering if it wouldn’t be better to teach the short form conjugation first, though it takes more effort to memorize which could demotivate some.

It’s often said that it’s best to study kanji using words, rather than studying kanji in isolation. The same principle can be applied to learning certain words that might not have direct English equivalents, they are better understood when placed in a sentence rather than in isolation (context + association).

Thanks for creatonauting!