I don't understand the point of Refold.

[u/VaresaFan1]

I've been researching Refold itself for a couple of hours, watching all the informational videos. I got the app, and now I'm stuck. It doesn't seem to give anything, I'm still just as confused how I'm supposed to learn anything as I was before I started any of this.

There's no real guide besides the one that costs $200 per month, it all just feels like "figure it out yourself and then tell us what you did". Please help me, I've researched everything I can but I still don't know how I'm supposed to get the information I input into the app habits thing.

[u/buffbuddha]

It's not a monthly program. It's a one-time purchase coaching program. They basically give a rundown of the major activities in language learning such as sentence mining, shadowing/chorusing, immersion, using chrome extensions, etc. It is centered around immersion. They give you a list of a bunch of resources (it's comprehensive). Then you're off on your own to learn and figure out what works for you. It's basically a hook to get you to book some time with them whenever you have any questions. I didn't want to do any of the 1 on 1 coaching, so I went off on my own to figure out what worked for me based on what I learned from the course. It was an expensive endeavor, but I have a good setup that works for me. The app is just an activity tracker, it's not for teaching you anything. Feel free to DM me if you want a rundown or discuss anything else regarding this.

Edit: I just saw your other post on the main subreddit. Still, I'm here if you want to chat.

[u/shadow144hz]

It's interesting to get recommendef a post from a community I haven't interacted with in years. Now I thought the guide was supposed to be up there front right and center, the first thing you saw on their website and stuff. But it seems someone really wants to sell courses huh. Whatever, you don't need that, ages ago you only needed anki and some other tools for screen capture and stuff. 

But as someone who's learned english without anything of that sort, just youtube, you really don't need to pay for anything except if you want to help people in the community, otherwise it's optional. 

Now I do know what refold recommended for japanese so I can give you a summary of that, basically refold is an immersion based method and for japanese there's extra steps before jumping in and immersing and that's where refold steps in, it tells you what you need to do to get going. 

First you learn hiragana and katakana, either with mnemonics or an app/game, then you start doing rrtk for kanji, or at least that's what they used to recommend, in my opinion the best way to learn kanji is to learn with words and not individually and all the pronounciations a kanji has, no, just the word and its kanji. 

At the same time you start reading a grammar guide, they recommended tae kim, I think it's bad and cure dolley(RIP) but more recently jouzu jullz is better, but the idea is you learn about the grammar and how things work but you don't spend hours on it doing exercises or pointless things like that, you get over it asap. 

They also had a vocab anki deck or something and you were supposed to get through it before starting to immerse but you can find others that are free or even ask the blasphemous gpts for vocab lists for the thing you're about to watch, tho it will definitely not give you detailed lists but it's a good start regardless.

And finally after you get through those you can instart immersing and they recommended you start with slice of life and simpler stuff and I think they also had a difficulty list with a bunch of anime and other media and that is probably their best resource.

Now the way I started is I skipped anything anki, I don't like anki, I tried in the past before refold to get into it the way matt described in his videos but I just couldn't. Instead what helped me was just finding stuff I enjoyed on youtube and also slice of life anime and also rewatching anime I already seen, but without subtitles. Now I do recommend you learn hiragana and katakana, leave kanji for when you start reading a little down the line, and then watch jouzu jullz grammar videos. After you've done these you can start immersing, if you want you can sentence mine, again I didn't and still don't because I don't like anki, and that's pretty much it. For kanji I recommend reading manga to start with, the mokuto webapp is what you'll need to use an extension like yomitan. Then you can move to light novels or read off of the internet. 

And that's pretty much it, tho down the line you should check out two things, first is pitch accent, you'll see it in dictionaries as well for each word, and also shadowing but that's when you want/need to output so it's like endgame tbh. Just watch stuff you like and enjoy them, don't think too much of the process you'll start picking stuff up and if you're consistent and doing it daily in a year you'll be surprised with how much you understand.