日本語を勉強しよう! Let's Learn Japanese! - Everything and anything that can help with learning Japanese language

[Alex Hogendorp]

Just wait until you look into how many readings 生 has.

My kanji dictionary listed 11 readings but there might be more. Easy to think of this as anything untampered with 'sophistication'.

 

[Not a bee]

I'm late and gay as always but I am now watching this thread. Thank you

Sorry if this is asked before, but I remember some old style of Japanese speaking cannot be translated, and it would be equivalent of reading in old English. How common is this to come across?

 

[Ms. Dia Gnosis]

I'm late and gay as always but I am now watching this thread. Thank you

Sorry if this is asked before, but I remember some old style of Japanese speaking cannot be translated, and it would be equivalent of reading in old English. How common is this to come across?

Just as common as coming across Old English, I guess. You'll probably see it more in anime/manga/books/movies that are set in a specific era.

 

[HRT Heisenberg]

My kanji dictionary listed 11 readings but there might be more. Easy to think of this as anything untampered with 'sophistication'.

I looked this up too, I thought it wasn't that bad but then I saw the 訓読み's pile up to 6 or 7 in the dictionary, but thankfully the ones that are rarer I've never seen before like うぶ or いく

I'm late and gay as always but I am now watching this thread. Thank you

Sorry if this is asked before, but I remember some old style of Japanese speaking cannot be translated, and it would be equivalent of reading in old English. How common is this to come across?

Not sure what old language you're referring to by not translatable, something like 四字熟語, i.e four kanji that forms an ideom maybe? There's ye-old style grammar used even in modern fictional settings when an anime or whatever overplays the old wise man trope, using words like ござる which is about as translatable as the rest of Japanese. Some parts gramatically may come up in really official Japanese ocasionally but I don't bother to read it unless I have to because it's hard. Otherwise it's pretty rare but games and anime sometimes use old or rarely used Japanese/kanji just to sound cool (and yes chunibyo is a real thing and some kids mimic it to be cool like their favorite animes). That's all I can think of but I'm not Japanese so I'm sure there's cases I've missed.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

This video will help you with verb conjugation in Japanese (and some other languages too)

Also, learning all the Kanji radicals will help you learn Kanji better.

 

[残念。]

The 生 thing is a big reason why trying to learn kanji isolated is a fools errand. Learn vocabulary instead.

 

[dick brain]

They usually use nama for raw food.

And for unprotected sex

Oo baby I like it raw

 

[Celestial Peace]

Anyone here has a hard time with listening exercises? I still can't keep up with how Japanese talk fast.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Anyone here has a hard time with listening exercises? I still can't keep up with how Japanese talk fast.

You'll get used to it. I had the same problem with Spanish and Spanish speakers had the same problem with us English speakers.

I also bought a Japanese (and Mandarin Chinese) language speaking book in Spanish. I wanted to learn languages while retaining the languages I have learned.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Watch this once (or a couple times if you don't have a Kanji Dictionary) and you should be familiar with a decent some amount of Kanji's if you dont know any. You see them enough times and it should make sense to you. You'll have at least 100 Kanji's burned in your brain. Especially if you know the radicals.

 

[HRT Heisenberg]

Anyone here has a hard time with listening exercises? I still can't keep up with how Japanese talk fast.

It's a never ending struggle But you will have moments of clarity when the speaker says something where you understand 90% really really well. Also Japanese games/shows subbed in Japanese closed captions helps.

As for the kanji discussion I have to agree with 残念, vocabulary over anything else. Once I got to the point where if I'm reading and find a new word, if I recognize one or two of the kanji I can type it into my phone to look it up and learn new words/kanjis naturally. My recommendation is to drill vocab maybe 1000 words or more and then read manga or something looking up new words as you go. Seeing new words naturally is the best way to aquire a word so being able to do that well should be a priority.

Also I learned basic Chinese grammar and around 2000 Chinese words a few years ago, there is hanzi for literally everything because there's no hiragana which brings the requried hanzi amount up so much I am pretty sure everyone just learns them through vocab / grammar points and not in isolation. The point is both languages have so many characters but Chinese demands more characters earlier on which highlights the futility of isolated character learning in my opinion. Yes in proper classes they get you to drill writing characters over and over again, but in my opinion that's a different skill and you still need to chain characters to words to remember correctly.

 

[quisquiliae]

Anyone here has a hard time with listening exercises? I still can't keep up with how Japanese talk fast.

I still have a hard time but I have noticed steady improvement, sometimes in leaps and bounds, as long as I'm listening everyday. It's probably the most time gated part of language learning. I've had a lot of luck with passive immersion; listening to Japanese constantly in the background, it trains your mind to parse sentences even if you're not understanding the meaning.

You might try this as well:

I have never done as many as 50, but I have watched the same episode 10+ times and listened to the same season of anime 5 times in a row. Every time I would notice more and eventually I started learning some words through context without looking them up. I still think the most effective way to improve is to mine something completely of its vocabulary and then listen to it repeatedly, but passive immersion is still a good low effort way to make progress.

My recommendation is to drill vocab maybe 1000 words or more and then read manga or something looking up new words as you go. Seeing new words naturally is the best way to aquire a word so being able to do that well should be a priority.

I agree with this. My vocabulary and retention improved dramatically when I started making my own Anki decks from immersing. Repetition and context are so important to the learning process. You do kind of need the first 1000 or so before you go in otherwise I imagine its a huge headache looking up everything or nearly everything.

 

[Hustlin' Thick]

I have been thinking about buying some native Japanese grammar materials for awhile now, would you or anyone else have some recommendations? I have done some searching and haven't found anything that seems definitive for grammar like the 大辞林 seems to be for dictionaries. I was hoping to find a book or series that natives consider to be the most authoritative. I have been trying to use more native resources to get better perspective although I think my "monolingual transition" is still a ways off.

I'd just use imabi tbh. I think people tend to overemphasize going monolingual early. Otherwise you could just try searching for the grammar point online or read those shinkanzen master JLPT grammar books if you're interested in the test.

I've got probably 6-12 months, it's not like a spur of the moment thing

You'd probably sound very foreign but you could realistically get kinda fluent given you have someone to speak to.

You might try this as well:

Isn't this the guy who did 800 days of duolingo? lol

 

[残念。]

Isn't this the guy who did 800 days of duolingo? lol

He is. He eventually made it, but personally I wouldn't avoid reading books/manga until 3 years after you start learning like he did.

 

[quisquiliae]

I'd just use imabi tbh.

Thanks, I'll give it a go. I've been using The Dictionary of Japanese Grammar, but I always feel like I'm just out of reach of a complete understanding, maybe it just needs to sink in longer.

Isn't this the guy who did 800 days of duolingo? lol

He is. He also recommends against using it, at least in his recent videos. He shills Migaku too, which I don't like, but some of his advice has helped me so I give him credit when its relevant.

personally I wouldn't avoid reading books/manga until 3 years after you start learning like he did.

It's so bizarre to me how long he waited to start. It was pretty difficult to get into reading but its probably given me the greatest improvement per time invested.

 

[残念。]

It's so bizarre to me how long he waited to start. It was pretty difficult to get into reading but its probably given me the greatest improvement per time invested.

No matter how much you study, learning to read will always be a tough pill to swallow, but it's very worth it.

 

[HRT Heisenberg]

Does anyone else find mining on anki gets to be too much after a while? When I first started my journey in immersion I actually started mining Jojo's part 1 complete with pictures and voice clips. But I eventually found making the cards took way too long (although the cards were really effective).

Then I did bare basic card mining, kanji on front with reading and a few English words on the back. This gave me heaps of extra time to spend on immersion than card making but about 1 1/2 months in my leeches piled up along with heaps of new cards I was easily spending over an hour a day just on reps. Eventually I just gave up and looked up words hoping I remember which was actually really effective when I was pulling in all my free time to immersion. I'm probably just bad at SRS methods and it doesn't suit me but I'm interested to hear others' experiences. When I first started learning I did a lot of kanji and vocab reps which allowed me to immerse but it was quite the time commitment for me, maybe more so than most people because I'm slow.

 

[Hustlin' Thick]

Does anyone else find mining on anki gets to be too much after a while? When I first started my journey in immersion I actually started mining Jojo's part 1 complete with pictures and voice clips. But I eventually found making the cards took way too long (although the cards were really effective).

Then I did bare basic card mining, kanji on front with reading and a few English words on the back. This gave me heaps of extra time to spend on immersion than card making but about 1 1/2 months in my leeches piled up along with heaps of new cards I was easily spending over an hour a day just on reps. Eventually I just gave up and looked up words hoping I remember which was actually really effective when I was pulling in all my free time to immersion. I'm probably just bad at SRS methods and it doesn't suit me but I'm interested to hear others' experiences. When I first started learning I did a lot of kanji and vocab reps which allowed me to immerse but it was quite the time commitment for me, maybe more so than most people because I'm slow.

Have you tried adding example sentences on the back? The ones that come with definitions on a J-J dictionary works as well.
I used to just brute force through leeches but once the deck got large enough (around 14k iirc) I just set Anki to suspend them. I've had success with adding sentence cards with words I mix up often but that's a bit time consuming.
If you have the latest Anki version, you could try enabling FSRS and turning retention rate to around 85% or less (you'd get 85% of your reviews correct but you'd actually remember ~92% of the deck).

 

[quisquiliae]

But I eventually found making the cards took way too long (although the cards were really effective).

With my setup it takes two button presses and about 15 seconds to make a card with screenshot, example sentence, definition, and audio. I followed this guide. Click on the card creation tab and watch the video if you want to see an example. Migaku is a paid browser extension that works similarly, but I have found it to be inferior. I use Mokuro for manga and sometimes books if its just page scans, and I use ttsu for epubs. Manga and books have an extra step for screenshots but you can still get everything else plus stock audio in one click. This also works with VNs if you can get them to connect to the Texthooker. I tried to make cards manually one time before I decided there had to be some script that could generate them automatically and ended up finding that JP Mining Note site.

about 1 1/2 months in my leeches piled up along with heaps of new cards I was easily spending over an hour a day just on reps.

If you have the latest Anki version, you could try enabling FSRS and turning retention rate to around 85% or less (you'd get 85% of your reviews correct but you'd actually remember ~92% of the deck).

I would recommend FSRS as well, using it plus hitting the evaluate and optimize buttons every now and then has made Anki much more bearable for me. I have Anki set to suspend leeches pretty quickly, I think its set to 6, and I just unsuspend them whenever I go to mine that word again. Tinkering with some of the settings can make your Anki experience much more enjoyable.

 

[HRT Heisenberg]

Have you tried adding example sentences on the back? The ones that come with definitions on a J-J dictionary works as well.
I used to just brute force through leeches but once the deck got large enough (around 14k iirc) I just set Anki to suspend them. I've had success with adding sentence cards with words I mix up often but that's a bit time consuming.
If you have the latest Anki version, you could try enabling FSRS and turning retention rate to around 85% or less (you'd get 85% of your reviews correct but you'd actually remember ~92% of the deck).

I would recommend FSRS as well, using it plus hitting the evaluate and optimize buttons every now and then has made Anki much more bearable for me. I have Anki set to suspend leeches pretty quickly, I think its set to 6, and I just unsuspend them whenever I go to mine that word again. Tinkering with some of the settings can make your Anki experience much more enjoyable.

I haven't seen this before.. if I go back to mining again I'll definitely try this, thank you! I also never considered suspending leeches which was probably my biggest mistake in hindsight.

Slightly related I recently I learned the word 病む because two different native friends of mine used it with me, more particularly with it's mental health connotations. I may be lucky enough to live in Japan and have native friends but I really think there's a lesson to be learned here. A lot of places focus on mnemonics and stories but what's even better is if you have a personal story to go with a word. And honestly I think immersion through comics/shows/games definitely count as personal if you can remember why that word was used while mining vocab, that may be the best way to pick up nuance from what I've seen.

Also thank you to everyone who's joined in on this thread again, it may be weird to talk about Japanese here of all places but I'm glad we are