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

[残念。]

I try to listen to at least an hour a day in addition to supplemental reading, a dedicated Kanji learning system like Wanikani, and a more freeform vocabular acquisition process like Anki where you build your own deck.

Be careful with grabbing on to too much SRS, it can kill you before you know it. I'd recommend only one SRS program at a time. Starts out slow, but it'll catch up with you. It's another case of slow and steady wins the race.

Also, learning kanji by itself is overrated. wanikani likes to teach your stupid shit before basic stuff in order to teach you kanji in order of least complicated to most complicated which leads to you not knowing words that are useful to you in the moment. I used it to a high level before I quit, I regret not quitting it sooner. Learn words, not kanji. If you learn words, you will learn kanji.

 

[Hustlin' Thick]

Kanji learning system like Wanikani

I don't think I've ever gotten past the point of understanding kanji as anything more than arbitrary squiggles.
However, if you want to learn kanji for handwriting, kanken etc. I found that having sentence cards with a highlighted word written in hiragana and putting the kanji stroke order on the back is quite helpful.

vocabular acquisition process like Anki

Have you tried putting grammar exercises into Anki? It could be just some conjugation practice, grammar points, a sentence/paragraph that you took a long time to understand.
You may end up overreliant on an SRS, but personally it works well and it's just complementing your natural spaced repetition after all.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

Be careful with grabbing on to too much SRS, it can kill you before you know it. I'd recommend only one SRS program at a time. Starts out slow, but it'll catch up with you. It's another case of slow and steady wins the race.

Also a good point. I have been doing WK for nearly a year before I moved on to supplemental stuff. I also tend to try to avoid adding words to my supplemental stuff if they're also in WK's library.

complicated which leads to you not knowing words that are useful to you in the moment

I have also had this problem with their system, where they will introduce a kanji and I will struggle with it for like three weeks only for them then to introduce a word that uses the kanji and that word make a lot more sense. It is my biggest frustration with the system over all.

Have you tried putting grammar exercises into Anki? It could be just some conjugation practice, grammar points, a sentence/paragraph that you took a long time to understand.

For my Grammar I tend to try and do things like read NHK Web Easy, in conjunction with resources like Cure Dolly, or the yomu yomu app someone mentioned a few pages ago. For me I have a hard time memorizing grammatical rules, its much easier for me to take some notes on it, then actually read something in Japanese and see the concepts applied. I have tried with Anki to do grammar exercises, but I tend to get bored with it and drop it in that format for whatever reason.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

I have also had this problem with their system, where they will introduce a kanji and I will struggle with it for like three weeks only for them then to introduce a word that uses the kanji and that word make a lot more sense. It is my biggest frustration with the system over all.

You could also study a few random Kanji and then take a break and let your brain absorb it so that way it may seem familiar to you. It's gonna take years to memorize but you don't need to study too intensively. You'll get used to it when you see them more often.

 

[00R-Gundam]

Been learning by myself and i just wanna say fuck Kanji. That said one of my struggles is the sentence structure, since its hard to break from the native one. Also any good recommendations for learning kanji? Only know 私 because it has been drilled to me.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

Been learning by myself and i just wanna say fuck Kanji. That said one of my struggles is the sentence structure, since its hard to break from the native one. Also any good recommendations for learning kanji? Only know 私 because it has been drilled to me.

I would make an effort to learn the particles when it comes to sentence structure. As long as you know what the particles are doing you can tell what the sentence is doing. It was something I put off learning till recently and it was a really dumb decision to do so.

As for Kanji, I think some resources were in the OP. Otherwise Anki has a few decks for it, or Wanikani if you don't mind SRS. The SRS system will drill you but I do have some complaints with particularly WK's approach (even though I still use it and think its good), namely it teaches a kanji and its associated vocabulary but it leaves it up to you to figure out all the possible forms of a word without necessarily telling you that.

For instance: WK will teach you that 歩く means "to walk" but it won't teach you 歩いて、歩いた, 歩かなかった, all of which are equally important

 

[残念。]

For instance: WK will teach you that 歩く means "to walk" but it won't teach you 歩いて、歩いた, 歩かなかった, all of which are equally important

If you learn grammar, you don't need to memorize those because it's all the same word.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

If you learn grammar, you don't need to memorize those because it's all the same word.

That's true, but my point was if you're just learning Kanji, its not necessarily going to tell you that. Its a little bit of extra work you have to do on your own.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

To me, It has gotten to the point where learning Japanese no longer feels very tough rather fun. It's the same experience with Spanish and soon Russian. But to focus on Japanese. My kanji dictionary also came with the Japanese word for it as well which really helps but learning the grammar really helped push me off the ground.

Been learning by myself and i just wanna say fuck Kanji. That said one of my struggles is the sentence structure, since its hard to break from the native one. Also any good recommendations for learning kanji? Only know 私 because it has been drilled to me.

Try Kanji Flashcards and familiarize yourself with each Kanji until it's in your mind for good. Going to Japan also helps. I have a Kanji Dictionary and I use Angki to memorize them. As well as a book where I practice writing Kanji. For me it's not that hard remembering the Kanji as my brain eventually absorbs them.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

Well if I ever plan to learn Japanese, this will be a fantastic thread to check. Also based Seras pfp, so far I've seen one other.

 

[00R-Gundam]

To me, It has gotten to the point where learning Japanese no longer feels very tough rather fun. It's the same experience with Spanish and soon Russian. But to focus on Japanese. My kanji dictionary also came with the Japanese word for it as well which really helps but learning the grammar really helped push me off the ground.


Try Kanji Flashcards and familiarize yourself with each Kanji until it's in your mind for good. Going to Japan also helps. I have a Kanji Dictionary and I use Angki to memorize them. As well as a book where I practice writing Kanji. For me it's not that hard remembering the Kanji as my brain eventually absorbs them.

Nah man fuck japan, the only reason im learning their language is because i want to play Super Robot Wars and have their language die with me if they ever go extinct.


Appreciate the Kanji suggestion though and ill check it out.

 

[Celestial Peace]

The amount of work I already do is pretty similar to the Japanese work week

Same here. People still seem to buy into the overworked salaryman/assembly line immigrant worker but I think America has already surpassed Japan in work hours. Brazil has the same yearly work hours as Japan so, personally, the difference it would make would be not living in a crime stricken corrupt third world tropical shithole with high murder rate and narcotics everywhere.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

Same here. People still seem to buy into the overworked salaryman/assembly line immigrant worker but I think America has already surpassed Japan in work hours.

I looked it up recently and the Japanese Work week on average was like .3 of an hour longer on average. So twenty minutes per week. I had a friend counter by saying there's a lot of stuff like going out drinking that's essentially mandatory, to which I countered with the same thing exists with unpaid overtime in America. I worked a factory job where the overtime wasn't mandatory, but you knew if you didn't do it they wouldn't extend your contracts, hire you on, or promote you.

Corpo-whores are Corpo-whores regardless of the race or nationality.

 

[quisquiliae]

Also any good recommendations for learning kanji? Only know 私 because it has been drilled to me.

Try Kanji Flashcards and familiarize yourself with each Kanji until it's in your mind for good. Going to Japan also helps. I have a Kanji Dictionary and I use Anki to memorize them. As well as a book where I practice writing Kanji. For me it's not that hard remembering the Kanji as my brain eventually absorbs them.

You could also study a few random Kanji and then take a break and let your brain absorb it so that way it may seem familiar to you. It's gonna take years to memorize but you don't need to study too intensively. You'll get used to it when you see them more often.

These are really good suggestions. Anki feels like a real chore but it is incredibly efficient for reviewing and reviewing is what makes the things you've learned stick. Don't overdo Anki or any SRS though, it is a reviewing tool not necessarily a learning tool. If I was at the beginning again and had to plot a course of action I would say to start making your own Anki sentence mining deck right away. I tried a couple premade decks when I started and always began failing reviews and hating Anki around 500 cards in, but when I started making my own cards my comprehension improved exponentially.

I would recommend taking the time to learn the radicals (the components of Kanji), it helps a lot and was a huge head start for me having studied Chinese in the past. Being able to break Kanji down into their component parts helps you to identify them, and can help identify meaning and pronunciation. For example 遺す(のこす) vs 潰す(つぶす) the only visual difference between those two are the left radicals, the road radical for the former and the water radical for the latter.

Learning to write them I think is very beneficial, being able to recognize a Kanji is one level of mastery but being able to create it from memory is a level above. If I can't scan a word with Yomichan or guess it's pronunciation, the easiest lookup method for me is still drawing them into a dictionary app which is very handy. I would probably just learn the stroke orders and how to write Kanji as you learn them naturally. I took several months to do books 1 and 3 of Remembering The Kanji writing all 3000 entries 20 times each, and while I think that was valuable for me, it was very inefficient. You don't have to start at the lowest stroke count or simplest elementary school Kanji and work your way up. The guide I was using recommended me to skip book 2 of Remembering The Kanji because it covers pronunciation rules that you will start to intuit naturally after learning many Kanji. I did start to pick those rules up after learning enough Kanji and I think you can do the same with writing, learning as you go with Kanji that are relevant to you rather than starting at 一 and working up to 鬱 like the books will have you do. You might take all of this with a grain of salt though because I do really enjoy Kanji, alphabets are more efficient but it is nice to have a language that can be beautiful visually as well as in it's meaning.

I will reiterate what Lunar Eclipse Paradox said above about getting used to them the more you seem them and absorbing them eventually. This is the case. Time is the most important factor, as long as you are learning and reviewing everyday it will sink in eventually. I have Anki set to suspend cards and mark them as leeches once it has lapsed 6 times. When I encounter those words again in my immersion I will unsuspend them and most of the time I will have no problem remembering them in future reviews. Your brain is constantly making connections and working out problems subconciously, eventually the groundwork will be there for you to easily pick up new Kanji and remember the old as long as you keep at it.

Sorry, this is a bit of a long post but I wanted to get some thoughts out there on this, both to give advice I wish I had when I started, and to outline at least a portion of a learning plan in this thread. I realized we have links to a lot of solid resources and some good discussion, but no guide of our own. I might do a more comprehensive guide at some point, but I do still consider myself a beginner, maybe intermediate at this point.

 

[00R-Gundam]

Writing kanji looks intimidating with all the small lines, if writing them will help me grasp it better so be it, ill bite the bullet.

 

[quisquiliae]

Writing kanji looks intimidating with all the small lines, if writing them will help me grasp it better so be it, ill bite the bullet.

Once you understand the radicals and the basics of stroke order they make a lot of sense, they'll stop being a bunch of lines and will start being a group of radicals you recognize even if you haven't seen that specific combination before. You can start writing them as big as you like, just try to keep them proportional. I print out 20x20 genkouyoushi paper and use that, any size will do it just helps to have a guide, graph paper works as well. Japanese is monospaced so everything should take up a cell of equal size, ｔｈａｔｓ ｗｈｙ ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ ｌｏｏｋｓ ｌｉｋｅ ｔｈｉｓ ｒｅｎｄｅｒｅｄ ｗｉｔｈ ａ ｊａｐａｎｅｓｅ ｆｏｎｔ.

If you don't like writing and it makes you dread studying Japanese don't feel like you have to force yourself. Unless you're under some obligation to learn it, you should do what makes it fun and motivates you to keep learning. There are people, probably plenty of them, that have learned to read and speak Japanese at a high level while rarely, if ever, writing Kanji. I just think it's something that helps a lot in the long term.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

There are people, probably plenty of them, that have learned to read and speak Japanese at a high level while rarely, if ever, writing Kanji.

To back up this guy, and while I have not learned Japanese at a high level yet, I know a decent amount of Kanji and I can write like two of them. I learned them by learning how to type them and then lots of repetition. That said, my wife cannot learn that way and has to write them.

I think for me, the hardest part of Japanese so far hasn't even been Japanese. Its been learning techniques that allow me to learn. I don't know if @00R-Gundam is American or not, but American Schools do not teach students how to acquire knowledge. They teach Americans how to temporarily regurgitate information for tests. So for me, I really feel like the first two to three months of learning was just trying different shit to see what worked for me.

 

[00R-Gundam]

To back up this guy, and while I have not learned Japanese at a high level yet, I know a decent amount of Kanji and I can write like two of them. I learned them by learning how to type them and then lots of repetition. That said, my wife cannot learn that way and has to write them.

I think for me, the hardest part of Japanese so far hasn't even been Japanese. Its been learning techniques that allow me to learn. I don't know if @00R-Gundam is American or not, but American Schools do not teach students how to acquire knowledge. They teach Americans how to temporarily regurgitate information for tests. So for me, I really feel like the first two to three months of learning was just trying different shit to see what worked for me.

Same, i was figuring out the method and how would i tackle the different topics. Ultimately i decided to game-fy it. Which has worked for me and keeps me invested since i noticed that one of the things that many people crack under is having the commitment to keep practicing learning. Mind you im learning by myself and at my pace since im sadly a busy kiwi. Something that i do to practice is that i look at my favorite media, turn on Japanese sub and try to read the sentences as best as i can and understand and it feels rewarding when i actually read it right and know the context of the sentence. Small nitpick but ever since i started it has become clear that some translations are just way off mark or miss the context so its kinda weird for me now when i know what they said in Japanese but the subs dont reflect that.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

To back up this guy, and while I have not learned Japanese at a high level yet, I know a decent amount of Kanji and I can write like two of them. I learned them by learning how to type them and then lots of repetition. That said, my wife cannot learn that way and has to write them.

I think for me, the hardest part of Japanese so far hasn't even been Japanese. Its been learning techniques that allow me to learn. I don't know if @00R-Gundam is American or not, but American Schools do not teach students how to acquire knowledge. They teach Americans how to temporarily regurgitate information for tests. So for me, I really feel like the first two to three months of learning was just trying different shit to see what worked for me.

Schools in Canada also do the same shit as well. I forget subjects and topics I don't care about because of this learning method. So learning Japanese during the first few months was really torture for me about a year ago. The American school system and the way it is designed to look like a prison whilst forcing people to regurgitate psychological warfare material encourages children to take refuge in the brain rot traumatized about their existential crisis of being "bad".

Writing kanji looks intimidating with all the small lines, if writing them will help me grasp it better so be it, ill bite the bullet.

Your hand will get used to writing all this when you write them enough. Once you see familiar symbols. It will make learning much smoother. genkouyoushi paper will help you keep the precision of the Kanji.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

I own this Kanji Dictionary and it has really helped me understand the Kanji and the meanings behind them. It gives you all the essential characters and compounds and even if you find a Kanji or compound that doesn't appear in the book. You'll likely get the meaning of them anyways because it deconstructs them by many different radicals.

These books are also really good if you wanted to learn to read and write Kanji as well and is very essential if you want to learn Kanji with it's Kana compounds.


In my experience, Japanese starts off hard and confusing, but after all this, it's a breeze and is practically one of the easiest languages to master once you get the essential basics down. And it's only gonna continue to get easier though with a few obstacles in the way, so expect that (Much like a silver price chart where the price of silver continues to rise long term but sometimes drop a little).

Learning Japanese also makes agglutinate languages like Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, etc, much easier and also makes Mandarin and Korean much easier as well.