Any premade structured self study curriculum?

Japanese
#6

Hey all, thanks for taking the time to respond!
Sorry for not providing my learning journey details.

I have some of the basics down I would say.
I know basic stuff like numbers, telling the time, the easy pattern-following propositions, etc.
I’m 70% through the N5 grammar on Bunpro, but still don’t have a complete foundational grasp of the -te form, and know a few hundred words in terms of vocab. Close to 500 would be my guess.
I’ve previously been to Japan a few times, 16 months total, so I know a few everyday phrases and environmental context if you could call it that.

My goal would be to move to Japan for work someday, as I am currently studying tailoring.

When I learned English, I learned just enough to use google, and never went back to class after that. That is, looking stuff up in the dictionary and learning through immersion (Videos, movies, songs, reading.) I suppose that this is my favored way of learning, not actually studying but simply looking stuff up when needed.
This doesn’t help at my current level yet though, as I would be looking grammar and vocab rules up for hours each time I saw a new sentence.
I know that there are a lot of tools for watching anime and reading manga, but I’m not really into those so I haven’t tried those tools.

I’m the type of person that likes to fully understand a concept before I start using it. Not great in the beginning either, I know.
I was at a language school in Japan for a month back in '19, and we used Genki. They had a vocab section you had to study before class, then we used it during class, and you got some homework for the next day (in addition to new vocab).
This obviously hit all the posts as it included immersion; listening, speaking, etc. But I felt that it was very inefficient.
I’m more of a read grammar stuff for hours until it clicks kind of guy. And look up / learn vocab when needed (perhaps this is just based on my experience of those words sticking the best).
I tried Anki and got some 800 words in according to the stats, and some of them still stick, so it isn’t that it doesn’t work of course.

Currently, I use Bunpro and a bit of jpdb.io, but they both feel supplementary. Perhaps I’m looking for a book where I know that I’m at page 53 and tomorrow I have to read the next chapter, and once I’ve read the whole book I should have a good grasp of the language, either excluding or including vocab.
As I said, learning vocab on the fly is completely fine for me, as long as I know how to use it.

As for hyperfocus, which @albcasahu mentioned, once I get started and get into the zone I can go all day. I do this at the technical college where I am studying tailoring by using high-energy music. But sitting down and starting is the tough part.

On my current experience with Bunpro; I have reached a point where I can answer a question correctly on the first try, but I don’t know why it is the correct answer. I don’t remember the underlying grammar rule. This really bothers and demotivates me and it makes me feel like I haven’t learned it at all, despite it summing up my entire “understanding” of the English language.

What a rant. Hopefully, some of it might even be useful info. Thanks again.

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#7

In that case, you could just go through Genki more quickly (which is what I did, anyways), and use it almost like a more structured graded reader. You could also do the “going through it quickly” method with the Marugoto courses I mentioned before and skip the parts you think are inefficient.

Speaking of graded readers, you could get some and start using this method from the beginning. I know there are a lot of free resources online, but personally, when I started, nothing would work for me until I started with these (I specifically started at level 0). Sure, they are a little bit silly, but you feel proud of yourself when you finish and you actually learn. They are also short enough that you can read one story a day before bed (just to add some structure).

I’d say it takes just a little time to get used to the structure of Japanese and be able to know what to look up (vocabulary or grammar) when you are reading, and that’s what I like about textbooks at the beginning (who am I kidding, I love textbooks! So take this with a grain of salt), but you may already be at that level.

That said, if I could go back in time, this is what I would do: Marugoto courses (quickly) + graded readers (until I felt comfortable enough to jump to other sources that I like) + the Tango series for vocab (+ its Anki deck) + some conversation lessons using Italki or Cafetalk + writing in Japanese (maybe using the writing prompts from the courses) (use Bunpo-check to get some instant feedback) and getting real corrections on Journaly (or similar) or from a paid teacher (there are some teachers who offer this service on Cafetalk and it’s not expensive).

As I said, I love textbooks so I’d be happy to use them up to a very advanced level. In your case, I would add several check-in points throughout your path and be ready to leave the textbooks behind in favor of real immersion when you feel somewhat comfortable.

EDIT:
I forgot to mention another resource that, although expensive, might be worth a look. The resource in question is NativShark. Their lessons are short (which may be what you want), although the leveling is a bit weird, in my opinion. What’s more interesting to me is that they also use SRS for teaching vocabulary, grammar, and kanji within a sentence. They use recognition (reading and listening to a sentence and being able to recognize the meaning), as opposed to the active recall Bunpro requires. I use both and favorite one or the other depending on my objective at the time (I’m studying for the N3 at the moment, so I’m using Bunpro a lot more right now). That’s it. I hope it helps!

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#8

When it comes to being a bad student I am rarely challenged.
My method for keeping up with Japanese is as simple as it is complex.
Step 1. Maintain a routine for like a week, and get a feel for how hard things ‘feel’
Step 2. Miss a day
Step 3. Oh, $#!^ everything is 5x harder for like 3 days
Step 4. Never miss a day out of fear of repeating step 3

I tend to add new items by feel. If everything feels under control, push it a bit. If things are tough don’t.

And also, get to review pile 0 at least twice a day like 8 hours apart.

Good luck!

#9

Getting a plan helps so much.

I’ll share two helpful ones.

First is Refold’s Roadmap. Really nice to just get a good outline of how to study a language. I’ve deviated from the plans in some ways, but it was really helpful for me to read both the Simple version and the Detailed version. Once you read it, there’s a Japanese-specific version that you can find in their Discord. https://refold.la/simplified

Another great one to glean info from is this one. Lots of great resources and links within.

There are others out there that have also been helpful to me, but these are the two biggest.

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#10

No, this is great information. The short answer is that the kind of book/information you’re looking for is more readily available in Japanese. Bunpro is likely the closest thing you’ll get to actual grammar explanations in English.

What have you tried reading?
It is possible to just power through Japanese text to learn the information you want but it may not have the efficiency you are looking for. Maybe if you’re comfortable with a free tool like https://www.japanese.io, which allows you to paste text directly in their reader, it can reduce the inefficiency to acceptable levels.
(Have not used Japanese io personally)

#11

For this style of learning, I have two recommendations.

  1. Use jisho.org for looking up unfamiliar Japanese words and phrases. Not only use it, though, become skilled at its use in searching for different kinds of things: identifying Kanji, via the Radical Lookup feature; finding words/phrases that contain a specific kanji; example sentences; etc.
    There is an “advanced search options documentation” which you can always find if you click on the dropdown box on the left side of the search-text box, and follow the link at the bottom of the popup. If you get good at using these options, you can puzzle out at least the word-meanings from most sentences, even if you don’t know the grammar yet. It’s also very useful for seeing how one radical ‘behaves’ in various kanji, or how one kanji ‘behaves’ in various words/constructions, so that you can get a better feel for how different language components fit together.
  2. In addition, it would be very helpful to also have a browser plugin like “YomiChan” or “10ten Reader”, both of which allow you to pretty-much-instantly do a lookup of words/short-phrases from Japanese text in a webpage to show their dictionary definitions, pronunciations, kanji/radical compositions, pitch tones, etc.
    I say ‘in addition’ because I spent most of my time only using Jisho, and I got really good at it, but having that instant access to info from a plugin is just so convenient, it’s really worth it, IMO. But on the other hand, if I had only used a plugin (I happen to use 10ten Reader in Firefox, btw), then I would not have developed the ability to use Jisho’s very flexible search features, and I think I would have a more-disjointed understanding of how the various language components fit together. So, if you’re big on looking stuff up, I think it would be best to learn & use both.

[Although the above advice might seem like it is only focused on kanji and vocab, it is absolutely useful for learning grammar as well, if not simply for the fact that you will be able to take any sentence, parse out all the ‘vocab’ words, and see that whatever remains (including things like conjugations / parts-of-words) are the grammar parts. Knowing this, it becomes easier to identify the structural parts of sentences and not just see them as a bunch of ‘foreign’/unknown words]

I am very much like this as well. However, over the years, especially when I briefly worked as a tutor for students in math and science, I’ve come to realize a universal truth when it comes to learning: Our brains are literally learning machines, and while intellectually ‘understanding’ a concept can get one a good good general knowledge of a topic, it is no match for direct, concrete practice of the skills associated with the topic for getting a working knowledge of it. Whenever a student had trouble with something, IMO the most effective way for them to overcome that difficulty was to just practice it a few times (or several times, if they needed it). Pretty soon, their learning machine brains would just learn it. That’s what brains do! :sweat_smile:

So, relying entirely on ‘fully understanding a concept’ before you ever use can be, IMHO, a serious barrier to making progress. Best (again, IMHO) to just accept that ‘mistakes are inevitable’, and what’s more, ‘mistakes are fodder for your learning machine to learn from!’, so in fact, ‘mistakes are useful for learning!’ Thus, there should be no shame in trying out a concept before fully understanding it. Even if we mess up, it’s okay! Everyone makes mistakes, and indeed, one of the best ways to learn is to learn from one’s mistakes.

All that being said, I am still very much in the habit of trying to fully understand something before I use it. I’m just saying that I consider this more of a personal barrier I would like to (continue to) try to overcome. :sweat_smile:

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#12

Thank you for your thorough recommendation. I’ll definitely try it out.
I already tried the graded readers here on Bunpro and they were pretty good, but they are kind of hidden away and the computer is always a possible source of distraction, so physical books might be worth a try.
I’ll check out Marugoto and Tango!

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#13

Sadly I always lose all motivation when there is a massive backlog.
And I’m horrible at adding new stuff.
I think Anki adds it automatically though.

#14

As for your described interest/desires for learning grammar, I don’t have a perfect recommendation, but I do have one that might be (quite) useful for you (if you can put aside some slight aesthetic considerations for the sake of gaining some good intuitions around grammar), which is the Cure Dolly channel on YouTube (sadly the author has passed away, but the videos are still good of course):

Personally, I have gained a lot of insight into grammar through Cure Dolly’s explanations. She’s quirky, she’s opinionated, some people find her gratingly annoying, but I look past all that because IMO she has some really great insights that help learning Japanese grammar make more logical sense.

#15

Hey, thanks for the response.
I’ve tried the graded readers, which went fine, so I might pick those up again. And I have tried some “easy” / younger age mangas.
The problem, in the beginning, is knowing what is a word and what is grammar. Not knowing where to chop the sentence into words, particles, conjugations, etc. makes it a bit difficult.
But the reason why it takes a long time for me is that I don’t just accept the translation and move on, I want to understand the specific conjugations.
This is why I like the approach when studying vocab because you can still keep a flow going if you already know the grammar.
Japanese.io looks very useful. Thanks

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#16

Thank you,
Yeah I already use Jisho, but I could definately get better at using it. I’ll try out the plugins!
I already know that practice is what really progresses your ability. It is simply one of those things I keep forgetting. I’ll try to remember it next time and cut myself some slack.
I’ll check out Cure Dolly, I’ve seen it mentioned on here before but it was about a fairly high level grammar point.

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#17

As for things like conjugations, I would recommend this super-duper-handy pdf:

http://cghq.net/japanese/verbs/AMB_Japanese_Verbs.pdf
[Originally from: http://cghq.net/japanese/ (can also find a Japanese Counting chart there). Also shared to Wikimedia, and referenced on the page for Japanese verb conjugations.]

Studying this one 2-page PDF helped jump-start me from ‘muddled’ to ‘pretty confident’ pretty quickly. Now I use BunPro as practice to keep me constantly using different conjugations, and indeed more complicated word combinations.

#18

Check out her channel, and specifically look into her playlists section, as I believe she has at least one playlist that starts out at the basics and builds up. Of course she also deals with more-advanced grammar, especially when they happen to be tripping-up points for a lot of Japanese learners.

#20

Excellent post, encapsulates a lot of the main dilemmas when it comes to how to approach learning Japanese grammar as a foreigner.

On the slightly tangential topic of 文節 in English: I think that there are multiple things to consider for why English doesn’t quite have this concept. Firstly, English words tend to not obviously belong to a specific class just from the way it is written or said (in Japanese it is pretty obvious what word class a word is just from looking at it most of the time). Second, English nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs are “open classes”, meaning that new words can be added to these classes at any time, so classifying words can get a bit tricky, especially out of context (Japanese has far fewer open classes and so it is, again, far easier to categorise a “word”). Third, English has spaces which, on a “word” level, makes parsing relatively trivial. Fourth, the concept of “noun phrases” etc of course exists in English grammar (although maybe you don’t learn about this in school depending on where you are raised). Fifth, due to much of English grammar (and not just semantics or style) relying on word order, any grammatical analysis of an English sentence will heavily involve an analysis of word order rather than a grammatically “atomic” chunk like you might find in Japanese. Sixth, English also, of course, has the grammatical idea of clauses, dependent clauses, etc as well. (I probably should have put words, phrases, and clauses together in one point.)

I teach English to Japanese people and, honestly, it is very difficult to convey a coherent sense of English grammar from the Japanese “文節 perspective”. That also partly has to do with the fact that Japanese has case marking particles as well. As someone who teaches English and is learning Japanese I find the whole topic fascinating.

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#22

Wow, that’s awesome! I’m going to have to spend some time absorbing this.

As for me, I feel like there’s more resources to explain Japanese concepts than I’ll ever need, but very few resources to let me actually drill anything. The entire learning-Japanese-in-English scene is overwhelmingly all about SRS.

When there’s a grammar point I struggle with, I really just want a printable PDF worksheet with hundreds of exercises I can just sit down and grind through until I couldn’t forget it even if I tried. I did use Genki Study Resources for a while and it’s brilliant, but the UI isn’t nearly as nice as Bunpro. Anyway, I’m new on Bunpro and it seems like I’ll be trying to use the Cram feature sometimes.

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#23

It looks like you’ve gotten some really good answers! I also wanted to add (I haven’t read fully through each response since I initially posted, so I apologize if someone already recommended this!), as someone who has trouble starting maintenance of a routine, one thing that helped me was using the app shirabe jisho, creating personalized decks through the app, and then either setting an alarm to study just for like 5 minutes at a specific time each day, or doing it whenever I could/remembered throughout the day, and then sloooowly but surely adding more time to that. It has a lot of vocabulary, lists of most common vocab, lists by JLPT, lists by category, and a good amount of grammar as well. I found it way more manageable than a full online program or anything since it was so simple and I could literally just do it on my break at work or if I was getting driven somewhere or something since it was literally at my fingertips. The second I remembered it during the day, I could start working on it. It has an SRS system you can use as well! Super handy. Again, hope this wasn’t redundant, and I’m glad you’re getting some good recommendations!

#24

I think I’ve seen that method of dividing the sentence before, but it isn’t really something that is common to see. Kind of like romaji once you get above self-introductions.
That’s my impression at least.

I have actually also picked up on it passively already by noticing that those divisions line up with where Japanese speakers put any pauses they might add in a sentence and adding a pause in other places sounds off/weird.

When you say “N-level “grammar points” beyond the basics” what do you mean?
Is it spread over N5-N1 or is it just the lower N-levels?

#25

Yeah I had it back when I used iPhone, but I switched to android as it allows me to block facebook, reddit, and mindless scrolling apps like that.
It isn’t on android sadly.
I use the web version dictionary though!

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#26

It is not common about learners cause they are not usually not taught this. If you mean natives, then you probably won’t see adults do this but children up to middle school would be tested on their ability to parse a sentence into 文節.

Like you have noticed, it is present in natural speech and not adhering to it when pausing will sound weird. In a way we could say that it is one thing that makes natural Japanese sound natural.

N2 and N1 are basically all, if not all, common patterns or vocabulary. They are useful of course but they are not grammar in terms of understanding systematic rules or characteristics of the language.

N5-N4 is technically where you are suppose to learn the basics but it depends on your resource. Bunpro teaches a lot more grammar than Genki, which is why some learners notice things “clicking more” after reading the explanations on Bunpro. But, Bunpro also has to cater to the seemingly majority of learners who prefer memorization over understanding.

edit for clarity: By basics I mean things like case-marking particles, other particles, how to change a verb to past tense, etc. This is usually all covered in N5, N4, and a bit of N3.

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#27

I see. This is all great information, it really helps with getting an overview.
Thanks!

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