Favorite learning tools

Japanese
#1

Hey ho,

I’m quite curious what learning tools (programs?) everyone is using.
Ofc most ppl will use (or at least heard) of anki, but what else is really helpfull in your eyes?

Personally I like Yomitan and I’m searching for something similar to “Yomininja” (or how to better use it lol). It can be pretty annoying to draw every kanji when I try to look up a new word. But for me Yomininja always tries to connect the kanji to the furigana next to it

But everyone is welcome to post anything else usefull :smiley:

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#2

Anki, Renshuu and Bunpro.
Renshuu is great. It has a lot of stuff that may not be initially apparent. Like I used to print kanji work sheets.
Bookwalker for reading digital light novels and manga.

I also have 4 Moleskine notebooks with all my grammar notes and quite a bit of kanji and vocabulary which I skim through from time to time.

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#3

JPDB is indispensable for me, it’s like a well polished Anki (I didn’t like Anki at all).

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#4

If you plan to work on native reading comprehension through games, textractor is a great tool. It’s a bit rough around the edges and only works for mostly text based games, but you can use it with a browser extension that puts your copied text into a browser window to translate on the fly with yomitan.

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#5

Anki is great for literally everything, but is a Bring Your Own everything app. I was using it until a year ago that I jumped to jpdb and then bunpro for grammar, but I still used it for uni exams because, let’s be honest, you won’t find an app to memorize Tomasulo’s Algorithm steps anywhere xD

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#6

I use https://www.kanshudo.com/ when I’m not sure about radicals in kanji I’m about to learn. Also it has pitch accents graphs for words and some more useful stuff. But it’s prity known thing.

Else is just Anki for kanji and words as well as Bunpro for the grammar

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#7

One of my favorite tools is Yomitan as well, and I like using Japanese Monolingual Dictionaries with it, with the English to Japanese ones being used as a backup resource.

What happens is that it leads you down a rabbit hole where you read a definition, which leads to another word you don’t recognize, which leads to another word you don’t recognize, and as you continue the process over and over again, you end up with multiple vocab points that have been contextualized through how the word is natively interpreted, instead of returning the closest equivalent English word, which won’t always 100% match up with the actual definition. It helps a lot in trying to figure out why a character would use one word, but not the other, and you start to learn that certain words aren’t really synonyms or antonyms.

Capture2Text is great as well, since you can capture the Kanji used in Manga/Light Novels to inspect what they mean if Furigana isn’t present.

Tying into Capture2Text, https://bookwalker.jp (with the language/region set to Japanese so that you can buy the books in Japanese) is fantastic, because it’s a legit source for Light Novels/Manga that also has high quality scans, so you can OCR using C2T on the page and quickly figure out what was said if you don’t recognize certain words. Sadly, if you use Capture2Text with this, you can’t yomitan the output, since it won’t be in your browser, but you can just use an actual online Japanese Monolingual Dictionary instead, like https://www.weblio.jp/

1 Like
#8

I use BunPro almost every day. My other go-to’s are Satori Reader and NHK’s Web News Easy and the iOS podcast app (mostly listening to Sakura Tips) . I used Miigi JLPT a lot too for a couple months before the July exam. Oh, and Bookwalker as someone else mentioned for manga.

I loved Anki for about year but eventually stopped because I wanted to create my own cards and it was taking way too long. Going to give JPDB another look after reading some of these comments. I currently use a dictionary app called Shirabe Jisho for flashcard practice. It’s easy to use but very limited. I probably need a new option heading into next year.

Other than that, I’ve got an entire shelf on my bookcase dedicated to textbooks. I had no idea I would take on so many materials and apps when I started studying Japanese a couple years ago!

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#9

I would strongly recommend asbplayer if anyone hasn’t heard of it — it allows one to add subtitles to any Japanese-language video or television show streaming on the internet. It is also free. The catch is that one must have the subtitle files already on your computer, of course.

I really enjoy using it to watch Crunchyroll but with Japanese subtitles instead of English ones, and I believe it also has the option to turn sentences you encounter — complete with audio — into Anki flashcards. Very convenient!

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#10

I tried using it once but I couldn’t find the hook for like 3 different visual novels. So I scrapped that :sweat_smile: but maybe the reason was bc I bought my games through steam…

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#11

Never heard of it before :see_no_evil: but I saw it’s AI based? Tbh I heard a lot of bad things about AI teaching languages (not only japanese)

#12

I love dictonarys with actually nativ definitions too :heart: sadly I still need to learn more vocabs before I feel I can somewhat effectively use it. but thanks for the recommendation I will bookmark it.

I buy books over book Walker too. I will check out your app later when I’m at home thanks :smiley:

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#13

All materials there look like made by hand of the human. I checked and they claim to have an ai that can personalize studies, but I think it has very little if has at all to do text models that people say can be bad in languages (I personally found chatgpt helpful in learning Italian, it’s just about being aware that it can lie).

For me it’s just grate tool as I said for kanjis’ radicals + pitch accent which are added by hands :hugs:

1 Like
#14

I was able to use it with steam games. If your game hasn’t generated any dialogue in a text box yet it won’t show up, so that might be it. Also make sure you are using x86 version for 32 bit games and x64 for 64 bit games.

It can also be a bit ambiguous as to what running program is actually the one you want, so that might have been your issue too.

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#15

I’ve been using HouHou SRS ever since I’ve finished WaniKani. It’s a free and offline dictionary with built-in SRS system that is just like WK. I’ve got over 3200 vocab items in there that are not taught on WK (you can filter by WK items, JLPT level etc.).

It also has the ability to use pronunciations from languagepod101, though that part hasn’t worked for me since the beginning of this year, still works on my Windows 11 laptop, though. I guess the problem is something with my main system.

Eitherway, it’s a great tool since it’s free and offline, so I have full control over my database and backups.

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#16

LanguageReactor → Yomitan → Anki. Just perfect workflow. I also mark in LanguageReactor the word I know so they become green, and orange the one I added in Anki but still don’t recognize at first. It really gives me a quick way to identify all words I still need to add/learn

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#17

Does anyone recommend any website to read manga in Japanese for free? Can be just old manga, kids manga. Trying to read more.

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#18

I like https://bilingualmanga.org - some of them even have OCR that works with yomitan. And often you can toggle between the English and Japanese version (if you want to quickly check your understanding).

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#19

I really love this one, both as dictionary and for vocab flash cards:

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#20

https://mangareader.to/ Most of the mangas have English and Japanese versions available for free

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