If you could give 'Just starting Japanese' you one piece of advice, what would it be

Japanese
#203

To High school me: class is not the goal. Here is anki. (RTK deck and All genki vocab deck) The goal is to learn Japanenes, not pass the test. It’s called “self study”. Now turn off those English subtitles on Netflix and do your best! Also, that was back in the hey day of “All Japanese All The Time”.

College me: More listening practice! And, unfortunately, reading along is still reading. Turn off those Japanese subtitles.
Don’t stop studing after passing N5! Join a tea circle or anime club or something besides playing on your phone and actually make friends. This would’ve been a good time to buy Jalup or Bunpro if it exists I think Subs 2 srs was created around this time.(2015?)

First Job: Your job is boring, and your boyfriend is worse. Join a club or networking events to find new ones. And listen to Japanese podcasts at work. Hustle is a lie.

To me now: the road to hell is paved with “about” you spent the last /hour/ giving Japanese advice when you have 200 reviews due!
Do your SRS then go watch a Japanese Lets Play on YouTube. Shoo!

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#204

(Oh Sweet. I found such a thing on Reddit. Parentheses are my own thoughts and not compiled from Reddit)

Advice:
Step 1: lea ひらがな and カタカナ
Step 2: go through kanji Damage (the one I used), RTK or Wanikani any kanji app until you feel stuck. Learn 5 to 10 kanji a day.
Step 3: 50% of your time to Japanese fun. Play a Japanese phone game, watch Netflix/YouTube in Japanese. You won’t understand. The important part is it is fun
Step 4: go through ATJ Kanji transition (the one I used) or https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782
Or
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2141233552
For vocab
Step 5: go through the genki Textbook, 5 pages a week. Do the work book exercises one week later to practice remembering (If you are using Bunpro, replace work book exercises with Bunpro)
Your vocab should be ahead of genki (or Bunpro) so you know all the vocab words in the Example sentences
At this point you would be N4, or as much Japanese as a Japanese Major in college. Getting to this level took the author (and me) 3 years. If you actually are taking the N4 do Kaizen Master and old JLPT tests to practice test taking specificly
Step 6
Now your 50% of ‘study time’ is spent looking up new words you come a cross while reading Japanese. In a Japanese dictionary.
The r/LearnJapanese guide cautions you to not add to many vocab words. Ask yourself “is this word important to me” before you put it in anki
And when making this transition
If you understand 80% of the words, it /feels/ like you understand nothing at all
95% of the words and you got a 50/50 shot at answering multiple choice reading comprehension questions.
98% of the vocab before you pass reading comprehension test.
(There’s 30 links next of where to practice reading and listening to Japanese. I used https://animecards.site/ guide in conjunction with tazumoto ren’s on how to add sentences from anime which is free and Item Store - Japanese Level Up which costs $300 for 9,000 Example sentences with definitions written in Japanese and the first few chapters of 30 manga with native Audio. )

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#205

My advice to myself would be to stop studying and restudying things you already know to get them “perfect”. The me from ten years ago all the way to 2022 wasted such a colossal amount of time on that, it is unbelievable.

Now I keep moving forward even when things are shaky. The key is just not to be scared.

You’ll confirm the stuff you’re shaky on later. I promise.

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#206

Now I’m somewhat far kinda in my journey (though not great at reading yet unfortunately) , my advice to myself would be stay calm. I always was motivated but constantly angry whilst studying lol. If I just was able to stay composed and know I’ll get somewhere, it would have been much easier of a journey in Japanese.

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#207

Anger sure is a nasty manifestation of anxiety, I’d know. It can be like that, you start out bright eyed and bushy tailed, and then the “oh no… when will I actually GET somewhere?” sinks in.

I could’ve done to be kinder to myself as well, given that learning Japanese as a monolingual English speaker is a long way off learning something like Italian, and it’s normal to take longer with it (much longer).

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#208

TLDR: Be consistent every day; 5 minutes is better than nothing. Kanji is important but general frequency vocab lists can help progress EVERY aspect of learning because without the vocab, learning grammar is harder. Don’t be afraid to fail, and if you are fail early.

I would have told myself to keep going and try not to take such long breaks between studying streaks. There was a 2-3 year gap where I did nothing. You don’t know just how much you don’t know until you come across it but even doing 1% of effort every day will land you in a place 30% better in a month.

After kana, I initially focused on kanji and worked on it heavily while basically ignoring grammar apart from half the Genki I book and general vocab. I got to level 10 in Wanikani three times because I kept reverting levels due to 600+ review queues. I didn’t think to study vocabulary outside of WK like specific N5 lists or just the general top 2k words. Instead of speeding through levels it would have been better to do the radicals, kanji, and vocab for the current level before moving on. It also helped to solidify the kanji’s meaning and readings for that level too.

When I first started Bunpro, I didn’t have as much vocab as I thought. So instead of learning the grammar in the example sentences and how it worked with everything else I had to figure out and learn the entire sentence at the same time. It slowed down my understanding of the foundational N5 grammar points to where I stopped learning new grammar. Cure Dolly also helped immensely.

Lastly, fail early and don’t be afraid to do so. I taught English in Japan for 9 months and on my first day, being picked up at the airport by my boss/landlord and her two kids (4f and 6m) I accidentally said さわてください instead of すわてください which is basically “please touch [me]” instead of “please sit down” to her daughter in the car. Figured nothing could be worse. We had a good laugh.

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#209

use speed focus add on for anki to make reviews faster. making anki reviews take less than 6 seconds per card rather than over 10 speeds up reviews so much. Its pretty easy to getting used to answering anki cards quickly, and its ok to fail cards more often as long as you do it quickly

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#210

I first started in high school in the 90s, so I didn’t have a huge number of options anyway. There was no way I was going to learn plain form first or do any real immersion practice. But I wish I’d spent more time talking to teachers/professors outside of class and asked for extra/individual practice. Now I’m paying money on italki for what they would’ve given me for free.

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#211

I’d tell myself not to spend so much time trying to figure out the ‘perfect’ method for language learning. Everyone has their own opinions and what works for you is different to what works for others. It is time wasted that you could spend on actually learning and using the language.

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#212

My study strategy is to spend an hour watching videos about how to learn Japanese, followed reluctantly by five minutes of practice

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#213

Lol, this really resonates. It’s called ‘micro-work’ (or I guess ‘micro-studying’ in this case) - you spend more time thinking about how to work than actually working… a common trap amongst software engineers in my experience

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#214

Study kanji along side beginner textbooks, learning 500+ kanji in the first 6 months after restarting my Japanese learning. Even though I had knowledge from high school, I had forgotten a lot of kanji since I didn’t study for about 5 years. But studying kanji separately on the side made the transition to harder material substantially easier. It also felt much more rewarding to me because I was able to actually read a lot more Japanese. Even with just 500 kanji, I think you’d be amazed at how much you could comprehend on a daily basis. By no means are you fluent, but you’d definitely be able to read a lot of signs or understand basic everyday things. You’d probably be able to read 駐車場, 危険, 到着, 禁止 ect.

For learning kana, I recommend playing a memory game. Similar to what kids play, that helped me learn kana so fast and easily.

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#215

Im so confused by this though. Instead of spending 6 months on 500 kanji you could have spent it on 500+ vocabulary meaning you’d know 500 words + recognise the kanji from them as well

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#216

I thought they meant along side the beginner textbook as in focused time on Kanji appearing in the vocab lists… Maybe I just read it that way because that’s what I did so I’m biased ʕ⁠ ⁠º⁠ ⁠ᴥ⁠ ⁠º⁠ʔ

#217

After a bit more studying and studying studying, I would tell myself to focus more on vocab. I fell into the trap of thinking I need to know every kanji. while yes, it is indeed helpful to know the gist of it, if i had put time into studying vocabulary, i would be much better off as of right now. After 2 years of study, I’m about n3 grammar, n2 kanji and like n4 vocabulary. at least better spread the study.

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#218

It’s the difference between learning that biology means the study of life, and learning that bio means life and ology comes from logos and it means the study of things.

The first gives you access to one word. The latter will let you more easily learn what something like what abiogenesis or psychology means without have to look them up.

The first is useful for particulars, and if you learn enough you may detect the patterns, or you could learn the patterns themselves without reference to particulars, or you could do both for the best of both worlds.

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#219

But thats not accurate. You learn kanji whilst also learning that word. You will see it over and over in your srs while srsing that word. Wanikani doesnt teach writing kanji iirc which is probably the only real way to have the best visual imagery of kanji if you needed it. Just looking at that kanji seperately with no real use isn’t effective imo when you could learn a word + see 2 or 3 kanji in that word and naturally recognise it faster.
Not to mention you’ll get readings memorised naturally that way + meanings you can infer from vocab definitions

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#220

There is something to be said for learning kanji on itself and the patterns that appear within them. @Sidgr comparison to ‘logos’ is actually quite accurate. Japanese and the readings of kanji share a ridiculous amount of common patterns that carry their meanings across several different words, just like Latin. This holds true for both onyomi and kunyomi.

Think of something like じゅん. There are so many kanji that use this reading, and they almost all mean ‘appearing in a sequence’, or ‘obeying a pattern’.
準 ‘follow suit’、旬 ‘sequence of days’、純 ‘unaltered’、准 ‘in line’、巡 ‘following a route’、遵 ‘following a rule’、順 ‘sequence’、淳 ‘pure’、殉 ‘following an ethic’.

Learning words is certainly not a bad method. But it won’t help you really realize what readings are usually doing by themselves, which is pointing out a specific underlying meaning like languages such as latin used to do. When you learn the kanji and the general meaning of the readings, you can get good at deciphering the meaning of new words you’ve never even heard before, or of kanji you’ve never seen before.

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#221

漢字が怖いさえ、せめてもっと早くひらがなとカタカナを学ぶべきだ。ローマ字は日本語の勉強を必ず難しさを上る。

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#222

It is accurate. That is exactly how kanji work.

Depends on what you mean by learn kanji.

We are not advocating learning Kanji in a vacuum, just that there is merit in studying them as a topic in an of themselves. My analogy to etymology in English is completely actuate because it is the same mechanism.

If you know that pan means bread and co means together, then a word like companion makes more sense because it is literally the people together with whom you eat bread.

Can you understand the word without that, certainly; however, your understanding is depended.

The inverse is not true, by knowing companion solely, you would not come to understand that pan means bread, you may come upon the fact that co means together, as that is a very frequent prefix.

For example if you know the following:

電圧 : voltage
威力 : power, might, authority

It’s not deducible what 威圧 means.

In this scenario you “know” four kanji but you do not get the combinatoric advantage of that higher number.

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