Recommended learning resources

Recommended source of the day is the 眠れなくなるほど面白い book series. (Level- High intermediate to advanced)
This is a series of books covering a gigantic range of topics in a presentable and easy to digest manner. An amazing way to pick up a lot of functional vocabulary.

This is a hugely popular series in Japan, but is also available for download from the Google Play book shop as e-books. Think of these as half way between a kid’s book and an academic text book. They are made to be understood. In the series there are books on Kanji, weight lifting, stargazing, computers, Chinese three kingdoms, biology, food, nature… Pretty much anything you can think of.

This is the only book series I recommend that is ‘outside’ of the novel/fantasy spectrum. If you purely want to build vocab in a specific field and have a good time simultaneously, this series is your jam.

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For today I have updated this previous post, as I have added new content. Being that N3 is the first level that takes a massive leap in vocabulary and the expectations on students, I have decided to split the vocabulary into 2 parts. Part 1 of N3 is now available for download. Note that both the original English, and the 100% Japanese versions are both available.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1joX75kc4Ws4GjElLpv4dxWbFyjHckgI6

At the moment I have up to N1 and then 6 more ‘additional’ lists that are comprised of about 1200 words each. I aim to have these all available in both English and Japanese eventually. The ‘additional’ lists came purely from my immersion in Japanese and should be taken with a grain of salt. Although I did try to immerse in a wide variety of content, whether these words will be useful for you or not will be up to you to judge. Also, I included a lot of slang, swear words and crude words in the ‘additional’ lists, as I feel that those kinds of words (though they should not be used) are equally as important for understanding.

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These are a bit too high level for me, bought 眠れなくなるほど面白い 図解 大人のための日本語と漢字 because I have more than enough coinson bookwalker, and hope to be able to read it soon, but am putting it on the sidelines for the moment.

Also, thanks for the new files on your google drive! They are great as always!

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Once you are able to go through it at reasonable pace you will really enjoy it! They are really well written books! The one you bought is one of my favorites. It has so much interesting Info on how the Japanese language developed and why certain changes were made along the way

Recommended source of the day. Sambon Juku. This guys channel is much similar to 日本語の森, but is a little bit better for beginners (also great for advanced learners). The pace he speaks at, and his perspective towards many grammar points is really unique and easy to understand!

While all of the videos are in Japanese, they are superrrr easy to follow along with, as he repeats important words and speaks very clearly. This is the ideal channel for anyone that wants to even think about trying to adjust their study to ‘Japanese focused’, rather than relying on English sources. Thanks goes out to @Pushindawood for this one. While I did not use it when I was initially learning, I definitely wish I had. I probably could have jumped into monolingual a bit sooner!

Hope Y’all enjoy

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Recommended source for the day … spent the last few days making this. This is a monolingual N5 deck arranged in a way to support people wishing to slowly transition into monolingual Japanese. First time I have publicly released a deck so any feedback from anyone that ends up using them would be great.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1369107187

Unlike the word documents/PDFs that I have already made available, I have formatted this in a way that different meanings are displayed on separate lines, and additional separations are made to show the verb types, if the word can act as a prefix/suffix etc, to make reading as easy as possible.

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These look absolutely stellar! I’ll give them a bit of a run for a couple of days and give a proper reply then, but on first look absolutely amazing!

One potential change (seeing as you made this to help transition to monolingual) is to change the English sentence to a “hint”, this way you have to click to display the actual English, thus encouraging people to first attempt to understand the Japanese text, rather than just glancing at the English.

So, to be exact, this would mean changing the English sentence portion of the back template from :

{{Back lower English}}

to

{{hint:Back lower English}}

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I put the English in very small font to prevent people being able to read it accidentally. Basically you cannot read the English unless you really go out of your way to do it. For me that was enough, but your idea is good too! Let me know what you think after you give it a run.

Also let me know if anything is confusing about the card layout. There are a few things such as (*)appearing on some cards which may not make sense without adding a ‘user guide’ to the deck.

Edit: actually that is a really good idea. I will give it a test run tomorrow and then re-upload it. :blush:

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After giving them a test run over the last few days I have to say that I really like them. Though I already knew all but a few of the words well, I feel that being able to link them to a Japanese explanation has expanded my vocabulary a bit. Of course in such a short span of time the effects won’t be extremely profound, but I think that making this switch will pay off dividends in a couple of months time.

In regards to actual lay-out and the like, I like the simplicity of the cards. Don’t know whether it’s everyone’s cup of tea, but I find them great! I had implemented the ‘hints’ I talked about in a previous post myself, but I see on the Anki page that you have updated the deck the 15th, I take it due to this? Or was there another change?

The only thing I would think would be a good addition would be an overview of the formatting, either on the decks Anki Page online, or if needed on a separate explanation card within the deck itself. Because I’ll regularly figure out the meaning off certain items but promptly forget them and have to figure them out all over again. This will fix itself over time as I become more familiar with the deck, but for new users I think this would be a definite boon.

Just my two cents, thank you for making these and looking forward to the other Decks!

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Thanks heaps for the detailed review mate! Yep I already updated the hint thing you suggested and and going to write a detailed usage guide. I am glad to hear that they were your only concerns!

I may add the usage guide as an additional field on the card in the same way that the ‘hint’ works. So people can just expand it on a card by card basis if they quickly want to take a look. As you probably figured out though, most of them aren’t too hard to figure out by yourself, but it would be nice for people to not waste their time having to figure out those things themselves.
I will do the usage guide tonight and try to finish N4 as well :muscle::+1:

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That’s a really great idea, hadn’t thought of that option!

Looking forward to it :smile: Thanks again for doing these!

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https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1734960174

This is the next part in the monolingual decks. N4. Note that Anki had a major meltdown because I was changing tags and things so frequently that I had to make a new account. Thankfully my data was on a backup and I was able to transfer it to the new account. Both the N5 and N4 updated decks are on this page. The usage guide is still coming, as there are lots of symbols etc used on the cards. Here is what I have done so far on the usage guide if you get stuck on anything.

All cards usually contain the meaning on the same line as the list of folowing symbols. When you see a symbol on a line by itself, it means that this particular word class has several usages, you will almost also always see a list of numbers below this, meaning that all of the numbers are the same word class.

〈五〉 ごだん verb. Following line is the verb meaning.
〈下〉 いちだん verb. Specifically a しもいちだん verb. Following line is the verb meaning.
〈スル〉 する verb. Following line is the verb meaning.
(対) たい. Words following this marker are an antonym (or something similar) to the target word.
(派) は. Kana following this symbol indicate the various forms the word can be seen in, either as a noun or with helper verbs such as がる.
(補動) This is short for 補助動詞(ほじょどうし). This is the japanese version of ‘helper verbs’. This means that the following meaning is used when the target word is appended to the end of another word. Examples include ていく、てもらう、てくろ、てしまう、and similar words.
(尾) お Indicates that the target word is sometimes used as a suffix, in this case the information on this line will indicate the suffix meaning.
(類)
(ア) (イ) Similar to the 1, 2, 3 meaning number system, but rarely used by modern dictionaries. Mark indicates a different but related meaning.
〈ダ〉 Indicates that the word is a noun
〔俗〕 Indicates that the following word or expression is a slang, casual, or otherwise idiomatic usage of the target word.
▼ Indicates that the following word or kana is often seen in conjunction with the target word to creat a new meaning.
▲ Indicates another kanji which shares the same reading, often with a similar meaning.
* Indicates that the following information is important and should be noted. Usually it directly relates to the previous line. This may indicate when you can or cannot use the target word, or any special meanings.
〈感〉
〈名・ダ〉
〈形〉 Indicates a けいようし a word that behaves like an adjective in English
〈副〉 Indicates a ふくし. A word that behaves like an adverb in English.
〈(と)副〉 Indicates a word that takes the 助師 と. Usually onomatopoeic words.

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Amazing! Can’t wait to give them a test run. As always, thank you so much for doing these, I have found them incredibly useful already, and I’m sure many more people will thank you upon stumbling upon them! They’re all absolutely fantastic and the time and effort you are willing to spend on these speak greatly about you as a person!

Take as long as you need! Everything is appreciated, but I can only imagine the amount of work it’s taking to make all this. The amount you have written is already a great start, and it’s not too difficult to figure out anything else on the cards.

Again, thank you so much for doing these! Absolutely love them!

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Awesome, glad to hear you are getting good use out of them. I will try to make at oeast 100 new cards a day. So at that rate you can expect N3 in a week minimum 2 weeks maximum. From there roughly the same for N2 and N1.

I am actually learning a lot from them too. They are great for learning nuances or colloquialisms. Such as 殺す for 消す。Thats an easy example but it is good to have reinforcement for meanings like that, that those colloquialisms hold up in real Japanese.

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Newest resource here is N3 part 1 of the monolingual transition decks. Please check out the link below and as always, if there are any errors feel free to let me know. Note that the reason I am releasing N3 to N1 in 2 parts each, is due to the fact that I generally don’t like decks with over 1500 cards in them. This is a personal taste thing as I think it more enticing to set reasonable goals (below 1500 words) per deck. If you prefer to have entire N levels in a single deck, please feel free to combine the decks once the second part of each deck is available.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1968837079

Once again I hope this is useful! There were lots of super common and super useful words in this deck. I had a lot of fun making it and think it will be really fun for people that want to get a better understanding of Japanese in Japanese!

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You guys weren’t posting any good videos recently, so here’s something from me instead.

Really good and easy to understand channel by a japanese teacher. Videos are purely in Japanese, which is great for practice. Highly recommended for anyone around N2.

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Thanks for the post Kuro, looks like a good resource!

And here’s one more channel.

Youtube randomly recommended me this one out of the blue. But I guess it thought I must be japanese and interested in cooking, IDK :slight_smile:

But it turned out to be a surprisingly good channel with easy explanations and clear diction*. Though, you would have to learn quite a bit of cooking vocab in advance to be able to understand anything.

[*] also does anyone know what dialect is that? I’ve definitely heard this dialect before, but I can’t quite identify it

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This is actually a really good one for me. I was watching Terrace House just a few days ago thinking that I should study more Japanese food vocab. They talk about food quite a lot on that show hahah.

Has anyone been following the 日本語の森 daily live streams (9pm Japan time)? I think they are great, mostly been ~N2 grammar lately however I don’t have a chance to follow the chats. We even get some spontaneous karaoke singing entertainment. I’ll sometimes add BunPro lessons as I listen along.

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