Let me add to this, watch learning content for subjects you enjoy! Love astronomy? there are two robot sounding girls to explain it to you. Love cats? there’s millions of robot sounding girls on youtube talking about cats in japanese! Love history about World war 2? Well, maybe can’t help with that.
I jest. But really, watch content you enjoy watching and have interest in already, that isn’t just mother’s basement jp. this is really helpful for learning more specialized language too. My wife recommends VAIENCE for science stuff, and I agree.
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Lots of great advice here. The one that resonated the most with me was about pacing and building a solid foundation.
In my case, I had to come around to the idea that it’s fine moving through a textbook slowly as long as I’m still getting something out of it and supplementing that with other ways to study and immerse. At first I felt like my teachers weren’t moving fast enough. But now I actually prefer this because I can do a first pass on something advanced and then shore it up in class later. Not saying it’s the most efficient way for everyone, but it’s worked for me.
Somebody said on these forums before that one way to approach language learning is as a messy, non-linear process. I wouldn’t have thought that described me, but I’m finding out that it does.
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This massively depends on when andhow you used Duo. I’m currently on section 4 of 5 and it’s an amazing complement to BunPro at mid N3 level as it shares a huge chunk of vocab and grammar. I also use it mostly as a series of Japanese language puzzles as a warm-up/down 15 minute chunk around BunPro and/or actual study, which I usually do before I watch/listen to an hour or so of Japanese content. Which is a pretty effective way to use it I think.
As with most tools:
- It’s constantly evolving and changing
- It’s useful in its right place
- Everybody is different and DL has a very gentle on-ramp for new learners that gets steeper much more gradually than traditional study routes, or even BunPro does
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“Learning channels in English with TONS of sample sentences of varying difficulty, especially with Japanese subtitles included.”
I think I’ve got the other areas covered. Do you happen to have any recommendations for channels like this?
I wish I practiced listening more much earlier on when I was around N5 level. I also wish I went straight to vocab instead of kanji. I can learn the kanji in context that way.
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Beginner:
Intermediate:
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@xeyk1 these two are great examples
One thing you have to avoid is rolling around in N5/N4 suggestions forever. Sometimes hearing it a different way helps, but if you’re listening to the explanation of あなた for the 100th time, stop yourself and get back to your SRS 
If you like video games, https://www.youtube.com/c/GameGengo is another option, and though not fully inclusive of all material, he covers N2/N1 points.
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Game Gengo is great! He has a… let’s say less than stellar accent, but the content is top notch, the videos are well made, informative and entertaining.
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Satori Reader. I love it. I was going to say that maybe you couldn’t use it really early on in your journey… but I think you could actually, as long as you can read hiragana, you could turn furigana on for everything.
Anyway, I was getting very bored of studying and Satori Reader has made ‘studying’ enjoyable (the inverted commas are because you’re not really studying like you would with a textbook, you’re reading story).
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THanks for this!!! x
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That you can start again. I’ve re-started Bunpro over four times, and I don’t mean from scratch, just picking up from where I left off. Surprised how much stuck since its been over three months since the last time I’ve used the site, yet I mastered over 100 words today alone, which means it’s been months since I’ve since seen those words, yet Bunpro’s method works for actually learning the site’s content. You can stop when life gets hectic and continue when life eases up, there’s no reason to punish yourself or feel like you somehow failed and need to get a fresh start learning from scratch.
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Agreed. There is so much you retain. Yes we beat ourselves for what we are always missing, but you never really start from zero.
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Japanese Ammo no Misa is probably one of the main reasons I continued learning Japanese as more than just a ‘learn a few phrases’ thing. I remember google returning one of her videos as a result to my query about how to say something in Japanese. It was, coincidentally, the original X は Y です video. Honestly her videos were good back then, but she has improved by leaps and bounds since then. I can’t recall with absolute certainty, but I’m sure her older videos didn’t have much by way of the subtitles including Kanji and color coding.
edit: I just went back to check and good gracious that was 9 years ago! I didn’t start serious study until much later, but watching those few vids definitely planted a seed that would eventually bloom. Thanks for unlocking that core memory.
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I wish I had started studying Kanji on day 1, or at least after learning kana. I was going to start after finishing N4 grammar, but I ended up only starting after finishing N3. My reasoning for delaying kanji was that I wanted to learn vocabulary by sound, but I don’t think that’s a great reason. I think you still learn sounds from studying kanji, and you’ll be able to learn the vocabulary faster if you know kanji.
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An author might use hirigana, katakana or kanji for the same word in their writing; they’re not being inconsistent, they’re probably trying to emphasize something (or not).
Just deal with it and don’t get annoyed.
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I wish I knew that rushing does work for some people. One of those people is me, because I truly lack the ability to pace myself in anything. So how do I deal with burn out? I let it happen. I rush through as much content as I can with the only goal being to be familiar with it, then sort of lose it a bit later during burnout, then come back and rush it more thoroughly the next time. A lot of stuff will still be remembered. Other stuff will become reinforced in other ways (thanks, anime). And then you pick up the stuff you forgot.
The point for me is just to get to the point of recognition, then let immersion take the work out of remembering what the heck something even means, anyway.
It’s not foolproof, but for a person who cannot pace themselves, it can work (as long as you keep coming back), and it means native content isn’t an endless sea of “I have never heard any of this before in my life, help”.
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I wished I knew how helpful it is to learn kanji stroke order and stuff much earlier. I started late and reached around 2000 learned words before I even thought about wanting to learn kanjis stroke by stroke and by their readings. Now I’m cruising through and things are much easier to remember after two months of dedicated kanji study starting from my 6th month journey up till now(the 8th month of JP learning). Also if possible I would’ve liked it better if I knew how much just jumping right into the deep waters(immersing to stuff you like, in my case its novels) is much better than not at all. As it really is helping me out a lot. Even if at first, trying to immerse using online novels felt like bumping myself into a wall. But now I’m almost 4 months into just purely reading the same novel(currently 7 chapters in), and I felt like its a massive improvement and a big motivator being able to weave words together into something that felt tactile in my imagination. I’ve always wondered what it would’ve been like if I started 2 months earlier alongside my grammar studies.
(I tried mangas and animes but I never actually liked them in the end. So I just went for the novels I’ve always wanted to read in Japanese that I’ve read in English before. There are lots of people that can help you out as there are many other advanced learners out there in the JP learning community that are willing to spend time and answer everyone’s questions as long as you honestly try to understand things and are attempting to search for the simpler answers on your own.)
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This also works for me. I love the ‘rush and reset, rush and reset’ process.
Nice post!
I actually had a solid foundation from the beginning because I took small-group lessons with a man from Japan. He helped with pronunciation and emphasized becoming conversational, so moving to Japan was way easier for me than it is for most people.
There are really only 2 things that I wish I would have done earlier in my journey, especially since I’m now living in Japan:
- focusing way more on vocabulary than grammar
- The reason I say this is because, even though it’s cool to have an ability to put sentences together, when I start to talk about really deep subjects, I start to get lost because I simply don’t have the vocabulary. Meanwhile, I have a friend whose accent is really bad but because he grinded vocab for so many years, he can keep up with conversations no problem.
Of course, I wouldn’t recommend neglecting grammar, but the more words you know, the more you can pick up on. Grammar only gets you so far.
- I wish I would have consumed more Japanese media.
I spent too much time trying to study so I could understand what I was watching rather than finding something at my level to watch for the sake of exposure. NHK has an online portion of their site called お家で学ぼう, composed of various TV programs. They have their shows categorized by level, from kindergarten all the way to senior high school. If I would have spent time on a site like that, even if I had to watch the baby shows, I would have learned a lot more applicable grammar and vocabulary as well as possibly learned more about Japan in general earlier in my journey before I got to Japan.
Hope this info is useful to somebody.
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