Japanese Langblr

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

So I want to pass on a piece of advice that has stuck with me for years. I don’t actually remember where I heard it.

*there is no bad motivation to learn a language*

if you're in the US or Canada and interested in learning a language using a free app please get a library card and download MANGO. it's very good and extremely free with a library card (there are many public libraries and universities using the service, so make an account and use the search feature here to find out if there's one near you).

mango currently has 72 available languages and dialects (that's right! different courses for french or canadian french! spanish or latam spanish!). it's set up basically like an audiobook with text. the idea is that the narrator explains the words while you read, and you repeat after them or say the translation out loud when prompted. there's a daily review where you go through flashcards. you can also use the flashcards at your leisure and create your own. at the end of each chapter there's a listening comprehension quiz and a reading comprehension quiz. i cannot emphasize how effective this all is. and it's free with a card.

if you're not in the US or Canada and/or looking for something more like duolingo (don't use duolingo btw tldr they fired translators and replaced them with "ai"), then try BUSUU! it only has 14 languages atm but the lessons are really descriptive and effective. it also has a feature where you can correct other people's open-ended speaking/typing exercises. you set your fluent languages, and exercises by people learning those languages will appear in your feed for you to correct. you can even add others as friends! and, much like duolingo, it has a streak and leaderboard system for you to strive for, minus the guilt-tripping owl.

busuu is free (you watch ads to unlock lessons and they're all skippable after like five seconds), although it also has paid premium/plus versions (i don't use the paid version—the language courses are available for free, and the ad system is Really unobtrusive).

So let the wheel decide your Japanese first-person pronoun

There's also Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, which is free and understandable.

Please note that I write about what works for me and share advice based on my own experiences. If you have a different opinion or if you use other methods, that's absolutely fine. Do whatever works for you.

Since some people asked me how I read books in my target languages, I would like to describe my way of reading in this post. I focus on reading for some time now and I'm very happy with my progress so far. This doesn't mean that I won't change a few things in the future (I'm constantly gaining experience and changing my learning style accordingly).

1. Choosing a book

Before I start reading, I have to choose an appropriate book, obviously. After trial and error I realized how important this step is. My ideal book is:

not too easy (I won't learn much)

not too difficult (if I can't follow at least the rough story I won't enjoy it)

interesting (motivation to read it)

I try to choose a book that is slightly above my level so that I can follow the story without looking up too many words but also learn new words. I don't need to understand everything, but I don't want to feel lost either. Balance is important.

2. Trying the first chapter

After choosing a book that seems to be appropriate, I try to read the first chapter (and sometimes the first two chapters, if they are short). I pay attention to things like:

Can I follow the story?

Is the story interesting?

Do I like the writing style?

If I can answer (most) questions like these with "yes", I continue reading the book.

Do I only understand single words or sentences here and there? Do I have no clue what happens? Then I put the book aside for now and choose an easier one. There's no shame in admitting that this book is too difficult at the moment. Deciding what I don't read is just as important as deciding what I read.

3. Reading

If the level of difficulty is okay, I start reading the book. In my experience, the first few chapters are always the hardest. I need time to get used to the writing style, the used vocabulary and the story. 

In the case of the japanese version of Harry Potter, the beginning was difficult because of the writing style. But after two chapters, I began to enjoy the story and so I continued. That's why I always try to read at least the first chapter. A book that seems difficult in the beginning can be very enjoyable once I've read enough pages. 

When I come across an interesting word or a sentence I like, I highlight it. I try to not highlight too much stuff, though. Two, maybe three words per page is usually my maximum. Enjoying the story is my number one priority. I can read several pages without highlighting anything, even though there are words I don't know. As long as I don't feel the strong urge to look up a word, I just continue reading. 

In many cases I can understand words from context and learn them over time just by seeing them again and again. That's why I don't look up words immediately. I wait to see if they come up more often.

After I finished one chapter, I look up all highlighted words and read the passages that contain these words a second time. This way, I can connect the meaning with the full context. I don't try to memorize the word; I just try to understand it in this particular context before I continue. 

Most of the time, I learn words unconsciously. If the book is easy enough, it's not so difficult to guess the meaning of certain words. While reading, I don't focus so much on words I don't know. I just focus on following the story. I may not always understand every detail, but as long as I can follow and enjoy the story, everything is fine. I learn so much by engaging with the language in a meaningful way and enjoying the content. Sometimes, I even forget that I am reading a book in a foreign language!

I have to add, that I'm already familiar with basic sentence patterns and that I have experience with reading books in my target languages. I finished the book "Remembering the Kanji" which makes it easier to guess the meaning of words. Knowing lots of kanji is a great advantage.

I have still a long way to go, of course, but this natural way of learning vocabulary may not work well at very early stages because you need a foundation first. After you are familiar with the dialogues and example sentences in your textbook, graded readers are a good choice in my opinion. Graded readers can make the transition from textbooks to easy books aimed at (young) native speakers easier.

Tip: One thing that helped me is to take a card, write down words I looked up and put this card into the book. When I read it a second time, I don't need to look them up again. Reading texts more than once can help to get more familiar with new words. Plus, writing helps me to remember words better. Reviewing them in their original context is much more enjoyable to me than reviewing them with flashcards. In the picture below you can see how my cards look like:

4. Enjoy!

I made enjoying books my number one priority. This is what helped me to make much more progress than before. All I need is enough reading material at the right level and a dictionary. As soon as I get absorbed in a book, I don't think about learning a language. I just want to enjoy the story. The more experience I gain, the better I become at understanding the language as a result. There's no need to force it or to hurry.

Polygloss has you describe an image in your target language so another player can guess it. It encourages creative answers. The game works for people of all levels — you can describe simple pictures or try your hand at wordplay.

If you are also learning Japanese and would like more practice for writing and reading in Japanese, this app is really nice! You yourself can decide how complex your sentences are (though you will get more points the longer they are) and even if your matched partner uses some words you don't know, it's usually still possible to tell which picture they are talking about. Which is exactly how you will improve your overall reading comprehension actually!!

How to Ditch Duolingo and Actually Learn Japanese

Not a name today, but a beautiful soap design! And it smells very nice too :)

喜 means joy, to rejoice, or to take pleasure in. It’s read よろこ.ぶ, よろこ.ばす, or キ. The radicals are 十 ten, 豆 bean, and 口 mouth. Because what makes you happier than 10 beans in your mouth?

Double the 喜 and you get 囍, a common ornamental or calligraphy design in China. It's particularly common as a symbol of marriage, where the two 喜s represent the bride and groom. There are some beautiful examples even just on Wikipedia...

It also appears in a more abstracted style, like this.

And once you start to recognize that, you might notice it everywhere!

Before I moved to Japan, a lot of people told me I'd learn the language through osmosis. I believed them to an extent. But in this day and age, you can absolutely live in a country with almost no knowledge of a language, especially if your native language is English and there's an international community. I have an advantage when it comes to learning Japanese over someone who doesn't live in Japan because I see kanji, hear/use certain expressions and have opportunities to speak to native speakers every single day. But I have to make the effort. I have to stare at kanji on signs with a loading sign over my head as try to recall the reading/meaning. I have to ask my friends to correct my shit grammar. I have to bumble my way through awkward conversations instead of shying away from them. I have to actively listen the beginner level podcasts/comprehensible listening videos that I've actively searched out, not just put them on as background noise and hope the words I hear just fall into my brain.