Learning How to Learn Japanese

I wish that people referring to Japanese as &quot;the most difficult language to learn...&quot; could add the important caveat &quot;...among major global languages&quot;. There are thousands of languages spoken on Earth, and some of them involve complexities that would daunt speakers of English or other Standard Average European languages more than Japanese. As just two examples, I remain daunted by the morphology of Skolt Saami and Nganasan, and Japanese’s inflexion looks easy by comparison.<p>I am learning Japanese now, actually, and the hardest part is the writing system, but that is really just a matter of rote memorization. (I already learned Chinese years ago, mastering the kanji is just repeating the same process of flashcards, except with the need to learn two readings for most characters and not just one.) Rote memorization of glyphs is something open to anyone with adequate time, but matters of phonology&#x2F;morphology&#x2F;syntax might ultimately defeat a learner regardless of how much time they throw at the problem.

I&#x27;m taking the mostly immersion approach to language learning. I just watch hours of Japanese gaming youtubers and whenever a word starts to stand out, I look it up if it wasn&#x27;t obvious from the context. I estimate that I learn a new word every 2 hours of content<p>I looked into traditional methods, I also know about Antimoon, AJATT, MIA, RTK, WaniKani, Anki&#x2F;SRS, etc. But I&#x27;m too low in conscientiousness to stick to a plan, and I burn out on SRS and mnemonics after about 500 cards, even with reasonably low card rates. The mnemonics become a frustrating scramble of meaning in my head.<p>Just last night I learned the words for mirror and crime with almost no effort and I still remember them today. That&#x27;s two words learned, both only encountered once, in context. I even have the image in my head of one of the in game mirrors. That kind of &quot;fast mapping&quot; just doesn&#x27;t occur any other way (that I can find). I&#x27;ve also picked up plenty of written Japanese, including kanji, from menu screens, subtitles, etc.

Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper, and for that kind of challenge this stack seems OK so long as they index much harder on the NHK Easy News after getting a basic level of kanji and grammar knowledge (they already claim to know 1000 so they should be fine).<p>But if the author wants to have any chance of understanding spoken Japanese or speaking, this will never get the author there - much better off watching and listening to as much Japanese material as possible. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in it, the Mass Immersion Approach [1] gives a good overview of how one can reach a good level of fluency relatively quickly without being in Japan.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;massimmersionapproach.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;massimmersionapproach.com&#x2F;</a>

I started learning Japanese four months ago and slowly converged on the same toolbox as the one in TFA. My only gripe is that SRS works much better for kanji and vocabulary than for grammar. Learning one kanji has a much more stable difficulty than learning one grammar rule, so it&#x27;s much easier to set a goal of &quot;learn X kanji per day&quot; than &quot;learn X grammar rules per day&quot;. At some point, I&#x27;ll have to force myself to take a break from kanji and vocab lessons to work on grammar for a while.<p>EDIT: I should add that this method is not the &quot;One True Way&quot;. Different people learn in different ways. If you want to see a radically different approach to learn Japanese, check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;massimmersionapproach.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;massimmersionapproach.com&#x2F;</a>

The thing I wish I had known originally is that Japanese talk shows are probably the best source of &quot;normal spoken Japanese&quot; out there. Definitely better than youtubers (TV people speak with better enunciation and less weird net slang), and 100x better than any anime.<p>On top of that the shows tend to have a lot of text on screen to emphasize points etc, and will cover really easy to understand topics.<p>It might be boring&#x2F;low brow, but you&#x27;ll absorb a lot more in shorter amounts of time IMO. And like... who wants to read the news?

I started learning again last week. This is now attempt #3 to learn Japanese for me and this time I&#x27;m coming at it differently to before. I tried using WaniKani in the past, and although it was good it wasn&#x27;t quite what I needed.<p>This time around I&#x27;m instead primarily using Anki, and I have 4 main decks. A hiragana&#x2F;katakana deck, a WaniKani kanji deck, a KanjiDamage deck, and a custom deck for anything else I want to learn. I work through the first three decks each day, but I&#x27;m not great at learning through memorisation, so instead the third deck is where I put things I actually want to learn; useful phrases, text from manga that I didn&#x27;t know, poetry, and regional dialect words. I&#x27;ve bought a moderate amount of Japanese-language manga (CDJapan ships internationally, and buyee.jp is great), and I&#x27;m trying to acquire more poetry books (send me recommendations if you have them!)<p>Ultimately this means I&#x27;m learning lots of fairly obscure stuff early on (like how nakagama is a billhook) but as that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m interested in it&#x27;s far more likely to hold my attention. And my short-term goal is to be able to write in the various Japanese poetry forms.<p>Kanji is still immensely frustrating to learn, no matter the techniques used. I am ultimately resigned to learning it though; in my lifetime I must learn a second language, and Japanese is one of the few that has ever held my interest.

I&#x27;m using 2 Anki decks to learn Japanese: one was something named &quot;COREplus&quot; with keys in kana and the answers showing kanji and definition of the word. I figured it would be useful to pick out words from their pronounciation alone, despite the amount of homophones. The second deck I generated myself [1], it includes kanji <i>and</i> words containing kanji, and also statistics on how often each pronounciation of kanji is encountered. Finishing this deck allows you to read quite a lot of things (although it doesn&#x27;t cover words containing non-Joyo kanji).<p>Now when I wanted to take an JLPT exam, I realized that my listening skills are awful, and my grammar skills aren&#x27;t very good either. I started watching grammar lessons on Youtube in Japanese, as well as random videos in Japanese (mostly about trains&#x2F;traveling). In the end I just barely passed listening (JLPT N2) but my grammar skills were really good.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ankiweb.net&#x2F;shared&#x2F;info&#x2F;831167744" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ankiweb.net&#x2F;shared&#x2F;info&#x2F;831167744</a>

I actually just started learning Japanese in my free time a few nights ago. (No particular reason aside from that it seemed like fun.)<p>I&#x27;ve got nothing really to add here, except that I&#x27;ve been using LingoDeer (another app in the same category as Duolingo) based on recommendations in &#x2F;r&#x2F;LearnJapanese, which if nothing else has made the process feel less like schoolwork and more like a game.<p>Hiragana and katakana weren&#x27;t hard to pick up at all — I can read and type them comfortably now without <i>too</i> much latency — and I&#x27;m 62.5% through the intro course that LingoDeer claims to be N5-equivalent. Picking up enough kanji for this to become a useful skill does seem a bit daunting, but as others have said, rote memorization is only a matter of time and consistency.

I’ve been learning Japanese on my own for 6 years, no teachers. In the beginning I used iknow.jp which worked very well for a little more than basic kanji and vocabulary. From there I moved to Japan and messed up my study of kanji. On second year living here I started with RTK and I wish I had done that earlier. Even though I procrastinated a lot, that book has been most successful with my retention.<p>Now that I’m learning Korean also as a beginner I googled sentence mining and downloaded Korean deck which after 2 months of using seems to work well and now I’m at the point where I will start study of basic grammar once a week to support the anki study

Two fundamental aspects of learning a language largely missing from the article. Speaking and listening.<p>Arguably more important the reading and writing is correctly pronouncing words in a language and being able to identify what&#x27;s being said.

Worth to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.vn&#x2F;pjW8G" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.vn&#x2F;pjW8G</a>

By reading this article, am I learning how to learn how to learn Japanese? So meta. :D

That&#x27;s a beautiful website. Definitely bookmarking this one