Learning How to Learn Japanese
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Learning How to Learn Japanese
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#2I 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's much easier to set a goal of "learn X kanji per day" than "learn X grammar rules per day". At some point, I'll have to force myself to take a break from kanji and vocab lessons to work on grammar for a while.
EDIT: I should add that this method is not the "One True Way". Different people learn in different ways. If you want to see a radically different approach to learn Japanese, check out https://massimmersionapproach.com/
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#3That's a beautiful website. Definitely bookmarking this one
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#4I wish that people referring to Japanese as "the most difficult language to learn..." could add the important caveat "...among major global languages". 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.
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/morphology/syntax might ultimately defeat a learner regardless of how much time they throw at the problem.
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#5I started learning again last week. This is now attempt #3 to learn Japanese for me and this time I'm coming at it differently to before. I tried using WaniKani in the past, and although it was good it wasn't quite what I needed.
This time around I'm instead primarily using Anki, and I have 4 main decks. A hiragana/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'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't know, poetry, and regional dialect words. I've bought a moderate amount of Japanese-language manga (CDJapan ships internationally, and buyee.jp is great), and I'm trying to acquire more poetry books (send me recommendations if you have them!)
Ultimately this means I'm learning lots of fairly obscure stuff early on (like how nakagama is a billhook) but as that's what I'm interested in it'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.
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.
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#6I started learning again last week. This is now attempt #3 to learn Japanese for me and this time I'm coming at it differently to before. I tried using WaniKani in the past, and although it was good it wasn't quite what I needed. This time around I'm instead primarily using Anki, and I have 4 main decks. A hiragana/katakana deck, a WaniKani kanji deck, a KanjiDamage deck, and a custom deck for anything else I want to…
That's interesting. For me, it's the exact opposite way. Kanji are actually the easiest thing for me. Does the WK deck or the KanjiDamage deck include mnemonics? If not, I highly highly highly recommend you get something with mnemonics. If not WK or KD, then get yourself the RTK book (Remembering the Kanji) and study with it. There are Anki decks with Kanji in RTK order, too.
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#7Depends 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).
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.
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#8I wish that people referring to Japanese as "the most difficult language to learn..." could add the important caveat "...among major global languages". 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 Ng…
Yeah, I actually find a lot of the grammatical rules to be pretty straightforward and generally there aren’t many weird exceptions. Distinguishing sounds is pretty easy too, unlike Mandarin for example. The levels of formality are tricky at first but you quickly adapt to it, and they also follow well defined rules. A lot of the odd pronunciations of words like you mention are generally things you can just memorize blindly. Cultural aspects and sensitivity can be very tough, but I think that’s true for any foreign culture. Time intensive? Sure, but most difficult? I don’t think so, but I think that depends on what you mean by difficult and what your goal is. If your goal is to masquerade as a pseudo-native speaker and be fully literate, then yeah, I could see it. But if it’s just to be conversant, it’s not that bad.
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#9Depends 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). But if the author wants to have any chance of understanding spoken Japanese or speaking, this will…
I leaned towards MIA at first when starting to study Japanese, but couldn't bring myself to work through it because I wouldn't have had the motivation to listen to Japanese content for hundreds of hours without understanding a whole lot of it. By contrast, WaniKani and BunPro are incredibly rewarding because you quickly know enough characters and basic grammar rules to be able to understand simple sentences and even form them with some effort. It's one of the few occasions that I"ve seen gamification applied to further the interest of the user instead of just the platform operator.
I do agree that immersion is important in reaching fluency, but I've decided for myself to build up a bigger foundation of kanji, vocabs and grammar than what MIA prescribes, so that the immersion will be more enjoyable.
Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese
#10Depends 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). But if the author wants to have any chance of understanding spoken Japanese or speaking, this will…
> Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper
Newspapers? How boring. I would want to be able to read the text in video games and manga!
On a semi-related note, I heard of someone who learned English largely by playing Final Fantasy 7 with a dictionary in hand. [Also learned practical bonus vocabulary like "mako energy" and "materia" I assume. ;-) ]