Would you please explain you opinions. I have the Feeling that you Just hate certain ways of learning, because they didn’t Work for you. Everyone is different. Just because you don’t like these three Options doesn’t mean that they are Bad for everyone. Maybe it would be better if you explain why These methods didn’t Work for you instead of Just badmouthing them.
Sure, I can explain, because this is not just because they didn’t work for me.
Genki: It works for me, because I like doing exercises. Of course the vocabulary is not the Most useful for me, but my Focus was on learning Grammar.
I already explained this one, but to repeat, it’s just not very well suited to self-study, because it makes a lot of assumptions about your environment that won’t be true for self-study. It explains things in ways that makes it easy to learn the wrong thing, but it’s done so because it assumes you have a teacher around to clear up confusion and misunderstandings. It’s not necessarily a bad resource, it’s just that most learners won’t be able to use it well on their own.
Japanese from Zero: I was definitely not bombarded with grammatical Terms. Have you ever read one of them? The Focus of This book are the exercises. And the vocabulary is Not specifically for students or Business.
Yes, I’ve read all four of them, and they are one of the worst offenders at trying to get you to being able to speak useful Japanese by just straight up teaching you things that are wrong. It will say “x means y”, when x actually doesn’t mean y, but it’s “close enough” so they’ll just go with it. It works for their example sentence, but now you’ve suddenly learned a grammar point that’s just wrong when you try to apply it to other sentences, leading to confusion down the line when you’re told that you’re not saying what you think you’re saying when applying the “x means y” pattern. A key offender is how they teach the particles.
JapanesePod 101: This is a good way to get used to how the Japanese language Sounds and to learn some expressions and Grammar Points.
It’s a decent way to learn how Japanese sounds, yes, but it’s a terrible way to learn Japanese. It’s how I started learning Japanese, and since then the things I’ve learned have made me realize that podcast is just full of misinformation, mistakes and just overall a very poor structure and approach to learning. It’s just not well made, it’s very clear there was no plan ahead of time, that it’s not made by people with a good understanding of grammar, and they kind of just rushed out episodes off the top of their head as they went along. The other two have some good stuff in them, but this one is the one I’m most comfortable with calling just straight up not very good.
Cure Dolly: I can’t stand that voice. So This doesn’t Work for me.
That’s very understandable, I had the same issue at first. I tried twice, but just couldn’t get over the voice. I managed to deal with the voice on my third try though, and I’m very glad I did. It’s an excellent resource, one of they very vew resources I’ve found that teaches Japanese grammar in a more organic and intuitive way by focusing on what things actually mean from a Japanese perspective. Most other resources try to make Japanese grammar fit into English grammar, which it just doesn’t, which is what leads to so many resources being littered with errors and confusing contradictions.
Many learners will do these resources and think “it works for me, I like it”, but that’s usually because they just haven’t gotten far enough along to realize they’ll still struggle with understanding basic usages of particles and auxiliary verbs. Because they never really truly learned the meaning of very basic things, they just learned the English translation of a few choice sentences and now believe they understand when they actually don’t. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not completely without value, and it’s not impossible to learn from them. They’re just made in ways that makes it very, very easy to take the wrong lessons from them. Which is an issue, because as a beginner you won’t know you’ve taken the wrong lessons until much later.
That’s what happened to me, even though I spent a lot of time with both Genki, JFZ and JapanesePod. I felt like I was getting it, but somehow I still felt stuck because I never really managed to get to a full understanding of things. I still kept being confused about basic particles, because suddenly they seemed to shift meanings. I felt I was taught they meant Y, but then sometimes they meant Z instead. This wasn’t because those resources “didn’t work for me”, it was because they just weren’t teaching what those things actually meant. Now that I’ve learned the right thing, I look back on those resources and see where they went wrong.
Now, I do think that CureDolly is the best at explaining Japanese grammar the right way, but my first meeting with a better and more correct approach to grammar study was ”TaeKim’s guide to Learning Japanese”. It’s what introduced me to the concept of learning Japanese from a Japanese perspective, and it’s a very nice written guide. For those who like to read, I can highly recommend it. However, if you checked out my comment above you’ll see I also linked a transcript to CureDolly’s videos. So now you can read CureDolly too. If you can’t stand the voice, you don’t have to, because you can just read it instead.