Just saw this as well! The way I immersed without being in Japan was through regular tutoring sessions on Italki. Conversation practice is top tier imo because your speaking partner can adjust to your level and help you understand what they’re saying with gestures, etc. Unlike a podcast or video, which can’t interact with the listener. Now that my level is more advanced I can listen to podcasts and shows without as much frustration, because there are far fewer things I have to look up.
I would still say that basics are key, to even be able to practice listening effectively and study new words, so hiragana is the way to start.
I will check out italki — hadn’t heard of it. Agree I have resigned myself / committed to learning harigana and working on it (I have vowels, k, and s memorized so far) but that’s as far as I’ll go for now. I listen to podcasts and watch movies not so much anime but stuff Ran and Hari-Kiri. I understand bits and pieces but steady vocab expansion imo is needed for that to benefit over time. Tutor talking would
Be amazing I’ll have to see about time and cost
I am convinced immersion is the best way to learn to speak it and finding the way to grow my vocabulary without context (ie I’m not in Japan so will be immersed in podcasts and videos) is what I’m trying to figure out now
Just saw this as well! The way I immersed without being in Japan was through regular tutoring sessions on Italki. Conversation practice is top tier imo because your speaking partner can adjust to your level and help you understand what they’re saying with gestures, etc. Unlike a podcast or video, which can’t interact with the listener. Now that my level is more advanced I can listen to podcasts and shows without as much frustration, because there are far fewer things I have to look up.
I would still say that basics are key, to even be able to practice listening effectively and study new words, so hirigana is the way to start.
I am native English speaker yes. I have some basic conversational Japanese and a limited vocab. For learning hiragana I have found the mnemonics somewhat helpful on this page https://kana-quiz.tofugu.com/ but mostly it’s just the rapid drilling over and over which I think is having it sink in. Three days of that site I have the vowels, k, and s memorized so far. If that holds in a week or so I should have hiragana done
I am not. And I too sometimes have difficulty when an example is giving me an english word to compare to the japanese reading. I feel like they are usually nothing alike. But that can also be due to Amarican English or British English pronunciation.
I usually don’t read too much into the examples and mnemonics. Only after multiple wrong answers, do I check on the mnemonic or make one myself.
Thank you for your insight. I have accepted hiragana (not katakana!) as a basic necessity and am working on that now. That’s as far as I’ll go with alphabet for now I really want to focus on speaking / listening comprehension. I think hiragana is the base that will help me expand my vocab in this regard
I would prefer to learn by sounds only but haven’t figured out a way to do that.
Hi! I spent the majority of my Japanese learning doing conversation practice, so I have somewhat the experience of learning primarily through sound and speech. However, before I jumped into regular conversation, I did have to get some basics down first.
The absolute first thing I did to learn Japanese was learn Hirigana and Katakana, which is an important base, even if your main goal is listening and speaking. I then went through 1.5 elementary textbooks to get some grammar and vocab before I started regularly talking.
After that I learned the bulk of my vocab through listening and speaking, and I’m at the point where I’m finally learning how to spell and read words I’ve been using for a long time lol. I will say, learning how to read is a fantastic aid for speaking and listening, and learning how kanji works hyper-boosted my recollection of new words.
Definitely start with Hirigana! It will give you a sense of how things really should be pronounced, when romaji alone can be vague.
What has helped me with the “wrong answers” is just writing them down. When I get it wrong, i write the correct answer. Reenforces the learning. If I’m still missing it after 2-3 times i look at my notebook and just put the right answer. I’ve already shot my SRS level, no point in torturing myself into remembering.
The issue isn’t the mnemonic, it’s how you’re typing.
You typed: RI - YO - KU (3 sounds) りよく (Big ‘yo’).
The answer is: RYO - KU (2 sounds) りょく (Small ‘yo’).
See how the yo is smaller in the second one? That’s a “combo sound.” In WaniKani (and Japanese typing in general), you have to type “ryo” or “ryu” together, not separate letters. The app was trying to tell you “Watch out for the small character,” meaning you missed the combo.
Thank you, Though I would echo everyone else’s sentiment that learning Kana, or Hirgana at the very least, will make Wanikani a much more effective learning tool.
Also that it’s really a tool meant to bolster reading of Kanji more than anything else, so it may not be the best tool for you to expand your vocabulary.
For your goals I think Wanikani is not effective at all to gain vocabulary - this is a site to drill kanji first and foremost. It’s not going to train you in the way you want it to - to train speaking and listening. I think you’d be better off watching videos with subtitles (there’s a ton on youtube), look for simple conversation guides that has breakdown explanation of every word and grammar. Then if you have the budget, the most reliable way is to get a private tutor (I’ve heard good things about Preply for this function), or join a conversational class (tons online, even better if you can find one offline in your area). A free alternative is to find language exchange buddy who is willing to have voiced conversation with, but this isn’t always guaranteed as opposed to just enrolling in a class.
Oh for sure this. You MUST learn hiragana at the start, no ifs, ands or buts. It’s like learning to read English without learning the alphabet at least (and phonics and phonetics too). I think theTofugu website has a breakdown of workflow as well to learn Japanese. It’s not perfect and as you go along you may disagree on a lot but it has some good jumping off points.
After you’ve covered hiragana, you can check out the Marugoto website as it’s free and its a good place to start for about the first 1-3 months or so. After that, you can come back to wanikani and then you will find that you understand so much and then you can get into Nihongo con Teppei or Comprehensive listening as well as the free version of Satori reader so that you are not learning kanji in a vaccum.
Thank you but I’m not trying to learn to read it I’m trying to learn to speak it and hear it. Learning an alphabet as a first step for that doesn’t make sense to me, especially when it’s literally thousands of characters. maybe one day!
My approach is audio/video immersion and growing my vocabulary. I’ve accepted without understanding how that learning hiragana will help me grow my vocabulary because everyone tells me to but I really don’t understand how. I have about half of it memorized now should have the rest in a week or two…. But then what? How do you suggest I use that hiragana knowledge to learn new words? (About 5 new words a day is my goal)
Oh for sure this. You MUST learn hiragana at the start, no ifs, ands or buts. It’s like learning to read English without learning the alphabet at least (and phonics and phonetics too). I think theTofugu website has a breakdown of workflow as well to learn Japanese. It’s not perfect and as you go along you may disagree on a lot but it has some good jumping off points.
After you’ve covered hiragana, you can check out the Marugoto website as it’s free and its a good place to start for about the first 1-3 months or so. After that, you can come back to wanikani and then you will find that you understand so much and then you can get into Nihongo con Teppei or Comprehensive listening as well as the free version of Satori reader so that you are not learning kanji in a vaccum.
The fact is that as a phonetic orthography, the kana provide you with the tools to learn how words are pronounced and verify your own impression of how words you hear are pronounced. Especially for non-native speakers, it can be easy to make mistakes in listening, and in a pure auditory immersion environment you won’t have any way of knowing if you have accurately identified the pronunciation of a word.
With the kana, though, you can use a dictionary like Jisho to look up words and immediately know how they are pronounced. While listening, this is an essential check on whether you heard correctly. As far as your question about learning vocabulary goes, you can also use any number of vocab SRS methods, like Anki’s Core2K or Core2K/6K decks, which come with audio but also have the readings provided in kana so that, again, you know whether you’ve heard correctly. You can easily set this to learn five words a day. There’s also Bunpro, or Migaku, or Yomitan, etc. and you can effectively mine a lot of vocabulary via listening to videos on YouTube from popular Japanese learning creators (again, with verifying the pronunciation thru a dictionary entry with a reading in kana as one of the steps).
At least for my part, I think that efficient language-learning means making the best use of the tools that are available to you. I don’t think you need to learn to read before you learn to listen and speak, but I think that knowing how to look up new words, see how they are pronounced, and be able to look up things you hear and verify their pronunciation, is an essential step of any listening workflow, and does not demand further literacy. I think it is risky to deliberately avoid this tool and hope that, despite not being a native speaker, you will be able to flawlessly recognize the phonology of the words you’re hearing. Babies have to do this, yes, but that’s because they have no choice.
To some degree I have accepted learning hiragana will help me gain vocab and I am doing so, but katakana/kanji no I think the time is better spent growing vocabulary than learning to read and write. If I gain speaking fluency I’ll work on writing then
The fact is that as a phonetic orthography, the kana provide you with the tools to learn how words are pronounced and verify your own impression of how words you hear are pronounced. Especially for non-native speakers, it can be easy to make mistakes in listening, and in a pure auditory immersion environment you won’t have any way of knowing if you have accurately identified the pronunciation of a word.
With the kana, though, you can use a dictionary like Jisho to look up words and immediately know how they are pronounced. While listening, this is an essential check on whether you heard correctly. As far as your question about learning vocabulary goes, you can also use any number of vocab SRS methods, like Anki’s Core2K or Core2K/6K decks, which come with audio but also have the readings provided in kana so that, again, you know whether you’ve heard correctly. You can easily set this to learn five words a day. There’s also Bunpro, or Migaku, or Yomitan, etc. and you can effectively mine a lot of vocabulary via listening to videos on YouTube from popular Japanese learning creators (again, with verifying the pronunciation thru a dictionary entry with a reading in kana as one of the steps).
At least for my part, I think that efficient language-learning means making the best use of the tools that are available to you. I don’t think you need to learn to read before you learn to listen and speak, but I think that knowing how to look up new words, see how they are pronounced, and be able to look up things you hear and verify their pronunciation, is an essential step of any listening workflow, and does not demand further literacy. I think it is risky to deliberately avoid this tool and hope that, despite not being a native speaker, you will be able to flawlessly recognize the phonology of the words you’re hearing. Babies have to do this, yes, but that’s because they have no choice.
Did those people know how to read Hiragana/Katakana? That seems like an essential step to be able to mine words through immersion methods.
If you’re only looking for listening, perhaps Bunpro might work? They do not have romaji but you can listen to each vocabulary word with pitch accent shown (I think some words use TTS however). When reviewing you can choose yourself if you got the right answer after seeing the English translation? This is not how I personally use Bunpro but I think you could get it to work like that.
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