How to study

So I’m trialing Wanikani and I love it, but I cant afford it so I need to look at some free resources. I have genki 1 and 2 and the corresponding work books but after I finish wanikani level 3 I won’t be able to learn kanji. So I need something that’s gonna teach me Vocab and Kanji, grammar not so much I’m okay without learning all the grammar there seems to be a lot of resources to learn that. I also really need listening practice and not just in Japanese I need listening practise in Spanish as well so if anyone has any place I get practice listening to languages at a really beginner level. Also any ideas how can practice speaking, ive tried Italki but it isn’t great I just need as many free resources for Spanish and Japanese my languages are in a state atm and I’m really stressed about my spanish GCSE but also want to keep my Japanese up please somoene hhhheeeelp.

For me, WK is hands down the best kanji and vocab app. However, you might want to give Anki a try as it is free and they have many decks on there- including some WaniKani ones I believe. Well worth a look.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/japanese
Good luck with GCSE’s- ahh to be young again. :spy:

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I’m not familiar with many resources myself, I mainly stick to a few, but I would definately suggest trying out vocab decks on Anki. After I finished Human Japanese (both the Beginner and Intermediate) it turned out I didn’t really remember anything, so doing the Anki decks for them definitely helped (although for you, you’d probably find it better to do Genki decks if they’re available).

In terms of listening, I’m not sure about how good Genki’s cd-ROM is (I’m yet to try it out), but again, finding a good Anki deck that has listening tests (with decent audio, non of that text to speech stuff) seems to be the way to go for me.

And also just listening to media in Japanese can be great; anime, Japanese TV shows and film, alternative language settings, they all help.

Also, since we’re on the subject of Spanish GCSE’s (although I did French), I’d say to try and get some practice with Duolingo or Memrise for that. You’re lucky with Spanish since there should be a ton of resources for that.

If you do Genki 1 and 2 you will be covering quite a bit of useful kanji and vocabulary, so I wouldn’t stress about those if I were you. If you get the CDs that go with it, that will also give you some listening practice. However, I’ll second UntitledName’s suggestion of listening to real Japanese media. Don’t worry about understanding things at first, just find media that looks or sounds interesting, look up a word or two here and there (not everything!), keep up with your other studies, and have fun with it!

But really, how to study and how much to study depends on what your goals are…

Are you sitting your GCSEs this year or next? If it’s this year, I would suggest maybe holding off on Japanese just for a few more weeks :blush: Of course, you know your own capabilities, but lots of students really struggle with the workload at GCSE and we wouldn’t want you to burn out and struggle with the important ones!

If the issue wasn’t money, I would suggest the Genki Kanji Look and Learn books. But there is an alternative: use Quizlet decks that people have made for each of the 32 chapters. They will typically include all of the vocabulary. Or find Anki decks for that series. (I believe you can import Quizlet decks into Anki but it’s something I’ve never tried.)

I’m currently studying abroad in Japan and the Genki Kanji books are what we use for my kanji class.

Hope you find something you like!

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