Hello dear japanese learning family, I’m Ben, 19, speak english, spanish, german and recently started learning japanese (and french lol). I’ve been taking Doulingo “seriously” and can read most of Katakana and Hiragana by now, aswell as make some simple sentences. I’ve also tried out online classes, but I’m frustrated with not increasing my vocabulary and speaking proficieny.
I am looking for some advice on which webistes/books you could recommend me to understand grammar rules, conjugations, tenses etc. and what I should pair it with to actually be able to speak and listen!
The reason: I want to move to Japan next year and am planning to take a 3 month intensive course before, but I want to be able to have some conversations by then and understand most of what I’m hearing. Realistic? I’m quite proficient in learning languages and my brain is still young, so I want to use the time as best I can! I am willing to invest ca. 2 hours everyday to immerse myself in “Japanese”. Looking for any advice, reality checks, recommendations and guides on what I should do, to learn the best and most efficient way.
Lot’s of love from Barcelona,
Ben
I haven’t been to Japan so I can’t speak to what it’s like to move there, but what worked for you when learning other languages? That’ll decide whether you get more out of listening or reading in Japanese. It’s more daunting with all the kanji and being different from the average European language but it’s still a language you can learn and you’ve done that before. So where did you start the last time you learnt a language and what worked for you?
I think a year won’t be enough to be fluent, but if you put in a good bit of time every day you could end up conversational. I’ve been studying off and on for 3 years and this year I’ve started making my way into books. If you want to move to Japan though, I think getting conversational Japanese ahead of your reading would be important. The reading is still going to help, but with a year to work with, more speaking will be useful to you. Imagine getting to Japan having read a manga or two versus having done hours of conversation practice through italki. Which one is more relevant to your needs? Either way you’ll be dropped into the deep end of the language pool, but speaking and listening would be the better things for you to try picking up. I think most wanikani users tend to be people who study the language as a hobby or project, so if it takes years to be able to read slowly, then that’s fine. But for moving in a year, you want to be listening and shadowing a lot to get good at pronunciation and understanding. Reading and listening aren’t completely separate muscles linguistically, but one is going to get you more gains now.
For grammar resources I think genki is probably the most recommended textbook, but as long as you start somewhere and keep up with it you’ll get through the grammar you need to know sooner or later. Tokini Andy has some good videos on the genki series. Cure dolly is also helpful if you can get around the presentation style.
Good luck with learning. がんばって
Your existing language learning experience will surely be helpful, but mind that an English speaker learning Spanish, French or German is like starting a marathon from kilometer 20, while learning Japanese is like running through the entire thing.
What I mean is that these European languages all have a lot in common, use a similar writing system, have a lot of vocabulary in common (less so for German, but still), have a lot of overlap on grammar as well, share many cultural references, have similar social hierarchies etc…
Japanese, as you probably already noticed, is not like this. There’s a decent amount of loanwords in katakana but beyond that it might as well be from a different planet. That means that progress at first will probably feel slower and more frustrating than what you’re used to with Indo-European languages. Once you’ve caught up with all the basics I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily harder in the long term, but it’s going to be a slower and more gradual start for sure.
That said with 2h/day you should progress pretty fast. There’s just a very long way ahead…
I don’t like paying too much attention to the JLPT because it’s a very imperfect metric but it’s somewhat useful in this conversation I think:
You’re in the “Other students” category, since I presume that you don’t have any preexisting Chinese character knowledge.
At 2h/day in a year you should be somewhere in late N4/early N3 which is a very solid base but certainly not “understand most of what I’m hearing” level for any random Japanese discussion. For that you’ll want to aim for N2/N1 territory, and as you can see from these time estimates that’s just not very realistic in a year unless you’re willing to spend 6h studying Japanese every day.
For actual resources to use, I’d recommend sampling a lot of things to find what works best for you and, as early as possible, start consuming native material to get a feel for where you are and what gives you most trouble to adjust your learning process. I will refrain from giving you actual resources here because I personally focus almost exclusively on boosting my reading ability over everything else so clearly what works for me is probably not what you want given your objectives.
Minna no nihongo is what I used initially and Genki is something that comes a lot on this forum and easily supplemented by Youtube videos.
It’s somewhat hard to recommend something for beginners as there’s now so many options compared to when I started. Herés my rambling, in case it helps;
I had really a low level of japanese i.e. « where is the bank? » when I moved to Japan for a 1 year study. There I did the Minna no nihongo books, which brought me to what I call « early intermediate ».
Speaking and listening in Japan is easy as you are truly immersed. I would say focus now on things you can’t pick up on the spot: Basic Grammar (this is surprisingly easy compared to other languages, but some convoluted patterns benefit from being learned early).
I would also recommend to start kanjis early. You don’t need 60 levels to see a great benefit in reading, but also memorizing new vocab more easily since you can « see » their ethymiology. 15-25 levels of WK would give you already great foundations (but don’t do only kanjis).
Of course, if you have someone in your surrounding you can speak japanese with, that should be your #1 tactic: learn a chapter of Genki/Minna no nihongo, and go practice your sentence patterns. Learn vocabs to your topic of interest and go practice verbally. Rinse and repeat.
Last advice: there are word families that are not fun to learn (mom, dad, elder/younger brother, elder/younger sister, hobbies, food, jobs, etc…) but those will come up all the time in Japan when you meet someone. So learn them thoroughly.
A good free 日本語 learning resource:
Yeah, no don’t expect to understand most of what you hear after only a year at a couple hours a day. Simias already summed things up better than I could anyways so I guess I’ll leave it there.
My personal take on this kind of level (which I think of as “finished the beginner stage” because it roughly corresponds to finishing e.g. Minna no Nihongo I + II) is that it gives you the tools you need to be able to get your meaning across when talking with somebody who’s willing to put the effort in. (There are going to be more natural or concise ways to say what you’re trying to say that you don’t know yet, but you won’t be just completely missing big things like “how to say if-X-then-Y” or comparisons or doing an action for somebody else.) Vocabulary as always is a separate problem, but some gesturing or paraphrasing or looking up in advance the words you need for a particular topic can help there. But it’s definitely nowhere near enough to understand somebody who isn’t making allowances for the fact they’re talking to somebody who’s still learning the language.
I spent nine months in Japan (at a language school); when I arrived I had this kind of “just out of beginner” level of competency. My experience was that it helped a lot with not feeling anxious about whether something was going to be a problem because I was totally unable to communicate. Of course many people go to Japan as tourists and for longer periods with zero Japanese ability, and they cope just fine, but I found it psychologically reassuring at least as much as it was practically useful.
I used to use duolingo as well. After lots of switching around, I’ve finally settled on YuSpeak. It is a paid platform but so worth it in my opinion. It will teach you loads of vocabulary, grammar, sentence structures, casual/informal/formal forms, and much more. It would also be good to listen to as much as you can, even if it’s just playing in the background. They call it passive learning. You could also try watching Japanese tv shows instead of the other shows you watch. I don’t have any Japanese speakers to talk to so I record video clips of me talking about my day or telling a silly story in Japanese and it helps me tremendously. Hope that this could be of help!! You got this!
thanks a lot! I will definetly try it…
I tried Duolingo and didn’t like it. I DO love
RocketLanguages.com. You have to pay for it, but they nearly always have a big sale around the holidays. Between now and then you can try three free lessons. You get listening, speaking, reading, grammar, culture tips, lots of practice, etc.