Hey everyone, been here for a bit but haven’t really had any forum presence.
Question: what are some good resources to help learn how to write and structure sentences? At the moment I’m using WaniKani (obviously), Genki, and I then throw everything into Anki as an additional aid.
I find Genki good for learning grammar points, but not really for practicing writing full sentences.
P.S. First post, so just discovered when you write your topic/title, it lists similar posts. Why don’t all forums have this?
If you want to practice writing full sentences, the most important thing is to have someone read and correct your writing, no? That can only be achieved by having a human person as a teacher, I guess. Not even the most advanced algorithm available today can do that for you.
So ideally if you can find someone through iTalki or HelloTalk, you can chat with them and they can offer you suggestions to improve your writing.
I find writing a diary was helpful in the beginning couple of weeks. Just try and catalogue what you have.
As for sentence structure, i’d favor Tae Kim over Genki: Learn Japanese – Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese
The lessons are well structured and short, adding to your vocabulary with useful words and they don’t shy on the kanji
It’s not all that necessary to have someone tutor you. You yourself can tutor your writing once you learn more, what is necessary is to actually try, you will know yourself when you are guessing, and you can mark a phrase, particle, word as guesswork and correct yourself later.
If there’s no rush, I recommend checking out japaneselevelup.com they have some great strategies to improve your grammar while having fun in the meantime. Granted, I didn’t start with sentence-mining or anki sentences or whatever you want to call it, it has really helped me get those basic sentence structures locked in. Basically the premise is to study sentences in anki and learn through exposure and not directly through grammar (Note: I did not do this: I learnt grammar through half of Genki 1 and the first 10-ish chapters of Tae Kim). There are a lot of articles, so don’t fall into that trap either. After all, learning about learning Japanese is not learning Japanese.
I use an anki sentence deck now to improve vocabulary and grammar at the same time with wanikani. They have paid sentences (not cheap) which are written out for you, but you can also write your own or find them (much better). It might not help your writing ability out too much at first, but later on some things just sound natural (sort of like how you can’t explain the grammar for an english sentence but it just sounds correct) which is why I think it’s worth checking out. This also doesn’t require a teacher/tutor to correct you, but is definitely not the fastest way to start writing sentences.