I didn’t really look at Japanese level material until I was around level 10 or so. When I did I was pretty happy that I was recognizing words and Kanji that before it was just a big blob of symbols. Not a lot, but enough to get a bit more motivation.
In the last few weeks I’ve switched all my games to Japanese and have managed to barely get by extremely slowly but it’s amazing when things click. Like when watching a stream of Days Gone By in Japanese and seeing the word 調べる (literally had just learned the word a few days previously) being used often really cements it in your mind and shows you usage.
Recently, watching regular Japanese TV, it’s really easy to read since they tend to subtitle just about everything and you can really get a gist of what they are saying by the kanji that is displayed, except for when it goes too fast. I try to watch at least 30 mins a day just to increase my reading speed.
Really behind on grammar though, I’m going to make a really hard push to make that a habit like WK since I think it’s at a point that it’s holding me back.
So you can expect to see results fairly quickly, assuming your expectations are not too high and you have constant material to sample.
Ah, step into my trap – the manga is 4-koma, and the VN has an estimated run-time of half an hour! Though that’s all the more reason for you not to worry – I’ll quickly finish those, and get to your thing.
Doing it alongside… well, it might not even be impossible, but I’m already full of shit – WK, BP, Torii, Anki, the manga, the VN… and that’s also just the Japanese stuff! I’m also working on my thesis and trying to it’s actually going well, I’m about 20% through the whole trilogy – read Northern Lights and watch Hibike with my gf, having a social life with friends, too, at least sometimes…
Man, this makes me sound so busy, and yet there’s still time when I’m just typing here and watching Pen Pineapple Apple Pen… like now.
As someone who doesn’t know japanese grammar. I will tell you that you won’t understand a thing without it. Yeah you will understand the kanji, so you could know what is being talked about for example, or read the text out loud, but without grammar, you will miss almost everything of a written text. So yeah don’t expect to be able to read a page of manga even at lvl 60 without grammar.
I’m still firmly in belief that BunPro is the best resource for grammar, hands down. https://bunpro.jp/
Why? They’re adding all the grammar points the textbooks have. They might be worse compared to beginner textbooks, granted, but I’ve peeked at Tobira (an intermediate one), and they have more examples sentences and more explanations (through the “Reading” section on the site). The beginner stuff is the only thing I might look elsewhere, I did so with Misa’s videos, but even the N5 grammar points have their own Reading sections (every grammar point does, for the record), so if you’re a motivated self-learner, it shouldn’t be a problem. I think “80/20 Japanese” (a beginner textbook; 40$ ebook version) is fantastic, judging by the sample chapter.
So anyway, it’s like all the textbooks wrapped up into one! If you pick the a year deal subscription plan, that’s 30$. You can’t even get one textbook for that money! But more importantly than that, it has something that each and every textbook lacks: practice and that’s the most important part. Well, I know Genki has a workbook, but does it have an SRS? No? Then into the trash it goes!
Actually, maybe the main reason isn’t even that, it’s that it’s actually fun, unlike any textbook I’ve ever tried. And fast. Like, I still maintain that the short description + looking over example sentences to get the feel of the point is enough (+ the SRS training of course). It boils down the boring studying part to to an absolute minimum so you can get to the fun active doing part asap! Of course, in cases where you don’t get the point from that minimal studying method, you read the Reading section, google, ask people here to explain it to you, etc. Best bang for buck, and you don’t even sacrifice knowledge.
No one can tell you at what WK level you’ll be able to do these things, because they’re entirely dependent on grammar and outside vocabulary study.
While this may be true for languages that share common roots, it’s potentially less true for ones as dissimilar as English and Japanese. WK also doesn’t structure itself around vocabulary, so while its words are (mostly) used with some regularity, it’s not a replacement for outside vocabulary acquisition (other textbooks/workbooks, vocab apps, your own personal vocab study routine, etc.). Vocabulary is selected first and foremost on WK for its ability to reinforce kanji readings. It’s all helpful, but it’s not a great stand-alone vocab resource for a number of reasons. (Which is fine, because it’s really good at what it’s aiming to do.)
What it will do is teach you how to read most common kanji, such that kanji will no longer be the biggest hurdle to your reading. It’ll give you the benefit of actually leaving comprehension up to grammar and vocabulary knowledge. To that extent, if you keep up with multiple aspects of learning, you’ll feel basically literate by around level 30, which is pretty damn cool. (Not that there won’t be unknown kanji in native reading, but they’ll be couched well enough in known ones to make picking them out, looking them up, and learning them not too much of a hurdle.) But you can and should start trying to read native material before that, because you’ll be surprised and inspired by how much you can pick up, and the only way to become more comfortable with it is to dive into things that feel too hard until they don’t feel too hard anymore.
iKnow (so good; basically WK for vocab - only downside is that it may not be friendly to absolute beginners in Japanese); JLPT vocab books once you’ve graduated from foundational textbooks.
Snagging this question for myself: I can do these things allowing for some vocabularly/expression look-up. Most younger-skewing anime I can watch without any captions and feel comfortable, and more difficult ones and adult dramas, I’ll generally (but not always) turn Japanese closed captions on for, which allows me to watch them comfortably even when dialogue is quick or mumbled. (And that is something WK helps with.) I’m also reading Japanese prose fiction, though obviously at a much slower pace than I could English, and again, taking time to look-up any unknown words or kanji (which are few enough now that this isn’t completely prohibitive).
But I couldn’t tie any of that to a WK level. I’ve passed the N2 level of the JLPT test, which is a better correlation for what I’m able to do with practical comprehension. I can only tell you that, again, being in the 30s in WK will have you feeling comfortable with reading most kanji present in most native texts (and giving you a non-zero chance at N2, even though it could still throw unknown kanji at you). Beyond that it’s all down to other areas of study.
Wow this thread has been way more helpful than I thought it would. Thanks to everyone for sharing because it helped a lot. Since everybody is giving resources I’ll just give animelon and daiweeb (anime w/ Japanese subs) just in case some people don’t know about them yet and are into anime. There’s also a built in dictionary where you can highlight some words and it’ll show pronunication and meaning. Good luck to everyone on Japanese.
It’s where I learned the basic grammar that was enough to last me a long while (It was probably two years or so, about a year into my reading, before I felt the need to complement it by using the N3 and N2 grammar videos on nihongo no mori)
I also used this anki deck (only the non-advanced recognition parts though) to drill what I’d learned.
Thats my goal, what was your process like for achieving this? I know what worked for you wont necessarily work for me or anyone else but id like to hear it, if you had to sum up what recipe you used to achieve this and remember, order matters in a recipe and list % for how much of it made up your study so far. For example for me, so far i learned Hiragana and Katakana 10%, then started on WaniKani 85% for kanji and vocab, just started using lingodeer for grammar 5% and im currently a month on my endeavor to watch Naruto with no subtitles. and if you had to guess what was your rough time frame to go from no Japanese to where you are now? Thank you
Since were all on the subject of grammar, What is the Community’s opinion on what appears to be the only contenders, 1.) Tae Kim’s guide 2.) Bunpro 3.) LingoDeer 4.) Genki
At the moment im using LingoDeer cause it didn’t have that much prior vocab knowledge necessary and they teach the vocab thats being used along the way. My only complaint so far is that it dosnt test you as vigorously as WaniKani. They have the English translation of the sentence right above the Hiragana that you cant get rid of(ive tried). And they dont test your ability to produce what you just learned, Only recall(so far that im aware of). And i wish they were more detailed with the explanation of the grammar points, Like は(WA), They Just “Topic Marker”. What does that even mean? and for another example あの, They list it with more examples with a 5 word line explaining the usage of the grammar point. 5 words to explain a grammar point that there is no equivalence to it in English. But still i like it mostly if not all for the fact that there is no prior vocab requirements for it.
It seems that whichever option you go with your going to be doing all right, but from people that have and/or are currently studying grammar and/or have experimented more in depth with the all the different routes you can go to learn grammar. Which route have you decided to go with? and what are the Pros and Cons in your opinion? And how much prior Vocab and Kanji did you have before you started? What would be your recommendation for a WaniKani beginner thats looking to get a head start on grammar?
I’ve really only used LingoDeer but I can comment on some of the points you brought up. Something to note here, I have only used the ios app, since the website was added after I signed up and now I’m used to using it on mobile. I don’t know if every feature on the app is also on the website, so I can only guarantee that what I mention is there on mobile.
True, but there is a review feature which allows you to test yourself on whatever you want as many times as you want. It requires more self-policing than WK, but eventually if you don’t review it will catch up to you and you won’t be sure on what the later lessons are saying.
You can get rid of it (at least on mobile), there’s an option to have the english, to just have the furigana above kanjis, and to only show kanji. I prefer the third because most of the kanji it uses are ones I’ve learned here, and if not then I’ll learn it with LD and already know it when it comes up here.
Make sure you’re looking at the learning tips pages. They’re still not super in depth, but it should be enough to understand the lessons. I also recommend looking at other resources, like once you learn a specific grammar point go on Tae Kim’s guide and read more about it. As much as I like LD, no one resource can be perfect, and supplementing the places where LD is lacking is a good idea.
I also used Genki for a bit before switching to LD, as far as I can tell they teach the same material but it’s much easier for me to have an app teach it to me rather than me drilling it on my own (hence why I’m here and not using an anki deck to learn kanji).
I use the Android app. i fixed it in the post. I didn’t mean the Hiragana to romaji translation, i was able to get rid of that, i meant the translation of the sentence right above the Hiragana not to mention the audio, the answer is in the audio, if you play it for me every time i dont even need to know what its saying, i can just sound out the hiragana and get the answer. There are times im not sure but by process of elimination i can get the right answer.
If you want lots of drill, I’d say go with Genki. There are exercises in the textbook and workbook, and there’s an answer key available. As you go along, it teaches all the vocab that it expects you to know, and it has furigana on all kanji (except in the separate reading/writing section), so you don’t have to wait till you get to a certain Wanikani level to start it.
I started reading manga when I hit level 30. You certainly won’t be able to read everything without looking up words here and there, but that was the sweet spot for me. Make sure not to neglect your grammar! You’ll need to be around N3 level in order to understand most of what’s going on.
It’s hard for me to answer this in any kind of practical way, since my path as a learner is kind of bizarre. I took it in high school for three years (which was only about the equivalent of maybe a year and a half of a college course; very slow-paced), then another two years in college (exhausting what my school offered), which took me up to about a JLPT N3 level. I probably could not have done too much with native material at that point, since I wasn’t taking it as seriously as I should have. (I did well in the classes, but wasn’t diving into the language seriously beyond that.)
I then didn’t use it for six years.
I came to Japan through the JET program summer 2017, intending to seriously study and at least pass the N3. I passed that after a year (and it was probably far too easy by that point), and then the N2 six months later. I was attempting to read native material that entire time, though obviously my reading speeds got steadily faster and I was taking on steadily more difficult content.
My advice for right now would just be to get through some introductory textbooks/workbooks, using WK and other apps to target other areas of study. When you get through them, start going through something like a JLPT book series, or whatever intermediate material works for you in terms of daily workflows. The most important part of being able to comprehend native material is just … diving into it at some point, even when it feels too hard (and it will at first; no way around it), accepting slow speeds and partial comprehension until it starts getting easier.
I live in the country and essentially made Japanese study my only hobby outside of work the past two years, with my daily task list getting kind of ridiculous, but it’s paid off. Since I basically only had an elementary foundation when I arrived (having forgotten most if not all of the material covered during my last year of college, which I was never super firm on to begin with), I guess you could get to a level of comfortable native reading and viewing in … two, three years? Maybe even less, especially for manga? (It isn’t unheard of to go from beginner to N2 in two years; you just have to be very serious about study from the start.) But you can start tackling things with partial comprehension far before that. Nothing wrong with understanding 60 percent of something, for the experience.
If you have a set, daily study routine that makes time for kanji, grammar and vocab, and then add in practice with native materials at whatever level feels comfortably challenging on top of that, you’re on your way. I wouldn’t worry about trying to predict an exact time frame. If your goal is really just to be able to comfortably watch/read younger-skewing native material (which actually isn’t that high a hurdle to clear), and you can stick to a study routine, my estimates might even be way too high.
I will say this: Foundational grammar is taught all the way through N3/lower-intermediate material. So for grammar, getting through either one lower-intermediate textbook or a JLPT N3 course book (or equivalent) should be your goal in terms of being able to understand all the basic constructions that will show up in manga/have a shot at parsing the more complicated ones. You could use that to plan. (I.e., be done with Genki I or equivalent after __ months, be done with Genki II after __ months. Lower intermediate texts pick up where Genki II leaves off.)
I actually have a lot of issues with Genki, but every time I’ve asked, it still seems like it’s (for better or worse) the best elementary textbook/workbook combo in town, and for grammar I’m kind of set in my ways about a text/work book giving you the best way to structure effective daily study. Taking your own notes also helps a lot.