I’ve spent hours today trying to find the best app to learn japanese and every time I decide on an app i then find a review saying its this or that. My goal is to be able to read kanji and then be able to speak fluently (long term). I am a completely beginner and never learnt a language before! Any tips or recommendations?
3 comments
The is no single best path (at least not one that’s going to be the best for *everyone*), though there *are* a few good ones. I say read this subreddit’s [Starter’s Guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/wiki/index/startersguide) first, then come back and ask if you’re still confused.
**Edit:** Oh yeah, also, to clarify: it’s unlikely apps and such will be of much help on their own — although, some *can* be great *supplementary* tools. But while something like DuoLingo may be a fun way to learn the “letters” of the Japanese “alphabet” (i.e. Kana) and a couple of words/phrases, that’s about as far as it’s going to take you.
Everyone has an opinion on apps. Just pick one and run with it. You’ll get a sense for what areas you’re lacking in and what areas need improvement as you go along.
Lingodeer imo is a good starting point. Covers vocabulary, grammar, and provides a nice trajectory.
Apps like DuoLingo aren’t going to do much for fluency and in my opinion, aren’t the greatest place to start. I see them more like “Uh oh, I’m going to [country] in a month and I need to know how to say hello.”
This is just a personal opinion and based on my own experiences, so take it with a grain of salt:
Learn Hiragana and Katakana first. Before any grammar or sentence structure. There are many ways you can do this, but using a free app like Hirakana is a good place to start. You can also find free, printable worksheets of both hiragana and katakana to practice actually writing them and reinforcing the characters and sounds. Physical flashcards are also a great choice.
There are a lot of great courses that work differently for people who learn differently. For an absolute beginner, my own personal suggestion would be the Japanese From Zero series by George Trombley. You can purchase the physical books, but the From Zero website offers a subscription based service. Also, the author has a YouTube channel with videos to go along with each of the lessons in the books and online courses. There are also MANY free resources online and on YouTube, for example, the Japanese Apple channel, CyberBunny .etc that you should check out.
More importantly, Kanji is something that won’t do you any good without having a solid foundation and understanding of vocabulary and grammar. There are over 10,000 kanji, and about 2,200 of them in mostly everyday use. If it sounds daunting, that’s because it is. I’m not trying to deter you at all, but you’ve got to understand that you can’t just memorize a couple hundred of them individually and know how to read a compound if you don’t know what the actual vocabulary is, what the context is and how to apply everything you know to comprehending what you’re reading. It’s not just you, everyone who has ever studied kanji to this day still comes across readings they don’t know or kanji they aren’t familiar with. Even native Japanese people.
So in short, build a solid foundation with hiragana and katakana. Move onto an actual course that’s right for you and suits your learning style. Each building block is important for a solid foundation and understanding. Vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, context, nuance. No course is perfect on its own and you’ll find that there are a lot of way to supplement what you’re doing. Again, I suggest staying away from apps like duolingo because they tend to not only confuse but also give a false sense of confidence when it comes to learning. If you’re just learning what konnichiwa means, you don’t need to have kanji thrown at you 2 lessons later with no other explanation than, “it means this” which is only a technical truth.