So I think it’s safe to say that I have no idea what I’m doing with my Japanese studies and that my way of learning Japanese is very stagnant because I’m not learning it actively and only learn things if an opportunity appears.
I am using Anki, which is a great app to memorize words and sentences, and even things such as transliterating and translating but I’m not putting it to proper use. My number 1 issue with learning Japanese is that I have no clue what I should look for. My basic idea is to learn vocab first but I have absolutely no clue in the world as to what words I should be looking for, therein, the stagnant style of learning, being based on opportunity and whatnot.
Can someone recommend me a consistent way to actively learn vocabulary? Should I be word-mining? If so then where? I would appreciate the help cuz I’m tired of the stagnancy.
13 comments
If you are a beginner, you should probably get a proper textbook or take a language course or hire a tutor. I think it’s possible to learn without those things “on your own” (though personally, I used a textbook). But if you are lost, I think you should use them.
If you are not a beginner, you should probably add to your post how far you are in your studies.
Im going to sound Like a broken record, but have you looked at the subreddits wiki on starting?
to learn vocab you learn it by reading, writing doing excersises its like when you learn any other language in school you need to use it.
for Anki i think that JP-> EN has the best impact. (i deleted all my EN->JP cards cause you cant really translate a lot of the things)
I have also made a post in the past [https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s1cv90/little_getting_started_guide/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s1cv90/little_getting_started_guide/)
might be time to update it with what I know now.
as other people mentioned a text book or a tutor can be used to get you started
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happy studying
Follow a textbook or other class, that will provide context appropriate vocabulary lists. Genki, Tae Kim, they’ll all be relatively similar. You’re definitely unbalanced if you know 600 words total but 400 kanji, that’s way skewed on rote memorization of characters. Also vocab alone isn’t the only thing you need to learn, there’s a lot of grammar and usage, and many words don’t make any sense outside a sentence pattern. You have to use the words, read write speak and listen not just the vocab you’re learning but also the grammar. This is why beginner texts exist, to provide a stable order with a balanced diet of different knowledge types.
_Many words know, grammar study language use._
That sentence sounds like nonsense, right? That’s what reading Japanese is like without knowing grammar. I meant to say “You might know many words, but if you don’t study grammar, you can’t use the language”, but I put things into Japanese word order and omitted words corresponding to grammaticalized constructions in Japanese.
You need to learn grammar at some point, one way or another, and it sounds like you’d benefit from a sequence/course that’s laid out. A textbook is a fine way of doing this for self-study.
Words are useless if you don’t know how to put them together. That’s the point of grammar study.
As for the “textbooks teach unnatural japanese” it’s not true. You know how in formal writing for class you write the “proper way”? As in, you don’t write how you talk?
Textbooks will teach you “proper” Japanese. It’s only considered unnatural because people don’t usually talk using proper grammar.
To quote the guy who writes the Japanese from Zero books “you have to know the rules before you can break them”
Once you get a grasp of how the language works, you can start listening and engaging with native content and speakers to learn how people actually talk
Others have addressed most of your points quite well, but I would like to add that there’s not much value in translation unless you are planning to be a professional translator. Translating is more likely to get your brain used to translating instead of understanding Japanese as Japanese.
>My basic idea is to learn vocab first
…No.
Get a textbook. Get some grammar. You can’t learn how vocab works without at least some basic grammar. Japanese is a synthetic language, how vocab is arranged grammatically is *part of the vocabulary*.
I can see from the comments that you’ve been taking language advice from youtubers. Don’t. Yuta, Matt, those guys are trying to sell you something; of course they don’t want you picking an alternative. It’s called conflict of interests.
Get a textbook, avoid the “easy” route, take the hard route, and what you’ll realise at the end of it is that there’s a reason I put ‘easy’ in quotes: the “easy” route sold by random people on the internet is the sucker route, it’s not there to help you learn, it’s there to make a profit on your wish to avoid putting effort into learning, and it will hold you there for as long as it can because letting you get through it quickly isn’t profitable.
It isn’t longer than the hard route, because frankly, it’s just a dead end.
Since it doesn’t look like anyone answered the question:
How to word-mine.
You word mine by reading or listening to native Japanese, and grabbing words you don’t know and putting them into Anki.
It’s kind of the stage after textbooks and traditional study. When you’re good enough to understand common grammar points and have a good base vocabulary from your traditional learning resources. Word-mining is the next step in filling out your vocabulary with words that you personally run into a lot.
You can mine from anything that grabs your interest.
News, news articles, TV shows, books, comics, whatever.
This is also how you sentence-mine. If you see a sentence that you think would be useful, you put it in Anki for review and memorization.
Ok, I need a little break from anwering all the comments here cuz I overloaded my brain.
Same here but for English.
私は日本人です。英語で読む、書く、聞くはできますが、話すがとても苦手でRedditでディベートに参加して克服しようとしています。
教科書ばかりではなく、楽しみながら、勉強すれば楽しく身につけられると思います！
I know how difficult to speak Japanese. I saw some fluent exchange students in my college, but others from America struggles to speak.
Break your leg to just ENJOY Japanese, you can try making 卵焼き by yourself with Japanese recipe.
Thank you for the suggestions, everyone.
I learned almost every vocabulary I know from a site called Wani Kani. Haven’t been there in ages but it got me to where I am now. I’m happy to answer any questions or just help out if you need to practice!
As others have said – Wanikani is a great tool which would hand-hold you through all 2k kanji and 6k words you need to learn and then some