im planning on traveling to japan to work/intern/maybe study there in a year or two and so far ive only got about 30-60 hours on duolingo of experience, plus a few youtube courses. is this enough? what other aproaches could i take?
Beginner textbook with audio files. Get a solid foundation. Take a course if available in your area
Duolingo has some blatantly incorrect translations and misspellings. It’s also not really good at teaching, because the “lessons” are just flash cards. If you are going to use an app for learning, I recommend using an app called Hey Japan. It’s UI is very similar to Duolingo, but it actually teaches you stuff (like grammar) too.
If you’re going to live in Japan for a bit I recommend learning as much of the writing system as you can. Kana is fairly easy to remember, and there are tons mnemonics out there to help. For Kanji, lots of people like the book Remember the Kanji. I didn’t use it to learn kanji personally, but it has some good practices for breaking down complicated kanji into more manageable pieces.
Also get as much listening and speaking practice as possible. Use what you learn while talking to yourself, even if you’re speaking Japenglish (or mixed with whatever your native language is).
Other than that just keep up the practice!
I’m not fluent and understand little Japanese, I’ve been to Japan twice and the stuff I learned from duolingo barely helped or made any difference.
I learned the two kana between trips though and that made a massive difference at a basic level like being able to get the jist of what’s on a sign or a box.
My issue with speech differences is when you have some idea what they’re going to say and it’s laid out like in classes vs normal speech it’s completely different.
It’s fine for memorizing Hiragana and Katakana. Don’t bother trying to learn Kanji there.
I don’t recommend duolingo for getting started in japanese. It can make you sound overly formal, doesn’t really explain kanji, and misses quite a few of the unique characteristics like the frequent dropping of pronouns.
Best i can recommend is a mixture of many different learning platforms. Even some introductory youtube videos should be helpful.
5 comments
Beginner textbook with audio files. Get a solid foundation. Take a course if available in your area
Duolingo has some blatantly incorrect translations and misspellings. It’s also not really good at teaching, because the “lessons” are just flash cards. If you are going to use an app for learning, I recommend using an app called Hey Japan. It’s UI is very similar to Duolingo, but it actually teaches you stuff (like grammar) too.
If you’re going to live in Japan for a bit I recommend learning as much of the writing system as you can. Kana is fairly easy to remember, and there are tons mnemonics out there to help. For Kanji, lots of people like the book Remember the Kanji. I didn’t use it to learn kanji personally, but it has some good practices for breaking down complicated kanji into more manageable pieces.
Also get as much listening and speaking practice as possible. Use what you learn while talking to yourself, even if you’re speaking Japenglish (or mixed with whatever your native language is).
Other than that just keep up the practice!
I’m not fluent and understand little Japanese, I’ve been to Japan twice and the stuff I learned from duolingo barely helped or made any difference.
I learned the two kana between trips though and that made a massive difference at a basic level like being able to get the jist of what’s on a sign or a box.
My issue with speech differences is when you have some idea what they’re going to say and it’s laid out like in classes vs normal speech it’s completely different.
It’s fine for memorizing Hiragana and Katakana. Don’t bother trying to learn Kanji there.
I don’t recommend duolingo for getting started in japanese. It can make you sound overly formal, doesn’t really explain kanji, and misses quite a few of the unique characteristics like the frequent dropping of pronouns.
Best i can recommend is a mixture of many different learning platforms. Even some introductory youtube videos should be helpful.