Hello! I’m a beginner and am travelling to Japan pretty soon, and would like to reach N5 or higher by the time I go there. In spirit, anyway, since I don’t plan on taking the actual test right now.
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I’ve spent about six months immersing by watching anime and television purely in Japanese and doing Anki vocabulary and kanji decks, with minimal understanding of grammar (never particularly studying it). I couldn’t tell you how many kanji or vocabulary I know, but it’s a good bit more than none.
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I have kinda been half-assing it and never really got into the groove of learning Japanese, but I will say that I have learned many, many more words and mannerisms and sentence structure. What always confused me about Japanese was just how fundamentally different it felt to read and speak. Seriously took me months to grasp even that as a concept, but I feel like I get the “idea”, though rough. So my plan was to just kinda… passively learn and pick things up over time since I wasn’t actually in much of a rush, albeit I wasn’t being very efficient with my studying methods either.
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My current method of pure immersion and flashcards was seemingly working fine, though I hear that it’s a bit of a divisive topic. Some people seem to swear by that you can learn Japanese through nothing but immersion and Anki (like how some non-native speakers learn English), and other swear that simply just immersion and Anki is not enough. So I was thinking maybe I could kinda combine the two? Combine heavy immersion on top of more formal, popular study methods, I mean. I figure it would speed things up and maybe just keep me more busy as I have a lot of time on my hands.
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So I guess the point of this thread is to ask, for someone in my position who is an only English speaker and has kinda ironed out some of the more daunting things about Japanese, what would you recommend for me to do to continue studying? Any resources you’d recommend as well.
2 comments
If you haven’t studied any grammar at all, you are going to need to study that. Check out something like Bunpro and get the basics.
Some [guidance and resources here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). For grammar, I highly recommend watching the [Cure Dolly series](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj) (turn on closed captions if you have problems with her voice) – the first 20 videos should get you a good basic understanding of grammar (each video is about 10 mins, so 3-4 hours in total – plus absorption time of course).