I took 1 year of Japanese in college in 2008 and have tried to study on my own, but I never really made any good progress. My wife is Japanese and we travel to Japan to visit her family for a about 6 weeks every couple of years in the summer (I work in public education in the US). I’ve done all of the Pimsleur levels, did some Japanesepod101, but I still have very limited skills. At this point I am frustrated and embarrassed that my skills are not better than they are. I feel like I can only understand about 10% of what I hear on tv or in everyday casual conversation. Is there a good program that you would recommend that could help me move beyond being stuck as a beginner and actually learn to speak and listen with more confidence?
31 comments
Let’s go man use that motivation and dive deep! I was in a similar situation with Spanish/Cuba, got me a tutor and a few years later I’m at an intermediate level and still striving for advanced.
likely a quantity problem. nobody gets fluent in japanese studying it occasionally and casually as a hobby. that might work for simple languages like german, french spanish etc. if youre not putting in a couple of hours of hard work every day, yes every day, for years, youre not gonna get anywhere. putting in 4-10 hours a day can get you decently fluent in a couple to 4 years. there’s no silver bullet.
[Here](https://jpdb.io/web-novel-difficulty-list) you can find a difficulty list of web novels in Japanese. Download Yomichan, which is a web extention that gives you translations when you hover over words. You can find guides on YouTube on how to install it, including dictionaries. Read a couple dozen web novels before the next time you go to Japan. You’re welcome.
Edit: I forgot to mention, reading has been proven to be the most productive activity for language learning. It makes sense. Think about the most eloquent people you know, do they read a lot?
I used Anki to learn a ton of vocabulary words. I’m learning about 20-40 new words per day. I use the flashcard decks that are sorted by word frequency.
Combined with reading stuff w/ voice overs and Japanese subtitles, it’s helped me learn a lot faster.
your wife is japanese? why not try to change to japanese while inside the house?
it might be an effort at the start but certainly worth in the long run…. and its cheaper 😀
I am in the same boat as you. For me, I know the issue is a lack of practice. I have gotten okay at understanding Japanese input but I’m still at a shockingly low level when it comes to output. You only get better at what you spend time on.
I tend to prioritize studying input rather than output because it is much easier for me and I can do it during down time at work. It is a challenge to get yourself to spend time on the thing that requires the most mental energy when you’re mentally drained all the time.
My goal is to start simple. Make myself write a little bit each day (using vocab or a grammar pattern I studied that day) and then once that has gotten more comfortable and not as draining, start practicing speaking more. I will probably start that by doing my self-talk in Japanese until I feel ready to get a tutor for speaking practice. Now to get myself to actually do it…
I’ve just restarted learning Japanese and what I can tell you, even though I’m not proficient at the language, is that I can see myself making progress when immersing in content at my level. YouTube is a great place for that. Just search for “comprehensible Japanese”. You’ll find channels like ゆきえ , Japanichiwa, しのせんせい , comprehensible japanese , もしもしゆうすけ , Sayuri Saying, Japanese immersion with Asami (I’d start here), etc. For vocabulary, Anki. For grammar, Tae Kim’s guide.
さあ、頑張りましょう！
That’s OK. So does mine, and I can understand media now.
The whole thing is a process. And if all you’ve done is lessons, then a lot of what you know is theory. You need active practice too. Which means a lot of speaking, writing, understanding, and reading, as much as you can.
Which also means SUCKING at speaking, writing, understanding, and reading for a while.
Personally, to help with listening skills I use Netflix and Language Reactor. I can set it to auto pause, and with Japanese subtitles I can use Language Reactor’s hover dictionary to pick up new words and stuff. It’s helped.
I’m years in and still suck!
I suck less than I did before I first tried to learn though. When I first went to Japan I tried to learn Hiragana before I got there and all I could read was す
For me the biggest hurdle has always been CONSISTENT studying. As in, do something every day (or every other day, at least). I’d try one method, give up, stop studying, try another, rinse and repeat. So far, though, I’ve had pretty good success with both wanikani and renshuu. (I think over a year with wanikani, and easily 6+ months with renshuu). Granted, neither of them really help that much with output, but that you can practice with your wife, time and patience permitting. I had fun with nativshark, but I felt the price was a bit steeper than it warranted and didn’t continue. I’ll probably look at it again if a sale happens. Speaking of sales, I think renshuu is having a summer sale at the moment, so you might wanna check it out.
I noticed you didn’t mention anki, reading novels and watching native content. They’re the 3 keys right there.
Here is something that really helped me understand just how complicated it is to learn a language.
When you were a kid u probably took English class until 12 th grade, including weekly spelling and vocab tests until high school. You were immersed in English everyday people spoke to you you spoke and it took years to get to where you are now.
Learning languages can be more difficult for adults and you probably are not completely immersed in Japanese so you are not able to practice like you would English.
The tortoise wins the race.
Break it down.
Vocab
Kanji
Grammar
Study each bit daily and day by day you will notice small improvement. Listen to music you don’t understand shows you don’t understand and just try to read and listen. Language is complex and sometimes will just come to you.
There are two things you have to try and maximize simultaneously: 1) retention and 2) motivation. A lot of people here will recommend that you use the spaced repetition software Anki, because it is arguably the most scientific way to put a large amount of material in your long-term memory.
The only problem is that people’s lives, personalities, and abilities are different, so some people have a harder time just banging out flashcards for the amount of time it takes to learn Japanese. So you have to adjust your workflow to fit your life. Otherwise, you’ll just burn out.
For example, I know about 3000 vocab thanks to Anki. But lately I have been taking a 6 month hiatus as I wrap up my PhD. My “study” almost entirely prioritizes fun right now.
Last, I would highly highly highly recommend that you use three tools: Anki, Yomichan, and Language Reactor. With these three tools, you can make personalized vocab decks from words/phrases you see on Netflix, YouTube, or any other Japanese text online extremely quickly (1. put mouse on word, 2. press shift, 3. click green plus sign). This makes Anki more useful because you’re learning words relevant to whatever you care about, instead of the most used words in a Japanese newspaper from 1995.
Language Reactor creates highlightable subtitles, Yomichan lets you look up highlighted words and export definitions, and Anki helps you remember the words through spaced repetition. Note that you have to integrate Anki into Yomichan, which is pretty straightforward. Make sure to get additional Japanese dictionaries for Yomichan as well.
I made a guide that could help you.
Check it out here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LH82FjsCqCgp6-TFqUcS_EB15V7sx7O1VCjREp6Lexw/edit?usp=sharing
It’s quite in depth but offers lots of resources for learning Japanese and making interacting with native material easier. The first half of the guide is very action-orientated so you should be able to start right away even if you haven’t read all of the guide (which will take quite a while tbh).
I made this guide for my own use and you can see my progress reports here.
1 year update: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ndw70e/2200_hours_of_japanese_in_1_year/
2 year update: https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ujac5e/4000_hours_of_japanese_in_2_years/
It’s hard to really know where your weak points are, so it’s a bit hard to know what to recommend. However, it sounds like if you’ve done all that study you should have a pretty decent grasp of basic grammar (at least intellectually, it may need reinforcement from seeing it in the wild). Your weak points are probably in vocabulary and listening comprehension if I had to guess. Someone has already recommended reading webnovels with Yomichan, which will definitely help improve your vocabulary level.
As for listening comprehension, a useful program might be [Language Reactor ](https://www.languagereactor.com/) which is a browser plugin that makes it super easy to look up words in subtitles on Netflix and YouTube. It also has some other helpful features.
Anyway, vocabulary is primary imo. You can’t learn to hear what you don’t know. And while you can learn vocabulary from listening practice if you’re using something like Language Reactor to look up words as your come across them, in my experience this is more slow and painful than doing the same thing while reading. I guess frequently pausing audio content to look something up takes me out of the story more than looking up a word while reading does.
Practice more.
This is going to sound flippant, because it is.
You’ve basically written that you have not put any effort into studying Japanese in a meaningful way and are frustrated that you have no results. Moving past that, if you want to put in some effort, I have a few concise steps.
* Memorise the written language – kana, kanji
* Find a grammar guide and read thru all basic grammar
* Use the Japanese acquired in the two steps above to either: read Japanese, or listen to Japanese
* Feel free to mix in attempting to speak here, but you will likely make many mistakes and not be able to express yourself outside of extreme basics
* After acquiring the ability to comprehend written and spoken Japanese, increase difficulty until you have mastered it
* Simultaneously, practice speaking while using your new found comprehension skills to mentally note the errors you make – identify where you speak differently than native speakers, etc
* ????
* Profit
Feels like you’re not putting many hours and that’s the main problem. People posted a lot of ways and ressources but you’ll need thousands of hours before you can understand casual conversations (which is way harder than you imagine).
Ask your wife to start speaking Japanese.
More practice
I am going to assume you understand all the basic grammar etc. If you like anime I can suggest watching an easy show like Yuru Camp on the website animelon. You can have both English and Japanese subtitles on at the same time and go at your own pace. If you shadow the characters you can practice listening and speaking whole acquiring some vocab. It won’t be easy but it’s fun.
Golden rule for languages; ya don’t use it, ya lose it. The best thing one can do when learning a foreign language is try to expose yourself to as many speaking/listening/writing/reading opportunities as you possibly can in your everyday life (without overwhelming yourself and causing you to quickly burn out). This can manifest in:
-Reading news articles & children’s stories (Recommend the NHK Easy Japanese website for easier to read articles)
-Watching Japanese media like movies or anime, optimally with no Eng. Subs – try with Japanese subs, and then eventually no subs at all. It helps if it’s media you’ve already seen too, because then you know the plot generally already to help you along.
-Get a Language partner and/or speak to your wife more in Japanese, or at least have her speak to you in Japanese more.
You should also ask yourself: are you REALLY PASSIONATE about learning Japanese? Learning a foreign language and learning to truly speak it well is a lifelong endeavor, and requires consciously, constantly pursuing target lang. opportunities to maintain proficiency. That’s not to intimidate you / shame you at all, it’s to say that if you aren’t SUPER passionate about it, then you might want to just make peace with not being that good in the lang, and put your time towards things you like more. I’ve seen lots of people sink YEARS of study into a language, and TONS of money into classes, only for them to barely improve because they didn’t use the language outside of class because they just weren’t that passionate about it.
I think you need to adjust your expectations. You did a university Japanese course 14 years ago and did some self studying, but are not fluent yet. You went to Japan a couple of times but probably your wife does all the difficult speaking parts right? Which is fine. But think of different fields of Japanese as different muscles. There is reading/grammar/writing (+creative and formal writing)/speaking/listening and probably a couple more .
Now Uni intro courses only tend to teach the very basics. Self studying will mainly train your reading & grammar muscles. There might be some spill overs but generally no matter how hard you train those, your speaking and listening will not get better. Especially in a non-learning environment. It’s mainly about dealing with/using patterns and words that you are non familiar with. Don’t beat yourself up over not achieving a level which you probably couldn’t achieved with your current approach.
Rather than doing another course, I would rather recommend you find a group to chat with (local learning group, italky etc.). For listening watching children series without subtitles might help, but nothing beats the real thing.
I felt the same following my college degree. I’d recommend checking out [Refold](https://www.refold.la) if you want a relatively structured approach to language acquisition, but honestly a lot of the advice in here is great. Read a lot of books, listen to a lot of content. You don’t acquire language through study alone, you acquire it when you understand it. Seeing words in a wider context speeds up that understanding through a natural acquisition. It’s a lot less stressful and easier for me than more traditional methods, and my Japanese has been improving constantly. Every reading session is motivating for me because of it.
Grab a pop-up dictionary for your web browser such as RikaiKun, yomichan, 10ten Japanese reader (works with iOS and iPadOS) and find a book that interests you. [LearnNatively](https://learnnatively.com) is a community curated websites that can help you find something to read depending on your level. Good luck! I’ve been where you are, you can do this!
I mean… I just started learning and that I found myself actually memorizing and learning is to have the passion and curiosity to learn.
For me, learning Japanese isn’t for fun and games at the moment, it’s a ticket/ opportunity to make my life a bit better in terms of finding employment. So the situation is a do or die scenerio.
So yeah… Gunning for a NT2 even though it’ll feel like climbing up a steep hill but I gotta do it!
I have a Bachelors degree in Japanese language and literature. I very rarely see a kanji that I dont know. I study religiously for a few hours a day. I watch TV in Japanese every day. I read manga or novels in Japanese every day. Ive lived in Japan for 4 years. My wife is Japanese, and we communicate in Japanese at least half of the time. BUT, I still cant keep up with native conversations! Speaking one on one with someone, I would consider myself fluent, but in a group of native Japanese speakers, I just simply cant keep up. I can understand most of what is being said, but the conversation usually moves too fast for me to be able to have any meaningful input. I guess my point is, learning a foreign language as an adult, especially Japanese, is unbelievably difficult. Its not impossible, but it is for sure the hardest thing Ive ever tried to do. Bottom line, you need to put in the work to see any sort of results, and those results will inevitably be slow to realize. I’m talking about hours a day, every day, for years. I realize that I will need to continue my studies diligently for the rest of my life. I try to enjoy the journey, because in reality, I will almost certainly never be able to obtain the native level fluency that I had thought I would be able to reach when I first decided to start learning Japanese. Good luck to you sir.
I immersed myself with watching Anime with daily life genre and watch Japanese YouTube everyday and it really helps my Japanese understanding. After I passed the beginner level comprehension, consuming a Japanese media is made me absorb new vocabs and increasing my understanding of the language nuance everyday. I’m at N2 level right now and it is all what I did to learn Japanese.
i think you’re going to have to actually invest some time and money to learning the language. does your area have any japanese language courses? maybe during your 6 weeks in japan you could also go to some sort of japanese language school.
Completely understand. The only system that has helped AND kept my interest is the [Jalup App](https://japaneselevelup.com/jalup-mobile-app-introduction/). Although, it’s in the process of switching hands, but later in the year it’ll be headed up by the [Nihongo](https://blog.nihongo-app.com/nihongo-jalup/) app.
I suppose you could always download the Jalup app in it’s current form now, and try out the first 100 cards of any deck for free. It would at least give you an idea as to how it works. Then if you like it, wait to purchase anything until the handover to Nihongo completes.
Check out Japanese Ammo with Misa on YT
Her videos are quite long, but she goes WAY deep into nuances of pretty much everything, and by the time the video ends, you’d pretty much view grammar and other stuff in another light
[here’s her channel link](https://youtube.com/c/JapaneseAmmowithMisa)
You might be one of those who fare better if forced to learn in class or under a sensei.
Self study is not for everyone and there’s nothing wrong with that.