what would help you while learning japanese?

4 comments

1. Oh, this should be good.

   Dude, you’re at BYU. You want a hit You Tube channel? Show the world how the Mormon missionary language training program works and base it off of that.

2. I think one of the biggest things is, even when you don’t feel like it, forcing yourself to engage with the language in some way every day. Even if some of the tools out there aren’t the “best” for learning, they can still be helpful if they force you to engage with the language daily. Duolingo, for example, isn’t one of the *best* tools for learning Japanese, but it’s still a free one that is easily used daily. Doing just one lesson a day, at least puts Japanese on your mind every day. It forces you to engage with and use the language on the daily and keep your skills from rusting. It’s ideal to do more than one a day if you can, but you should strive to mange at least *one* form of enganging with Japanese per day. Be that Duolingo, reading Japanese articles or comments on something. Something that forces you to turn on your language brain.

   I also think it’d be cool to include things that *aren’t* flashcards. I’m so sick of hearing people say to use flashcards! Flashcards absolutely do not work for me. I learn by using things in context. I recognize more kanji and can read more kanji now by seeing them used in real sentences online. Textbooks are also infinitely more helpful to me than flashcards. Having a full lesson-plan is infinitely better than shoving words at yourself ad nauseam without context.

   Building your ability to read basic kana (hiragana and katakana) to me was the 1st key to unlocking *everything.* Once you can read kana, you *have* to ditch romaji. Don’t ever lean on romaji again once you’ve got kana down. Then you can work your way up to learning kanji by reading things that use furigana (small kana characters above kanji).

   I think the thing that has helped me learn most is by organically learning words by looking them up when I don’t already recognize them. I take lessons in college and use textbooks and online teaching tools, but the most vital thing is to just engage with Japanese outside of lessons and figure some things out on your own. You won’t learn grammar this way, but vocab and gaining recognition of words and kanji will definitely come to you this way, in my experience.

   The best online J-E dictionary I use is [jisho.org](https://jisho.org). They’re incredibly helpful since you can search things in both Japanese and English, and you can also draw or search for kanji by the radicals inside of them. I’ve managed to look up a lot of kanji I didn’t know by picking out radicals I recognized in them and being able to learn a lot that way. It doesn’t always work, since you can misidentify radicals, especially in more complex kanji, though. I’ve also had a lot of trouble with the “drawing” feature for searching kanji, but I have better luck using it on my phone than my computer.

   I use the なかま textbook series in my college classes, and I think the lessons are laid out pretty well. Those come with a separate textbook and workbook. I also have one of the Contemporary Japanese textbooks by Eriko Sato. It has a similar structure, but is a textbook and workbook in one. I have another textbook/workbook from TUTTLE publishing that I got at a local bookstore called “Essential Japanese Kanji,” that probably teaches kanji in the most practical way I’ve ever seen from a textbook? It actually has you learn and use kanji in specific contexts. The beginning of the book also explains the general rules of stroke-order, which makes learning to both read and write kanji moving forward a lot easier. I definitely recommend these types of books since they are/come with workbooks as well, because while learning to read and understand Japanese is one thing, learning to write is also very necessary to building a deeper understanding and recognition. Your reading and recognition speed improves *drastically* when you are also regularly practicing *writing* the characters.

   So, from nothing? I think the most vital is first learning to read/write/pronounce all the kana. Hands down. Then, you try to build your vocabulary and learn kanji at the same time as learning vocabulary, as much as you can. At least, start working in learning kanji as you build your vocabulary. It’s going to be vital in reaching full comprehension to not lean on the kana for words that are commonly spelt with kanji too much. [Jisho.org](https://Jisho.org) is also very kind to beginners by having the furigana appear above the kanji in search results, so anyone who can read their kana will always be able to learn.

   And for building up learning the radicals in kanji? Wanikani exists for that. I’m still not too deep into wanikani myself, and the method of it does annoy me at times, it’s necessary sometimes to do things you dislike to get a better grasp of things. It’s still a very handy tool, though.

   And for gaining vocab, while also being handed the kanji for those things at the same time, [renshuu.org](https://renshuu.org) often does this. You can customize the vocabulary you are handed by searching a large library of lesson plans, but it does essentially work as an online flashcard site that also has some more game-ified things you can do, such as a counting mini-game that is super handy for learning all the different terms for counting in Japanese. They have a few other things, such as a community discussion board to talk about things in Japanese, or writing Japanese haiku. Again, I’m not really a fan of flashcards, so I don’t use it often, but as far as flashcards go, I think that renshuu does it best. They also hold discord events to help beginners, though I’m not sure how that goes, since it looks like a recent feature, and I don’t participate in their discord.

   Some other things I do is just reading online comments and forums. Articles. Japanese manga. Things that are just. In Japanese. I look up words I don’t know with jisho and try to take note and move forward that way. I do a lot of translation practice with these things, especially. Writing down and working on a translation of real Japanese sentences you find as if it were a workbook problem.

   I also try to get in read practice by playing Animal Crossing in Japanese. On Nintendo Switch, any game that has Japanese listed as a supported language on the e-shop can easily be played in Japanese on *any* switch by changing your console language to Japanese in the settings. This will make any and all software that support it launch in Japanese (unless it is a software like Pokemon that makes you choose the language when you start your save file). I also do this for Katamari Damacy on my switch, since the game has the name of various items in the bottom left as you pick them up with your katamari. It’s a very fun way to learn vocabulary.

   Sorry for the long response, but I hope any of these tips and tools sound useful!

3. By imagining how cool you’ll sound when you can rap in Japanese (*as a motivation, or a side project for yourself as your rapping skills get better together with your Japanese*).

4. I can’t think of one particular market gap.

   The last big one was when Dogen observed that there weren’t a lot of videos covering pitch accent in detail so he made his series.

   Another one (smaller but important) was Tokini Andy going through Genki (a textbook) for people who need some guidance through it.

   Yeah IDK, finding “what’s missing” is gonna be hard. One thing I would avoid if I were you is, I wouldn’t waste time re-iterating what a lot of already established youtube channels already do. Think of hitting it from a new angle.

   EDIT: I bet you could do a “book-club” type channel. A lot of people want to break into reading but want some hand-holding. Though I frankly would hire a bi-lingual native speaker or someone with EXTREMELY high non-native JP