I’m native bilingual Japanese and English, but since Japanese was only used in my household conversationally, I never learned proper reading and writing, as well as professional conversational Japanese. I am able to understand most spoken Japanese, (except certain dialects), and can read hiragana and katakana, as well as having maybe a 2nd grade understanding of Kanji.
I would like to become more acquainted with written Japanese so that I can write to my aging grandparents and childhood friends in Japan better, but don’t know where to start. Does anyone have any good resources? I’ve been searching but everything I find either has a level of vocabulary too low for me, or a level of kanji too high.
2 comments
Have you looked at materials for studying for the kanji kentai exam (full 日本漢字能力検定)? The lower levels are taken by younger children, who may not be particularly literate and it sounds to me like maybe you are in the same situation: your verbal vocabulary is reasonably big and you do OK with grammar, but writing is still tough.
It stands to reason the study materials for elementary school students might work well for you
Somebody recommended this game to me:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.or.kanken.shirikan.free
And you could give it a try, too. I have 2 problems with it, personally:
It’s still got too much vocab and, more importantly, some of the text is too small for me to comfortably read. But you could try it.
Regarding typical foreign language learner-oriented materials:
For reading, you could try the KKLC book and GRS; the author now recommends doing the GRS in the Kanji Study app, and I would second that recommendation (for working in the App vs
trying to use the kindle or printed versions). I tried these a while back and really struggled because even in the beginning there’s a lot of grammar and idiomatic expressions that you won’t find in beginner textbooks like Genki 1 & 2 and because the contents is pretty boring. But they are a good sequence of exercises to learn the phonetic reading of kanji and avoid confusing similar looking kanji. You could look at those.
The Kanji Study app itself is good, it has nice writing practice exercises and “fill in the blank” multiple choice quizzes. You can study custom sets of kanji or work through almost any of the popular sequences (grade level, JLPT level, RTK, KKLC, …)
Besides that, you could get just the kanji workbook from a popular study series, e.g. the Tobira kanji workbook and do the exercises. I personally like the Tobira workbook,.but I didn’t get too far into it because I’ve been prioritizing speaking/listening and reading/typing over hand-writing.
If you want to practice typing, a language exchange app like HelloTalk or Tandem might be a good place to get that kind of practice.