Beginner Learner

4 comments

1. Duolingo is okay for the start, but at some point I found the sentences really strange. Love JA Sensai and Drops for vocabulary.
   Also the only thing that helped me getting started /better at talking was taking a class.

2. Duolingo has a very bad reputation here.

   I wouldn’t use it much

3. Read the side bar.

4. If you haven’t already, read the wiki. Your post will probably be deleted because the wiki answers most things, but I thought I’d share my experience anyway.

   I decided I was going to start about 2.5 months ago, after having done a little bit a few years ago. I thought I would just slowly drip feed myself vocab, phrases etc. through apps like the ones you’ve mentioned and that would be enough. After 20 days straight of Duolingo I realised none of it was properly going in, and it’s just a very slow and inefficient way of learning a language, but it is easy. YMMV, but I felt a bit like I wasted most of my time with it.

   I switched to going through the Genki textbook at my own pace, as well as installing a few decks in Anki and doing it properly. It’s a lot more effort but it’s so much more rewarding, and I’m already feeling significant progress. I do about 30 mins – 1 hour each day give or take.

   To remind myself of hiragana and katakana I used the kana drill app on iOS, among a few other things. I would strongly recommend hitting this the hardest first, and it will make everything else a lot easier.

   The Anki decks I use are Jlab’s beginner course, Recognition RTK and JLPT Tango N5 MIA Japanese. I do 10 a day of Jlab and N5 and 5 of RRTK. The Jlab course is for grammar (it’s based on the widely recommended Tae Kim course), RRTK is to be able to recognise the 1000 most used Kanji and the N5 deck is for both, and vocab.

   Genki is the main resource for everything, almost everyone recommends using it and it’s good if only to know how you should structure your learning and goals. If you were to take a paid course at a university or school, it’s likely something like that would be used. You can probably get away with just doing Genki and a Kanji memorisation tool (lots of people like Wanikani, which I have also started additionally) but I like the extra decks to make Genki easier and keep the knowledge in my mind.

   For extra reading, [this is what helped me hugely](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hRuiFm-vvVFiOpUExOHPkZBJSNheDRbL2I2p6v5SjcA/edit) when trying to figure out how I was going to learn, as did the wiki. You don’t need to read all of it, just scan the sections you’re interested in.