Hello folks! 🙂
I have been learning Japanese with Marugoto’s free online course and I want to share my experiences with it. I’ve used the course for over a year now and progressed in a steady pace through their A1, and A2 books which some sources say would put me somewhere in the N4 level.
The first four courses have been amazing. I loved the interactivity, the mix of listening, speaking (recording) and grammar lessons all oriented by somewhat real-life scenarios and situations. It really helped me and I could feel the progress I did and was so motivated when I started to pick up more and more stuff in Japanese media. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s starting out.
But it all started to change in the later A2 books, where the amount & frequency of new grammar points and vocabulary ramped up quite a lot. This is also the part where I first started to experience some frustration with the online course format.
With each lesson you watch a drama with some new grammar points that you’re supposed to revisit during the course and get a deeper understanding of. Which sounds great in theory but what it boils down to in the later lessons is 3 different grammar points back to back with minimal explanation first and then exercises.
The explanations are downloadable PDFs with a break down of a grammar point like ” V‑ なく なりました ” along with often just a single sentence explaining the usage like “Say this if you want to say your freezer broke” without ever really delving into the grammar / linguistics along with 4-6 example sentences.
Another recent example was ” V1‑ ないで V2″ which was explained with: ” Used when doing something without doing a certain action.” – somehow my brain just didn’t understand that wording at all 😅 It got clear after watching a YT vid delving a bit deeper with some easier example sentences.
Pair that with grammar exercises that are sometimes too difficult, be it because I didn’t understand the explanations before as well as I thought I did or because new vocabulary is randomly introduced. I get that you can’t expect to know every single word but often these are crucial words to understand.
Often they also inject grammar points you’ve learned a few lessons back into the exercises for new grammar points. Which is good I guess but it’s also often frustrating when you feel like you haven’t even grasped the basic concept yet and the first exercise is to conjugate this verb you’ve never seen into the past tense and also apply this new grammar point (just a made up example).
I feel like this has to do with the fact that Marugoto started out as a classroom book and especially with these later courses I get the feeling that they’re probably more supplemental and would really benefit you having someone there to explain certain points in detail. It also doesn’t help that there’s way more material on every other textbook like Genki or Minna no Nihongo.
I guess I’m also a bit frustrated because I enjoyed the earlier courses so much and hit a slope with this one. But I hope at least that this writeup gives you some insight if you’ve been thinking about giving the series a try 🙂
6 comments
All textbooks have to be supplemental because human languages are simply too big. Books might lure you in with the illusion that things are easy, but sooner or later the kid gloves need to come off and the overwhelming reality becomes apparent:
Learning a new language will literally change the structure of your thoughts. You can’t expect that to happen over the course of a few hundred nice little lessons – it requires going through periods of *absolute bewilderment.* I don’t think textbooks do any favors by hiding that.
The truth is that you can continue to make progress even when you think you’re drowning, and you’ve caught a glimpse of that. ないで is pretty simple, but the explanation kinda sucked and it was *much* better to hear and see examples in context. This pattern will continue to be true as you learn to understand the rest of the language: spend a lot more time on examples and a lot less on explanations and exercises.
The biggest problem with exercises is that textbooks will try to explain pattern X and then immediately test your knowledge of it. You need a lot more experience between the two, hundreds of hours of listening is needed for basic words and patterns to sink in. The gap becomes much smaller as you improve: by the time you can comfortably read novels, yes, you can learn something and immediately try using it. But when you’re beginning a language the process is a lot more like caring for seedlings than studying some kind of science or math.
I think one very important thing with self-study to vary the sources.I started learning on a whim, with Duolingo, but then quickly realized that it would not be enough.
I am now using Duolingo, Wanikani, Renshuu, Anki, Bunpro, a grammar book that I bought, and several graded readers. None of those are perfect or enough, but the combination of all that is working fairly well so far.
I have also used marugoto up to B1. I get what you’re saying. In my case though, I started reading through Tae Kim after finishing the A1 stuff, so I never felt like I needed more explanations going to the A2 and B1 stuff. Which makes me think that you are spot on: the further you go in the series the more suplimental it feels. My advice would simply be to leasurely read through Tae Kim once.
When studying anything at all, language or otherwise, it’s important to look up other explanations when you don’t understand a concept. One source will generally be your primary source, and when you don’t get something, you look it up in other places until you get it. This can sometimes lead to switching your main source when you find that you keep checking one specific other place lol
I didn’t do that course, only used the textbooks, but I think Marugoto has that kind of style – teach by demonstration more than by explanation. They dont want you to get stuck in the minutiae, they want to focus on the big picture.
Many Japanese beginner textbooks have incomplete and/or missing explanations. The teacher should help add colour. For example, this strategy is intentional in Minna no Nihongo; we can guess what some of the pedagogy is behind that.
From a practical perspective, this requires the student to use supplemental material to get a better grasp on some vocabulary and grammar. This probably is a bigger problem for westerners, where Japanese is so different from western languages. There just aren’t many perfect one-to-one translations.
I used several resources as no one resource is complete or clear.
– the MNN grammar supplement (not relevant to Marugoto textbook)
– several dictionaries in electronic form, including free apps
– some online grammar resources (see the Wiki for ideas)
– Free Tae Kim app or PDF
– Japanese Dictionary of Grammar (3 books). The “Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for Teachers and Learners” is just one book so a bit easier to manage but has less “material”