Sorry about the title, I’m not sure how else to word it.
For context, I’ve known Japanese all my life but since I don’t live in Japan, my Japanese is at a very young age level (Around grade 1-3) and has stayed there since I was in grade 1-3. Recently I’ve been wanting to get to my age level. I can think in Japanese but since I’ve started using sites like Duolingo/kanji learning websites and YouTube videos it feels like I’ve gotten worse and started translating everything into English even though before I didn’t.
Recently I was practicing 飲む (kanji) and now I heard someone say 「お茶飲みたいね」and all I could think was “飲む means to drink”. I still of course want to get better at Japanese but it feels like I’m going backwards and I shouldn’t learn. Is there a better way I could learn that doesn’t make my brain do this? Or a reason to why I started to do this when before I didn’t?
2 comments
if you know spoken Japanese, but are struggling with kanji (maybe because your family speaks to you all the time in Japanese but you’ve never had to see it in writing, Im speculating because of lack of info…), then maybe you’d want to learn kanji in Japanese? Instead of using english translations? Sites such as [this one](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/kanji/飲/)…,now I realize this site has kanji all over the place….but if you learn the basics of the structure of the page (音読み =おんよみ 、 訓読み=くんよみ 、意味 =いみetc), you can just learn kanji without translating to English….hopefully I didnt misunderstand and this helps
Pretty sure you are having the issue you’re having because when learning kanji you are relating it to another language…and so your brain automatically thinks of the translated meaning in English…because thats how you learned it
Edit: I realize the meanings might not mean much without context, so you could use [this site](https://synonyms.reverso.net/類義語/ja/飲む) to get some example sentences (scroll a bit and you should see a couple of sentences, under 例文/れいぶん)
Since you already know some Japanese you should ditch English entirely when you’re learning. Instead I suggest you grab a book with furigana that interests you and start reading. If you don’t know a word look it up on a monolingual dictionary like [https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/)