How do I go from understanding nothing, to understanding something?

21 comments

1. by studying way longer than 2 months

2. imo listening is too hard at this stage….you should focus on reading as much as possible…build up vocab, and then start listening….for now, keep on with your studies….maybe try some [graded readers](https://www.amazon.com/-/es/dp/B08H5RGKN6/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=japanese+stories+for+language+learners&qid=1677190272&sprefix=japanese+stories+for+%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-7) (content based on your level).

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   but yea…read read read read…and keep studying vocab and grammar and kanji…..2 months is unfortunately too little time to understand most things. things will make more sense with time

3. Ok I’ll walk you through this with some basic example.

   For instance can you read this sentence from Dragon Warrior 1:

   勇者ロトの血を引く者よ！

   If you can’t read this, then what’s screwing you up? Do you not know the vocab? The grammar? What’s that particle at the end do? How about the term 血を引く, know that one?

   First all you do is look up all the words, you gotta use the dictionary. Use jisho.org or install yomichan.

   Next you know the words, do you know how the particles work?

   If you don’t know what particles are, you have to read a beginner text or tae kim’s guide.

   Can you identify the particles here? Can you tell me what they do? You should be able to find three of them and know what each does.

   Next, do you understand how the verbs are being conjugated? If not, you have to read a beginner text or tae kim’s guide. There is one verb here, what is it, and what form is it in?

   Now let’s assume you know conjugation. So then, why is that verb 引く in front of that noun 者? If this doesn’t make sense, again, this is all in beginner textbooks. Or you can ask in the daily question thread. Ask something like this “Why is 引く in front of 者 in this sentence?”

   If you can get through all that, great. If not, that’s fine too. But these are the kinds of questions you can start asking yourself.

   If you don’t understand a thing, why not?

4. if you’re immersing in things you barely get anything out of, then the material is too hard, pick easier material

5. Two months just isn’t enough.

   It took me almost 6 months to learn the basics (2.3k kanji individually, 2.5k vocab and basic grammar). Then, I started reading and understood basically nothing even with a parser. After another six months and 6k more vocab (8.5k total), I could finally more or less understand simple stuff, but still struggled quiet a lot. After yet another 6 months and 6k more vocab (14.5k in total), I finally felt like I could read simple visual novels with ease. My listening somewhat lags behind, but lack of vocabulary remains to be the main issue.

   Right now I’m approaching 16k words and 2.6k unique kanji and it’s still not enough to be comfortable with more difficult content, e.g. action or fantasy anime (which is partially because I’ve been mining words from a totally different domain, but still). Judging from the word frequencies, I’d need around 30k to feel truly comfortable.

   To sum up, you just need to know WAY MORE than you expect, but you’ll eventually get there.

6. You’re going to have to do more practice. Two months in you probably understand the です or ませんか type of sentences. That’s good, but lots of Japanese isn’t spoken or written with the basic grammar you find in your early studies. You have to learn more grammar, vocabulary, kanji, reading, listening, speaking. It’s nothing that you are doing wrong but rather you have a small understanding of a very large subject because you are just starting out. Don’t let it discourage you, you can get there if you keep practicing!

7. gestalt

8. To be completely honest. The easiest way to sum up everything everyone is telling you is to just use easier material and it’ll come naturally. I may not be the best person to listen to since I don’t necessarily use anki like I did in the past. In fact I hardly ever use anki but trust us. Use easier material and it’ll start sticking to where you don’t even need to use anki

9. You should start with a beginner textbook or even better a beginner class if you can find one. You will find the gap between internet and reality there.

10. Man ajatt really takes me back. Great way to learn if you’re dedicated but there’s lot of growing pains you’ll go through along the way. it’s down to immersion but you have to be doing what you can to understand and learn as much as possible to make it work

    I’ll split this post between tools and general advice as in ajatt you’ll need to use tools to make content you’re immersed in easier to learn from

    Tools I recommend

    Before you do anything look for as many tools, learn how to use them and SET THEM UP ASAP You don’t want to be stuck spending hours trying to get tools and set them up when you’re in your golden period of immersion and learning tons every day. Do it now when immersion isn’t worth as much

    USE SUBS when available. They’re invaluable and will help you test your comprehension while simultaneously improving your reading and recall in anki and In general just increase comprehension. They’ll also be a necessity when you start making your own cards

    Subs will also allow you to use subs2srs to make condensed audio files. It cuts out the dead air in shows where nobody is talking and you can listen to it when you’re too busy to immerse more intensively. It basically cuts the length of an episode of anime in half. You’ll be able to recall most scenes since you’ve seen the show and it’s a good way to get extra practice listening and maybe even pick up more words

    Also be sure to leverage the tools like migaku, the jpdb mpv addon, and anything that lets you look up words in a show by hovering your mouse over the sub. You want to be trying to understand as much as you can and mining tons of new words (that are popping up constantly) and these tools make it incredibly easy.

    Don’t worry much if you don’t learn everything in a show rewatching the show later will give you another chance to pick up the remainder of the vocab and can be a good confidence boost comparing your current level to your past one

    You’ll also want to do reading outside of jsubs since that’s mostly listening in my experience. Start as early as possible reading improves at a faster rate compared to listening and will help you make connections between words and concepts that will increase your comprehension

    For reading

    You’ll want to find good ocr tools. These tools take text off of a page and make it something you can use to look up the words and make anki cards

    if its manga be sure to make use of an ocr. They have one for android called just manga ocr and one on android called kantan manga. They make lookups a lot easier than typing it by hand. I’m pretty sure there’s a site you can use on pc that does the same but it ocrs the page before you start reading which I’m assuming means it’s more accurate but I’m not sure I don’t read on my pc.

    For games there’s an app called game2text that works reasonably well but you might also want to set the ocr feature in sharex since it does better on some fonts but in my experience text scanner ocr on android and a different app on iOS are nearly 100% accurate so I tend to use those despite being far slower

    For books on kindle the search function built in works really well assuming you install a better dictionary like jdict. For android any dictionary you can access inside of the book will be a life saver

    General advice

    Don’t get down on yourself if you’re immersed, and you’re keeping up on the srs you’re most certainly making progress but it can be hard to see as it’s a snowball effect that sometimes doesn’t pay off as fast as you’d imagine. If you’re feeling down go back and rewatch something you’ve seen in Japanese and be amazed you understand so much more.

    Be quick to make necessary changes even if they’re hard. To make ajatt work you have to be willing to learn how to learn so to speak. look at those who have results you want and learn from them. If something doesn’t feel like it’s working drop it or change your methods, if you’ve seen someone have good results with x try it. If you’re stuck in your ways you might either burn out or progress so slowly you eventually burn out anyways.

    Don’t stop and try not to have cheat days where you do nothing. At a certain point if you’re consistent momentum and habit will do all of the hard work. At a minimum do anki and some immersion but don’t stop.

    Sorry for the long post I did ajatt for 2 years and quit due to depression (not related to ajatt) and lack of free time. I’m just now getting back into it after 6 months off. This is most of what I learned doing it and if you’re curious about my level I was comfortable reading most of the light novels I learned Japanese to read and had a small group of Japanese friends I’d talk to regularly which for me is exactly where I wanted to be when I started learning

11. How much mining do you do? I would reread a few of the texts you have already read and just mine the fuck out of them. Just look up/mine every single word.

12. Spend more time than two months on it.

13. I don’t understand doing AJATT from the get-go. Don’t you need at least a basic grasp of the fundamentals before you start trying to learn via osmosis? I don’t understand people who spruik this approach from the start (not saying you are, but others) when I don’t think it’s reasonable to dive head-first into consuming media of another language if you don’t even know the basics. Not to mention that even if you did look up every single character, word, phrase that you didn’t know, I can’t imagine the sort of trooper you’d need to be to not get burned out by this, since that’s literally every sentence when you start out.

    Obviously once you have the fundamentals down you can and very much **should** start consuming Japanese, as much as reasonably possible IMO, but from the start? If I consumed nothing but Thai language material for 2 months with barely any study then I’m not gonna be able to read Thai, right? There’s the idea that you should immerse in content that is **just** above your current level, but if you’re consuming from the get-go, everything is going to be too far above your level to be reasonably enjoyable IMO. Obviously if you really want to read something that is far above your current level of fluency then go ahead. The first piece of media I ever consumed entirely in Japanese was Great Ace Attorney 2 because it wasn’t translated into English at that time. And I struggled a lot, it had lots of legalese and faux-old Japanese which I had not encountered before. But I pushed through because I absolutely adored that game, even though looking back, I think it was pretty far above my level of JP at that time, but my enjoyment of the game, and pushing through despite the challenges, kept me motivated.

    Sorry to sound like a hater and I really don’t even mean most of this directed at you, I just really get surprised by people who will go all in on immersion and get surprise pikachu face’d when after a couple of months they still don’t can’t read anything because they got enticed by the idea of “learn Japanese just from watching my animes!!?!?!” instead of doing the ‘boring’ fundamentals. Again, not saying this is you, but I feel like it’s something I see really often with JP learners but idfk

    It’s like Japanese is this odd paradox of a language in that it’s super popular for people to learn because of all the content, culture, etc that Japan outputs, but most people’s study motivations fall off a cliff when they realize how much time and commitment it takes to learn, though I’m sure other languages also experience this

    god I feel like such a grouch for typing this out

14. I’ve been living in Japan for about a year now (I studied a bit before I came but it was useless tbh) and I still can’t watch Japanese youtube or TV shows aimed at adults. The material is too hard.

    I recommend watching children’s TV shows with Japanese subtitles. You’ll be able to read along as you listen. I watched the Teletubbies with a Japanese dub on Netflix. If you have a Disney+ account, you can watch Disney Junior shows with a Japanese dub too. The shows themselves are by no means enjoyable for an adult, but I did get a kick out of actually understanding something!

15. I’ve been watching Japanese tv shows for 2-3 hours a day all throughout high school and university and it wasn’t until I became serious about learning Japanese and made Japanese friends and forced myself to speak broken Japanese did I start to see improvement in the areas I wanted to see: listening and speaking.

    I still cant read or write for shit, but I’m good enough at speaking and listening after 3 years to pass off as a fluent speaker to non-natives.

16. My biggest epiphany was when I realized that learning Japanese was going to be a lifelong commitment. Set realistic expectations so that you don’t get overwhelmed and just quit. I try to do something every single day, whether it’s studying kanji, listening to Japanese pod101 lessons, or just attempting to speak, but I don’t spend hours and hours and I don’t set goals like 2300 kanji in 6 months or 20 vocab words a day. What I do is repeat, repeat, repeat. I’m on my 3rd go round of JP101 lessons and I’m starting now to at least get the jist of any new dialogue I hear. With kanji, it’s not just meaning, but stroke order, and most common reading committed to memory. This approach is not fast….at all. But, my long term retention will benefit from learning this way. I don’t want to cram hundreds of vocabulary and kanji only to forget them 2 months from now. My approach is to be able to dissect the basics as much as I can, so that gain a deeper understanding moving forward when it starts to get more complex.

17. Fluency (and confidence in any skill) are the result of repetition. Insane amounts of repetition. If you put yourself in situations where you have something to lose (or gain) you will be more emotionally involved, and that will also help you retain whatever you learn.

    If you have to use Japanese at work, or in friendships, you will retain it better.

18. One recommended method is to practice just beyond your ability level. This includes speaking practice. Most textbooks start past tense with schedules and exceptions to it. What do you usually do in the morning? what is your usual routine? What did you do today? what time did you wake up? what did you eat for breakfast?

    From here, they will usually move into compound sentences or simple lists: I woke up at 7, ate rice for breakfast and went to school.

    For actual practice, you’d find a partner and start talking about your day. Pay special attention to verb tense and respond to questions they specifically ask. As you negotiate meaning you can learn new words and also learn methods to parse what you know and don’t know so that you can understand without understanding everything.

    This process takes anywhere from 3 months to 6 months to start “getting it” for an average person. If you have a good linguistics background and memory, you may do better. It takes children the first 8 years of their lives to get it down naturally remember.

19. The concept of AJATT only works once you have a solid foundation of how Japanese works as a language. Such things like how adverbs are used, where temporal nouns should be placed, adjectives and their various forms, verbs and their conjugations, etc… should all be learned (not necessarily mastered) before you begin to immerse yourself in full-blown Japanese videos or TV shows. Even when you do manage to get the grammar down, it’ll take more than a year for most people to understand everything that is being said from beginning to end (Low-level Japanese videos, not TV shows), mainly because there are a lot of words in Japanese you probably have never even heard of to begin with.

    From my experience, sitting down with a few JLPT textbooks, N5-N4 manga, and watching youtube videos on Japanese grammar will help get you to where you want to be with AJATT. You’re looking at around 2+ years worth of consistent studying. Best of luck.

20. keep up this level of dedication for 3 more years and you will get the gist of not overly advanced youtube and tv shows without subs

21. It takes time, but I found practicing with other learners helped. People always seem to want to jump right to native speakers. I never understood that.