Any way to add learning materials besides Anki?

I’m having a good time learning with Anki but it feels like I should be doing more.

5 comments
  1. The best learning materials will be the books, shows, blogs, whatever you enjoy written in Japanese, by Japanese people.

  2. Definitely yes. I’d even say that depending on your level, Anki should be the minority of what you do.

    Unless your goal is to get good at Anki, you should have some media to read and listen to. If you’re still a beginner, you could go with graded readers or podcasts specifically for learners. If you’re not a beginner anymore, try manga and anime. Stick to slice of life to avoid most of the weirdness associated with “anime Japanese” until you know better.

    You could also give visual novels a shot. They’ll train both reading and listening. Most other characters aside from the protagonist are voiced, so you can ignore the textboxes for their speech unless there’s something you missed when listening only if you wanted to focus on listening. For the main character’s lines, you’re usually on your own. VNs are great because you can scroll back up the log and replay the voiced lines.

    Oh, and don’t forget, you can also look up your hobbies in Japanese, so while you might need to learn new words, you’ll know a bit of what’s being talked about.

    If the option is available to you, get in some actual conversation practice with a tutor or even online friends (if there are no Japanese people near your area).

  3. If your vocab is 2k+ then you should be able to start with native materials, but continue with Anki. Anki type SRS (I use JPDB) is how I have learned probably 80% of my total vocab – encountering the vocab in materials certainly cements usage for me, but I do not pick them up via dictionary look ups *while* reading. My retention from stopping to look up words was bad, and I also did not mine properly from reading either. If you are going to do a lot of reading, make sure to make Anki cards and study them.

  4. Thanks for the answers! Any links to resources like manga or graded papers? Thanks!

  5. anki can be like 25% of what you do, 75% would be either reading books or listening to things, or talking to people might sometimes qualify as studying as well

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