comprehensible input with on-the-fly dictionary look-ups, casual curiosity, Anki premade high-quality and free JLPT decks and perhaps paid Tango books, or self-mining your own cards into Anki or another actual, legitimate SRS program of your choice (Duolingo and Memrise might be nice to get you started but you shouldn’t be paying them money and they aren’t actual true SRS programs either)… and you would mine those vocabulary and sentence flashcards from your comprehensible input.
Music and incomprehensible input is fine too if you enjoy it but don’t always expect for much or anything at all to stick from it. See TheMoeWay website guide, or AnimeCards website guide, or Rentry.co/mining, or Anacreon’s DJT website for good resources and guides and such, that’s the springing point. The communities for those websites might not be your cup of tea, which I totally understand, but their resources and methodologies seem to be fine and high quality. Practice standard internet caution of course. The key rule of thumb for learning most languages is that if you think you have to pay to learn them then you aren’t or might not be fully keen on scams.
also for the love of god filter through the top posts of all time (go through a few pages of the top posts too) and read the information that the subreddit already has to offer itself before asking a question that established learners have to see daily. We answer these questions all the time.. it’s like clearly the information is out there and people aren’t doing their due diligence. I don’t know how to express this without sounding snarky but please know that that really isn’t the case
Read more.
I use jpdb.io to review pronunciation, especially pitch accent, focusing on common words. But for actual understanding: read more listen more.
I like vocabulary cards in Anki for the first 2k words or so and sentence mining for another 10k sentences or so, but eventually it turns into “read more, listen more, get *extremely* comfortable with dictionaries.”
In my experience, efficiency went up a *lot* once I was able to comfortably read manga and novels. So I encourage people to focus more on reading comprehension than cramming many new words per day. When you hit the inflection point and things become easy, you’ll know. Before then, be aware that 20 a day is actually really fast and be careful to not overload yourself.
My man, you posted the same type of question a year or so ago. Will you actually go out there and start?
It depends on your level.
**super beginner**: a dictionary and just looking up words for items around you and simple adjectives is a good start.
**beginner**: apps like Memrise or a pre-made anki deck.
**mid-late stage beginner**: start dabbling in things with context for new vocab. Memrise or duolingo for instance.
**intetmediate+**: if coursework vocab and grammar are getting too easy and you can’t find the next step THEN start dabbling in media. You’ll need a dictionary and probably a translator because even if you know the grammar and vocab the phrasing isn’t always intuitive.
From there it’s kind of your choice what you want to do. Each piece of media has a core vocab that repeats early and often (and frankly don’t worry about any words that don’t repeat. If you forget ’em, they’ll come up in something else later that repeats them better).
1. You can look up the words and continue on, letting the media do the SRS work for you.
2. You can build an Anki deck for new words.
3. You can write new words (and sentences too) in a notebook or on a spreadsheet or note app or w/e and never look at it again.
…. I go back and forth between 1 and 3 because I find wrote memorization helps some days. Most of the time though I just look it up and keep going.
Today I learned 引っ越す (ひっこす) from Pokemon. The setting, context, imagery, everything just made it *click* and I only had to look it up once.
read books
before that read … textbooks
also there are word lists in some of those test-prep books
5 comments
comprehensible input with on-the-fly dictionary look-ups, casual curiosity, Anki premade high-quality and free JLPT decks and perhaps paid Tango books, or self-mining your own cards into Anki or another actual, legitimate SRS program of your choice (Duolingo and Memrise might be nice to get you started but you shouldn’t be paying them money and they aren’t actual true SRS programs either)… and you would mine those vocabulary and sentence flashcards from your comprehensible input.
Music and incomprehensible input is fine too if you enjoy it but don’t always expect for much or anything at all to stick from it. See TheMoeWay website guide, or AnimeCards website guide, or Rentry.co/mining, or Anacreon’s DJT website for good resources and guides and such, that’s the springing point. The communities for those websites might not be your cup of tea, which I totally understand, but their resources and methodologies seem to be fine and high quality. Practice standard internet caution of course. The key rule of thumb for learning most languages is that if you think you have to pay to learn them then you aren’t or might not be fully keen on scams.
also for the love of god filter through the top posts of all time (go through a few pages of the top posts too) and read the information that the subreddit already has to offer itself before asking a question that established learners have to see daily. We answer these questions all the time.. it’s like clearly the information is out there and people aren’t doing their due diligence. I don’t know how to express this without sounding snarky but please know that that really isn’t the case
Read more.
I use jpdb.io to review pronunciation, especially pitch accent, focusing on common words. But for actual understanding: read more listen more.
I like vocabulary cards in Anki for the first 2k words or so and sentence mining for another 10k sentences or so, but eventually it turns into “read more, listen more, get *extremely* comfortable with dictionaries.”
In my experience, efficiency went up a *lot* once I was able to comfortably read manga and novels. So I encourage people to focus more on reading comprehension than cramming many new words per day. When you hit the inflection point and things become easy, you’ll know. Before then, be aware that 20 a day is actually really fast and be careful to not overload yourself.
My man, you posted the same type of question a year or so ago. Will you actually go out there and start?
It depends on your level.
**super beginner**: a dictionary and just looking up words for items around you and simple adjectives is a good start.
**beginner**: apps like Memrise or a pre-made anki deck.
**mid-late stage beginner**: start dabbling in things with context for new vocab. Memrise or duolingo for instance.
**intetmediate+**: if coursework vocab and grammar are getting too easy and you can’t find the next step THEN start dabbling in media. You’ll need a dictionary and probably a translator because even if you know the grammar and vocab the phrasing isn’t always intuitive.
From there it’s kind of your choice what you want to do. Each piece of media has a core vocab that repeats early and often (and frankly don’t worry about any words that don’t repeat. If you forget ’em, they’ll come up in something else later that repeats them better).
1. You can look up the words and continue on, letting the media do the SRS work for you.
2. You can build an Anki deck for new words.
3. You can write new words (and sentences too) in a notebook or on a spreadsheet or note app or w/e and never look at it again.
…. I go back and forth between 1 and 3 because I find wrote memorization helps some days. Most of the time though I just look it up and keep going.
Today I learned 引っ越す (ひっこす) from Pokemon. The setting, context, imagery, everything just made it *click* and I only had to look it up once.
read books
before that read … textbooks
also there are word lists in some of those test-prep books