Hey there,
Been working in Japan for many years in Japanese companies, I had a lot of overwork hours so I couldn’t dedicate myself into continuing classes
Now that I have time and a great job without any stress and any overwork, I would like to continue learning and improving. I’m however at a weird level where I can actually speak well and use keigo quite correctly but I cannot read/write much.
Going back to school would be annoying because going to beginner and even intermediate classes to re-learn kanjis from scratch would feel like a waste of time as I know the grammar etc already… (I could definitively have some improvement but I don’t feel that would be worth the bucks)
Is anyone have been in that kind or situation before where his/her spoken level is much more higher than reading/writting ? How did you past through that ?
Just buying a kanji book and learn every kanjis “randomly” would make me a headeache, I would like to have a structure where you learn kanjis and pratices them into sentences per exemple. My goal is to get N2
Do you have any school recommandation or teachers who could help me on that ?
Thanks !
14 comments
The effort/reward ratio is *much* better for reading than writing, so focus on reading. In your situation, I’d use a spaced-repetition program/app such as Anki, and download premade N2 vocab and kanji decks.
Semi-regular private lessons by a qualified teacher works too of course, if you can afford it. They can adapt the lessons to your situation.
Then once you have basic reading skills, just start reading stuff (duh!). Light novels, manga, whatever. Setting your TV/Netflix up to show Japanese subtitles on Japanese content is useful too.
But first you need to just memorize the basics. Spaced repetition. Better late than never.
If you plan to go from “nothing” to N2 level (around 1100 kanjis), I’d suggest you to use a kanji app to check you’re fine with the first 150-200 kanjis, and then get a book of etymology to understand the radicals, constructions and logics around kanjis, maybe with a teacher. So you’ll be able to have a clever method to remember the meanings and the pronunciations.
And in my opinions, kanjis you can’t write are the firsts you’ll forget / misread. Write a little bit the kanjis when you discover them, writing with the right stroke order helps you to really read a kanji and all its components.
After all, it really depends if you want to learn super fast to help succeed a test, or if you want to really keep them in your brain for everyday use.
I’m struggling with the same issue since I’m half Japanese and completely understand grammar but don’t have the vocabulary or Kanji of N1. If anyone has suggestions I’m open!
Wanikani and manga. Reading is thankfully one of those things you can fully do on your own. I’m in the opposite situation where I read relatively well and can watch shows in japanese (with japanese subtitles) but haven’t practiced speaking enough.
It’s going to take a couple years of very consistent practice to get to N1 for reading (and you really need N1 for reading, unlike for conversation).
How do Japanese people learn Japanese? They aren’t born with it?
They take Kokugo classes.
The cheapest and easiest way to study Kokugo is with Kumon (or Gakken) workbooks sold in most bookstores. If you have time, go to the Kumon classroom near you and pay the low monthly fee to do unlimited worksheets and get corrections.
This works particularly well as a complement to one-on-one private tutoring. Online is fine, and there are tons of options.
Start reading japanese books and articles even if just for an hour day, use a dictionary to look up some stuff u don’t know, and after a while you’ll be better
I was in a similar situation here, I work in Japanese and my family speaks Japanese, so over the years I picked decent listening and speaking but my literacy was really low. Kumon worked out well for me, I’ve been doing the correspondence course, the Nihongo foreign language course goes through N2 level, and now I’m working on the kokugo course.
> Going back to school would be annoying because going to beginner and even intermediate classes to re-learn kanjis from scratch would feel like a waste of time as I know the grammar etc already…
Reconsider this and start studying for kanji kentei. From level 10. And when you progress and forget the basic ones you come back again and again. Forgetting is part of the learning process. It’s a marathon but good news is you don’t need a teacher or school or anything fancy just pen and paper (and it’s the natives way of learning so plenty of ressources everywhere)
Use the app wanikani or the book remembering the kanji.
These both will give you a structured way of learning all the basic kanji. Don’t really focus on learning how to write the kanji unless that’s a skill you think you want to have, it’s not that useful these days.
I personally used remembering the kanji and made it through the book in a couple of months, then I used various methods (flash cards, reading, kanji koohi companion website) to solidify things.
https://www.pdfdrive.com/remembering-the-kanji-vol-1-e11497242.html
Why not consider a personal tutor? They can tailor sessions to your exact level.
OP if you’re like me and don’t like textbooks or anki, I recommend starting with easy daily life manga such as Chibimaruko chan or Cojocoji(my favorite) to get familiar with daily use Kanji. Also when I’m riding the train I try my best to read the advertisements and if there are some kanji I don’t know I just look them up.
I’ll add another recommendation for Wanikani. I was in almost exactly your situation. It’s a really nicely structured way to learn Kanji. And a lot of the vocab you already know verbally will come up and you’ll think “Of course it’s those characters, that makes sense”.
You’ll pick up a lot of new vocab along the way and much of it will be using the same characters as those that appeared in words you alredy knew. It helps everything stick really well. I think it’s been much more enjoyable running through wanikani with a decent level of spoken Japanese than it would be starting from scratch I think.
Once you can read a little, you’ll find yourself improving your Japanese in general much more quickly and push through that barrier.
I think satori is a great app for reading. It’s not free, but they have a lot of stories at different levels. You can turn on furigana or tap on words to see their reading and meaning. It could be too simple for you, but give it a try.
Also in my opinion furigana will hurt your learning. For one, if you always have it, you’ll just read the furigana. Secondly, you need to practice looking up kanji. There’s lots of ways to do it but I like jisho.org. Third, if it’s annoying to look up kanji, it gives you more motivation to remember it.
I’m fairly sure an organized course like that does not exist, in the same way that there are no technical support hotlines for people who are sure that rebooting their router will not fix their problem: the person making the claim that skipping a few steps is safe is not an expert, because if they were, they would also know the next step.
That is the “awkward level” you’re at: you’re not expert enough at Japanese teaching to know whether any of the material you’d be skipping is important, but you’d still like to skip, and get an expert to sign off on your decision.
It is not necessarily wrong to skip ahead, but good teachers will only sign off on this if they are convinced that this is indeed a good idea, so they’d need to evaluate your existing level in a 1:1 setting first, examine your grasp of the material, and then make a recommendation. Anything less than that would be quackery, and more of a loss of money than “repeating” a course would be.