Much in the same way we have a number of Native Japanese speakers on this subreddit, there is a benefit to looking at things from the other side of the fence and perspective. I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite resources that I found to be extremely comprehensible provided you can read Japanese somewhat.
If you are just starting out it might be worth checking out still. It is definitely interesting to see how Japanese attempt to reconcile learning English. The environment/websites being all Japanese are better for immersion too.
https://www.1karaeigo.com/ — Not sure how I found this site, but I really love this one. I found it to be extremely comprehensible. Very strong understanding of English nuances and they provide tonnes of examples of English sentences and Japanese equivalent sentences. The explanations about nuance are clear and easy to interpret. Everything is written in a short, succinct explanations and are well formatted.
https://eikaiwa.dmm.com/uknow/ — A useful forum for asking how to express themselves in English. It’s also very comprehensible because every question they’re asking for is a rather simple one or two sentence expression in an English equivalent. Good practice is to read the original post, write your own answer intended for them, then compare your answers to the ones submitted. If you save your answers in something like evernote you can review the things you wrote later.
https://ja.hinative.com/explore/questions/newest?language_id=45&question_type=MeaningQuestion — Another question asking forum, all kinds of people ask questions but the primary language being Japanese leads to a different experience. It’s sort of like here.
https://kimini.online/blog/topics/how-to-say — Just a blog of random slice of life, “how to say X thing in English.” Not as comprehensible but still useful for practicing reading and picking up things here and there regardless of level.
If anyone has any similar resources, I would love to see them.
3 comments
These are neat!
One of the things you find out doing this (studying Japanese by reading ESL materials for the Japanese market), is that it is easy, even for natives, to end up with odd ways of saying things in our native language, when you are translating things back and forth, because we tend to overly value saying things in analogous ways in both languages
But often the differences in logic between the languages means we have to let go of that desire to express things similarly.
The more you make English from Japanese sentences, the more you let go of trying to be analogous, and the more natural your Japanese becomes because you gradually convince yourself that making analogous sentence structure is not the goal, only communicating ideas.
This one, in particular:
>https://eikaiwa.dmm.com/uknow/ — A useful forum for asking how to express themselves in English. It’s also very comprehensible because every question they’re asking for a rather simple one or two sentence expression in an English equivalent. Good practice is to read the response, write your own answer intended for them, then compare your answers to the ones submitted. If you save your answers in something like evernote you can review the things you wrote later.https://eikaiwa.dmm.com/uknow/ — A useful forum for asking how to express themselves in English. It’s also very comprehensible because every question they’re asking for a rather simple one or two sentence expression in an English equivalent. Good practice is to read the response, write your own answer intended for them, then compare your answers to the ones submitted. If you save your answers in something like evernote you can review the things you wrote later.
Looks like it could be amazing for learners. You will see Japanese people asking how to say things we might never even think to try and say in Japanese! Plus the whole breaking habits on retaining analogies thing.
I teach some stuff in Japanese, that I learned to teach in Japanese. And it’s amazing how broken my English is, if I just try to translate that into English on the fly in my head.
These are great thanks!!
https://eigopedia.com/ is another good one.