I am having trouble with the lesson because I usually write the word down then the pronunciation then the translation but lesson 3 seems to have removed the pronunciation. I watched a few videos but it’s still hard as I am unable to read it myself. Was I supposed to be able to read Japanese this fast or is there an issue with the book?
2 comments
hi there! japanese has three alphabets. by lesson 3 you should have already learned two of them: hiragana and katakana. the first two chapters showed latin characters (romanji) as a crutch since you were just starting out, but it’s important you start learning to read japanese as soon as possible, so you avoid falling into english pronunciation habits.
i recommend taking a few days to learn hiragana and katakana. the lists are located on the first and last orange sheets of your genki book. there are a variety of resources for learning them including youtube videos and flashcards. once you know the alphabets, you’ll be able to read and pronounce the chapter 3 words just by looking at them.
First things first, hiragana and katakana are essential. You can learn them in a week or two using
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
Once you can read them and probably write them you can move on to vocabulary.
When it comes to starting japanese I pretty much agree with everything in this video except I prefer the free Migaku Kanji God addon Anki addon over RTK. The addon creates RTK style cards which are based on the kanji coming up in your Anki decks.
https://youtu.be/L1NQoQivkIY
I am a big fan of the Tango Anki decks starting with Tango N5 for vocabulary. They are set up in an i +1/1t format which means they teach you with sentences but every sentence only has 1 new word. That way you see the words and grammar you have learned over and over in a natural way. I used them myself and then moved in to sentence mining later on to get to a good level of japanese.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/866090213