I’ve been doing Japanese Duolingo for some 6 months or so now, and, although I won’t say I’ve gotten most of what I can out of it (specially because I’m still VERY early on in the course), I feel like I already know the basics of grammar enough so that it’s mostly a matter of vocab now. I will keep doing Duolingo, as I said, it can still teach me a lot, but I was wondering what other ways are there to really learn new vocabulary. I really like the idea of using original source material, made by japanese people for japanese people to learn vocab while having fun, but I feel like I don’t actually know enough vocab to actually take advantage of that. What do you guys think?
Edit: thanks for all the answers! I ended up choosing Anki pre-made decks. I think they fit in better with my style of learning
5 comments
For vocab, use an SRS program like Anki. For everything else, get a textbook or some other commonly recommended learning resource (e.g. Tae Kim grammar guide, etc). You likely still have a lot of work to do before you’re ready to tackle authentic native writings and sources.
Duolingo won’t get you very far by itself, and especially not if what I’ve heard about the recent changes they made to their Japanese course are true.
i like the genki exercises where you actually use the word, like to make sentences to describe whats happening in a picture.
Check out nayr 5k anki deck. Better than the core decks imo because it’s a frequency list based on a wider range of of things as opposed to just newspapers from the 90s. Each card has a sentence with native audio. Also the sentences included have a great deal of variety so you’ll pick up new grammar and vocab not explicitly numbered among the 5k cards.
books or textbooks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensive_reading