Fun Learning with My Cousin

So recently my cousin started studying Japanese in earnest. She is doing virtual design and was offered a job by a company that has a branch in Japan.

Long story short she needed a quick way to learn vocab and grammar. She wasn’t as interested in Kanji because she is mor focused on speaking right now. So she asked me if I had any ideas for quick and engaging learning.

So what I did was go through Genki 1 and 2 and wrote down all the vocab on flashcards. I then broke it into separate piles for verbs, adjectives, nouns, adverbs, particles, and helper verbs. Then I created some modifier cards, such as present/past/nagative and so on.

Then I walked her through each lesson of Genki, and as we were walking through, I would have her pull a random car from each pile and use those words to build sentences. I would then have her perform the necessary conjugations for each word and put them into correct order to form coherent sentences. Each lesson I would add the new vocab in and her decks would keep growing through this process. She has just finished Genki 1 after about two months and is now moving to Genki 2.

When I started learning myself, I never thought of this and honestly I am kicking myself for it. Even though I finished Genki 2 a while back and have been using Tobira, this honestly helped me refresh my memory a lot and I’m probably better for it.

I don’t think this is a very unique study method and someone else has probably done it, but I never saw anyone suggest this when I started learning and I just wanted to toss it out there as an idea for new learners. The upfront time with writing out vocab and the repetition and structure building really helped my cousin and I think it could possibly help others as well.

Sorry if this was long winded and all!