Hello,
I have a friend who’s studying a foreign language (not japanese, but danish) and his method the whole time (from begginer level) was to just read the material, he didn’t write almost any notes, he didn’t use Anki or any other program. He used some apps at the beginning and took a short language course. I’m curious have you ever studied a foreign language like this? Are you studying Japanese like this at begginer level 🫨?
He’s now at about A2 or even early B1, he can’t speak, but understands a lot.
5 comments
Perhaps he has near perfect memory? Flashcard type stuff is totally unneeded if you just remember stuff after the first time you see it. Sadly most people aren’t like that.
With japanese it’s much harder to do the same, cause you need to memorize kanji, but if you use instant translator addon like 10tenreader, then I guess it’s doable.
Yes, I’ve always studied my languages *something* like this with good results (in the sense of ‘just reading and listening’, but I really grew heavy with listening as I experimented). I personally just liked http://www.antimoon.com/how/input.htm and the ideas behind something like lingq, and socialized with other language learners who’d had great success similarly. Many of them were not actually intentional language learners, just foreigners stuck with American content.
I wouldn’t hear that and disregard a powerful tool like anki though — especially when most people having learning constraints like a job or family (or excited impatience)
Don’t compare yourself to others. You need to find what works for you. Also not all language learning is the same. Just because you can learn French (for example) easily and with passive learning it doesn’t mean you can just as easily learn Japanese, which is a very very different language and requires entirely different thinking.
what is this, a video game challenge run? 😛 i’m not sure why people want to hobble themselves by deliberately limiting what techniques they use to learn. use everything available to you. your needs change over time. and the same old techniques get boring over time, too. do everything.