Hi everyone,
I’m thinking of picking up Japanese again after not speaking it for around 8 years! I’d love any advice / recommendation you have. A bit about me:
\- Graduated in Japanese in 2014, was quite good at the time (also won a speech national competition from the Japanese Embassy)
\- Spent a year studying in Tokyo the year before, but I feel I reached my peak fluency the year after thanks to the more advanced courses I took at university
\- Almost passed the N1 while in Japan in 2013 (missed it by few marks!)
I now work in a completely unrelated field and don’t use the language at all. However, I’m not excluding going back to Tokyo at some point (through work even), hence I’d like to start again. I can understand basic conversation / read manga, but I feel quite lost in more complex settings (a shame, really). Especially my kanji reading / vocab got quite poor.
In general, I believe in passive learning and immersion (it’s also how I learned English and French), but I feel Japanese requires also some sort of structured approach (AJATT/MIA?). I was thinking of taking an evening course but there are so many resources online that I feel my time is better spent making use of these. I used to be a reader of the kanji koohii forum (I see it’s now dead!) and did RTK back before starting uni in 2010. Perhaps I should go back to that? Does anyone have any tips for people who do have a strong foundation / intermediate understanding and want to start picking up things on an advanced level after not using the language for years?
Thank you!
3 comments
Watch tv/movies, read books, and find Japanese people to talk to. If you were near fluent already, then there’s probably no real reason to study any grammar.
I’ve heard good things about kumon’s 国語 program and if you can swing the timezone maybe you can do remote.
I came back to Japanese after a very long hiatus.
If you want to regain your reading ability, try subbing to [Satori Reader](https://www.satorireader.com/). It’s meant for intermediate learners, but some of the stories/articles can get more advanced, like the “Close-up” investigative news stories. The grammar notes are really detailed for all the stories. You can adjust the amount of kanji shown (although I cranked it up to max kanji) and it’s got its own SRS to learn words, but you can also export your saved words (as a csv file) from the website and import them into Anki.
I also followed [this reading guide](https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/learn-japanese-by-reading/). I enjoyed most of the short story and novel recommendations and it has a nice progression from easier to harder material.
[Natively](https://learnnatively.com/) is also a good place to check on the difficulty of a book. Also look at [jpdb.io](https://jpdb.io), where you can also pre-learn vocab for the media you’ve selected as they have their own SRS system.
For kanji, if you feel you need a RTK refresher, there are a couple short RTK decks that you can quickly get through in a month or less. They just contain the most frequent kanji, and you only focus on recognition (kanji is on the front), rather than recalling and writing the kanji.
It’s much quicker that way, and I did the 1000 most common kanji deck in a month, but you could try the [shorter one that only contains 450 kanji.](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1561461108) You probably can finish that in a couple weeks.
You could skip that and just focus on learning vocab via sentence mining, and if you encounter kanji that is difficult to remember or learn, you can check the [rtk search site](https://hochanh.github.io/rtk/index.html), or use the [Migaku Kanji GOD Anki add-on](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1872210448) to generate kanji cards for you, based on the words you learning in your Anki deck. It’s based on RTK (but it includes kanji outside of RTK as well), and you can look at the primitives and koohii stories (if they’re available for the kanji). It can also scan your Anki decks and keep an accurate count of the kanji you’ve learned, as well as show you how many kanji you know from various lists (JPLT, Kanken, etc).
That add-on is free but definitely check out the other [Migaku tools](https://www.migaku.io/). Some tools require a $5 patreon sub, like their web browser extension, but it can do a lot, like sentence mining from TV shows, books, etc easier. It can scan for +1 sentences, add pitch accent coloring, show you how many words you’ve learned so far, etc.
There are free alternatives though. Take a look at guides at The Moe Way website: [https://learnjapanese.moe/](https://learnjapanese.moe/) . Also be sure to look at their “resources” page. A ton of good info there. The Moe Way discord is also helpful too.
Also for reading in general, I recommend using [ッツ Ebook Reader](https://ttu-ebook.web.app/b?id=20), with Yomichan installed as your dictionary / Japanese parser. You can install a ton of Japanese dictionaries into Yomichan and instantly make Anki cards. See The Moe Way site to help set that up and get dictionaries. BTW ッツ Ebook Reader only takes epubs, but you can convert them to epub format using [Calibre](https://calibre-ebook.com/). I just buy Kindle books from Amazon Japan and convert them to epub. (FYI there are third-party tools for the Kindle too, like for the Kindle Paperwhite e-reader device, that’ll let you import Japanese dictionaries and also extract vocab and sentences from your Kindle books into Anki cards).
The Moe Way also has a really good visual novel guide, using textractor and a texthooker page (so you can use Yomichan on it to look up words easily and make cards). If you don’t like reading novels, VNs might be more enjoyable for you. I wasn’t really into VNs before but now I’m a big fan.
So basically for me, it was reading a ton. Lots of short stories at first then novels and non-fiction books. Also using mixed media, like visual novels, audiobooks, and listening to podcasts (initially focusing on podcasts that had transcripts, like [American Life 4989](https://www.4989americanlife.com/blog)).
Using Anki and making my own cards gave me structure to my days because of my reviews. All the constant reading drastically improved my listening ability as I can now listen to NHK News radio, lectures on YouTube, and audiobooks (it depends on the author though) and understand things. I couldn’t do that before.
As for speaking, I’m sure that’ll come back to you as you use the language more.
Listening to Japanese variety shows helped a lot with more colloquial phrasing as well as slang, and topical subjects.
Variety shows like Tantei! Knight Scoop, 水曜日のダウンタウン, and 月曜から夜ふかし. 世界の果てまでイッテQ! is a particularly funny show. 人志松本の酒のツマミになる話 is a show hosted by Hitoshi Matsumoto (who speaks Osaka-ben), and it will really push your listening abilities, as it features celebrities and comedians, trying to top each other by telling the most funny (or interesting) story, based on random topic that is chosen by spinning a bottle. You can find these shows on Chinese websites, searching in Japanese on YouTube or Dailymotion, or using torrents.
If you’re concerned about pitch accent and pronunciation, you’ve probably heard of Dogen. He’s got a [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/user/Dogen/featured) and a [Patreon (where you can access his pitch-accent lessons)](https://www.patreon.com/dogen).
Since you won a speech contest, you’ve probably already heard of [Toastmasters](https://www.toastmasters.org/), but maybe there’s a Japanese language club that you can practice your Japanese public speaking skills, like this one in [Washington DC](https://jetoastmasters.toastmastersclubs.org/) in the US. Maybe there’s a similar club in the UK for you.
For improving your writing, you can do a write streak at r/WriteStreakJP/. I think you’ll probably need a tutor in order to really improve your writing. Fortunately I have friends and relatives who are professional Japanese writers, so I get help from them.
Good luck. I think you may find the first few months to be a struggle, but after that, you should be able to get back into the swing of things quickly.