I have gone through Genki 1 and 2 twice. I took a bit of a break in between both readings and made grammar anki cards after the second review to help with retention. I also had an anki vocab deck for Genki, but ultimately ditched it and just focused on the core deck and I am currently a little past 1000 cards. So currently I’m just daily reviewing my Grammar and Core Anki deck.
I don’t really have anyone to actually practice Japanese, so I end up just making random conversational sentences and doing a quick google translate to see if it matches (not the most reliable, I know).
Unfortunately often times it feels like I didn’t learn anything when I struggle to read sentences with unfamiliar Kanji or similar looking Kanji (but completely different meanings) form sentences, conjugate verbs/ modify nouns, which can be frustrating.
My goal has always been conversational Japanese, but I am not sure what other resources I should look into/how I should modify my study routine. Does anyone have any advice?
7 comments
>I don’t really have anyone to actually practice Japanese
Can you go on iTalki and get a tutor? Or try other language exchange resources on the internet?
>Unfortunately often times it feels like I didn’t learn anything when I struggle to read sentences with unfamiliar Kanji or similar looking Kanji (but completely different meanings) form sentences, conjugate verbs/ modify nouns, which can be frustrating.
Are you just trying to read random Japanese sentences, or is there something specific you’re trying to read? Would it help to start with easier reading material? (e.g. NHK News Web Easy, graded readers…)?
You’re doing fine! It really feels that way at the very start. What I did when I finished Genki 2, I downloaded an Anki deck N5,N4,N3 tango and kanji decks, since you finished Genki2 you can just breeze through N5 and N4 decks as review and continue N3 decks. You can start reading Tobira Intermediate – It’s gonna be very hard at this level, translate as you read the chapters and make sure you give yourself a goal like, 5 pages per day depending on how hard it is for you.
Have you considered chatting or texting generally? At early stages it can be easier to do.
Have you tried comprehensible input? Before focusing so much on trying to output, maybe it is best to focus on passive vocab while reading and listening. While doing so you gain much more familiarity with the language.
Eventually of course you should get a tutor to help you with output, but I think if you are only at around 1k words then your best option is a lot of reading from which to mine vocab for some time, then starting to listen with all the passive vocab you’ve gain from reading, then focusing on output
By the way, you are past 1000 cards but I have like 11,000k cards and I feel all this as well. I’m not too advanced but let me see what I can say here:
> how I should modify my study routine
Question: how much are you studying per day? In terms of hours.
Reason I ask is that, time and numbers matter a lot. Past a point, you just need to throw more hours at it.
> I don’t really have anyone to actually practice Japanese
iTalki
> I have gone through Genki 1 and 2 twice.
Genki is a good beginner thing but that’s all it is. You have to move past that. Don’t keep doing genki again and again. Just jump into reading. It’ll be like slamming into a brick wall, getting kicked in the nuts, or whatever choose your analogy. But just do it and be slow and careful and ask questions online and you can do it too.
> it feels like I didn’t learn anything
If you feel like you aren’t making progress, that can be an illusion as well. Or it can be real. But it’s more likely some illusion. I will elaborate though.
If you are forgetting stuff at a rate faster than you are learning, then you actually aren’t making progress and are making negative progress more accurately. Then really the best thing is to study longer.
Otherwise, you probably are making progress, it’s just harder and harder to tell the farther you get. It’s like if you learn at a unit of 1 per day, and you have only 3 units, and you study one day, you went up by 33%. But after a while, you have like 1000 units and go to 1001, and it seems like you didn’t make any progress but you still made a progress of 1 unit.
Learning about the language is not the same as learning the language. You need to stop going over Genki like you’re gonna just memorize the grammar and words and be able to use them well. If you want to use Japanese, you have to use it (try reading more, watching more without subtitles, listening more to podcasts), even though that’s really hard at first. You can’t learn your way into fluency, rather to get there you have to spend a lot of time understanding and picking up patterns. There is no book or course that will take you where you want to be, so take the time now to find a diverse set of content in Japanese to consume.
As an aside: I know there’s a big tendency here to think “I just want to learn to speak conversationally” or “I just want to learn to watch anime and read manga” (which people mostly use to justify not reading) but the reality is that those are both very difficult things. If you’re going to be conversational in Japanese to any meaningful level, you’re also going to have to be able to understand things like anime, and you’ll probably want to learn to read so you can text and google and just in general make the process easier on yourself.
So as someone who studied for a long time to reach some level of fluency, if I could redo my studies more efficiently I’d have done one thing differently (provided you already know hiragana+katakana perfectly) and that is learning the most common Japanese words from some list. Just the reading/writing in hiragana / katakana and how to say it/what it sounds like. You’re just starting out so hold kanji off a bit. A great list would be JLPT5 (which didn’t exist when I first started studying lol) vocabulary lists. I also REALLY like jpdb.io which honestly, blows my mind as to the resources available nowadays online lol. Literally just learn the most common vocab you can. Once you cram/input enough vocab, it immediately opens up several other paths of studies— audio comprehension and reading mainly— or at the very least makes things easier.
You’re gonna have to stop and look up a word regardless as you study more, but if you devote a lot of time now to vocabulary input it will greatly reduce that time. Kanji will come later. You want to be conversational either way and people talk with sounds ultimately, not kanji.
edit to harp on vocab a little more:
I always think of it like, if youre learning a language and want to say “I want the thing on the table”, it’s great to know the grammar and word order of where to put each word, but ultimately, if you don’t know how to say “thing” or “table” or “want” then what good does it do? Lol So really focus on vocab for now and do your usual studying imo.