Hi! I’ve currently been studying Japanese for about 7 months now; I bought the entirety of what Pimsleur has on offer, which is 5 volumes, and am currently beginning volume 4. I majored in English and Linguistics in college so I come at it with a bit more knowledge about language structure than many people; this has helped a lot with Japanese having such a different word order and grammatical structure, but as I am approaching the end of my Pimsleur collection I am noticing a few of its shortcomings. It’s great for learning on my car rides and has been fantastic for making sure I don’t have an accent (I managed to meet a Japanese person at my Alma Mater and he complimented my pronunciation, so that felt pretty good!), since I stayed completely away from romaji (pimsleur is audio-only). However, I’m noticing these few problems that I doubt Pimsleur will rectify within the last two volumes:
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1. From a language-learning perspective, since it is not conversational but focuses on repeating previously-constructed sentences, it creates the problem that once you step outside the areas I have previously learned to talk about I literally have no idea what you’re saying. I would be perfectly confident ordering at a restaurant, for example, and handling basic small talk, but if you ask me about something even a little bit outside of my knowledge base I am completely at a loss. Is that one of the reasons that it is so hard for an english speaker to learn Japanese, since it has almost no etymological roots to my native language?
2. Pimsleur doesn’t help you at all with learning how to read. If you’re learning a language that shares your native language’s writing system then that’s not an issue, but this is a major problem for me – I am learning on my own but am having a very hard time finding reliable methods for learning Kanji. I have learned Hiragana almost completely (thought I still have to sound out words) and am working on Katakana, but am lost at how to learn Kanji. I’m also in an area where there is almost no Japanese population so I have almost no opportunity to read Japanese or even hear it in person in my daily life.
That’s basically my issue and my question – what should I do to become more fluid and conversational in Japanese after I finish the final volume of my Pimsleur collection? I don’t want all this work to fade away because I can only talk about basic things. As an example, if I watch a Japanese episode of Peppa pig I can sortof follow along but am missing half of the words; the context of the show helps me keep up. Japanese sesame street is harder, and I’m missing about 75% of the words. I asked my japanese friend what TV shows he watched when he was very little and he pointed me to Shimajiro – I found it on youtube and I was literally only getting ‘amazing,’ ‘let’s go,’ ‘tomorrow,’ ‘rocket,’ ‘yesterday,’ things like that. Completely unable to follow it. Really discouraging since it appears to be about the same level as Paw Patrol or Dora the Explorer. Basically, I’m feeling like a 3 year old who knows how to make a reservation at a hotel lol. How can I remedy that? I feel like Pimsleur is giving me a good start but I know I’ll need much more work before I can reach real fluency.
2 comments
What are you looking to do?
I might get a textbook or something which focuses on creating with the language.
[My comment here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/wj62ve/program_to_learn_to_speak_japanese/ijfenep/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) might offer a happy medium in a more comprehensible context. I expect a lot will be repeated, but it might help.
There are several different strategies for learning kanji.
Some people find great value in things like WaniKani and anki decks.
Others prefer bruteforcing it by reading a lot and looking up every kanji they come across, until they stick (even if that means looking some characters up many times over).
And yet others prefer learning the kanji as part of words, often using vocabulary cards.
Personally, I started by working through the relatively small RRTK 450 deck, which just contains kanji. I almost burned out doing this, and in hindsight I should probably have stopped early – but I do think I got some value out of the effort. After that, I went through the Tango N5 deck, which teaches vocabulary. By the time I was mostly done with Tango N5, I was ready to start reading simple texts, such as those on Satori Reader. They are hard enough that I do learn a lot of new words from them, while being easy enough that I do not get frustrated.
Now I’m continuing on with Tango N4 while also spending some time reading, and listening to podcasts like Nihongo con Teppei.
Given that you already have a decent starting vocabulary and reasonable grasp of the grammar, you will likely be able to skip most of the words in Tango N5, and probably also a bunch of those in Tango N4.
So my suggestion would be: start an anti deck for kanji, but set it to a low number of characters per day. Something like 10 at most. If you ever burn out on learning kanji, simply take a break, or drop it entirely. It’s not a necessity.
Then, at the same time, go through the Tango N5 deck, and simply suspend all the words that you already know. It starts out *really* basic though, so maybe you should start with the N4 deck and see if it’s a good difficulty level for you. Set it to 10-15 words a day, adjust if needed.
And start reading! Satori Reader has all words annotated, allowing you to see both a pronunciation and translation simply by clicking them.
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Now, all this only trains input, not output. But you will certainly need to train input if you want to be able to improve your output.
I am also, myself, looking for better ways to train output. I’ve been trying to write a diary but it’s pretty hard at the level I’m at.
Whatever the case: make sure to start reading and listening as soon as you can. Everything else is to support that goal.