Hi , I’ve been watching anime and playing Japanese video games for a long years , so i decided to learn Japanese , I finished Japanese from zero + I’m studying kanji from “kanji look and learn” i know all n5 kanji and i know some basic grammer
And i use “Japanese core 2000 step 01 listening sentence vocab + image” anki deck. What should i do next? Should i buy genki 1 or 2 ? Also what do you recommend for kanji and anki deck?
I’m struggling to find a routine to learn Japanese.
4 comments
genki 1 because it’s the first in the series; genki 2 is for people who finished genki 1
Genki and then Quartet. I recommend ToKini Andy’s videos for better understanding each lesson.
For kanji I’d recommend Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji because that helped me learn kanji in several months but there might be a better alternative nowadays.
I recommend doing Duolingo on the side. It’s a good resource for reinforcing your knowledge and learning new words.
Once you feel comfortable I recommend you jump into manga. Yotsubato, The Girl from the Other Side, Girls’ Last Tour, Ranking of Kings, Nichijou (order easiest to hardest). That kind of stuff is easy for beginners. Then move on to harder manga that you like an anime adaptation of and watch each episode after reading a chapter it’s adapted from.
I don’t know if this is the best thing to do but it sure helped me a lot.
From what I have seen online there seems to be two main methods of learning Japanese.
1. The skill building approach
2. Immersion
The skill building approach is learning grammar and vocabulary as building blocks to construct sentences. Youll have to think of what to do consciously. Immersion is where you absorb content in the target language which is japanese in this case. It can be reading or listening. You apparently subconsciously pick up things if the media is comprehensible. but I suggest you also want to be consciously looking up words and unknown grammar if you do it.
For the skill building approach there are books, apps and websites for this. You said you studied *Japanese from Zero*. That has *5 books* so you could continue to the last one if you haven’t already. If not there are the popular *Genki* books, but the books seem designed for use with a teacher rather than for self study.
What most people seem to do these days is go through a grammar guide and flashcards for vocabulary up till a certain level, then they watch or read Japanese content using one of those apps that has a popup dictionary.
There is also the option of hiring a tutor on italki or another website, to give you structure and teach you.
I’d recommend that you *avoid* flashcard-based “practice” along the lines of Anki. Language-learning is most effective and long-lasting when you learn words, phrases, kanji, and grammar *in context* rather than surgically isolated on a screen.