japanese and english are both my first languages. since i live in the us and my mom (who is the only one other than my siblings who spoke japanese to me)moved away for a year when i was 7 or 8, my dad banned speaking japanese until she came back. (hes racist.🧍♀️)as a result, i forgot most of the japanese i knew. i now only know enough to write kana, a little bit of kanji, and have both formal and informal surface level conversation (i have a near perfect accent if that helps clear up how much i know, probably not tho).
any recommendations or something to help relearn japanese?
3 comments
The first step towards solving any problem is identifying the problem a specifically as possible. There are 4 skills of language: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. So the first step is figuring out your upper bounds in each of those skills.
It sounds like you’ve thought about this a little bit already. It sounds like you’re comfortable with both タメ口 and です・ます, but only when it comes to more simple topics. That’s a good place to start. From there you’ll want to keep practicing speaking. Try pushing yourself to talk about things that are more difficult for you. Maybe that’s narrating things that happened in the past. Maybe it’s talking about hypotheticals. You may find it helpful study some more grammar or vocabulary to help enable you to talk about these topics. Family is a useful resource, but if you find that insufficient (I find my family to be very bad language partners lol) then maybe look into getting a conversation tutor on something like iTalki
I’m assuming you can read about as much as you can write? Graded readers might be a good place to start. Practice reading aloud to yourself, since you probably know the words used already, you’re just not used to seeing them written. Normally, I advice against using picture books since they’re deceptively difficult for learners, but you’d actually probably get a lot out of them. To improve your kanji knowledge you’ll need to sit down and study kanji, just like any Japanese kid would. Resources for learners would probably help you here. WaniKani and Remembering the Kanji are the two most popular kanji resources here, but go with what works for you.
How’s your sound segmentation abilities? By that I mean, if you hear a new word in Japanese, do you instantly know what kana it’s made up of? This sounds basic, but it’s an important part of pre-literacy that kids are taught. Not sure how far your mom got in that regard. If it’s difficult for you, trying picking words you know and breaking them down into their component hiragana. For example, ringo -> り ん ご. If sound segmentation isn’t an issue for you, then that’s obviously something you can skip.
For writing, you know how to form sentences already in speaking, but you likely make the same sorts of errors that small Japanese children do. Try practicing writing short paragraphs for now (all hiragana is fine. Use the kanji you know) and try to get someone to correct it for grammar errors. 2 or 3 sentences is fine even to begin with. You could even try keep a simple diary where you write one or two sentences about your day. That’s pretty common homework in Japanese elementary schools
You didn’t mention listening in your initial post, so how’s your listening? I imagine you can understand simple household conversations fine, based off what you wrote, but where’s your max? Can you understand a kids tv show? A drama? The news? Figure out where your max is and then get lots of listening practice, slowly pushing yourself to listen to more and more difficult things. Once again, some explicit vocab study would probably be a good supplement here.
Since you are not a kid – do not learn Kanji like a kid – Use something like Remembering the Kanji to get through the Joyo in about 3 months – 2200 Kanji and the basis of understanding written Japanese is halfway complete. It will also help you to write the Kanji, but handwriting outside of Japan is basically not a requirement.
Something like [https://www.jpdb.io/](https://www.jpdb.io/) would be good after that to get the vocab and you will certainly need to do some grammar studies like Tae Kim or Cure Dolly (on Youtube) to round out the grammar which will go beyond the conversational and even get into literary grammar.
You should theoretically have a good leg up on other learners, but it depends on your goals – focus on what you want to do after you get a good foundation. I personally read (audio and output is my weakness) but you may be focused more on speaking – so give priority to how you are going to use the language. That focus should let you round out your weaknesses in time, but it will make sure you don’t lose motivation as quickly – motivation is really the fuel to run the marathon that learning a language requires. It will take at least a few years to reach fluency, quite often many years even if you study 2-3 hours a day.
That being said, reaching even N2 levels basically unlocks most of the basic language and you need probably only 10k-15k words to be able to handle most light novels and such. The real issue is coming out of things like the Core 2K and textbooks only to find out that real native Japanese is not going to follow JLPT guidelines and that committing to about a core 10k is what is truly needed to drop the dictionary for most middle school level material. On the other hand, many tools like Yomichan and [https://jisho.org/](https://jisho.org/) will help you learn the words you do not know. I would still use something like JPDB or Anki to remember these words as the rarer words do not get much of a natural SRS.
Also, I think u/mrggy meant タメゴ (タメ語) which is casual language and there is a ton of slang which even I have no idea about. I learn most of this through vocab lists based on series from JPDB – then I would watch the relevant shows which have it. Sometimes internet slang is just best learned from watching it on Youtube though. If you like games – try watching Let’s Play – (Search Youtube for <game you want to watch> + 実況.) Depending on who it is the content can be easy or really tough to follow. Daidara is great, but his voice is a bit tough to follow – [https://www.youtube.com/@daidara2525/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/@daidara2525/playlists) though generally it is all simple so you could probably be fine if you are conversational. As almost everything he says is really basic commentary. [https://www.youtube.com/@OnomachiHaruka/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/@OnomachiHaruka/playlists) is another though any vtuber typically does a lot of this type of stuff.
Getting deeper into Japanese is something which takes time, but if you like manga you can buy sets on eBay for pretty cheap and you can get great deals for $1-3 a book shipped to the USA. I like to buy completed series so I do not have to pay $13~ or so per volume as they come out. Early on you will need to look up words quite often, so anything like Shonen Jump will have furigana – but getting a high vocab quickly will make reading just plain fun. About 8k vocab is good for most titles, but you will find non-Joyo and certainly odd words pop up that you may learn based just on context then.
https://www.satorireader.com/ adjust to your current reading level
https://kids.gakken.co.jp/
Cute site about the world oriented towards kids! See how you do with reading it 🙂