Good beginner resources for people who have trouble learning?

9 comments

1. LingoDeer is supposed to be really good

2. My trick with grammar is the text books. I do all the little practices and stuff and then review after a few weeks. The gamification is really great for vocabulary but I haven’t really found anything other that Duo and Bunpo that have that for grammar.

   Japanese Conjugation City and Coban will help you gamify conjugation a bit which I really liked.

   Oh and have you tried out wankikani? Its for kanji and vocabulary but I really love the app

3. The problem with treating language learning as a game is that it isn’t a game, so you don’t want to think of it as one. You can give yourself a false sense of satisfaction by tricking yourself into thinking you’re learning the language, either at all or to a degree of proficiency, but that’s about it. In my opinion, just go through grammar and learn words, then start reading VNs or something. The first boring part doesn’t account for much of the process (you hear about people spending 100-500 hours on Genki; don’t do that), or rather it doesn’t need to, and the second part is like gamificiation but actually useful.

4. If your looking for an app I would recommend lingodeer they give you basic grammar explanations and while it’s not as gameified as Duolingo it is much better at explaining it to new learners the only downside is that it’s not free it’s like 14.99 a month but I think that’s pretty worth it considering the amount of information you get plus the quality of that information is on par with beginner textbooks and that over time could be cheaper option but if textbooks aren’t your thing than I think having an app like Lingodeer and duo on your phone makes it way easier to slip into studying than a text book but it’s kinda a personal choice at that point. I used lingodeer when I first started learning and it really helped me get a good solid foundation in the fundamentals like grammar, some vocab and the writing system. But I would recommend over time to start transitioning into using textbooks cause these apps are only gonna get you so far. I use them when I I’m not actively studying and kinda burnt out to just keep me having consistent contact with the language outside of active/ passive listening.

5. my trick was to write down your study times

   if you study a lot or a little, it helps you to put it in perspective

   I think another thing is, I used this book called “Genki” to learn some basics, it’s pretty good. To work through Genki I and also Genki II, in total, took me 7 months. Should be good to go after that into reading actual books.

6. Hi. So from personal experience i have a few resources that i used at the beginning of my journey. Using Genki is highly recommneded as you can go at your own pace and do practice questions. Next i used an app called Bunpo for extra learning but not needed. Many people also recommend Anki as it’s a form of flashcards that could used for east memory recall.

   If you want to go a bit more pricey to help motivate yourself more. I also hired a personal tutor from Preply to keep me going. Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions

7. App wise I really reccomend yuspeak and marumori.io
   Adhd and illness has me really struggling but I’ve been finding it a tad easier with them. Yuspeak explains the grammar better than anything else I tried. And marumoris spaced repetition is better than others I’ve tried too, with the bonus you can’t just multi question answer your way out of it

8. LingoDeer is pretty good. It is not a gamified app like duo, but imo it is precisely the reason why it is a good app. It focuses on teaching you rather than making it a competition or a game and although they keep a streak, they don’t push it nearly as hard (or at all)…

   Here’s the thing, as others have mentioned, language learning isn’t a game..if you jump with that mentality, you may not get as far…that doesn’t mean it is not enjoyable…

   Back when I was learning Japanese, I also started with Duolingo, but I quickly thought it was boring and wasn’t really teaching me. Instead I just jumped straight into what for me was fun: reading content I would enjoy in English, but in Japanese. In my case that was through gaming…I wasn’t even N5 when I started this…now I don’t even study anymore (no books, anki, or kanji studying) and I even use a Japanese->japanese dictionary…but it all really started for me doing something I like.

   If you don’t have the patience to sit there and read and look up words, then how about you something a bit controversial, but effective in getting your hands and feet wet in the language, AI.

   If you don’t have the patience to try to sit there and think what everything means, just take a couple of minutes to put it in ChatGPT (but try your best to figure out what you think it means before you put it)..then ask it to break it down for you….of course, AI can be wrong, but you’re only using it to get a bit used to seeing sentences…after that you’ll move on from it..

   Because I currently dont have as much time available to do Chinese as I once did with Japanese, I found AI to be in my case an easy point of entry into learning Chinese (although I already knew Japanese so that made it a bit…a lot… easier too)…I stopped using AI with Chinese not too long ago because I feel now I have enough knowledge of basic Chinese sentences and grammar (in part thanks to ChatGPT and LingoDeer) and it’s been going great…maybe if you give ChatGPT a chance, you could jump into immersion with less of a headache and in turn making it a more enjoyable experience:)

9. Watch curedolly on toutube for basic grammar. Short and extremely helpful lessons.