When it comes to the best method in reading, I always run into debates between Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji” and Kodansha’s “Kanji Learner’s Course.”
I’m trying to decide which one is best for learning how to read quickly and effectively. Right now, I’m leaning a bit towards the latter. Both have plenty of side-resources such as Anki decks (which I haven’t really used yet).
I’ve seen plenty of cases for both on the Learning Japanese subreddit, but do any of you guys have suggestions?
Thank you for your response, my college is big so I don’t have to go out (and I don’t!). But lessons are outside and far (some people don’t care that distance much). So for this year I am stuck in my college.
Thank you for encouragement, I need it 
I need to be encouraged from time to time, so I encourage myself
I will do what can be done and study. Though, I am getting things a little messy (first year, alone in college).
Pitch was something one of those links talks about but now you said that in that way I understand. It’s embarrassing bit to get something 
I don’t know if someone already pointed that out but I think that being in contact with people that speak japanese is a good way to improve. Actually, I’m only a beginner but I feel like everything I’ve learned until now is a bit fragile, I mean that I’m not very confident when I try to make sentences in japanese. It’s a bit the same with english as I’m not a native speaker though 
… but to me, writing is always easier than speaking ^^
If you guys are looking for people to chat in japanese, I realized yesterday that there were a ton of discord servers that actually are a good place to meet people that also want to learn japanese and english so you might also want to check that out ! 
As a french native speaker I tend to stay on the fr/jap server but there are more en/jap servers as far as I know.
So my city’s public library system offers free rosetta stone. And since a lot of these other services are like restricted in some way with a pay wall, I was wondering if that would be good. I always see memes about how weeaboos use rosetta stone and it’s not legit but like… why?
Because you can fart into the microphone and it counts as Chinese
But really Rosetta Stone isn’t the worst thing in the world
It’s better than not doing anything, so, since its free, why not give it a try?
Free = try if you can
Hey all.
I noticed there weren’t many responses here but thought I’d try to get it revived a bit (possibly) with my attempts at learning Japanese very, very slowly.
Well, once I get going it won’t be too slow but, yeah.
I’m going to personally use Imabi.net and Duolingo. (If there are better free choices, do let me know but these two seemed like a good start, with starting at Imabi and then testing myself pretty much on Duolingo)
Hopefully it goes well and you’ll know (yes, you, even though I did this joke on my profile already) if it does!
Although I haven’t tried the Japanese course, I’m a bit skeptic about how really useful Duolingo is 
Imabi is a good source, and you can complement it nicely with Tae Kim’s guide, as they have different ways to approach the same topics. Textbooks like Genki are expensive, but it’s what most people look into if they’re looking for a more structured approach.
For practice, Anki flashcards can be a good way to practice vocabulary and whatnot if used wisely, and there are many Discord servers where you can talk to other learners or to natives. I think you can get their links on Reddit. Also, let me know if I can help you with anything!
Please do keep consuming media you like to consolidate what you learn. It helps you remember what you learn and learn new things, and keeps motivation up.
I believe that after you reach a certain level where you get a gist of the language (i.e. you can understand pretty easily many sentences given that you know all the words and the grammar structures in it) you can dive into VNs armed with a dictionary and the Internet, and slowly work your way up to build your understanding and learn new words.
Just a little disclaimer, which tackles the reason people sometimes don’t recommend watching anime or whatnot to learn:
During all of this, you need to be mindful of the context of what you’re reading or listening to. Try to understand when a character is overusing some speech patterns, when they’re saying cheesy lines or when a word is too specific to be used in certain contexts. If you’re not sure, look it up on the internet or ask someone, but try not to mimic characters’ speech patterns unless you’re sure it’s standard. If you talk all the time like a hotheaded shonen main character or like a cute quirky anime gurl, you’ll just come out as silly.
Thanks and that was quite helpful! I’ll be sure to remember to use some flashcards of some sort, probably going to practice how to write in Japanese as well at some point but my main focus is ultimately learning the language, being able to properly type it and THEN how to draw and speak it. (I believe they kind of go hand-in-hand but, that’s for sure level of importance for me. Always wanted to be able to understand the language and be able to type it, understand what it meant if I heard it, etc…)
I’ll check out Tae Kim as you mentioned them, thanks for the info! Yeah honestly, after getting the Duolingo app as well as signing up, it seems rather barebones and a bit more like “Learning for fun” which, is COOL but, it’s all over the board almost. It doesn’t seem to be “Okay here’s what this letter means and this how it can be fit here and here” but more like “HEY HERE’S THIS WORD”.
@cjlim2007 was saying they liked to use Duolingo to test themselves on what they knew already and I think it works well for that but not as much for learning.
Edit: Just checked out Tae Kim and, that’s awesome. I got the PDF version, highly suggest grabbing it for anyone learning.
Following a conversation on Discord, a certain source for learning came to my mind, which as far as I can see has been mentioned a couple of times here but hasn’t been properly introduced.
NHK Easy is a news site specifically made for children or people whose primary language isn’t Japanese, which focuses on using simple grammar and words for its articles, and providing readings and information for the kanji used. It can be helpful once you’ve learned a couple of things about the grammar, as a way to practice reading comprehension on real non-fiction non-workbook sentences.
It even has a dedicated subreddit where you can check for feedback about your understanding of the articles, so it can be really useful even if you can’t still read the entirety of an article.
This article was shared to me some time ago, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it since it makes a convincing argument… I was wondering what you guys think of it, especially the more experienced among us.
http://www.antimoon.com/how/input-intro.htm
While the article is about learning English, it does claim that the method works for any foreign language. It’s basically saying that grammar rules are irrelevant, and you simply need to read more. Because that’s just how native speakers learn a language.
Is this true? What were your experiences in regards to learning Japanese grammar? I’d love to know.
I’d generally agree with the article, but it goes to some extremes with open up a number of holes in the argument. They claim to be using Krashen’s ideas, but I think they’re mixing in some Piaget as well.
Yes, input is extremely important. As a student, you should surround yourself with the target language as much as possible. This depends on your environment though. Like, I–unconsciously-- surrounded myself in English and Japanese after I graduated high school, and that ended up being very beneficial for my learning. Krashen’s theories shouldn’t be applied to a traditional school setting, I believe. Mimicking how babies learn is very hard to achieve for a number of reasons. First of all, babies are just magically better at learning languages; at least, my teacher said scientists don’t know why. As you approach adulthood, it becomes harder for you to absorb languages in the same way. Second, as I touched on, it’s hard to be as completely surrounded in the target language as a baby is: babies have parents, maybe siblings or other relatives, and TVs or radios and all kinds of other garbage around them. They can and must absorb everything. Therefore, saying you only need input and not explicit knowledge of the language is wrong. Stuff like grammar books and exercises are our way of compensating for the things we had as babies but don’t now. That’s a thing about learning; children have more opportunities to learn, but adults have way better strategies for learning.
Another issue is how the article put all the weight on implicit knowledge(knowing something by instinct rather than being able to explain it). This is where Piaget comes in to play. There’s this idea of how a learner will “interact” with themself by like practice building sentences in their head. This counts as output according to some, so saying “Output (speaking and writing) is less important. It is not the way to improve your language skills” is contradictory to what the article says about building sentences from input. Having explicit understanding of the language is how you make your internal output more effective. Building only off of input is just mimicry, and you can easily find yourself in a spot where you don’t have anything to mimic.
So to conclude, my opinion is that you should take in lots of input, like way more than you study rules, but those rules are still an important part of strategic learning. In our world of having infinite knowledge in our pockets, strategy is the most important.
Damn, I never thought those didactics courses would come to use on Kaza…
Learning languages as an adult is a completely different mental process than that of a baby learning to communicate. Most of this article is based on the assumption that all the languages on your head are completely separated from one another so that when communicating in a language you’ll just access the info your brain needs, but that simply isn’t that way.
Normally, when people start learning a second/third language, they take words and expressions from the new languages and translate them to their native language so that they understand what they mean, and that’s regardless of the method you use to learn. That’s simply because adult learners simply cannot learn like a baby. You won’t find an adult who is a native English speaker going to a foreign country like China and expect him to somehow understand things as time goes on without him associating those words he hears to concepts he’s already learned in his native language.
Either way, at the start there’s a connection between languages’ vocabulary, and, as time goes on and you become more proficient in a language or you’re learning your third/fourth language, you instead start associating words to feelings and abstract concepts that have nothing to do with other languages. If you’ve become proficient in at least one more language, I’m sure you’ll have found times where you try to express something in your native tongue but the phrase you’re looking for just doesn’t exist in your native tongue, it only exists in that other language you learned.
This way of thinking that is the one of a more proficient speaker is the one that is the most similar to people learning their native language when they are loud brats. It’s widely accepted between neuroscientists that the way the brain learns and develops abilities and memories is by creating and strengthening new neural paths, while old memories and abilities that you don’t use don’t get strengthened and become irrelevant when compared to the abilities you use. This means that for each word you learn in your native tongue, “there’s a path between the word and the concept it represents”. For other languages, you start having a connection between a word in a foreign language, the closest word in your language, and the final concept. As a result, the word in the foreign language doesn’t correspond to the ideal meaning it would have because it goes through your native tongue in between. For proficient speakers, each word in a foreign language is linked to its own concept, so it your native tongue doesn’t necessarily interfere.
That’s for vocabulary, grammar is a completely different thing. You see, when we want to express something (still talking about vocabulary), we evoke de concept that we want to convey, then the neural paths linked to that concept take us to the closest word (that’s why sometimes you can only evoke certain concepts in a single language). But grammar is all about putting those things together so that they actually make sense, and that isn’t as simple as associating a concept and a word.
Grammar is waaaay more complex than a single piece of vocabulary. It can’t be learned just by reading and hearing people; you need a translation and rules to dictate how to use it, at least when you start learning a language. Sure, you can pick some things up like the general verb position in extremely simple sentences, or where to put the subject, but stuff like pronouns and so on, yeah, good luck learning that from unexplained input.
And here comes the main issue of the article: it assumes that babies learn alone, and that’s not true. Babies hear, babies do, and babies fail, but if they are heard and somewhat understood, their parents, a teacher or someone will correct them. What this means is that “Output (speaking and writing) is less important. It is not the way to improve your language skills.” is a half lie, because if you never speak, you’ll never know whether what you’ve learned is correct.
This is more of a personal experience, but I’ll throw it in regardless: having been born in a region where people start sentences and conversations in Spanish and finish them in Catalan, grammar books and rules are what keeps people here from not being able to be understood in the rest of Spain and speaking proper Catalan. This article underestimates the synergy (or destructive interference) that knowing several languages has, and I say this a someone who speaks two native languages, a third to a decent level, a fourth to some extent and just a bit of a fifth, yet due to learning more languages, I can’t even speak my own native languages the same way as someone who only speaks Spanish natively.
So all in all, yeah, pretty much what Helios said: immerse yourself in the new language and live in a foreign country if you can, but you should still be looking for lessons or a grammar book if you wish to survive the first year and have a strong foundation to build your new language upon.
Very good post. I learnt something new. Thanks
Thanks for the responses guys, they’ve been very insightful. I only realise now that the article omits a lot of common knowledge that goes against its points, the main one being how adults simply can’t learn a language the way babies do. I guess that article was alluring for the fact that it was saying that you can get better at a language without “studying” per se, which now I know is not true. There’s no two ways around it, studying a new language as an adult is hard work.
Definitely gonna continue studying vocab and grammar with the tried and tested strategies already posted on this thread.
Well, the fact that it doesn’t bring up a lot of things doesn’t mean that the article is 100% wrong:
This is after all the bottom line of what both Helios and I were trying to say, so don’t just go and omit the immersion. Immersing yourself in a language is what ultimately makes you stand out from someone who just goes to lessons and does some homework.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to refute that point. I was mostly concluding that the article is rather misleading by saying once you have input you pretty much don’t need anything else. My bad for not making that clear enough.
I’m certainly going to try to increase the amount of Japanese input and immersion I get whenever possible after this.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzPeVG_pQJu0GVq2HJ1s0rw/featured
This is a youtuber who has recently started teaching Japanese. I’d recommend him if your interested.
My teacher just showed me this site http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/pages/home
You can use it to check intonation and stress which most dictionaries don’t include. You go to “Prosody Tutor
Suzuki-kun” on the left and type in your text. There seems to be a ton of other stuff too, but I haven’t looked into it.
