It seems like it’s every day that I get advice that is aimed at beginner learners, like how to learn kana, or to pick up Genki or Minna no Nihongo, or use an app like Duolingo or Lingodeer. However, I’m closer to intermediate level (approximately N3, maybe N2), and I’m kind of stumped when it comes to studying.
For example, one of the most common pieces of advice I get is to immerse myself in the language, for example by playing games or watching movies/anime in Japanese. However, that method does get really frustrating in many ways. For example, when there are no closed captions available for Japanese movies, which makes understanding much harder, especially if the characters speak very quickly. Another nuisance this method has, is when I have to look up a word or two for every single sentence I hear/read. This is made even more annoying when a certain word contains complicated kanji, so I have to type it into the dictionary radical by radical. Doing that so often can be a real pain in the backside and suck the enjoyment out of the game/film. And also, it gets even tougher when I come across some slang or colloquial expression, or onomatopoeia, or a grammar structure I haven’t heard of before. During these times, I’m not very sure how to look those up, since I’m most likely not going to find these in the dictionary I use.
Moreover, I’m not quite sure how to learn vocabulary with this method of media consumption, since it’s not uncommon for me to encounter a word once or twice and then never again, making it difficult to remember. I’d learn it with flashcards, but 1, making flashcards takes a long time. And 2, it gets quite boring, and I tend to forget words very easily, even with Anki.
I also heard of advice saying I should pick up an advanced textbook, like Tobira. However, the grinding aspect of just translating sentences into a specific grammar pattern repeatedly always felt boring. Even with Genki, I kinda just speedran/skimmed through the exercises, made notes out of the grammar explanations, and solidified what I learned through graded readers (which were still a pain, because they weren’t very interesting to read, to be honest).
I have a feeling that despite being given these pieces of advice, there must be a wrong and right way of using them. So, I think I might be misusing the advice I’ve been given (either that, or I’ve been given the wrong advice, which I kind of doubt).
If anyone out here can give me corrections on how to study correctly, as well as perhaps giving new advice, would be very much appreciated. 読んでくれてありがとうございました。
(lemmy.world seemed to be struggling yesterday as my reply didn’t seem to show up here, only on the lemmyworld instance, so I’m trying again with another account on another server, and deleting my old post)
I totally know how you feel. I was stuck in intermediate purgatory hell for a very long time. I could speak somewhat decently and travel on my own in Japan, but conversations remained fairly superficial. My vocab was still limited because I couldn’t consume Japanese media, mainly because I couldn’t read well so I couldn’t read books and manga, and couldn’t use JP subtitle to better understand what I was watching.
Trying to improve also I tried many of the methods you mentioned but it didn’t seem to work.
Revisiting my old college Japanese textbooks would bore me. I got Tobira but I had forgotten most of my kanji I had learned in college, so it was too hard for me to read.
Immersion helped the most, but like you said, I’d forget words too quickly, so I would get demotivated to continue.
I finally had a hallelujah moment when I discovered these three things:
- Discovering mnemonic-based kanji learning systems like Wanikani or RTK (Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig) so I could learn a method to quickly learn any kanji I encountered. Kanji was no longer my mortal enemy.
- Subscribing to Satori Reader so I could improve my reading ability from low-intermediate to a more advanced level, and finally make the transition to reading native materials.
- Using Anki 3rd-party sentence mining tools so I could instantly make cards from my immersion material, so I no longer forgot the words I was learning. Because the words were from things I was interested in, it made the words easier to learn. These tools also added audio and images from the TV show, anime, video, etc, to add context to the word so I was more likely to remember it.
That was it. Basically the key was learning how to read proficiently, so I could easily read novels and newspapers, play videogames and visual novels, and read JP subtitles as I watched TV shows, read transcripts as I listened to podcasts, in order to improve my listening ability.
Also because I could read quickly, I could start shadowing TV shows, YouTube videos, podcasts, repeated what I had heard, which improve my speaking ability.
But I’m not going to lie. It requires a lot of pain at first. It was really really really tough, especially for the first six months, because reading Japanese felt like a billion brain cells exploding over and over, but it slowly became better day by day. Just read everyday and stay consistent. Satori Reader was invaluable in the beginning, and it made the transition to reading native materials much smoother, but my first few novels were still a really big challenge at first.
Once you can use Japanese dictionaries and resources to look up Japanese words and grammar, you’ll improve a lot too. I eventually tried to do everything in Japanese, even when looking things up regarding my own hobbies.
TIP: To find suitable reading material, you can go through learnnatively.com to find books and manga appropriate to your current level. Also try to put a priority on increasing your vocab to get it to around N2 level (around 6k words), when you can start reading non-children books, but at 4k to 6k words, which is N3-ish level, you could still try to read N2 stuff if you don’t mind the challenge.
You mentioned it takes too long to make cards in Anki but only if you do it manually. By using tools like Migaku Tools, Memento, ASBplayer, Yomichan, Language Reactor, I could study and sentence mine from Japanese TV shows on Netflix YouTube videos, downloaded anime, etc.
I know you said it takes too long to make cards, but only if you do it manually. With using these various, I could quickly make multimedia Anki cards with a few button presses so it literally took seconds to make.
For reading Japanese books. I used ttsu-ttsu reader and Yomichan via my web browser, which also let me quickly make Anki cards. On my iOS devices, I used Immersion Reader to do the same thing. If reading manga on my computer, I used Mokuro with Yomichan.
I learned around 10 to 30 new cards per day, depending on my schedule, but my yearly average was around 15 new cards per day.
While reviewing my my cards, whenever I didn’t understand something in the sentence on my card, I’d look it up. If it was a new grammar point, I’d make another card for it. If I had to ask someone else for help, like a native, or in a Japanese language forum, I’d add some notes to my card explaining the difficult section for me.
Since these were sentences taken from my immersion material, it helped me to further enjoy my immersion material so it never felt like work to me.
I think I already knew around 3k-ish words when I started? So after a year and a half I knew around 10k to 12k words and around 2.5k to 2.8k kanji (I think N1 level is around 10k words and 2k kanji), and I could read fairly decently by then but still nowhere as fast as I could read in English. A lot of manga and videogames were easy to read though, as well as slice-of-life TV shows and slice-of-life light novels. A lot of mystery and cop shows were easy to understand as well, but some variety shows could be hard still.
I could read typical adult novels fairly well, like horror, mystery, fantasy, self-help books. I but still needed to keep a dictionary around since a lot of writers like to use a diverse vocab, so I could still get tripped up. I could also listen to audiobooks without reading the the book first, but even now it still depends on the topic and the author.
It was around year three when it became everything became much smoother, once my vocab started going beyond 16k words and over 3k kanji, but I still have room for lots of improvement.
I didn’t speak much during that time, aside from some shadowing practice, so I’m trying to improve my conversational skills now. My writing skills remain really bad though so I’m trying to keep a journal now, and I’ve been trying to email and text more in Japanese now.
I skipped over a lot of stuff, especially on details with learning kanji, or how I looked for sentences to mine, but I hope that gives you an idea of what worked for me.
If you have further questions, feel free to ask!
I swear I could have written this post. Here’s my 0.02:
- I totally understand where you’re coming from. That feeling of not being able to understand even a single sentence without having to look up a word or two is just… the worst. Basically, I’ve just had to come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to 100% understand everything. Heck, man, I live in Japan, and I doubt I truly understand 100% of any given (nontrivial) conversation. So, my advice is to give up. Give up on trying to 完全に understand every sentence, every word. Be okay with ambiguity. And I know, it feels like “I know every word in the sentence except the most important ones!” Sucks, but you’ll enjoy Japanese a lot more if you release yourself from the need to grok every tittle.
- Tobira was the very next textbook I studied after Genki II. If you’ve finished Genki II and retain most of it, it shouldn’t be too advanced for you. I know the Internet romanticizes the idea of learning languages quickly, but really nothing beats time in the language stretching your skills. If it’s not too frustrating for you, try studying the textbook a little more contemplatively rather than speedrunning it.
- Believe it or not, you actually have an advantage over me, despite the fact that I live in Japan. Japanese people aren’t exactly warm and forthcoming in casual conversation with foreigners, so I wouldn’t describe living in Japan as a constant state of immersion, especially because I work remotely for an English-speaking software company. Your advantage is in the consumption of Japanese media: I’m not a huge fan of anime/manga, and I don’t have time for video games. I’ve noticed that my friends who do like anime in particular have much better listening skills than I do. Simple exposure will get you used to speaking styles, etc. and you’ll be able to pick out the difficult words in time.
- Key insight: if a character says a complicated word once, and it’s never used again for the rest of the show, don’t worry about learning it. Media consumption is a natural SRS. If they don’t use the word again, chances are it won’t be worth learning (at this stage in your learning). We’re not targeting 100% comprehension, after all.
Best of luck to you!
I mean, this is kinda the rub. Once you hit intermediate, you’re going to be doing a lot of work.
Looking stuff up too often has turned me off of many books. I instead opted for slice-of-life manga that my wife got me and isn’t so heavy on words/grammar I don’t know. This comes with the obvious downside of learning less quickly in some ways. Other than that, the options are to drill kanji, vocab, and grammar with apps or lessons to make those shows/books/games easier.
