New Site!
It has been quite some months since I have written one of these blogs. On my old rubbish website that I built myself, I posted three submissions about my journey through Japanese. I have since moved these to this new, beautiful looking word press blog and thanks to the management of word press I should hopefully be producing a lot more of these entries. If you want me to make more, then let me know in the comments so that it puts these blogs higher up on my “to do list”. Also, any concerns or questions about language, feel free to ask and I might possibly write about it 🙂 Anyway! Let’s get this started..
Introduction
In the last entry, which you can find here, I discussed the early part of my studies which included flash cards and a little bit of Kanji as well as discovering AJATT. AJATT contains a lot of information for me to talk about but it is essentially the most important website you will ever read. So ignore this blog. Go read it. Now. I’m not even joking. :p
Click here for the previous post
In this post I will discuss the next entry log I made at the beginning of August last year. As usual I will comment on what I think of it now that I know a lot more Japanese and about language learning. I will give you advice on what I did right and wrong so that the process is easier and faster for you. Here is the entry:
Diary Entry
“3rd of August 2015: Finally bought the App version of Anki which boosted the amount of flashcards I could get through in a day. I found I could just whip it out at any opportunity I had. Have stuck to the AJATT method for a month now, listening to Japanese music/podcasts/TV/Anime/Films constantly (unfortunately breaking my decent pair of headphones in the process). I am doing around 60-90 minutes of Anki flashcards a day.
My main Anki decks consist of the same Kanji deck which includes 7000+ Kanji
as well as the decks for the Core 2000 Vocabulary. I have deleted all the cards except the sentence cards in this deck, this way I have about 2000 basic beginner sentences and then I will have to make my own sentences afterwards
to make it up to the 10000 sentences for AJATT.
According to Anki I know about 750 Kanji (mature+young) and about 200 sentences from the two main decks. Starting to move over from J-E cards to J-J cards but I feel it’s going to be difficult.
I start University on 12th of September and have already signed up for the
Japanese Society, for language exchanges, and the Universities free language classes to improve my pronunciation and confidence in speaking. Still haven’t found a speaking partner.”
Anki Mobile
The first thing I will mention is this. Seriously think about getting Anki, as its mobile version is very powerful. You can create cards on the mobile version but I find that the PC version is better for this. The Apple store version does cost a bit of money (I think I paid around £25 at the time) but it was well worth it. The Android version is in fact free (woo!). Being able to do flash cards where ever and whenever is brilliant, as you can break down the amount you do into smaller chunks throughout the day. I will talk more about how to SRS in future posts but for now, get it, you will see the benefits.
Starting Immersion
So far at this point I had just started the first month of immersion, and it was tough. It was fun (at times) but it was also painful. After this first month, however, I did get into a habit and just never took my headphones out (except when they broke, which happens more than you would like :/ ). The first month of learning anything new is always hard as you don’t understand a thing. After about a month, you get into the habit of being in the language and you also start to understand stuff so it starts to become fun :D. With anything its the starting point that matters most. Most people give up before they even get going. All you need to know is that if you keep the gas on, and you keep going forwards towards your destination, you will eventually reach it.
Kanji and Sentences
AJATT and other people who have done the method do not recommend using pre-made decks. I was unaware of the disadvantages at this point and used them up until the 750ish sentence mark. From there I switched into J-J sentences only which I will go into more detail in future posts. This deck was not entirely useless, however, as it did have audio and full sentences with reading for each. This provided me with a good basis for being able to pick out words in audio, especially the really common words. The sentences also provided some reading practice, however, at this stage I very much struggled through them, not being able to read much kanji at all (at this point I did not know about The Heisig Method). Don’t do this, study the most common kanji first for 2-3 months before doing sentences. It just makes sense, is quicker and less stressful over all.
Speaking and Classes
The last paragraph I would advise you to completely ignore. Speaking at this stage is very dangerous. Speaking in a class setting can hurt your pronunciation no end. It will be unlikely that it will be corrected by the teacher (especially in larger classes) and the other students speaking bad Japanese will influence your language that you speak, causing you to speak bad Japanese as well. Steer clear of classes and speaking practice at this stage and wait until you understand what you are hearing before trying to copy it. Note, shortly after I started the lessons I quickly gave up as they where way below my level and I learnt that they have more disadvantages than its worth. After the lessons I did not speak for an entire year. I now get compliments on my accent and natives are surprised it doesn’t sound foreign. I got to that point by listening for a year before starting to speak. That’s a lot of listening before speaking but it does mean you know exactly how to replicate pronunciation correctly. What can I say, it works.
Language Partners
Also, finding a speaking partner is not always a bad idea. I made a really good friend from 北海道 (Hokkaido) and we really hit it off. We mainly spoke in English but I got a lot of my media and content from her (songs, TV shows etc). So talking to natives about media can be a great idea. Just hold back if you feel the urge to speak before you are ready.
Summary
That’s about it for this update, to summarize:
- Get Anki and its mobile counterpart (or another preferred SRS system that has a mobile version)
- Learn kanji before sentences
- Don’t use pre-made decks
- Don’t bother with classes (you will save money and time, trust me)
- Don’t speak until you understand
See ya in the next one!
Click here for more information on learning Japanese
マット
2016/22/11
By Matthew HawkinsHere are some of my favorite tools and sites for learning Japanese
Thank you for reading this blog post, which I hope you found useful for learning Japanese. Here are some of the most useful websites that I’ve found for finding Japanese content to use for immersion as well as some really useful learning tools to help you through your Japanese studies. Some of these are affiliate links which just means that if you decide to use these sites by clicking the following links, then I will earn a commission. But honestly speaking, these are the sites that I use and recommend language learners, even my friends, to use anyway.
Anki Tools: To get started, I really like Migaku for Anki. By itself, Anki is already a super useful tool for language learners but Migaku allows for integration with websites like YouTube and Netflix, allowing it’s users to create flashcards from the shows and videos that they are watching, as they are watching them. If you use my link you can get an extra month for free.
Speaking Practice: For this I absolutely love iTalki. There are thousands of Japanese teachers on the platform that are available at all times of the day to have conversations with you, in Japanese. Some teachers take a more traditional approach while others are just there to chat, these are the ones I would recommend if you are looking to improve your conversational Japanese. Lessons start from just $5 and there’s no long term commitment, I highly recommend them.
Immersion: I’ve used a lot of different earphones / headphones over the years but by far the one that has come out on top is the NENRENT S570. This is a singular in-ear earphone that matches your skin tone to keep it discrete, meaning you can listen to the language you are learning while at work, or school. For a full list of tools and gadgets I recommend for maximizing your immersion time, check out this blog post.
Keep em coming, good stuff.
Thanks for doing these blogs Matt. I’m reading through AJATT at the moment and am keen to start in about a week once I’ve got some more time to get some immersion material. I’ve been studying Japanese on and off for the alst 2 years but never made any real progress, but AJATT sounds like a really good method. These blogs are great at distilling down the key information that Khatz mentions as he does tend to ramble a lot, and your old diary entries are a great insight into what it’s like as a beginner doing AJATT.
I have a question about sentence cards. After spending a few months familiarizing myself with kanji, since I won’t know any words, only the meanings of Kanji, what kind of sentences would I start out with? Is it easy to find simple i+1 sentences that I can learn from or is it better to start off with things a bit tougher and struggle a bit until it becomes easier to make cards, eventually transitioning to monolingual cards?
No worries 😀 I’m glad that they have been helping. I will keep updating them as I have plenty more entries left, I just have to find the time to upload and talk about them. I Know exactly what you mean though and I felt the exact same way when I first started, hence why I thought I would make them 🙂
Personally, what I did was jump head first into immersion and then picked out sentences that I found, funny, interesting, cool etc. These are the ones that you will less likely get fed up with when doing reviews so finding these are really important. The whole i+1 thing is actually very useful, it gives you a guide as to what is an easy sentence to learn. Take this example 相変わらず阿漕な商売してるな, if you know 相変わらず and 商売 plus understanding of some basic grammar such as な particle and している and the sentence-ender な then all you have to learn is the new word 阿漕 which makes learning that word a lot easier. If you didn’t know more than two words or grammar structures in this sentence then it would make it incredibly difficult to learn. So definitely, aim for i+1. Also aim for shorter sentences, something like 明朗な性格 is much easier to learn and memorise than something like 腫瘍とは一般に、体の表面や体の中にでき、かたまりとして触れたり、色が違っている部分があるなどのものを総称して呼ぶ言葉です。(although this sentence is in my deck, but I can handle it now). So stick with i+1 but try and read as much natural content as you can, only that way will your brains see enough example sentences and begin to understand everything 🙂 easyFlashcards + nativeImmersion = win 😀
Hope that helps,
Matt