Hello, i have been trying to study japanese for 2 months and it’s impossible, otherwise inefficient as it’s taking toooo much time without romanized letters, i spent 2 months trying to memorize hiragana and katakana so i can be able to read but then comes the kanji and all those writing systems together without romanization is like running in circles
Kindly consider adding romanized pronunciation to speed up the process, as sometime people could be focused on listening and speaking but being forced to learn the writing systems first to be able to go through the course is a hassle
Sorry if I’m being so blunt but, do you practice daily? If so, how much time do you dedicate to learning Japanese every day? Is it 5 minutes or 1 hour? Do you use resources other than Memrise which, in the grand scheme of things, is limited in kanji and grammar and doesn’t do it justice?
All these plus a billion other variables can make your learning much more enjoyable and easy to do. Saying “Japanese is impossible” after only two months is nothing short of ignorance. You can’t assess if it’s possible or not in such a short time. I’ve been studying for 3 years and can tell you it’s 100% possible, but you have to sacrifice a lot of your free time and study like crazy if you wanna see results. Learning once in a while isn’t going to get you anywhere. Also, I advise you to not ignore learning how to read kanji, even though you only wanna “focus on listening and speaking”, you’ll lose a lot of links between kanji that will make the vocabulary easier to memorise once you know them.
With that said, Memrise takes a pretty weird approach to learning kanji, so I believe it’s not entirely your fault. Try to find other methods, go and learn the easiest kanji at first, like 日、目、男 ; make your own self-studying course. etc… .There are resources that teach you kanji in this way, like “Remembering the kanji” (the book) , Wanikani (paid) or Kanjidamage (free).
I study around 4hours daily and i have other resources, but having to comprehend all 3 writing systems before even the begginer courses takes alot of time, in chinese case it was much easier cause they had the pinyin it really made learning more effective and fast, i have completed all the hiragana, katakana courses, i write them daily but it’s just waaaaay too slow, having romanized letters would make learning easy and fast, i passed the hsk3 chinese exam after only 6 months of studying and the pinyin was the key factor the gave me speed for learning, for sure eventually I’ll learn japanese but why take soo much time? People don’t have time, also i still don’t undersea how the kanji suddenly falls into play when am studying its too complicated to be all shoved in at once, am not even sure if my pronunciation is correct cause i have no reference
If it was chinese or korean i wouldn’t even complain its easy since there’s one writ system, i can easily learn the Korean letters and lear reading and writing, but with japanese having 3 writing systems used together at the same time! I mean how am i supposed to read if i don’t know them it will take me alot of time to complete the Japanese courses
Once you know them, it’s pretty intuitive how you use each system, so don’t worry about that. If you don’t know how kanji are read, just look them up on jisho.org . Generally, if there’s two kanji together, you pronounce them in on’yomi and if it’s one (+ kana) it’s kun’yomi.
Memrise courses are not optimised to teach you kanji, so they’re pretty hard to follow in my opinion. Usually when you don’t know a word in kanji, you’ll just write it in hiragana, but I’m not sure Memrise allows that. My advice, again, is to make your own course and write your words in hiragana and go with kanji progressively.
That is the way to go, i know you are right, but my problem is not the inability to learn, my problem is the time it takes to learn, you see, i am not a student and i already have a job so i can’t dedicate so much of my time, and with my current pase of 4hours a day it will take alot more time… I am certain that with romanized letters it won’t be less efficient, pronunciation isn’t hard cause it consist of alot of vowels, but i have no reference of comparison or correction how will i know if am hearing right or talking right?
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. When I started learning Japanese, I’m sure I didn’t do 4 hours a day, but I just throw myself into kanji (particularly the ones in the Genki series, even when they had furigana). What I don’t get is why would you use romanised characters if you know hiragana already? Kanji aside, you know kana, so learn using kana from now on.
Also hearing and speaking wrong is just part of the learning process. I heard and said weird things over the years. They will fix themselves once you get good enough and you hear those words hundreds of times.
i know what you mean - especially if you are the visual type, to have the pronunciation given in latin helps immensely.
i would suggest taking some user courses with romaji given for each item as pronunciation - the official courses on the web, or some user made courses. The jlptbootcamp courses - for ex- usually have also the pronounciation given in Latin characters, at least for levels 5 and 4
Learning Japanese without romanization reminds me when i first started drawing without knowing anatomy and proportions and i wasted alot of time, but now that i have a visual library i can draw from imagination, Same thing goes for Japanese, does that makes sense?
Hmm, personally I can’t stand romaji, it actually always confused me more than hiragana/katakana.
If you have the hiragana/katakana down, my advice would be don’t worry about the kanji for now. What I mean is don’t learn their readings yet, first work on the meanings of the kanji through a course like one of these:
Then in the meantime, work on learning vocab that only uses hiragana/katakana, courses like these:
Then once you get a good grasp of a good bit of varied vocab and a good few kanji meanings down, then start learning the kanji version of the words you all ready know with courses such as this:
Hope this helps, it all seemed overwhelming to me at first when I first started learning Japanese, especially when people say things such as “hiragana/katakana only took me 30 minutes to learn”, it took me a good few months to get them down properly, or “YOU HAVE TO LEARN 2000+ Kanji meanings before learning any vocab”, which was rubbish advice, may work for some, but that can be very boring.
However, if you look on memrise’s decks site, I’m sure there are a few romaji courses you could probably use for learning.
yes, so I still prefer courses which have an extra column for pronunciation, although I can read furigana really fast. The point is that I am still unsure if I understood the pronunciation right, as I have to type the kanjis, and mistakes in reading the furigana lead to mistakes in writing the kanji. And seeing clearly the pronunciation allows me to focus on the kanji and the sound of the word…
Do not let yourself derailed, just fool a bit around, there are hundreds of pretty well made user courses for Japanese, try bits of this and that, and quit those courses you dislike/feel they do not help you. It is your learning, your time, your brain, your energy… Good luck!!!
I used this website to learn Hiragana & katakana years ago just before I discovered memrise https://realkana.com/
How it works is that you select which to study, and it’ll go through it like flashcards indefinitely that you have to type the romaji answers for. You WILL learn it, and quite fast I might add(it took me literally 2 days for a total of maybe 10 hours to fully learn both well enough to not forget when using memrise, and I don’t think i’m a fast learner). Just make sure you know the pronunciation before doing this as there is no audio.
