in the beginning memrise was much better, and it would have been good enough to get a very good basis for a language
but they’re always taking pieces away
next thing will be the leaderboards, and then you can’t measure the relative value of your progress anymore
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After years of studying different languages, I can say that flashcards are only good when you have to study very specific words (like for a test) and even then they’re not as good as other options. If you need to learn food terms for example, it’s much better to read a manga or forum thread about food, or read a recipe, or something like that.
What would be the best way to learn, would be a site like readthekanji where you always see the words highlighted in sentences BUT you randomly get DIFFERENT example sentences for every word. So it would switch the sentences between “I have a dog” and “My dog is sick” for example, but answering each would still just be 1 point towards the word “dog”. On Memrise you can’t do this at all, it’s “one entry - one answer”, and on readthekanji there’s only one sentence per word (usually). Basically your eyes need to be able to notice the word fast WITHIN sentences, like in real life. As far as I know a site like this doesn’t exist, so readthekanji is best for now.
Don’t care about that. I’m taking university classes and they’re not very useful, and most people aren’t actually good at teaching their own language. Unless you have a completely amazing tutor, it’s not worth it. If you want to speak to Japanese people, find friends on lang8, twitter and all those other places for free. I’ve just started writing lessons for Japanese on my dreamwidth account, if you want to my username there I can PM you. (I’m in my 3rd semester of a Japanese degree so I’m not perfect either but I can help with all the beginner’s things at least.)
I forgot to link you to this site, you should read it to get an idea of the grammar before you start reading that beginner’s dictionary of grammar I mentioned earlier:
http://users.tmok.com/~tumble/qadgtj.html
Now think about how you can possibly save time so you can learn more. For example, make really big meals on the weekend and freeze it all in portions so you don’t have to cook during the week. Read about memory techniques so you learn faster and remember better. I can do Memrise faster on my smartphone when I use a magnifying glass, and I save minutes every day by using elastic “no tie” shoelaces instead of normal ones. When reading a forum like this one, or internet pages in general, you can use a speed reading firefox add-on or something similar. When watching youtube videos, speed up the video to 1.5 or even 2.0 speed. If you drive to work, take the bus instead and study while on the bus. Thinking about all these small things add up to hours more of free time a day.
Then when you study on readthekanji or when you’re doing chores or something else, play Japanese drama movies or drama CDs (you can find them on youtube, search ドラマ or 映画 or “drama CD”) so you get audio. Movies and manga have exactly the same type of dialogue and it’s easier to learn from them than from radio talk shows.
Also try to use this site for individual kanji meanings (ignore the pronunciations) if you want something to help you with readthekanji:
http://kanji.koohii.com/
When you’ve started reading about basic grammar, read the reading practice here. It’s very simple stories with pictures to help you read (you might have to change the browser encoding settings):
http://botsan.com/botsan.htm
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Hi, Gal, did you have a look at italki?
hi man thanks a lot of taking your time and helping me about this, I really appreciate it.
to the topic- 2 days a week I can study to my heart’s content, the rest of the week I work 12 hours a day, and ill be spent as hell if I press more than an hour or 2 of language studying, but ye I need to find the time if I’m serious.
also- I’ve tried using “readthekanji” site today, but tbh it looked… over simplistic? and the prioritizing of the hiragana and katakana studying was weird, example- vowels that contain 2 “letters” like cha( chi+ya) came a lot before 1 “letter” vowels like “ka, Ke, ko” and so on. but I could see the learning potential and learning experience of this site, should I subscribe to it for the full content right away or is it not needed until certain level?
lastly- it may sound dumb\pathetic- but I’m seriously getting confused when there are a lot of information sources that I need to study from- I’m doing my best when I have 1 solid source that has everything(or near everything) that I need to know- from the very begining(how the grammar works and kana), all the way to the advanced\intermidate level. if I need to jump from site to site, from app to app, from this list to this source and so on, it will just confuse me more. will “readthekanji” give me that all around learning experience I’m looking for?
damn I feel troublesome XD
a teacher once said: choose 1 book to study, and only 1, and stick to that 1 book
i follow that advice more or less by choosing 1 course as my main course and make sure that i study a minimal amount of it each day, but i feel free to try other things in between
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Wait to subscribe until after you’ve finished all their free levels (even though it’s only $5 USD a month, its a waste of money otherwise!). I think they introduce new words in random order. For learning hiragana and katakana it might be faster to just pick up a manga and look up every single hiragana/katakana you find until you know them all.
Readthekanji gives you kanji and vocabulary. All advanced Japanese grammar is actually just vocabulary words, so it does give you grammar too in a sense. What I mean is, past verbforms and a few “particles” literally everything else that’s ever called “grammar” is just vocabulary words.
The book series I mentioned (A Dictionary of…) gives you grammar. The website page (“quick and dirty guide”) is a basic summary of Japanese grammar that will get you to learning faster than the book series will alone. But all the detailed grammar usage, related ways to say things and when to choose which one, example sentences and so on are in the grammar book series. If you seriously want to learn Japanese you will have to use the book series but I think “starting” is easiest with the webpage.
The website (Botsan) gives you easy reading practice. It’s not “lessons”, it’s just something you can start reading right away in order to practice hiragana and katakana or basic grammar. Just because if you pick up something else as your first reading practice you might be a bit discouraged because it’s too difficult.
It’s NOT good to only pick one source and stay with it - the reason is that most sources are completely horrible at teaching something-or-other. Are you going to struggle along for weeks trying to understand something, when simply reading a second book that explains it in an entirely different way would clear up your problem in an instant? For example, a lot of people struggle with Japanese sentence structure but it’s extremely simple (there’s literally only 1 rule you have to follow). Most books don’t even teach it however. Or, most books don’t teach that verbforms are just compound words, so they expect you to memorize something long like “samukunakatta” (“it wasn’t cold”) when in reality that’s a compound of 3-4 separate words. If instead your book teaches you the pieces and then shows you how they’re put together, you’ll understand and remember a lot faster.
If you stick with only one source, you won’t learn those things that help speed up your learning the most. But only switch sources when you don’t feel like you understand what you just read, because there’s no need to read different versions of stuff that’s easy to understand, it just wastes time.
the 1 book idea is to have a reference point, not to limit youself to 1 book
Do you spend time in a car? If so, I recommend Pimsleur while you drive.
Really? That’s 36,000 words after 3 months if you do it consistently. And then you should be pretty much done learning new words?
Yep, unfortunately I can’t do it very consistently because of my housing situation (basically it’s not quiet enough to study unless everyone else is sleeping, and my own computer has a broken keyboard so I can’t “escape” to somewhere else) but you do notice a huge jump in progress just from week to week, and even other people notice your progress from month to month. If you study 2+ hours a day you’ll even notice a difference just by the end of the day!
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Check out text books Minna no Nihongo or Genki, and pair it with the Memrise courses to help memorise the words. Memrise don’t teach you too much grammar in most courses.
If you can’t go to a class, italki lets you do skype lessons fairly cheaply. Speaking practice really helps the new grammar and vocab stick.
Memrise is just another tool in the box, but you can’t learn a language just by using it.
ive finished learning the hiragana. but now learning the katakana seems
like a headache. but a necessary one so… ill try follow what you people
suggested. especially risgrynsgrot. you were very helpfull.
בתאריך יום א׳, 30 באפר’ 2017, 7:35 PM, מאת Matt <[email protected]
Hey again, I can add something else now. My Japanese teachers claim the absolute best way to learn real Japanese is through manga. Especially if you want to live there, you need to know the “spoken language” (=manga dialogue) which textbooks like Genki don’t teach. They also say it’s the best for learning phrases. I think it’s really good for the same reason readthekanji is good — you need to have context for all the words you’re learning, otherwise you can’t really understand them. And manga tends to repeat the same words over and over so you don’t have to worry about actually memorizing them with SRS or anything, just keep “reading”.
Some manga are extremely difficult to read and others are pretty easy so if the first few you pick are difficult, don’t worry about it. Right now I’m reading “Inuyasha” (犬夜叉) on matome.manga-free-online.com and it’s pretty easy in that they don’t talk very much and they constantly repeat the same words and phrases, so if you don’t understand the first five times you’ll eventually learn it. Since it has a weird setting they use some weird words (like “shrine/sacred tree”) and sometimes some old grammar or words, but it doesn’t matter. Just ignore those. If you do happen to learn them they’ll still end up useful eventually.
One thing you need to know is that “oi, ai, ii, ae” can all turn into “ee” in spoken language/manga. So てまえ (“thou”) becomes てめー, ない “without, not existing, doesn’t have” becomes ねぇー, かっこいい “cool, stylish” becomes かっこえー and so on. But only the original, written-language forms will be in the dictionary. I think nowadays you can probably Google these and find out the original forms instead of having to know the rules, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t really matter because they’ll normally repeat the same word a few pages later in its original form so you’ll eventually link the two together. Also they can put a っ inside a word where it doesn’t “really” belong, which just means the word is being emphasized. For example すっごい is really すごい (“impressive, that’s/this is great”) emphasized.
There’s a Japanese-English dictionary phone app called Takoboto where you can put in conjugated forms of words, so I’d recommend to download and use that. That way you can put in ex. こわかった and it’ll say “this is ‘was scared’, the past-tense of こわい, 'is scared” so you can eventually learn grammar just by looking words up too. It’ll save time.
hy man, thanks for the extra info!, i have to be honest here. for about a
week i haven’t learned japanese at all, job is draining and i got
discouraged by learning all the hiragana and than realise i have to learn
more or .less the exact same thing again(katakana).
also-im still not at a point where i can start reading manga ,unless
knowing only the hiragana is enough.
and i do not plan on living i japan, just a 1-2 months trip there, and as
i said before-also to know how to read wll my favourite mangas and
understand anime without subs. ill try picking things up again, so thanks
again for the help
בתאריך יום ה׳, 25 במאי 2017, 8:26 PM, מאת Risgrynsgröt <
[email protected]>:
No problem! Well, a 1-2 month trip IS living there for 1-2 months.
Don’t read expecting to understand! Just read and look at the letters. When you come across the same word over and over, which trust me will happen REALLY fast if you pick the right series, you’ll know “this must be a word by itself” and you’ll either learn it from the manga’s pictures alone or you’ll look it up in the dictionary, or you’ll Google it and learn the grammar. Then it will come up again and again so often that you don’t really have to look it up again because you’ll memorize it just by seeing it so frequently that you can’t forget it. You know, like how when you watch anime you hear words like しまった！ くそ！ やった！ ちくしょう！ ねこ and you learn these just from context. It’s the same thing. You can even skip around in the book and focus only on speech bubbles with almost no text if you want.
Manga for kids always has pronunciation help (=hiragana) on all the kanji, so yes knowing only hiragana is enough. Inuyasha is one example where there’s always hiragana like that. Some other manga only have hiragana on the kanji you learn in high school, and manga for adults only has it on rare/weird words.
Katakana’s actually easier and more rewarding to learn than hiragana because a lot of words from English are normally in katakana so if you see one in manga you can usually puzzle out what it is in English (ex. "あいすくりーむ; ぐっどもーにんぐ; あめりか) and you don’t even really have to “learn” the word. Sometimes you can understand what’s going on in a scene just from knowing a few katakana words. Of course, that’s in standard written Japanese. In manga, tweets etc you’ll see “anything goes”, words that “should” be in katakana are in hiragana for example. But anyway, that discouragement is why I said to just open up and manga and “read” it in order to learn hiragana/katakana. That way you see the actual results of what you’re learning right in front of you.
I would argue the reason why language courses in school are structured as they are is to squeeze every possible penny out of students (and taxpayers) for as long as possible. I note in my city some cultural Japanese outfit or other apparently connected to the Japanese government offers a nifty 3-week Hiragana course followed by another 3-week Katakana one for a cool $500 each. Laughing their way to the bank.
I took four university credits in German and Italian (over two years) and hardly a single student could ask how to find the bathroom at the end.
Finally, I think to say 365 hours over a year of Memrise would leave one speechless is absurd and easily contradicted by anyone here, surely.
lol Dude…
Learning by manga.
If you want to be made fun of by every Japanese , sure.
There is a guy at the Japanese club that I go who speaks like that. Everybody makes fun of him.
Don’t speak like manga. Please.
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The studies are also based on specific ways of learning/teaching. My girlfriend is Korean and over a period of 3 years of studying English, she has not yet acquired fluency. This isn’t to say that she is bad at learning a language, but rather that the way of teaching and practicing has been insufficient. I never attended English class with a serious mindset nor have I practiced it seriously in my life. However, over a period of 8 to 12 years I’ve acquired fluency while being a few months away of native level, were I to practice an hour daily.
My point is… language learning, in my opinion, is being approached in a way that’s way too academic, lacking proper, natural practice where the subject is allowed to make many mistakes and try his own things; articulating his interpretation of the grammar, comprehension and pronunciation. I don’t necessarily believe kids are better at language learning, they simply don’t take it seriously. They enjoy it, play around with it. How is language learning, something seen as logical, getting harder as we grow older? Because when we grow up, we lose our creativity and playfulness. He (xvg11) uses the word “Professional” as if it is something with inherent quality. Academic education has been proven to kill creativity, leaving everything to logic and reason while neglecting arts. The process of learning a language is an art. It’s supposed to be playful, fun, interesting. Not an absolute hell to go through. It’s not an awful choir we have to do. So just loosen up, enjoy what you are doing, play (F$%#) around as you wish, and you’ll get there. Improve your learning process by reflecting on it and trying new methods.
I agree completely that some language courses and teaching methods are very ineffective, even at the university level. And I also agree with you that some people are able to learn and become very proficient, even fluent, entirely through independent study.
But, in general, for the average adult learner, I think that finding a good professionally designed program will probably give them the best chance of success. For example, the US Defense Department, with its almost unlimited resources, sends its personnel to its own extremely intensive foreign language institute for training. They don’t send them to typical university language classes, nor do the ask them to study on their own. They have experts who have designed the optimal program for teaching adults a new language quickly and well. But they also know that not everyone has the necessary aptitude for learning a foreign language, so they pre-screen their applicants to see who will benefit from their intensive training methods, and develop a very high degree of proficiency after completing a course of training, which lasts anywhere from six to fifteen months, depending on the difficulty of the new language.
Neuroscientists, psychologists, and linguists have studied this issue in great depth. The latest science indicates that infant and young children’s brains are innately wired for learning any human language through social interaction. And they learn different aspects of language at different stages of their early development. First they learn the sounds, phonemes, then syntax, then finally their vocabulary knowledge explodes. All of this happens at very well defined times in infancy and early childhood. Then the window for easy, passive, social language acquisition closes.
But adult brains are not at all like an infant’s brain, and learning a language in the later stages of life, after the language acquisition window closes, requires a great deal of cognitive effort, and is greatly aided by studying a course designed by true language teaching professionals, which, of course, will include real practice speaking and listening to natives. It would be a mistake for you to dismiss “academic” education, simply because some academic programs are poorly designed and delivered.
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On Memrise, AnkiSRS or any other site / software?
UPDATE: Sorry, something went completely wrong with the quotes and understanding following posts.
You clearly talked about “readthekanji”and not Memrise (SR), sorry again!!
Does the above site use spaced repetition (SR)?
Doesn’t this basically mean that you will be beaten by the HUGE review backlog queue each day?
(Only) Speaking for Memrise:
You even do if you only would learn 50 to 100 or max 150 new words.
More than 15-20 words / day quickly gets IMHO difficult to handle with SR software (can not speak about different writing scripts like Japanese)!
My experience on Lingvist in learning “1000 new Spanish words in 11 days in 20 hours” has not made a big difference (not single words but complete sentences, “fill into the blank” system) to my SR experience and being constantly beaten with repeats of incorrect answers.
I tried a few times to (re-)learn ~70 words Portuguese verbs/adjectives/adverbs on Memrise after completing a DuoLingo skill so I definitely know how it feels the next days - and I had to stop learning NEW words for several days to catch up (and finally get some wrong answers right).
Is Japanese really that much easier to bulk cram “words” into your memory than with a Latin script based language?
Warning (for Memrise):
If you do NOT cleanup the old words from the Memrise review queue (FIFO), as far as I understand you will NOT even see the NEW planted words with 4h + 12h SR repetitions intervals to reinforce what you have learned a few hours ago!
I do not think that the Memrise algorithm uses a priority switch in their code to organize what 100 words (on the web portal) are pulled from your review stack and to prioritize first on the “learning 4+12h short-term steps” vs due >7 days (older) words, or does it???