this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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Japanese Language
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ようこそJapaneseLanguageへ！ 日本語に興味を持てば、どうぞ登録して勉強しましょう！日本語に関係するどのテーマ、質問でも大歓迎します。 This is a community dedicated to the Japanese language. Feel free to come in and ask questions or post your thoughts and opinions about this beautiful language.
Feel free to check out the web archive of r/LearnJapanese's resources if you're looking for more learning material or tools to aid you in your Japanese language journey!
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I'm using Duolingo. That should be good enough to start learning, right? I don't expect to be able to read and write all 50,000 kanji through it, but I hope to at least eventually be able to watch Japanese media without subtitles.
Duolingo is good for the first few days to see what the language is about but as a main learning resource I'd say it's pretty bad.
When I was starting, there was just not enough content and after finishing it all I still couldn't understand hiragana fully.
Things have gotten better in recent years that's why I decided to revisit Duolingo a few months ago but I found content to be so inconsistent and impractical. Sometimes they teach you something simple and sometimes you get a word that is usually at the end of any language course.
Many sentences are just dumb and/or have no use in real life.
Once I got to translate: 「私はりんご」which to be fair is a sentence that one could say and it wouldn't be weird but not only you don't have a context but the accepted translation was "I'm an apple". Which is obviously ridiculous. Correct but ridiculous. It feels like they took out of context examples and decided to put it in "translate this sentence category". If you're wondering btw how this sentence could be used it's worth remembering that "私は" means "As for me" not "I am" so for example when someone asks your name you say:「私はトムです」which literally means "As for me Tom". It sounds weird though so obviously we translate it as "I'm Tom". Same with apple, "As for me Apple" can be an answer to a question "What fruits do you like?"
If you want to learn quickly I recommend downloading the Anki app. It's a flashcards system where you can download premade decks of cards or create your own. I started with popular Anime/VN vocabulary deck and then some N5 vocabulary deck. When you want to go to the next level you download 2k/6k deck. If you still struggle with hiragana and katakana then I really recommend tofu guide.. It was so good I learned everything in one day. As for anything other than vocabulary Tim Kae's "Guide to Japanese" is an absolutely amazing resource.
I also recommend Livakivi on YouTube. He also started with Duolingo and then got into sentence mining in Anki. Now he speaks really good Japanese. I like to watch him for motivation and to see just how much effort is needed for certain level.
Wow, damn. Right info at the right time. Watching his 800+ Days on Duolingo vid and I'm at the exact same point he started using other things. TYSM! 😃
Happy to help! I remember getting this video in the recommended tab on YouTube at the right time. If not for this video I'd probably give up on japanese tbh. I felt like I was working really hard with no results. His channel is a gold mine of great learning methods. Depending how serious you are you can do what he's done or like me, study for just a 15 min a day. It might seem low but still depending on the topic I still can understand 70-99% of what's being said.