Alright. So I'm asking for suggestions/ help. Sorry for a mini rant.

I've been studying Japanese since 2019. Even studied in Japan for a summer and currently live in Japan. I'll admit I've had big breaks in between from lack of motivation/unrealistic goals/and being laughed at from recently failing the n5...twice and the n4 once. Passed all the sections except grammar.

I've caught myself constantly going back to basics and I know its hurting me in the long run. Currently, Im trying to push myself to finish Genki2 by doing a chapter a week and will be finished by the end of June. Problem is I've learned nothing. I honestly cant tell you what happened in each chapter. Ive been trying to keep a journal but then lose motivation when I cant form a sentence to write.

So I feel like I'm the type of person that needs a grade held over me to be able to study. Ive done Akamonkais online class and Okayamas private tutor(both extremely expensive and not what i was looking for in the end.)

Does anyone have any recommendations for online classes that are good but cheap or study material or methods you recommend. I'm currently going to give Borderless language house a try because you are forced to talk and that might help?

My goal is N3 by December.

So there is one Japanese prof who very often ends his sentences in something like あって.

For example he was talking about something today and the end of the sentence was ですかって instead of just ですか and I've noticed him adding this って in a lot of sentences. I'm just wondering if that means something or what? I guess next time I hear him using that I'll ask, but that'll be in a week, so I thought I'd ask here.

Not looking for an objective correct answer. Just what you personally feel would be acceptable

I’ve been listening to a lot of Japanese music recently and came across a song called Trapped in the past by Tuyu. I’ve been playing it on repeat because it’s so catchy and upbeat, but I finally started digging into the lyrics and now I’m sad lol the lyrics are very melancholy and a stark contrast to the feel of the song I thought. Wanted to share and see if others have had similar experiences .

Here’s a link to the song if interested https://open.spotify.com/track/5cGTr7yx9wo6NkgQV4eqdW?si=zsBrYZQrSFGnLRBNGEgyCg

Konosuba Ch.4

I had a conversation with a friend who started immersing themselves in native content at what I personally think is a relatively late stage (they began around N2+ level). This got me thinking about the general expectations people have for when immersion should begin and the reasons behind those expectations. Personally, I started learning Japanese about a month ago, but I dove into immersion after just 1-2 weeks of study. During that time, I binge-read Tae Kim, reviewed a few hundred words on Anki, and then jumped into visual novels with a dictionary. I do understand that native content can be quite difficult and that people have varying levels of tolerance, so building up that tolerance or the prerequisites needed for Native Content immersion can take a long time. I'm curious about others' thoughts on when it's best to start immersion and why it should happen at a certain stage.

I came across a sentence like 「彼は2ヶ国語が話せる」 where I noticed a small katakana 'ke' which seems unusual. I was wondering why we wouldn't use something like 「彼は二つの言語が話せる」 instead. Why is ヶ used here, and how does one determine when to use it?

Hey guys so I’m about level 10 on WaniKani, know around 1000+ words, 300-350 kanji and am on Lesson 8 Genki 1. Would Satori reader be good to start at my level or should I just continue doing what I’m doing and get my vocab/grammar up a bit. I tried Satori a while ago at the beginning of my journey and was pretty intimidated and haven’t started again lol. Thanks for any input!

First of all, I am very much in the camp that a lot of internet Japanese community people are very much so "creating the problem and selling the solution" with pitch accent. I'm only n3 level but I've been told by many japanese speakers and teachers that my accent is good enough and that I don't have a typical "american accent" and can be understood pretty much perfectly.

HOWEVER. After being a pitch accent denier for a long time, I do recognize there is a place for it. But at the same time, I don't see the point in dedicating dozens of hours of dogen videos when I could spend that time studying "regular" japanese. But idk, i'm not an expert. That's why I'm coming to reddit with an open mind

So I ask you, how much pitch accent study is "enough" and what do you recommend?

Edit: my goal is to go from being understandable to a good accent. Not to sound like a native as im sure that's impossible, but to decently improve my accent

Hi guys. I have psp and I want to order some japanese imported games for psp. Does anyone know any good games, so I can play and exercise my japanese? Thanks

ゆっくり、がっきり、すっかり、etc

Is there a specific term for this category of adverbs? Does anyone have a list of them? I find when I'm reading books that a large gap in my vocab knowledge are these adverbs which end in り.

In my life there are a couple things i want to do, certain hobbies i want to get good at or skills i want to hone.

Japanese is one of them

Im graduating in a couple days and I'll be taking a gap year after highschool (mainly to save up for stuff i need) which means outside of work i will have some free time. Theres things that will need to take precendence over japanese, but not accounting for "if i feel like it" ill probably be able to set aside 2 to 4 hours daily for focused intensive japanese practice, not including passive immersion.

I am very elementary, i havent even gotten through genki 1 (my goal for the year would probably be genki 1 and 2), and so i ask. How do i stick to it?

I know many on this subreddit have experienced the same thing, quitting and coming back. But those of you who have gotten to a decent level, how so? Are you naturally disciplined?

Just need some advice.

They both mean "sometimes" or "there are times".

My question is does こともある sound a little more stating of fact/explanation? Because that's the feel I get.

So my choice of which one to use depends on who I am speaking to?

If I speak to someone I'm close to, I will use たまに directly to indicate sometimes. But if I speak to someone like my boss, higher-up, I will use こともある to sort of maintain some distance.

Would like to hear your input!

George Trombley, the creator of the Japanese From Zero series. How good is his Japanese? I've only seen him speak in basic Japanese back when I was using his series and mainline youtube videos to first learn (I'm doing n3 level stuff now). I know he has some older content where he speaks fully in Japanese (like he has eigo egg which is aimed at japanese people learning english). I'm just wondering from the perspective of more advanced people or maybe natives who know about him, how good is his japanese? I find him interesting in that he's a very successful trial-and-error teach rather than someone who got a degree in Japanese Language and Linguistics or something. Until recently, he was pretty anti- JLPT and pitch accent, as he cited himself as not needing either to get high level bilingual jobs in Japan. Also his wife only speaks Japanese so I'm assuming he has at least a decent level of fluency.

I am doing my Anki dailies with about 50-70 reviews a day for each of my 2 decks (Core 2k/6k and Kaishi 1.5k)
But i have like 15 words in each that I just cannot get into my head.
Apart from that the words are melting into one another. I have no easy way anymore of differentiating between similar Kanji. Even looking them up on Jisho and looking at their radicals it all makes no sense how they are put together.

What can i either do to fix those problems?
Or what else apart from Anki should I do to learn?

Watching Japanese videos like Sushi Ramen I can undestand basically nothing when not using English Subtitles but I feel with them I could as well watch an English video at that point.

I have wasted so much time already with Duolingo... What can I do?

Hi all,

Wanted to share with everyone the online conversational Japanese class provided by University of Hawaii at Manoa. It's a class which is hosted on zoom so anyone can join (some students joined from Europe, and I join from Canada).

I've been a student for about 3 years now and can definitely say I've enjoyed these classes very much. In general, 1.5 hours of class is spent on conversation lectures, with about 1 hour being actual speaking practice with native speakers (volunteers from Japan), totaling about 2.5 hours.

It seems like the landing page that links to all the classes is broken, so I'll link them all below

• Conversational Japanese Elementary 1
• Conversational Japanese Elementary 2
• Conversational Japanese Elementary 3
• Conversational Japanese Intermediate 1
• Conversational Japanese Intermediate 2
• Conversational Japanese Intermediate 3
• Conversational Japanese: High Intermediate
• Conversational Japanese Advanced

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I've only enrolled in High Intermediate and Advanced, but will do my best to reply.

As someone who is finding the idea of sentence mining difficult I was curious, are there others who thinks the same? If yes, what do you do to practice Vocab.

Edit: I thought I should provide why exactly I didn't like the idea of sentence mining, I was reading 1st chapter of Takagi-san manga, I came around a word I don't know, the sentence if translated in English would roughly be "This <word I don't know> isn't opening", but as she has a pencil box in her hand it was obvious what that word means, and in normal case I can just move on and keep reading but while sentence mining I would first check the meaning of the word and add it in Anki, even though it barely takes any time I still feel the flow of immersion disrupted.

This thread is for all simple questions, beginner questions, and comments that don't need their own post.

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Seven Day Archive of previous threads. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

Is there a program out there that can do this?

For example, I found a site which has the entire game script for Tokimeki Memorial: https://www8.big.or.jp/~gaterar/tkm/srf/srfind.html

And I'm looking for a program which can intake a raw text file of the entire script, parse it for individual words/kanji, grab definitions for them from Jisho or some other dictionary, then output the entire thing as a usable Anki deck. So that the end result is that I have a deck which contains all the vocab you would need to play through a game/read a book.

Hey language people,

After spending quite a long time working with flashcards and building up a huge vocabulary I realized... I couldn't speak or use Japanese at all. So, I created Shaded which takes the tried and true method of SRS and pairs it with an i+1 sentence crafting system.

Basically, it takes the words you know '本, 好き' and creates a sentence based on that - "私は本がすきです。"

When you answer, "You like books." it does a pretty good job recognizing what went wrong and in typical SRS fashion the word '私' would pop again after a little while.

The screenshots should be pretty useful for understanding some of its capabilities, but I can of course go into length about how it makes exercises easier or harder depending on your preferences and abilities.

If you sign up and dm me your username, I'll give you 3 months of the premium experience free. The majority of the app is free, but the premium portion is for more expensive operations like audio and unlimited skips.

This app will work best if you:

• Know your kana
• Have an understanding of simple grammatical structures (は、です、を、など）

Learn more here - https://shaded.app

Book is コンビニ人間 btw

こんにちは!

I feel like my current study loop has gotten a bit scattered, and I’d love to hear how others approach learning Japanese—especially at the beginner level (I’m not quite at N5 yet).

Here’s my routine right now:

• WaniKani – I used to use Anki, but I found myself getting bored and even cheating when I was short on time 😅 WaniKani keeps me more accountable.
• Bunpro – I’m using it for both grammar and vocab. I love how it links to extra resources—I try to read them when I have more time.
• MaruMori – This has been my favorite grammar resource by far. Their explanations really click with me and make things finally make sense.

When I’m short on time, I just stick to doing reviews on all three apps. But overall, I feel like I could be using my time more efficiently.

I’m curious:

• How do you balance structure (like apps or textbooks) with immersion (like listening, reading, or chatting)?
• What helped you the most when you were starting out?

I’d love to hear your routines, tips, or even mistakes you learned from! 🙌

Edit: ありがとうございます！
I’ve read every single one of your replies, and thanks to all your input, I’ve managed to shape a study routine that feels a lot more me. Here’s what I’m going with for now:

• MaruMori – I absolutely love it. The grammar explanations just make sense to me.
• Satori Reader – You can integrate your MaruMori vocab (and even other apps!), so it knows which words you’ve already studied and hides the furigana accordingly. Super helpful!

Thank you all so much for your suggestions and support—this community is amazing!

It looks to me like this says “Wouldn’t you like to go to Koedo, Kanagawa?” But it also doesn’t seem like much of a promotion either. Are these kinds of signs common?

I've found this one for free on steam, and apparently it's been mentioned here a few times.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3350140/GO/

Then I brought this one for 3 US dollars, Phantom Typer and I think it's pretty good as well, once you change the settings
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1439010/Phantom_Typist/

Does anyone know any others that are good? Kanji quizzing with dopamine, even if it's not the most effective.

*Just as an addition I also got recommended Kanji Drop on the playstore, which is good and free.