The Road To Japanese

This is something I have been doing a while now, as you probably know by now you should immerse yourself with Japanese things as much as possible, watch Japanese tv shows, listen to Japanese podcasts, read Japanese articles etc. Well when you are looking over these, I'm sure you will come over a whole bunch of vocabulary and phrases that you don't know (if you are a beginner then you will come across far to many to do this but I'll go into that later.

So what do you do? You write down all the phrases and vocab (even grammar points you have to look up) into your special vocabulary book! If your a beginner and you come across too many alien words or phrases then just pick out the most important and useful words and phrases. This can really help your Japanese and will extend your vocabulary, depending on what you are reading/watching/ listening to, you may even learn colloquial terms to help you sound more native. Give it a go, it will help you LOADS!

Ok so yeh, I borrowed the idea for this blog post of Textfugu so you should definitely read their article on it here, but hear me out. This is something that really made sense to me, if something is your passion, you want to do it all the time, am I right? If you really love learning Japanese then you really will stick to it, you really will learn, you really will become fluent!

Of course I'm not saying that you can learn Japanese with passion alone, hard work along with multiple other thing come into the equation, however with passion, that hard work, those spent pennies will all seem worth it, even fun to you, if you don't enjoy doing what your doing, it will be harder to accomplish. I know some people learn Japanese, or other languages for that matter, because they have to, for work, or because they have to move their, but even if you have to, find some way to make it your passion, relate it to things you love, incorporate those things you love into your studying!

Passion is the key to faster, easier success, so why not give it a try!

OK after youtube giving me way too much grief I have finally got the video up. Now you get to see the man behind the mask :o.

みなさん こんにちは！ So I recently got this comment : "hey! what is your studying method? you are in also on grammar? or stopped on hiragana e katakana? i need to know because i have to much things to study and i dont know what is better to do! STEVEN" and I thought a nice new thing to do was to start this new... section. Basically it's called Post Bag and if you have any questions, just post them as a comment and I will answer them, even if I don't know the answer, I will research them, then I will learn something also! So of course, let those questions roll on!.


As to the question above, this is my answer:
My studying method? I have lots, but for each part of learning Japanese, my study methods vary, allow me to go into more detail.


First I'll go a little into the order of which I have done/am doing things, if you have been following my blog, as you may already know I started off learning hiragana and katakana, this gives you a good foundation for learning Japanese, as some of the best kanji  resources give pronunciations in kana and some of the best grammar recources use kana in examples, in fact for learning grammar I'd say that knowing kana is vital, why? Well because all particles and grammatical points should be in kana, why change that? As well as this, the particle は in romaji is written as wa, but it is written with the hiragana for ha, which will only cause confusion when you convert! Now what I am doing is, at the same time, learning Kanji and Grammar, now my kanji studying method has changed a lot since my last post, as in the end Heisig's method wasn't for me, but that doesn't mean its bad. Once I have the grammar and kanji down, I will just work on my vocabulary and phrase knowledge, maybe learn some colloquial terms and of course practise what I have already learnt! I will watch Japanese television shows, this will help my listening and pronunciation as well as my vocabulary, I will read Japanese books and manga, to make sure my Kanji and kana skills don't dull, and another thing that I will do is translate books from English into Japanese and vice versa! I actually got this idea from PathogenProductions from Youtube, he mentions it in this video. Basically I will do lots to immerse myself, improve myself and to make sure my skills don't dull! Now onto my actual methods. 


For Kana I have made a few posts on that already, feel free to check them out: Kana E-Course, Learning Katakana, Hiragana Resources.


For kanji, again I have already made a post, but as I said above my method has changed since then, It's too much to go into in this post, as it's already long enough but expect this method tomorrow or the day after! You can check out my old method here, it's really good, it just didn't fit my learning style!


For Grammar I am mainly using Tae Kim's Guide To Learning Japanese this is an amazing recourse and I really can't fault it in any way. However let me warn you now, all the examples are in kana and kanji, although if you hover over the kanji it shows you it in kana. If you don't know kana you won't be able to use this effectively, of course you could translate it all into romaji using a chart, but that's time better spent actually learning kana. It also has exercises after each section to secure your knowledge on what you have previously learnt.


Also for Grammar I have a pocket grammar guide called BARRON's Japanese Grammar, this is a nice little book for reference and it's very affordable, my only complaint is that it is all in romaji, but its not meant to learn from only as a reference and such so I like it anyway.


As well as all of this I regularly watch, people on Youtube who blog in Japanese, I watch Japanese television shows, I listen to some Japanese music and try to read what Japanese I can. Also one of the most important things to me is that I practice everyday, stay in a habit of practicing, the one day you miss might turn into two days, three days, a week, a month and before you know it you've given up, don't let that be you! Study hard and don't give up, forget about the haters and embrace this chance to learn a wonderful language, at some point in your life you just won't have the drive or time to do it, so do it now!

I signed up to this while learning Katakana, it's a e-course that is supposed to teach you all the kana in two weeks and is made by http://nihongoup.com/, however it didn't prove much use to me because it sends you one lesson a day so I couldn't access the parts I needed to learn. However I do think it's a good course that can prove beneficial to anyone learning kana, so, in order to bypass the one lesson a day limit I have all the links to each lesson here in one place for you all!

I know most of you probably drill and drill and drill vocabulary, kanji and all the other vital aspects of Japanese that you need to learn, I'll be the first one to tell you that it isn't cutting the mustard, it's just not effective (for the most part) and their are easier, less boring ways of going about it. So what am I preaching about this time you ask? ANKI! yes, Anki, I decided that it was so good, so vital, such a time saver that I would dedicate a whole post to it.

Anki is a free "spaced repetition flashcard program" that is designed to help you memorize... anything, as effectively as possible, and my gosh does it work! Basically you have a deck of virtual cards, you go through them one by one and click a buttons to tell the program how well you remembered the card and depending on how well you memorized it the time that the card next comes up is changed, if you did well it comes up later if you did badly it comes up sooner, simple yet effective.

There are lots of shared decks of cards available to download that spread across many fields of study, including  Remembering the Kanji, Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese and many more (not just Japanese based) and to add to that you can create your own!

One thing that I do a lot is while I'm listening to a Japanese podcast, or watching a Japanese show, any new and useful words I come across I write down on a notebook I always have handy. Later on I then put this vocabulary into an Anki flashcard deck ready to review later, you can also add in sounds in case you want to put in the pronunciation and also pictures. This way the new vocabulary really sticks in my mind and next time you hear it, you will be able to understand just that bit more! There are endless possibilities to Anki study methods, so I invite you to try it out and find out what works best for you! If you have time, please post a comment on your favorite Anki study methods!

With around two thousand kanji to learn, it may seem like a daunting task and I'm not going to lie, it is. However with these tips you will be on you way to becoming a kanji master in around six months, maybe, actually I can't really predict that as it is entirely down to how much work you put in. And you will have to put in work, lots of it, regularly but it will be very rewarding in the end.

Learning kanji should be the next thing you do after learning Hiragana and Katakana, which you should learn first , a lot of kanji dictionaries use kana to tell you how to say the kanji. Kanji although being a big task will improve your Japanese ten fold, why? The answer is simple, you will be learning around two thousand kanji, that's two thousand new words that you will learn, as well as achieving a higher level of understanding of the Japanese language, the benefits of learning kanji are obvious. As well as this without learning kanji, your Japanese writing will always be at a six year old Japanese child's level, you can do better than that, can't you?

There is no one way to learn kanji, and my way might not be perfect for you but it works for me and may work for you, you should try it out if you have no idea how you should learn them, or adapt it to suit you better! When I first started experimenting with learning kanji I steered clear of Heisig's methods, this was a mistake in my personal opinion, after finally giving it a go I found out the wonders it presented to me! So I will explain all about this and before you leave this post because you don't want to buy the book STOP, because I have a way around it!


Of course I recommend buying the book but if that isn't an option for you I will show you a way around this, being the nice person I am :). First off, if you have the book do the same as I explain but you wont have to use the extra website I present and you will get the warm feeling of supporting the author and having the book!

The website that you will be using is http://kanji.koohii.com/ and the extra website is, a personal favorite of mine, http://www.google.com

This is how I do it;

• Go to The first website sign up and click on study, type in 1 in the start box or if you are using the book open it up to the first kanji, the kanji One.
• On paper (squared is preferred, even better if the squares are divided into four, it helps you ballance the character) write the frame number (eg. 1) next to it write out the kanji as neatly as possible and next to that the Heisig keyword (eg. one). Note: If you don't have the book you will have to copy the kanji from the first website and paste it into google search and after that write stroke order and you will come to a page like this and click (usually) the first link, this is how you will find out the kanji's stroke order, this is VERY important to learn perfectly! If you have the book it shows you.
• Next go to the first website, sign up if you haven't already, go to study and in the search box search for the frame number of the kanji that you are studying. Scroll down to favorite stories and pick a story that you find memorable, you see the Heisig method is all about relating a kanji to a keyword and being able to draw it from a story so this step is important. Write it down next to the kanji and its keyword you have already written.
• Do this for another 10-20 kanji per day, yes everyday and don't you dare go breaking the chain!
• Once you have done this for all the kanji that you are going to learn on that day practice writing out each new kanji three times (and only three times no drilling!). Whilst you are writing them out pay attention to the stroke order and go through the story for the kanji.
• Now we move onto the magic part, using possibly my favorite computer program to date, ANKI! What you want to do is download the Remembering the kanji deck from the shared decks in anki, set anki to give you the amount of new cards you will study per day, so if you chose ten put in 10 and then review! As you review it will give you the keyword, think about the keyword and try to write the kanji that goes with it, remember to use the correct stroke order and go through the story in your head!
• Do this everyday until you can recognize and write all the kanji in the book!

I'm back! And as promised here are some tips and resources for mastering those katakana! Remember to return to this blog tomorrow for some great tips on learning those challenging Kanji!

You can learn these really quickly but make sure you secure it in your mind, I recommend doing a column a day and doing the last three columns all together (ra, wa and nn columns) but of course first off of course you need your faithful katakana chart, courtesy of http://www.textfugu.com! And this will do as a stroke order reference. Now all you need is a notepad or paper and a pen!

Ok now you're all kitted up lets start learning Katakana! It's not hard, really it's not! Write down the romaji for each symbol in the column(s) you are learning like so:
a
i
u
e
o

Once you have done that write out the correlating symbol next to it, take your time, try to remember it and pay attention to the stroke order. Once you have written the symbol once next to each romaji cover it with paper and write it again, from memory, again take your time and pay attention to stroke order, repeat this process of covering up the symbol and writing them out across the whole page.

Wait five minuets and without looking at the symbols write out all the Katakana you have learnt so far so say you got up to ko you would write out: アイウエオカキクケコ. Do this until you have learnt all the Katakana, it's really that simple!

Note this method also works well with Hiragana, of course you will need different resources for Hiragana for those resources please visit this link