Learning Japanese, Part 1

Since I started playing those Japanese language learning games I posted about before, I gradually got sucked into going all-in on trying to learn Japanese. To that end I started playing language-learning games, reading books about Japanese, and immersing with podcasts and anime.

I've tried learning Japanese in the past, and at one time I even had a streak of over 50 days on DuoLingo, but I never got the results I wanted, and it never lasted. I always felt like I hardly made any progress and lost interest after a short amount of time. The many years that I spent watching anime didn't help much. I developed a bit of an ear for Japanese and picked up a few words and phrases, but that's it. This time I'm determined that it should be different, using an "all of the above" approach to how I'm going to acquire this language.

Apps

Here's a rundown of apps I've tried and abandoned:

Bunpo, LingoDeer, Mondly

These apps are similar to DuoLingo, but only a few lessons are free. The rest of the content is locked behind a paywall. I couldn't access enough to judge the quality of the Japanese teaching materials, but it didn't feel as fun or rewarding as DuoLingo. Mondly had free daily lessons, but I couldn't progress in the course without paying. Both Mondly and LingoDeer felt like the didn't teach very well, especially Mondly.

Rosetta Stone

It was once my go-to app for language learning, but it's not as fun and gamified as DuoLingo, and was always very expensive. It has the advantage of teaching the language in the language, using only the target language and images, thus avoiding translation. I might go back to it someday, but by the time I feel ready I might have already moved beyond the level where it's useful.

DuoCards

A flash card app with additional resources and modes of interaction, but I felt like it was a chore to use it and didn't like it at all. Even though it seemingly has more going for it than Anki, with the ability to easily create new cards, cute characters, animations, and different ways of interacting with the cards, I somehow felt that Anki was more fun. Although it's free, it also limits how much I can do at a time if I don't pay.

Falou

I don't really have an opinion on this app. It seems to focus on having the student practice conversations by speaking Japanese. I don't feel like this is right for me at my current stage, but I might revisit it later.

These are the apps I'm currently using:

Anki

Despite how barebones it is, I find the experience of using Anki to be fairly rewarding and enjoyable. I've been using decks for Hiragana, Katakana, and multiple vocabulary decks.

So far out of the vocabulary decks I'm using I think the Kaishi 1.5k deck is the best. The front of the card has the word in Japanese and an example sentence in Japanese. The back has the Furigana (transliteration of the Kanji, the Chinese characters), the word definition, translation of the example sentence, audio recordings of the word and the sentence, and an illustration. This helps me learn what the word looks like, thus helping me to learn the Kanji so that I could read Japanese in the future.

The Core 2k/6k deck has on the front the word definition, an example sentence that's missing that word, and a photo illustration. The back has the word in Japanese along with recordings. As a result in many cases I feel like I'm remembering the sound of the word on the basis of the illustration rather than the meaning, and that I'm not learning how it's written.

The JLPT Tango N5 MIA has technical problems so it's difficult to evaluate its design, but even so there are problems with the content. It's inconsistent about whether it's a vocabulary deck or sentence deck and which words or phrases it highlights or translates. Sometimes the sentence doesn't seem to have audio. Still, I'm able to learn from it.

At first I tried to go fast, but as YouTube creators have warned, I was soon flooded with daily reviews. So now I slowed down to a maximum of five new cards per deck per day.

DuoLingo

It has nice animations, cute characters and voices, and a variety of different ways of interacting with the learning material. It also uses animations, sounds, leaderboards, social elements, and special events to create a feeling of the player being rewarded and foster a sense of competition. I'd say it provides the best overall experience that makes me want to grind many lessons a day and maintain an infinite streak. However, I do feel that the words and sentences it teaches are a bit lacking. For example, having the male character say "My skirt is cute".

Drops

It feels like Anki and DuoLingo had a child. It seems to work on the basis of something like flash cards, but with many varied exercises for each item, nice animations, illustrations for everything, and lots of repetition to really sear the knowledge into my head. However, the app doesn't display correctly on my phone, with the bottom edge of the app being cut off. It also limits how much time I can spend studying during the day. I might end up dropping it as it's annoying to deal with the rate-limiting and it's largely redundant.

Renshuu

An almost completely free app made specifically for Japanese. It's obviously a labor of love as it lacks the commercial soulless polish other apps have, but seems to offer a fairly complete course that is based on the SRS flashcards concept. I did have to manually change a setting to get it to automatically play the audio when reviewing cards, and I feel that it has too much Romaji (representing Japanese with the Latin alphabet) and too little Kanji, hampering the rate at which I pick up on  reading Japanese.

Memrise

A commercial app, somewhat in the vein of DuoLingo. However, it uses videos of native speakers to teach the letters, vocabulary, and phrases. These video clips are often subtly humorous, helping me remember what they are teaching. It feels like a very friendly and enjoyable app, and it's designed to just keep going directly from lesson to lesson without any pause so that I often end up binging multiple lessons in one sitting. Some content requires payment, but that doesn't stop the progress along the course.

WaniKani

Technically it's not an app but a web site. Having to wait between lessons is frustrating, but it seems like the mnemonics are really effective, since I remembered all the radicals (almost) perfectly after just one lesson. I just started using it, so I'll see how it goes, but maybe Kanji can be easy after all.

Todaii: Easy Japanese

The material there is labeled easy Japanese, but it's too advanced for me, especially since it's full of Kanji. Originally I thought that I could just learn Kanji as a side effect of learning vocabulary, but I'm no longer satisfied with that. Still, looking at it at least gives me motivation to try harder to learn how to read. Once I can start reading stories and articles on this site I should be able to read manga, I hope. It's the main reason why I decided to try WaniKani instead of making do with what the Kanji I'm picking up through studying vocabulary.

What Else

In addition, I'm also reading Japanese for Dummies, 2nd Edition. The frequent use of Romaji instead of Kana along with always writing how to pronounce the words using really gross English spelling is annoying, but the writing style is fun and there is useful information in there.

Next I'm planning to read Tae Kim's book A Guide to Japanese Grammar: A Japanese approach to learning Japanese grammar, which is available as a free PDF download, and Cure Dolly's book Unlocking Japanese: Making Japanese as simple as it really is, which I already bought for the Kindle app. Both of those books have been lauded by online learners.

When I can't watch anime I listen to EASY JAPANESE PODCAST | Learn Japanese with us! I downloaded 707 episodes to my phone so that I could listen to it as background noise without getting interrupted by ads, and try to listen to it whenever I'm not talking to other people or doing things that require concentration. With this I can even reach around 10-12 hours of day of Japanese immersion. Although it's just listening without visual context, and therefor the least effective, it helps keep my mind in "Japanese mode" and I even picked up a few words from it. It's also a way of getting a feel for my progress. Almost every day I understand a little more, letting me know that I am indeed improving.

Also, there are several language-learning games I'd like to play which haven't come out yet, including So To Speak and Wagotabi: A Japanese Journey.

Why All of the Above?

I believe that there are many advantages to using all methods and resources at once:

• Repetition. The more I see the same thing over and over again, the better I remember it.
• Each source will teach the same material in different ways, giving different definitions, explanations, examples, and exercises. This both gives a more complete understanding of the subject and help reinforce the memory.
• Different sources will teach different topics at different times. This means that I have more of a breadth-first approach to progressing with the language, learning more beginner material while being a beginner rather than saving some of it for later when I'm more advanced. Also, not all topics are taught by all sources, so they cover each others' blind spots.
• Variety is the spice of life. By constantly switching between different learning resources I keep it fresh and avoid boredom. If it every becomes too much to keep juggling so many of them then I can always choose to focus on the ones I like the most and drop the rest.