Learning Japanese, Part 2

 

It's been almost a year since I started my daily study of Japanese, and about 10 months since my previous post about it. So how's it going?

Apps

I ended up dropping almost all the apps due to them either being too restricted in the free tier, not fun enough, or not effective enough, or not having enough time and energy to do them in addition to the ones I felt to be part of my core routine. I'll focus here on the few that I do feel are part of the core routine, and the few extras that I feel are almost but not quite there.

DuoLingo

The main strong point with this app is how it gets me to consistently maintain my streak, which means maintaining a daily study habit. The way that it's gamified and the fact that it's very forgiving help me avoid falling off completely. It's also okay in terms of drills and introducing new vocabulary, but it feels very slow and based on doing repetitive exercises rather than giving instructions or moving forward with new material. The Kanji practice is nice because it gets me to notice the radicals that appear in each Kanji and how they are composed, which I think helps with remembering them. Maybe I should try to focus more on Kanji drills?

One major flaw that I didn't notice other critics mention is that DuoLingo uses a casual speaking style in English as the translation for Japanese sentences that are written in the polite style, which causes two problems: the translation between the Japanese and the English is further from a one to one translation than it needs to be, which makes it harder to create neat mappings between vocabulary in both languages, and it creates a misimpression about the level of formality in the Japanese phrase, so English speakers might confuse what's casual, polite, and formal and use polite speech as casual speech.

Another issue that I'm not sure is a flaw or strength is that some of the Japanese audio is spoken in an unclear way, which makes it harder to understand. It could be a strength in training the student to understand unclear speech, but it feels like a flaw that makes it harder to learn normal speech.

Busuu

I feel like this is one of the most effective teaching apps. It gives proper lessons with good explanations and exercises that immediately follow up on the instructions, with native speaker video and audio as well as cultural information and some information that would be relevant to me as a tourist. I really feel like I'm learning something here. The streak isn't as forgiving as DuoLingo so I end up losing my streak occasionally. They did get a bit more lenient recently, though.

Memrise

At first I really like Memrise because of its amusing Hiragana and Katakana native speaker videos as well as the video listening practice. Then for a while I started to think that it's pointless as I moved on to the part where it's drilling words and phrases, but recently I'm starting to feel more like I get it, and that maybe it's helping to teach common words and phrases in everyday Japanese.

One thing I noticed, especially with native speaker videos, is that they often pronounce things a little differently from how they are written, like swapping m and n, or k and g. I wonder if it's an accent thing, or if it's similar to what I often encounter in Hebrew where people are not careful about the distinctions between b and v, k and kh, and p and f. It's annoying, but could prove useful in getting used to both sounds being used interchangeably so that one doesn't get confused if he hears sempai instead of senpai, for example.

WaniKani

I more or less finished the free tier and I'm trying to get all of my items into the Burned category before moving on to the paid tier. I feel like it's the most effective app at teaching Kanji and vocabulary so far, but until I start the paid tier, there's usually not much to do on it.

Anki

I'm focusing on the Kaishi 1.5k deck. It's a good deck and I like it, but I find it a bit too boring to do Anki drills every day, so every few weeks I'll spend a few days going through my backlog until it reaches 0, then forget about it. It's not the right way to do Anki, but it's all I'm managing to do right now due to lack of time and low energy and motivation.

Free Tadoku Books

They're nice. I read dozens of them, but at some point I dropped off. I need to get back to it.

Renshuu

Seems like a good app, but it's too demanding for what I'm able to do right now.

Wagotabi

Seems nice, but I didn't get very far before dropping off. Some day I should just binge it.

So to Speak

Same as Wagotabi, except I think I like it more precisely because it's so much more basic. It's also a lot smaller. I wonder if I can do the whole thing in a day, if I really focused on it and nothing else?

Current State

After almost a year of nearly daily study by various resources, I find that I understand more and can say more (if I wanted to). Sometimes I'll watch a show in Japanese and only realize a few minutes in that I forgot to turn on the subtitles, after which point I won't understand anything anymore. I also found that most of the time while rewatching Rising of the Shield Hero Season 1 I don't need subtitles, as most of the dialog is very simple and slow. There were only a few points where I had to turn them on. I can also formulate new kinds of sentences, especially thanks to the lessons on Busuu, and do so more easily and intuitively than before. However, when I try to read random posts on X I only understand a word here or there and am forced to use the translate function.

So on the one hand I can definitely feel that I've made progress, but not nearly as much as I expected, and I think that's mostly because I only do a little each day, and even with the things that I do, I don't do all of them every day.

What's Next?

For now I plan to simply continue with my daily habit. When my situation changes, when I have more time and energy, then I can consider increasing the amount and variety of my daily practice. Since what I'm doing brings tangible progress, then continuing it should continue to bring progress.