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why cant kanji just get like... downloaded into my brain

like im just a girl. why must i learn kanji 😞

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I know I never post to this blog anymore BUT! I wanted to share another comprehensible Japanese channel I started following a couple months ago and really enjoy:

It's a relatively new channel that does beginner comprehensible input videos. I.e: explaining the subject of the video entirely in Japanese with the use of visual aids and gestures to help you understand it.

His videos are either him explaining an anime (like how the show starts or general, non-spoiler stuff about the plot/characters), or videos dedicated to a kanji character or two, with a bunch of little drawings and doodles related to the topic, like this:

(they're very cute lol)

idk I just enjoy the vibe and the way he explains stuff. I follow a couple comprehensible Japanese channels because they're great for listening practice and comprehension and feeling like oh hey I have actually learned something over the years of snail's pace self study lol and so far I enjoy his content a lot!

He's got about 2.2k subscribers currently and you should definitely check out the channel if you're learning Japanese :D

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Junior I think that's illegal or something

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You can tag with your answers! I chose 11-13. Rebolg if you vote, I'm curious! :3

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I remember when I first started learning Japanese, I was really intimidated by the fact that there aren’t spaces between words like I’m used to in English because I thought that’d make it way more difficult to learn to read it

I mean, I still can’t read much yet but not only is that aspect less of an issue than I thought it’d be (especially when it includes Kanji that helps visually break up the sentence more), but I realized I already occasionally do that with English anyway nowadays since a common way to add emphasis to something online is to-

t y p e i t l i k e t h i s ....lol

(when a sentence longer than a couple words is all hiragana it’s still kind of tricky for me though)

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Not a nameplate but more obsolete kana in the wild! ウヰスキーmeans whiskey/whisky. Today it's written ウィスキー. It's interesting to imagine how that pronunciation sounded. I wonder if it was substantially different from the modern one...

The phoneme wi is no longer used today, but the katakana form is ヰ and hiragana is ゐ. It's derived from the kanji 井, which means well (like well water), and is read i, sei, or shō. You can type it by entering 'wyi' in Japanese keyboard input.

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Hi I’m still vaguely studying Japanese even though this blog is a bit dead and a cool thing happened earlier!

So I found a Japanese song (this one) this morning that I really like and noticed in the first choruses she ends several lines with から (kara), which is a grammar thing I roughly know the meaning of, but in the last chorus she sings the same words but instead ends the lines with のに (noni). And I was like, oh that’s interesting I wonder how that changes the meaning of those lyrics

(I could only halfway understand those couple lines of the song and did have to google translate them to get the rest....lol)

Anyway I just remembered that while listening to the song again and looked up a short video explaining what のに is used for. I just clicked the first video that popped up and it ended up being spoken entirely in Japanese. But she started to say an example sentence before I could turn on captions and I actually just understood her? Pretty easily??? It was such a weird feeling lol

Decided not to turn on subtitles, just for fun, and actually understood it all pretty well, aside from a few words in a couple of the example sentences. Like it’s an N4 lesson so she’s speaking clearly and using simple sentences, but as someone who isn’t even at N5 yet and can usually only pick out random words or very simple sentences at best, it was still very neat!

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Happy new year!

I know this blog is mostly dead lol, because I kind of lost motivation to study Japanese at all for like 80% of last year. Recently I’ve just barely started trying to get back into it. I decided to not try and set any strict goals and just to try and study when I feel like doing so, which tbh makes it feel a lot more fun. I don’t even use Duolingo much now after losing my 700+ day streak a few months ago (rip)

I’m only making this post because I just took a mini N5 practice test I found, just on a whim tbh, and I got about half of the questions wrong. (It was like 16 questions total) But that means I got about half of them correct! And considering it’s entirely in Japanese, I was just really surprised how much of it I could read and understand to be able to get those questions right at all without just guessing. I think of the correct ones, only one or two was a guess. The others I was roughly able to figure out the right answer!

And one or two of the ones I got wrong were where I was debating between two answers, the other of which actually ended up being the right answer. Idk, I guess it’s just a bit encouraging. Like I struggled and if it were a real test I definitely would have run out of time lol, but still nice to know I could even understand enough of it to get through

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How to learn a language when you don’t know where to start:

General Plan:

Weeks 1 and 2: Purpose:

Learn the fundamentals sentence construction

Learn how to spell and count

Start building a phrase stockpile with basic greetings

The Alphabet

Numbers 1 - 100

Subject Pronouns

Common Greetings

Conjugate the Two Most Important Verbs: to be and to have

Basic Definite and Indefinite Articles

Weeks 3 and 4: Purpose:

Learn essential vocabulary for the day-to-day

Start conjugating regular verbs

Days of the Week and Months of the Year

How to tell the time

How to talk about the weather

Family Vocabulary

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 5 and 6: Purpose:

Warm up with the last of the day-to-day vocabulary

Add more complex types of sentences to your grammar

Colours

House vocabulary

How to ask questions

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Forming negatives

Weeks 7 and 8: Purpose:

Learn how to navigate basic situations in a region of your target language country

Finish memorising regular conjugation rules

Food Vocabulary and Ordering at Restaurants

Money and Shopping Phrases

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 9 and 10: Purpose:

Start constructing descriptive and more complex sentences

Adjectives

Reflective verbs

Places vocabulary

Weeks 11 and 12: Purpose:

Add more complex descriptions to your sentences with adverbs

Wrap up vocabulary essentials

Adverbs

Parts of the body and medical vocabulary

Tips for Learning a Foreign Language:

Learning Vocabulary:

What vocabulary should I be learning?

There are hundreds of thousands of words in every language, and the large majority of them won’t be immediately relevant to you when you’re starting out.Typically, the most frequent 3000 words make up 90% of the language that a native speaker uses on any given day. Instead try to learn the most useful words in a language, and then expand outwards from there according to your needs and interests.

Choose the words you want/need to learn.

Relate them to what you already know.

Review them until they’ve reached your long-term memory.

Record them so learning is never lost.

Use them in meaningful human conversation and communication.

How should I record the vocabulary?

Learners need to see and/or hear a new word of phrase 6 to 17 times before they really know a piece of vocabulary.

Keep a careful record of new vocabulary.

Record the vocabulary in a way that is helpful to you and will ensure that you will practice the vocabulary, e.g. flashcards.

Vocabulary should be organised so that words are easier to find, e.g. alphabetically or according to topic.

Ideally when noting vocabulary you should write down not only the meaning, but the grammatical class, and example in a sentence, and where needed information about structure.

How should I practice using the vocabulary?

Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check - Use this method for learning and remembering vocabulary. This method is really good for learning spellings.

Make flashcards. Write the vocabulary on the front with the definition and examples on the back.

Draw mind maps or make visual representations of the new vocabulary groups.

Stick labels or post it notes on corresponding objects, e.g when learning kitchen vocabulary you could label items in your house.

How often should I be practising vocabulary?

A valuable technique is ‘the principle of expanding rehearsal’. This means reviewing vocabulary shortly after first learning them then at increasingly longer intervals.

Ideally, words should be reviewed:

5-10 minutes later

24 hours later

One week later

1-2 months later

6 months later

Knowing a vocabulary item well enough to use it productively means knowing:

Its written and spoken forms (spelling and pronunciation).

Its grammatical category and other grammatical information

Related words and word families, e.g. adjective, adverb, verb, noun.

Common collocations (Words that often come before or after it).

Receptive Skills: Listening and Reading

Reading is probably one of the most effective ways of building vocabulary knowledge.

Listening is also important because it occupies a big chunk of the time we spend communicating.

Tips for reading in a foreign language:

Start basic and small.  Children’s books are great practice for beginners. Don’t try to dive into a novel or newspaper too early, since it can be discouraging and time consuming if you have to look up every other word.

Read things you’ve already read in your native language. The fact that you at least know the gist of the story will help you to pick up context clues, learn new vocabulary and grammatical constructions.

Read books with their accompanying audio books. Reading a book while listening to the accompanying audio will improve your “ear training”. It will also help you to learn the pronunciation of words.

Tips for listening in a foreign language:

Watch films in your target language.

Read a book while also listening along to the audio book version.

Listen to the radio in your target language.

Watch videos online in your target language.

Activities to do to show that you’ve understood what you’ve been listening to:

Try drawing a picture of what was said.

Ask yourself some questions about it and try to answer them.

Provide a summary of what was said.

Suggest what might come next in the “story.”

Translate what was said into another language.

“Talk back” to the speaker to engage in imaginary conversation.

Productive Skills: Speaking and Writing

Tips for speaking in a foreign language:

If you can, try to speak the language every day either out loud to yourself or chat to another native speaker whether it is a colleague, a friend, a tutor or a language exchange partner. 

Write a list of topics and think about what you could say about each one. First you could write out your thoughts and then read them out loud. Look up the words you don’t know. You could also come up with questions at the end to ask someone else.

A really good way to improve your own speaking is to listen to how native speakers talk and imitate their accent, their rhythm of speech and tone of voice. Watch how their lips move and pay attention to the stressed sounds. You could watch interviews on YouTube or online news websites and pause every so often to copy what you have just heard. You could even sing along to songs sung in the target language.

Walk around the house and describe what you say. Say what you like or dislike about the room or the furniture or the decor. Talk about what you want to change.This gets you to practise every day vocabulary.

Tips for writing in a foreign language:

Practice writing in your target language. Keep it simple to start with. Beginner vocabulary and grammar concepts are generally very descriptive and concrete.

Practice writing by hand. Here are some things you can write out by hand:

Diary entries

Shopping lists

Reminders

What could I write about?

Write about your day, an interesting event, how you’re feeling, or what you’re thinking.

Make up a conversation between two people. 

Write a letter to a friend, yourself, or a celebrity. You don’t need to send it; just writing it will be helpful.

Translate a text you’ve written in your native language into your foreign language.

Write a review or a book you’ve recently read or a film you’ve recently watched.

Write Facebook statuses, Tweets or Tumblr posts (whether you post them or not will be up to you).

Write a short story or poem.

Writing is one of the hardest things to do well as a non-native speaker of a language, because there’s no room to hide. 

There are lots of ways to improve your writing ability, but they can be essentially boiled down to three key components:

Read a lot

Write a lot

Get your writing corrected

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It’s the exclamation mark that really gets me with this one lol

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Was ANYONE gonna tell me that Disney+ added the Japanese dub to all of their content?! I just discovered this! There’s now a legal way to use Disney movies to study Japanese without needing to purchase Japanese iTunes cards or import Japanese copies of Disney movies or tv shows!

I repeat, Disney+ has added Japanese dubs to EVERYTHING!

Did YOU know there’s a Japanese dub of Kim Possible?! I didn’t!! But now I know and I’m watching it now!

This is AWESOME!!!

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me learning english at 12: You lethargic, imprudent imbecile, how exactly have you managed to speak ONE language in your entire life, and never learned such simple rules as your/you're and who/whom? The english language has the grammatical complexity of a shovel, and I've mastered it better than you!

me trying to learn a new language at 27: I put enough word in sentence in an order, hope it make sense. My heart good but my brain small. Thank you and have mercy.

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Because I've been watching videos like the Comprehensible Japanese channel where it's meant for learning Japanese but is also entirely in Japanese, YouTube has started sometimes giving me ads for an Japanese app meant for learning English lol (It's called Cake, if you're curious)

Like thanks YouTube I appreciate the recommendation but considering 98% of my YouTube viewing is videos fully in English you can might be able to assume which of those languages I actually speak

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Me learning Japanese (or literally any other language probably): But if I don’t have a perfect understanding of the language or a really broad vocabulary, how will I ever be able to have a conversation or understand what I hear/read???? D:

Also me, a native english speaker: *regularly googles literal english words to make sure I’m spelling or using them correctly* - *has worked with people who use limited english and had no problem understanding them 90% of the time*  - *knows full-well that even native speakers don’t need/have a perfect understanding of the language to be able to use it*

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I know I haven’t posted much here lately and it’s mostly because I’ve just been a bit busy/tired to actually study more than like not breaking my duolingo streak for the most part lol.

But anyway this post is because I found this channel called, Comprehensible Japanese, the other day and figured it’d be good to post about

Basically she does three levels of Japanese: Complete Beginner, Beginner, and Intermediate (all sorted into their own playlists too, bless) of just talking about different subjects completely in Japanese. For example, some in the Complete Beginner playlist include one about parts of the face or body, there’s one about simple weather, one about seasons, the most recent is just about what utensil you’d use to eat different foods, there’s one just describing what cats are doing in various photos, etc..

She uses simple phrases (in the beginner vids at least, probably a little less simple in the Intermediate ones), draws pictures and/or gestures to help show what she’s saying, repeats phrases/words, and every video has Japanese closed captions. She also has a website with like a $5 monthly membership to unlock more videos on the site, but tbh there’s a good amount of the free ones even without that.

So yeah, just a rambly little post about a channel I’ve been watching this week. 

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This video showed up on my recommended page earlier and I love her energy, please go watch this lmao

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If you want to gain confidence speaking, mimic. Sing along to songs, and say lines from shows in your target language.

And do it with enthusiasm! Try different voices, put emotion into it! Act it out!

Speak to yourself in the language. Treat it like your native one. Make up dumb little songs that you mutter under your breath while doing something. Swear in the language!

Learn some phrases you use a lot. “Estoy Cansada” (I’m tired) and “Quiero comer algo” (I want to eat something) are good ones to start with. By trying to speak your target language you also get an idea of what grammar and vocab you are missing.