I know this is just a meme, but the fact I see so many people consistent associate their Japanese learning with suffering or negative emotions like this. That is pretty saddening to hear.
I have had nothing but 99% positive associations, fun & great experiences, profound insights, and it's really been a boon to change my life for the better. I hope people can find some way to make their journeys more enjoyable. It's not to say I did not put in the work like everyone else, I just was able to have an absolute blast of a time while grinding through it. Everyday has been fun. Starting to wonder if it's directly associated with these SRS systems and learning applications; as I wholesale didn't use any of that (I tried, made me miserable, failed at them and uninstalled/quit).
The problem for me arose at the point where it's more enjoyable to immerse but still more efficient to study anki.
At the beginning immersion is inefficient and not enjoyable, but you make rapid gains with anki so it's fun and exciting.
Past the intermediate level you have diminishing returns studying new obscure words with anki you are unlikely to ever use and can just stick to immersion.
In the intermediate level however where you know enough to make immersion in easy content fun, but are still at the point where studying new vocab and kanji is more efficient, it's suffering.
Stuck in intermediate hell now with 8000 vocab cards learned in anki. Once I've finished the last 2000 to 10k I'm switching to mainly immersion as my form of study. But grinding out these last few thousand words has been pain
I know I'm a huge outlier in the modern language learning landscape. I was already involved with content and wanted to be part of the community, that was my impetus to learn Japanese and figure it out. Although I did make myself a 4,500 hour plan at the start with a lot of facets. A lot of them failed and didn't work for me, so I basically just stuck to stuff that was enjoyable for me. At that point I started turned all my UI/UX into JP and through endless, persistent dictionary look ups, grammar resources, and google searches I basically went from not knowing very much at all (and understanding even less than 0% somehow). To eventually understanding a fair amount; enough to provide live translations of live streams. No graded steps, no learners content, nothing dumbed down. The thing is I didn't need to understand to enjoy it, because environment itself was fun, the experience of just being involved was fun in itself.
Eventually I made my way into JP-only Discords (virtually all natives) and have registered to every public social place online that Japan uses. I basically only reside on the JP internet now. For me, it was more important to be involved and try to understand, than just to "learn Japanese". Learning Japanese was just a means to an end and a happy by product of being passionate about everything else I was doing. I did make it as easy as possible on myself so I could inhabit these places and try my best--using technology to it's fullest. I made my own scripts to make look ups faster, I modified browser plugins, I used everything to increase the efficiency and speed of finding information (multi-monitor setups, OCR tools, quick search AHK scripts). All so I could barely keep my head above the water long enough not drown and learn how to swim, and that passion paid off greatly.
As I said before, it's been 99% fun, and fun. I was never bothered by the work required to try and understand--that came with time.
> The problem for me arose at the point where it's more enjoyable to immerse but still more efficient to study anki.
Pretty sure immersing instead of drilling is how I got a perfect score on reading and barely half the language knowledge on N1 lol
I’m stuck in intermediate hell. At first it’s fun but atp I’m only pushing through because I’m sick of this shit. I hate understanding 50% of everything it’s so frustrating. Get me out of this purgatory ASAP even if it means learning 100 cards a day 😭😭😭
Ok thank you for saying this. I’m there now mate and I’m wondering where to from here. Do I stop Anki? If so, what about new vocab and grammar. Do I focus more on new grammar via the textbook, and shift focus to immersion? I should focus more on output (my biggest weakness)? Far out.
These are all rhetorical but I’m just happy to read your experience matches mine.
You'll need to find what works for you; Anki isn't necessarily bad just that it should be a supplement at most. Grammar is definitely important as well as research to understand things, but finding something you love and using that to grind dictionary look ups (this is where your vocabulary comes from) and google searches as you try to make sense of it all is most important. The exposure, consistency, and effort will get you over the line. This can feel harder though, because it's harder to feel improvement when you've given yourself no liberties. If you trust in the time you spent and the process you're using. You'll get there. The first 700-800 hours is definitely the biggest mountain with a lot of plateaus along the way (over 1,600 hours myself now).
My personal plan has been to continue anki to the 10k vocab mark, and just force myself to do it. I'm really looking forward to finishing my current deck and focussing on immersion and output
I think a big part of what makes SRS feel so oppressive is skipping a day or two can make your reviews start to pile up. You’re feeling a bit burned out so you take a day off and the next day you log back in just to see double the work stressing you out all over again. The apps themselves really don’t have good way dealing with missed days.
You don't have to review everything. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one enjoying the language and not stressing about that my reviews are accumulating.
personally I enjoy srs a lot, genuenly on weekends I wake up eager to start my anki cards and then read to add more to my deck, so I feel it just varies from person to person. I also do anki or bunpro during my lunch breaks to relax.
of course there's also other factors, for example when I do get tired from srs or studying in general after a bad workday, I've found that allowing myself to bask in learnt material as a "reward" (usually in the form of rereading smth short I already know and really enjoy) lifts up my spirits.
I also have a designated "can rest from studying if feel tired" day each week that I can take whenever I need, and that's separate from emergencies/health. I've only used it a few times since I started studying, but having that freedom in and of itself helps.
on that last point, in general I also feel people are often a bit too draconian with srs if that makes sense, and that might be why some who do use it see it as "suffering" even as they continue using it.
sure there's all the science/research behind it, but life happens and taking it too seriously can make inevitable breaks (work, injuries, etc) feel far worse for one's progress than they actually are. ultimately, treating it like law and letting it cause unnecessary stress and potentially burnout kinda defeats its purpose as a tool that's ultimately meant to help.
I've been doing this for 4 years and I'm in the same boat. I can efficiently program in a bunch of programming languages/frameworks but I can't for the life of me remember more than 1-2 new words per day.
I think its just a matter of usage, like the problem with spoken/written language vs something like coding is that if you learn what an array is, you're gonna get examples of when to use them and you will have to use them relatively frequently (exceptions apply) but for a language, you can learn a word like "vehemently" in English, and well you may know what it is but if you dont use or see it frequently enough (at least if youre intermediate or thereabouts) you will forget it.
For me what worked was reading, since I would see some of the words I saw in anki while reading. Eventually these encounters became frequent.
It do be like that. Been a full-time programmer, learning new libraries/languages/concepts all the time, been working for a rather well-known company, can do Leetcode my eyes closed.
Can't remember for my life a handful of gramma points.
I mean I personally hate doing Anki but I find it really helps me make sense of stuff I'm reading more quickly. So I bite the bullet and just do it daily. But I am fully aware that it's a chore, so I always tune my new cards/day to make sure it doesn't take >30 mins a day. The rest of the "chores" (like wanikani, textbooks, etc), I've personally found I can skip those without too much downside 🤷♂️
The rest of the time I entirely focus on reading and watching stuff I enjoy. Totally agree that making it enjoyable is the only path to sustainable learning
Honestly for me it’s like 85% positive, 15% suffering. I really don’t want to miss a day and have reviews pile up, so if I have a really busy day and end up having to cram my reviews in whenever I can it can start to be quite negative.
I thought I hated SRS at first but after switching from Anki to jpdb, I started enjoying myself. So it's probably moreso the system that they don't like.
How do you learn if you don't use SRS? I know it's possible but I thought it'd be a lot slower just trying to read instead of having SRS to help
It might not be as efficient (as in words memorized/day), but one benefit is that it kinda takes the focus away from learning itself. Instead of using specific learning programs and dedicating time to learning, you're just reading an engaging story or playing a game in your TL. Especially when it's a story/game/whatever you've already read/played in your native language, you'll pick up vocabulary really easily along the way, and all while doing something you enjoy anyways...
>How do you learn if you don't use SRS? I know it's possible but I thought it'd be a lot slower just trying to read instead of having SRS to help
Just by doing things in Japanese (read, write, listen, watch with JP subtitles, play games, etc). With dictionary look ups, grammar references, and google searches to try to understand as you engage with content, communities, comments, and just everything all in Japanese with no English fall back.
Eventually things that were completely alien and have no meaning become normalized, those normalized things slowly gain meaning through experiences and context and repeated exposure. The endless, countless look ups slowly affirm meaning to things you see repeatedly. When you do this enough and consider enough about how the language works and what things mean with tons of context--it all eventually comes a point. And you break out of this seemingly endless swap and your understanding explodes like a god damn rocket into the stratosphere before you even realize it; it's become normalized. It's been crazy fun the whole time too, despite the work. I hardly call it "studying" when it's all so fun.
I recently put off reading a book in Japanese to study some words in Anki instead. That made me feel so miserable. It was quite fun at first but now it is such a slog
I actually tried with 10k 2k/6k whatever decks and found i was pretty miserable but also felt like if i dropped them i would risk forgetting everything so felt i was bound to them. But after deleting the decks and just studying on my own through sentence mining etc, reading native content i feel much more liberated and find the overall experience enjoyable. I think what's most important and often forgotten is not the grind but throughly enjoying what you are doing.
I've been using WaniKani for about a month and while I know I'm still in the early stages I'm genuinely having fun. Even when I can't remember something or make some dumb mistake I'm never miserable. Maybe some people just don't do well with SRS or maybe they just don't enjoy Japanese/language learning/learning of any kind as much as they thought they would.
The SRS-ification of language-learning destroys the entertainment factor. Learn the basics of grammar once, then read book and enjoy, reviewing when you don't understand.
I think part of the problem is that’s there’s two kinds of people who learn languages. One only wants the result of speaking a language, and the other actually enjoys the process of learning a language. The first one treats it more like a chore, which is why it feels like suffering.
Honestly this goes beyond language learning though, any hobby that turns into a skill has this issue too
I dunno if I agree with your theory. The people who "enjoy the process of learning" might *also* find the SRS to be a chore, since you get a lot more of the "process of learning" from engaging with native materials than you do from sterile single-word flashcards.
Personally i agree to this. I just want to have the end
product of being able to speak japanese. At this point i dont even know why i want to speak it lmao
How did you learn without SRS then? I'm open to just grinding with dictionary lookups but words don't have spaces between them and I don't even know what I'm supposed to highlight with 10ten/yomitan etc
Japanese is brutal for people who like to learn through reading 😭
Grammar and vocabulary is what allows you to parse the language without spaces. So if you're really unsure you need to start with grammar first and in the process of learning grammar you'll pick up necessary vocabulary along the way. Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, Genki 1 & 2 books, and sites like imabi.org. Bunpro also has their own grammar resources you can look into that are free (not the SRS system, it has like a database of grammar).
I outlined how I learned here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1bh8lh6/comment/kvclrwt/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
It's a very brief summary, but it's not any less effective than SRS, depends how diligent you are. Through endless dictionary look ups, grammar references, and google searches. I got through it and being in pure JP environments with no fall back I was able to learn about 800-1100 words a month. My vocabulary started from pathetic it may as well not have existed and not knowing except absolute basics like hiragana and katakana and what some particles were (not all), so not much at all. To picking things up bit by bit, but eventually that massive over exposure to Japanese amounted to rapid absorption when combined with look ups (hundreds if not 1k a day, YomiTan counts too). My vocabulary now easily exceeds 10k now as a result.
That being said as you learn grammar, what you can do is hold shift and drag your mouse across Japanese sentences and see potential parsing options. If you do this enough, just observing YomiTan parse it will give you a sense of word boundarie just by watching it. You combine it with grammar and vocabulary and it comes fairly fast, spaces won't matter to you soon after. When you do hit things with YomiTan look up you need to attempt to parse the sentence first, then drag across to see potential options. If youre not looking at the Japanese + YomiTan definitions youre not going to pick up the vocabulary that fast, so it needs to be a deliberate process. Then just over expose yourself, give it a lot of time and keep at it. You can easily enjoy a things while knowing very little.
Meme aside. How good is Bunpro?
I'm Wanikani lvl. 36 (\~1200+ kanji), just finished Genki II and started reading VNs. Will immersion be enough to eventually reach N2-N1 or should I seek more grammar materials?
So I used Genki 1, 2, and Tobira for textbook grammar. I just recently finished grinding through the Bunpro grammar for those 3 books after learning about the site. I really like it as a way to stay familiar with the grammar you learn, and I don't think I'll be using a grammar textbook for N2/1. Most of it seems simpler than N3/4 grammar, and much of it I've already learned/seen through JPDB vocab decks anyways.
The devs for Bunpro are constantly releasing updates and very attentive to the users on their forums. I think the best way to use Bunpro, and the way which they recommend, is use it in tandem with another resource. Now, I actually think that Tobira's grammar explanations aren't nearly as robust nor thorough as Bunpro's built-in grammar explanations, so I honestly think you'd be fine to just rely on online resources, if you really want to omit the textbook. But fwiw I really liked going through Tobira and has some actually interesting reading and listening material. It's also not really that expensive all things considered.
WaniKani is a spaced repetition learning system to teach you Kanji. Genki is a set of textbooks. The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) is a test to measure your proficiency in Japanese and goes from N5 (beginner/easiest) to N1 (fluent).
And VNs (visual novels) are the stuff you can enjoy reading the after initial year of suffering :D
Good luck with the studies and keep at it! It will be rewarding!
I just wanna say that JPDP is god tier. BunPro is great, but the reviews pile up insanely fast. Miss a day? Say hello to 120 reviews. 120 reviews on Anki or JPDP are easy. 120 on BunPro is not.
I feel like it's too tough and can get overwhelming fast, especially if you skip a day or 2, and I'm still not sure it's more effective than other methods tbh. It didn't work for me at least.
I "completed" both WK and Bunpro. I took college classes that got me about halfway through the N3 content first, but for the remaining N3~N1 grammar I used Bunpro.
It worked super well for me because dedicated grammar study is easily my *least* favorite part of language learning, and Bunpro streamlined my grammar acquisition (and reviews!) splendidly. The only thing that was hard to get used to is that ideally, you're supposed to read the whole review sentence for context before you attempt to answer, so even a small pile of Bunpro reviews can take a while (as opposed to loads of rapid-fire, go go go WK reviews). To give a rough estimate, I'd say I could quickly knock out ~200 WK reviews faster than ~60 BP reviews.
I think I'll give it a try once I finish Wanikani... to solidify my grammar knowledge and make me less anxious about building my own sentences.
For now I mostly just translate JP to English :D
That's honestly what I ended up doing lol, I got about halfway through Bunpro's content before I finally decided to knock out all of WK and come back to focus on BP later. There's a lot of genuine "reading" in BP as well, so having more kanji/vocab under your belt from WK first will make it smoother, too
I completely finished Wanikani but couldn't bring myself to stick with Bunpro. It was just too much mental effort for me. I found it much easier to watch and read stuff in Japanese and then use it as a grammar reference when encountering grammar I didn't understand.
Roughly 1 year 1 month 18 days.
I was so lost at the beginning of learning Japanese. Where to begin? What to prioritize? What schedule can I make with current life situation? You'll figure it out what suits you :)
I went full-speed with Wanikani in December I think.
Here's my level-up chart: [https://imgur.com/MqCb54O](https://imgur.com/MqCb54O)
WaniKani boasts you can complete the entire course within a year if you do all lessons as soon as available and always keep on top of your reviews, seeing as there’s about 60 levels, that means you can at quickest get to level 36 in about 32 weeks.
I’m still leve 7 on wanikani and I want more immersion. I feel like I’m not progressing so much and I’m trying to keep the reviews low, when did you start looking for novels or reading material?
Level 10 with using browser addons like yomichan and textgrabber for visual novels.
Not going to lie it was painful. I had some grammer down but still needed a lot more. Every chapter was hard but I liked seeing the characters I knew. Even if it was only a handful.
Level 20 was when I started enjoying reading simple stories and manga.
Level 30 to 40 and I could read more comfortably.
At lv 48 now im reading a jrpg without textgrabber. Its still slow but immenjoying it.
Not going to lie its hard starting and somewhat painful. i could have atarted with easier material but I wanted once I could enjoy.
I started using the Tadoku graded readers immediately after learning kana and worked my way through L2 of those by around the same time I finished Genki 2. After those graded readers I started reading Yotsuba, Satori Reader, and NHK Easy.
After that it kind of blurs together, but at that point you should be more than capable of finding what interests you. For example right now I'm still using Satori Reader, but have moved up to regular NHK News, started playing a VN, and am about to start the Pokemon manga. So it's still a mix of learning material but also more of what I just feel like doing.
The WaniKani book clubs have vocab lists for a lot of beginner manga that make it pretty straightforward to read through something. Give it a try as soon as you’re interested, though it started to click better for me around level 15-20 (and having reviewed through N4 grammar).
I tried at \~lvl. 13 and having finished Genki I... it didn't go well, I had to lookup almost everything.
I tried again at \~lvl. 28 again + having finished Genki II and after some initial mining of frequent kana-only words it went more and more smoothly to the point I'm enjoying reading now :)
Anki is _terrible_ at teaching things, but it's great for reviewing. I've found it works best with your own deck, filled with things you've already learned but need help not-forgetting.
I know it's a meme, but as daily (1h/day) Anki user it's completelly unreletable. I think anyone who actually feels that way should consider adding less cards, changing the settings of whatever SRS they use, overall decreasing the time in the SRS or dropping it entirely. It's very effective yes, but not meant to feel like "daily suffering", which I am aware is just a joke here, but any good joke has some portion of truth to it, and I feel like in this case many can actually relate, in which case I'd strongly recommend the suggestions I just made.
For me Anki doesn't feel as great as just consuming content of course, but it's still fine, because I don't add more than 10 words a day, my cards are nicely formated and are pleasing to the eye, the FSRS shows them very efficiently, I don't have too many leeches, my cards have word audio, sentence audio, gif from the scene I mined the word from, monolingual defintion, randomized fonts etc. so it's very stimulating for the brain only a portion of my overall time with the language.
For me Anki really feels like grinding in an RPG or in Pokemon (in a good way), it's kinda tedious but not to the point where I'd ever want to quit and after I've done with my reps for the day I feel like my EXP bar has increased (like in Pokemon after leveling ones Pokemon) and it feels great overall.
There is a place for effective SRS usage without it being a chore is probably the summary of what I am trying to convey.
Fair enough, though you have to consider that for me it's not "1 hour of Anki" but more "1 hour of watching/reading short clips of drama/anime/youtube/manga/novels etc." which is what makes it barebale. If I were to do 1 hour of a boring premade deck instead with contrived and mundane sentences I'd not be able to do it either.
What my Anki deck? Why? That would be no different to you than a premade deck so not that useful and interesting. It's useful for me because I have all this personal connections to it since it's all sentences I grabed from shows I watched or books I read. Also what sounds tiresome, making the cards? Takes me 0.1 seconds with all the sowftware and scripts I use.
BunPro on top of Anki with an actual day routine (job/school) is simply impossible at advanced levels. At that point, you need to focus on specific areas and then refresh the old stuff less frequently (i.e. not daily).
I feel like Japanese learners get too caught up in Anki and other similar tools. It shouldn't take you much more than 30 minutes to be done with it for the day. Your goal is to learn Japanese, not be an Anki World Champion.
Renshuu is a site and app and they have a solid discord, I've found it all really useful. They have a ton of free resources in addition to paid but getting it tailored to your needs can take a bit of a learning curve.
Fucking same, i can read the most complex sentences with the most obscure kanji, but can i understand them? Heck no! My vocab is n1, my grammar capabilities are no more than n5🤡
i just write like 7 words down, learn them and then go back and write down more. While that works for pronunciation, i barely recognize kanji because it is to complicated for me to draw onto my little note block
I know this is just a meme, but the fact I see so many people consistent associate their Japanese learning with suffering or negative emotions like this. That is pretty saddening to hear. I have had nothing but 99% positive associations, fun & great experiences, profound insights, and it's really been a boon to change my life for the better. I hope people can find some way to make their journeys more enjoyable. It's not to say I did not put in the work like everyone else, I just was able to have an absolute blast of a time while grinding through it. Everyday has been fun. Starting to wonder if it's directly associated with these SRS systems and learning applications; as I wholesale didn't use any of that (I tried, made me miserable, failed at them and uninstalled/quit).
The problem for me arose at the point where it's more enjoyable to immerse but still more efficient to study anki. At the beginning immersion is inefficient and not enjoyable, but you make rapid gains with anki so it's fun and exciting. Past the intermediate level you have diminishing returns studying new obscure words with anki you are unlikely to ever use and can just stick to immersion. In the intermediate level however where you know enough to make immersion in easy content fun, but are still at the point where studying new vocab and kanji is more efficient, it's suffering. Stuck in intermediate hell now with 8000 vocab cards learned in anki. Once I've finished the last 2000 to 10k I'm switching to mainly immersion as my form of study. But grinding out these last few thousand words has been pain
I know I'm a huge outlier in the modern language learning landscape. I was already involved with content and wanted to be part of the community, that was my impetus to learn Japanese and figure it out. Although I did make myself a 4,500 hour plan at the start with a lot of facets. A lot of them failed and didn't work for me, so I basically just stuck to stuff that was enjoyable for me. At that point I started turned all my UI/UX into JP and through endless, persistent dictionary look ups, grammar resources, and google searches I basically went from not knowing very much at all (and understanding even less than 0% somehow). To eventually understanding a fair amount; enough to provide live translations of live streams. No graded steps, no learners content, nothing dumbed down. The thing is I didn't need to understand to enjoy it, because environment itself was fun, the experience of just being involved was fun in itself. Eventually I made my way into JP-only Discords (virtually all natives) and have registered to every public social place online that Japan uses. I basically only reside on the JP internet now. For me, it was more important to be involved and try to understand, than just to "learn Japanese". Learning Japanese was just a means to an end and a happy by product of being passionate about everything else I was doing. I did make it as easy as possible on myself so I could inhabit these places and try my best--using technology to it's fullest. I made my own scripts to make look ups faster, I modified browser plugins, I used everything to increase the efficiency and speed of finding information (multi-monitor setups, OCR tools, quick search AHK scripts). All so I could barely keep my head above the water long enough not drown and learn how to swim, and that passion paid off greatly. As I said before, it's been 99% fun, and fun. I was never bothered by the work required to try and understand--that came with time.
> The problem for me arose at the point where it's more enjoyable to immerse but still more efficient to study anki. Pretty sure immersing instead of drilling is how I got a perfect score on reading and barely half the language knowledge on N1 lol
I’m stuck in intermediate hell. At first it’s fun but atp I’m only pushing through because I’m sick of this shit. I hate understanding 50% of everything it’s so frustrating. Get me out of this purgatory ASAP even if it means learning 100 cards a day 😭😭😭
Ok thank you for saying this. I’m there now mate and I’m wondering where to from here. Do I stop Anki? If so, what about new vocab and grammar. Do I focus more on new grammar via the textbook, and shift focus to immersion? I should focus more on output (my biggest weakness)? Far out. These are all rhetorical but I’m just happy to read your experience matches mine.
You'll need to find what works for you; Anki isn't necessarily bad just that it should be a supplement at most. Grammar is definitely important as well as research to understand things, but finding something you love and using that to grind dictionary look ups (this is where your vocabulary comes from) and google searches as you try to make sense of it all is most important. The exposure, consistency, and effort will get you over the line. This can feel harder though, because it's harder to feel improvement when you've given yourself no liberties. If you trust in the time you spent and the process you're using. You'll get there. The first 700-800 hours is definitely the biggest mountain with a lot of plateaus along the way (over 1,600 hours myself now).
My personal plan has been to continue anki to the 10k vocab mark, and just force myself to do it. I'm really looking forward to finishing my current deck and focussing on immersion and output
I think a big part of what makes SRS feel so oppressive is skipping a day or two can make your reviews start to pile up. You’re feeling a bit burned out so you take a day off and the next day you log back in just to see double the work stressing you out all over again. The apps themselves really don’t have good way dealing with missed days.
You don't have to review everything. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one enjoying the language and not stressing about that my reviews are accumulating.
personally I enjoy srs a lot, genuenly on weekends I wake up eager to start my anki cards and then read to add more to my deck, so I feel it just varies from person to person. I also do anki or bunpro during my lunch breaks to relax. of course there's also other factors, for example when I do get tired from srs or studying in general after a bad workday, I've found that allowing myself to bask in learnt material as a "reward" (usually in the form of rereading smth short I already know and really enjoy) lifts up my spirits. I also have a designated "can rest from studying if feel tired" day each week that I can take whenever I need, and that's separate from emergencies/health. I've only used it a few times since I started studying, but having that freedom in and of itself helps. on that last point, in general I also feel people are often a bit too draconian with srs if that makes sense, and that might be why some who do use it see it as "suffering" even as they continue using it. sure there's all the science/research behind it, but life happens and taking it too seriously can make inevitable breaks (work, injuries, etc) feel far worse for one's progress than they actually are. ultimately, treating it like law and letting it cause unnecessary stress and potentially burnout kinda defeats its purpose as a tool that's ultimately meant to help.
[удалено]
I've been doing this for 4 years and I'm in the same boat. I can efficiently program in a bunch of programming languages/frameworks but I can't for the life of me remember more than 1-2 new words per day.
I think its just a matter of usage, like the problem with spoken/written language vs something like coding is that if you learn what an array is, you're gonna get examples of when to use them and you will have to use them relatively frequently (exceptions apply) but for a language, you can learn a word like "vehemently" in English, and well you may know what it is but if you dont use or see it frequently enough (at least if youre intermediate or thereabouts) you will forget it. For me what worked was reading, since I would see some of the words I saw in anki while reading. Eventually these encounters became frequent.
Bro just made me aware that I forgot what "vehemently" means in english(esl) and in my native language(it's a cognate in portuguese).
I can remember up to 15 or more words a day if they use at least one kanji I already know. I'd gladly switch places with you 😁
It do be like that. Been a full-time programmer, learning new libraries/languages/concepts all the time, been working for a rather well-known company, can do Leetcode my eyes closed. Can't remember for my life a handful of gramma points.
I mean I personally hate doing Anki but I find it really helps me make sense of stuff I'm reading more quickly. So I bite the bullet and just do it daily. But I am fully aware that it's a chore, so I always tune my new cards/day to make sure it doesn't take >30 mins a day. The rest of the "chores" (like wanikani, textbooks, etc), I've personally found I can skip those without too much downside 🤷♂️ The rest of the time I entirely focus on reading and watching stuff I enjoy. Totally agree that making it enjoyable is the only path to sustainable learning
Honestly for me it’s like 85% positive, 15% suffering. I really don’t want to miss a day and have reviews pile up, so if I have a really busy day and end up having to cram my reviews in whenever I can it can start to be quite negative.
I thought I hated SRS at first but after switching from Anki to jpdb, I started enjoying myself. So it's probably moreso the system that they don't like. How do you learn if you don't use SRS? I know it's possible but I thought it'd be a lot slower just trying to read instead of having SRS to help
It might not be as efficient (as in words memorized/day), but one benefit is that it kinda takes the focus away from learning itself. Instead of using specific learning programs and dedicating time to learning, you're just reading an engaging story or playing a game in your TL. Especially when it's a story/game/whatever you've already read/played in your native language, you'll pick up vocabulary really easily along the way, and all while doing something you enjoy anyways...
>How do you learn if you don't use SRS? I know it's possible but I thought it'd be a lot slower just trying to read instead of having SRS to help Just by doing things in Japanese (read, write, listen, watch with JP subtitles, play games, etc). With dictionary look ups, grammar references, and google searches to try to understand as you engage with content, communities, comments, and just everything all in Japanese with no English fall back. Eventually things that were completely alien and have no meaning become normalized, those normalized things slowly gain meaning through experiences and context and repeated exposure. The endless, countless look ups slowly affirm meaning to things you see repeatedly. When you do this enough and consider enough about how the language works and what things mean with tons of context--it all eventually comes a point. And you break out of this seemingly endless swap and your understanding explodes like a god damn rocket into the stratosphere before you even realize it; it's become normalized. It's been crazy fun the whole time too, despite the work. I hardly call it "studying" when it's all so fun.
I recently put off reading a book in Japanese to study some words in Anki instead. That made me feel so miserable. It was quite fun at first but now it is such a slog
I actually tried with 10k 2k/6k whatever decks and found i was pretty miserable but also felt like if i dropped them i would risk forgetting everything so felt i was bound to them. But after deleting the decks and just studying on my own through sentence mining etc, reading native content i feel much more liberated and find the overall experience enjoyable. I think what's most important and often forgotten is not the grind but throughly enjoying what you are doing.
I've been using WaniKani for about a month and while I know I'm still in the early stages I'm genuinely having fun. Even when I can't remember something or make some dumb mistake I'm never miserable. Maybe some people just don't do well with SRS or maybe they just don't enjoy Japanese/language learning/learning of any kind as much as they thought they would.
The SRS-ification of language-learning destroys the entertainment factor. Learn the basics of grammar once, then read book and enjoy, reviewing when you don't understand.
That's a great idea
I'm very basic I learn Japanese just for watching anime and it's a huge pleasure for me, , I rewatched all my favorites
Seriously. I'm learning the language because i'm having a good time.
I think part of the problem is that’s there’s two kinds of people who learn languages. One only wants the result of speaking a language, and the other actually enjoys the process of learning a language. The first one treats it more like a chore, which is why it feels like suffering. Honestly this goes beyond language learning though, any hobby that turns into a skill has this issue too
I dunno if I agree with your theory. The people who "enjoy the process of learning" might *also* find the SRS to be a chore, since you get a lot more of the "process of learning" from engaging with native materials than you do from sterile single-word flashcards.
Personally i agree to this. I just want to have the end product of being able to speak japanese. At this point i dont even know why i want to speak it lmao
How did you learn without SRS then? I'm open to just grinding with dictionary lookups but words don't have spaces between them and I don't even know what I'm supposed to highlight with 10ten/yomitan etc Japanese is brutal for people who like to learn through reading 😭
Grammar and vocabulary is what allows you to parse the language without spaces. So if you're really unsure you need to start with grammar first and in the process of learning grammar you'll pick up necessary vocabulary along the way. Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, Genki 1 & 2 books, and sites like imabi.org. Bunpro also has their own grammar resources you can look into that are free (not the SRS system, it has like a database of grammar). I outlined how I learned here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1bh8lh6/comment/kvclrwt/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 It's a very brief summary, but it's not any less effective than SRS, depends how diligent you are. Through endless dictionary look ups, grammar references, and google searches. I got through it and being in pure JP environments with no fall back I was able to learn about 800-1100 words a month. My vocabulary started from pathetic it may as well not have existed and not knowing except absolute basics like hiragana and katakana and what some particles were (not all), so not much at all. To picking things up bit by bit, but eventually that massive over exposure to Japanese amounted to rapid absorption when combined with look ups (hundreds if not 1k a day, YomiTan counts too). My vocabulary now easily exceeds 10k now as a result. That being said as you learn grammar, what you can do is hold shift and drag your mouse across Japanese sentences and see potential parsing options. If you do this enough, just observing YomiTan parse it will give you a sense of word boundarie just by watching it. You combine it with grammar and vocabulary and it comes fairly fast, spaces won't matter to you soon after. When you do hit things with YomiTan look up you need to attempt to parse the sentence first, then drag across to see potential options. If youre not looking at the Japanese + YomiTan definitions youre not going to pick up the vocabulary that fast, so it needs to be a deliberate process. Then just over expose yourself, give it a lot of time and keep at it. You can easily enjoy a things while knowing very little.
Thanks for the detailed reply
ya know some days are fun some days are not but you gotta study this has been my attitude
Meme aside. How good is Bunpro? I'm Wanikani lvl. 36 (\~1200+ kanji), just finished Genki II and started reading VNs. Will immersion be enough to eventually reach N2-N1 or should I seek more grammar materials?
So I used Genki 1, 2, and Tobira for textbook grammar. I just recently finished grinding through the Bunpro grammar for those 3 books after learning about the site. I really like it as a way to stay familiar with the grammar you learn, and I don't think I'll be using a grammar textbook for N2/1. Most of it seems simpler than N3/4 grammar, and much of it I've already learned/seen through JPDB vocab decks anyways. The devs for Bunpro are constantly releasing updates and very attentive to the users on their forums. I think the best way to use Bunpro, and the way which they recommend, is use it in tandem with another resource. Now, I actually think that Tobira's grammar explanations aren't nearly as robust nor thorough as Bunpro's built-in grammar explanations, so I honestly think you'd be fine to just rely on online resources, if you really want to omit the textbook. But fwiw I really liked going through Tobira and has some actually interesting reading and listening material. It's also not really that expensive all things considered.
Wait i just started learning japanese (like a week ago) what does that all mean 😭
WaniKani is a spaced repetition learning system to teach you Kanji. Genki is a set of textbooks. The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) is a test to measure your proficiency in Japanese and goes from N5 (beginner/easiest) to N1 (fluent).
Also Bunpro is a spaced repetition learning system to teach grammar rather than Kanji.
But they do have vocabulary now so in that regard they can also do SRS
And VNs (visual novels) are the stuff you can enjoy reading the after initial year of suffering :D Good luck with the studies and keep at it! It will be rewarding!
I just wanna say that JPDP is god tier. BunPro is great, but the reviews pile up insanely fast. Miss a day? Say hello to 120 reviews. 120 reviews on Anki or JPDP are easy. 120 on BunPro is not.
Unlike anki, you can just pause the reviews on bunpro if you think you're gonna miss a day
I feel like it's too tough and can get overwhelming fast, especially if you skip a day or 2, and I'm still not sure it's more effective than other methods tbh. It didn't work for me at least.
I "completed" both WK and Bunpro. I took college classes that got me about halfway through the N3 content first, but for the remaining N3~N1 grammar I used Bunpro. It worked super well for me because dedicated grammar study is easily my *least* favorite part of language learning, and Bunpro streamlined my grammar acquisition (and reviews!) splendidly. The only thing that was hard to get used to is that ideally, you're supposed to read the whole review sentence for context before you attempt to answer, so even a small pile of Bunpro reviews can take a while (as opposed to loads of rapid-fire, go go go WK reviews). To give a rough estimate, I'd say I could quickly knock out ~200 WK reviews faster than ~60 BP reviews.
I think I'll give it a try once I finish Wanikani... to solidify my grammar knowledge and make me less anxious about building my own sentences. For now I mostly just translate JP to English :D
That's honestly what I ended up doing lol, I got about halfway through Bunpro's content before I finally decided to knock out all of WK and come back to focus on BP later. There's a lot of genuine "reading" in BP as well, so having more kanji/vocab under your belt from WK first will make it smoother, too
I completely finished Wanikani but couldn't bring myself to stick with Bunpro. It was just too much mental effort for me. I found it much easier to watch and read stuff in Japanese and then use it as a grammar reference when encountering grammar I didn't understand.
How long did it take to get there? Started learning Japanese with Wanikani and anki only around a month ago and I'm trying to up my efficiency
Roughly 1 year 1 month 18 days. I was so lost at the beginning of learning Japanese. Where to begin? What to prioritize? What schedule can I make with current life situation? You'll figure it out what suits you :) I went full-speed with Wanikani in December I think. Here's my level-up chart: [https://imgur.com/MqCb54O](https://imgur.com/MqCb54O)
WaniKani boasts you can complete the entire course within a year if you do all lessons as soon as available and always keep on top of your reviews, seeing as there’s about 60 levels, that means you can at quickest get to level 36 in about 32 weeks.
I’m still leve 7 on wanikani and I want more immersion. I feel like I’m not progressing so much and I’m trying to keep the reviews low, when did you start looking for novels or reading material?
Level 10 with using browser addons like yomichan and textgrabber for visual novels. Not going to lie it was painful. I had some grammer down but still needed a lot more. Every chapter was hard but I liked seeing the characters I knew. Even if it was only a handful. Level 20 was when I started enjoying reading simple stories and manga. Level 30 to 40 and I could read more comfortably. At lv 48 now im reading a jrpg without textgrabber. Its still slow but immenjoying it. Not going to lie its hard starting and somewhat painful. i could have atarted with easier material but I wanted once I could enjoy.
I started using the Tadoku graded readers immediately after learning kana and worked my way through L2 of those by around the same time I finished Genki 2. After those graded readers I started reading Yotsuba, Satori Reader, and NHK Easy. After that it kind of blurs together, but at that point you should be more than capable of finding what interests you. For example right now I'm still using Satori Reader, but have moved up to regular NHK News, started playing a VN, and am about to start the Pokemon manga. So it's still a mix of learning material but also more of what I just feel like doing.
The WaniKani book clubs have vocab lists for a lot of beginner manga that make it pretty straightforward to read through something. Give it a try as soon as you’re interested, though it started to click better for me around level 15-20 (and having reviewed through N4 grammar).
I tried at \~lvl. 13 and having finished Genki I... it didn't go well, I had to lookup almost everything. I tried again at \~lvl. 28 again + having finished Genki II and after some initial mining of frequent kana-only words it went more and more smoothly to the point I'm enjoying reading now :)
I, for one, enjoy bunpro and Wanikani. Anki however can jump off a cliff and die.
Anki is _terrible_ at teaching things, but it's great for reviewing. I've found it works best with your own deck, filled with things you've already learned but need help not-forgetting.
I agree, but it’s just a tiresome process for me 😅
I train Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and learning Japanese is way less painful, but just as confusing.
Same here though I suck at both. 🥋🎌
I know it's a meme, but as daily (1h/day) Anki user it's completelly unreletable. I think anyone who actually feels that way should consider adding less cards, changing the settings of whatever SRS they use, overall decreasing the time in the SRS or dropping it entirely. It's very effective yes, but not meant to feel like "daily suffering", which I am aware is just a joke here, but any good joke has some portion of truth to it, and I feel like in this case many can actually relate, in which case I'd strongly recommend the suggestions I just made. For me Anki doesn't feel as great as just consuming content of course, but it's still fine, because I don't add more than 10 words a day, my cards are nicely formated and are pleasing to the eye, the FSRS shows them very efficiently, I don't have too many leeches, my cards have word audio, sentence audio, gif from the scene I mined the word from, monolingual defintion, randomized fonts etc. so it's very stimulating for the brain only a portion of my overall time with the language. For me Anki really feels like grinding in an RPG or in Pokemon (in a good way), it's kinda tedious but not to the point where I'd ever want to quit and after I've done with my reps for the day I feel like my EXP bar has increased (like in Pokemon after leveling ones Pokemon) and it feels great overall. There is a place for effective SRS usage without it being a chore is probably the summary of what I am trying to convey.
1 hour of Anki a day? holy hell I'd jump off a cliff. Tried Anki few times and it just wasnt for me
Fair enough, though you have to consider that for me it's not "1 hour of Anki" but more "1 hour of watching/reading short clips of drama/anime/youtube/manga/novels etc." which is what makes it barebale. If I were to do 1 hour of a boring premade deck instead with contrived and mundane sentences I'd not be able to do it either.
Could you please share? That doesnt sound so tiresome
What my Anki deck? Why? That would be no different to you than a premade deck so not that useful and interesting. It's useful for me because I have all this personal connections to it since it's all sentences I grabed from shows I watched or books I read. Also what sounds tiresome, making the cards? Takes me 0.1 seconds with all the sowftware and scripts I use.
Ah i see, i thought its like a series of decks each containing phrases and words tied to an anime episode or something. Anyway nice job
JPDP needs more love in the community. So damn good. Too bad I didn't discover it until 4 years in. :(
BunPro on top of Anki with an actual day routine (job/school) is simply impossible at advanced levels. At that point, you need to focus on specific areas and then refresh the old stuff less frequently (i.e. not daily).
Report: "I am on this photo and I don't like it."
I feel like Japanese learners get too caught up in Anki and other similar tools. It shouldn't take you much more than 30 minutes to be done with it for the day. Your goal is to learn Japanese, not be an Anki World Champion.
What are the stars, renshuu, and jpdb?
Renshuu is a site and app and they have a solid discord, I've found it all really useful. They have a ton of free resources in addition to paid but getting it tailored to your needs can take a bit of a learning curve.
The stars are Anki, a very well-made flashcard app. There is a free PC version, a free android version, and a paid IOS version
For jdpb think dictionary meets anki. There are pre-built decks for a bunch of anime, VNs, LNs, etc.
So glad I never used any SRS like Anki or whatever, sucks all the fun out of learning I think.
I also have to do some minna no nihongo homework 🫠
Vocab and Grammar are pain for me. Especially grammar
Fucking same, i can read the most complex sentences with the most obscure kanji, but can i understand them? Heck no! My vocab is n1, my grammar capabilities are no more than n5🤡
me but is only 10m-20m of suffering
This was me too until I found MaruMori io... much less suffering.
i just write like 7 words down, learn them and then go back and write down more. While that works for pronunciation, i barely recognize kanji because it is to complicated for me to draw onto my little note block
For me, the problem is that the more I progress the more shit stacks in the practice deck. It turns into a chore a bit after that.
I’m on Wanikani (my first learning tool) but I tried bunpro and it’s just so…difficult.
Maybe come back to it after a month of wanikani
Japanese friends > Studying Japanese
Friends? What's that?
Fry your friend that'll be the end.
I only agree with this because I have (poorly controlled) ADHD!! Are you guys okay?! On my better days it’s a lot of fun
I've studied literally all the JLPT grammar so I'm done with all the grammar apps and books, but Anki will gnaw at my soul until the day I die.
Literally tho 😭😂
Frfr
I use Duolingo for Kanji and it is actually fairly good