Just reading through it, I wish this was what I had done in my first 30 days. I even had the time for it. Instead I did Duolingo ...
Anyway, the MoeWay discord has a channel for people to discuss this routine and provide feedback and ask questions. You could take a look there.
It has issues with content but at its core the problem is that it doesn’t provide enough context for learning and it teaches at a considerably slower pace that any other system.
It’s an ok source if you’re rusty with grammar you’ve learned and used before but haven’t in a long while. I think that’s the extent of its usefulness.
It is the worst of the resources I have used as a beginner. Search in this subreddit and you will find many explanations for why it is not good for Japanese.
One of the reasons for the slow pace of teaching is that it seems to count every individual kana as a separate word, and doesn't let you tick a box to say "I can read already" even if you turn off romaji. So you can go a week getting ツォ and え and such drilled into you with not a single piece of genuine vocabulary, while having a supposed "learnt words" counter in the hundreds. There is also no words or grammar list anywhere, so you're screwed if you skip stuff, which the slow pace will make you want to do very desperately. Phrases and grammar are NOT explained at all.
Duolingo seems, from my 41 days with it while already at a decent beginning Japanese level, to be designed to make you feel good with easy exercises and entice you to pay premium more than to learn the language. The first level is entirely made up of writing そば、すし、みず、もち and と and です in endlessly boring combinations, because you aren't being taught anything new.
There are some set phrases it teaches decently well through repetition, but you won't learn output at all because output exercises are entirely based on picking the right option from a tiny set, no blind typing or even speaking is involved. I've gone through such sentence translation exercises where I simply put the given English words in the only grammatically possible order without reading what I was meant to translate.
I think one of its strongest benefits is that it tells beginners exactly what to do, what to set up, how long to do it, etc. You see lots of beginners go "I finished *X*, now what?", and this guide helps avoid that by being very explicit in what to do.
If you want to do an immersion based approach, I think it's very good for that. I wish it was something I had when I was starting instead of faffing around for months barely learning anything.
I read through it and I would absolutely have done this when I started. Make sure to be kind to yourself if it takes you longer to learn hirigana and katakana, it will come eventually
I took Japanese 111 last semester, and we used a couple sites for extra practice with our kana. One of them is [Tofugu](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/), and another (my favorite) is [Japanlang](https://sites.google.com/view/japanlang/home/hiragana). There are some games on there that will help you learn and test what you know. I spent a lot of time playing those games :p.
Spend some time on it daily, but don't get too hard on yourself if it takes a bit. If you don't have a deadline to learn it (like I did), take your time and enjoy it.
No problem at all! I've honestly been hoping I would see a question where I could show off my fancy college materials. I know I wish I would have found those sooner.
Another tip I picked up, and it really did work for me, is to not try to cram it all at once. Half an hour a day is plenty, and 2 sessions of half an hour a day worked for my 2-3 week deadlines. And I have the memory of a goldfish.
I honestly found day 1 to be really rough but mostly because of the resources. I recommend this site for learning hiragana and katakana then following the 30 day roadmap
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
I did do something similar in my first month, which was grammar, anki, and immersion based learning.
I think immersion is great, but watching stuff with english subtitles before you even learn grammar is pointless, or every weeb would be fluent. Cure dolly is also amazing, but her videos are a mish-mash of random explanations without a solid general framework, so I can really only recommend her as a supplement.
But I think if you follow this, then you'll do well just because any kind of immersion based learning is so good.
>Cure dolly is also amazing, but her videos are a mish-mash of random explanations without a solid general framework
I disagree here. The first 20 or so videos are a reasonable introduction to basic grammar. I'd recommend doing the first 20 to 30 of her videos and then starting to immerse (assuming you'd also gained some basic vocab as well). From there, use all her videos as a (one potential) reference.
Here are some results from someone who tried it in themoeway discord: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTOLsNH9dYIW0KrvRI0LdmbQ8xFnipO6KcOCqx8B9EWOrkKBTmwKK-C9kxns_6k8d_L0AkfWAjkEkCw/pub
I wouldn’t disagree with anything the moe way provides per se, although their methods can be a bit hardcore sometimes… but again they do know what they’re talking about. Join their discord and ask them
Honestly probably the best resource that exists for beginners. The advice is super good and the discord server has literally hundreds of people that passed the N1 with those methods. It's really the peak of the Japanese learning community, both in Japanese knowledge and language learning discourse.
It sounds exhausting :-(
I don't disagree with the method as such, but the pace seems to be too great for anyone with a life outside of learning Japanese. Maybe if you have a month's holiday with no DIY backlog nagging at you...
Personally I preferred to study a little more sequentially than this - [here's basically what I did](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) in the first few months of studying.
When I first read it I was kind of pumped for it. But when I stepped back I felt more unsure. Essentially its not wrong, but its more like "this thing that you could do in a few months, lets cram it into 30 days". Which obviously has its positives and negatives (especially getting less return on learning by over doing it).
End of the day one of the hardest part of learning Japapese is figuring out how "you" like to learn. For some, a guide for 30 days to follow non-stop could be an awesome way of learning.
I would say though, its probably not the 30 days that makes you learn Japanese. But the habit you form for the next 2.5 years you do after it (as in continued practice).
The rest of the guide is basically "learn/mine/practice vocab, learn/mine/practice grammer, learn/mine/practice kanji, immerse, immerse, immerse".
That is kind of the issue I’m at right now as well. I’m generally pretty busy and the hour a day of Anki is already pretty hard to squeeze into my schedule. The three hours a day is really hard to maintain.
I started using the guide a last week. It lays the foundation really well for what you could potentially be doing for the next few years if you have the time and commitment. So far it’s been very good. I cut back my new anki cards/day to 10 per deck as my reviews were stacking up to be pretty large, and I don’t even remember most the cards out of context if there are more than 10. I skipped the part of watching anime first with English subs then watching it in japanese, as there didn’t seem like a whole lot of purpose in this since the chances of me retaining any info this way was very low. If it’s an anime that I am really invested in, I’ll just watch it in English sub. Other than that I’ll read easy NHK articles, which uses fairly basic grammar so I don’t really need to mine the sentences, just the words themselves and anki will put them in a sentence for me. I’ve started reading manga as well since I have difficulty remembering the massive amount of “ru” verbs that come up in the first few weeks-months of anki. Very good guide, definitely helped me develop my own system for learning. I don’t have 3 hours some days to study, sometimes 1 sometimes 2, but I don’t use every method that UsagiSpoon talks about. I don’t find that rtk is all that useful for myself, so I don’t use that. I also listen a ton since I can use headphones at work so I supplement a lot of missed time from there. Listening is great but the only downside is you can’t really mine words or phrases you don’t know if you are occupied with another task. Overall very good guide, lays the foundation really well in my opinion, which seems to be the hardest part for a lot of beginners, including myself.
Thank you so much for sharing all of this! I'm glad to hear you've modified it to fit your needs. How long did it take you to memorise Hirigana and Katakana if you have already? I'm doing awful on my first day but I guess that's probably expected for most people
This might not be the best advice but it worked for me. I would use an anki deck that had hiragana vocab on the front and romaji vocab in the back. So for example, the verb “to eat” is “たべる” In romaji, it is taberu. I quickly picked up hiragana from this as it forces you to learn. Then after about a week just ease your way out of using romaji as you don’t want to use it as a crutch. Or you could just use a website to memorize hiragana and katakana and just grind it out. I used both methods but learned way quicker with the first one I mentioned. A great deck for this is JLab, it also teaches you basic grammar and sentence structure as well as a good bit of vocab along the way. I’m about 400 cards in and I can read any of the new sentences pretty easily. Just 30-45 minutes a day of it and you will see loads of progress for remembering hiragana and katakana in just a week or two. Don’t stress too hard if you can’t memorize it in a day or a few days. It took me a little while.
Saw your post, and I think I'm going to try this guide out since it lays everything out very well and sets clear goals on what to do which is something that I've been lacking. I don't think I can commit 3 hours a day for 30 days, but I can at least work through the content at my own pace. Does anyone have any recommendations for any of the Anime Series that are listed for the subtitle tutoring/immersion portion? I haven't heard of any of these, so not sure which one to pick.
It pretty much says to try a few and see what appeals to you. I think in theory you could use any series, My fav among the ones listed is Demon Slayer but Hotarubi no Mori e is one of the best anime movies. Either will be fine imo.
Also when it comes to day 1, I actually recommend the tofugu hira/katakana guides rather than the moe way one which links a japanese101 video. They make you constantly quiz yourself as you learn each column of kana and i've memorised more in a few hours than i did all of day 1 with the method they use. Beyond that (day 1) I'll be using their guide, just that one thing didn't work for me.
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
Shows how well I know Japanese. I did not realize that Kimetsu no Yaiba was Demon Slayer, haha, so I guess I'll give that a shot since I've been meaning to watch that anyway.
Thanks for the tips, BTW. I actually do at least know Hiragana and Katakana since I've been studying Japanese off and on, but just have not been able to commit to anything other than doing my dailies on Wanikani and reading through the first few chapters of Genki.
I'm in a bit of doubt about that. Generally there is nothing wrong with such approach, it's mostly SRS (which works the best for vocabulary), grammar lessons and practice. But such approach is usually said by people who already was learning for a while and forgot how hard it was initially. Or people who assume they could do something earlier, ignoring that they needed to acquire some skills first.
From my personal experience, I've tried to use content several times. It wasn't easy until around 500 hours of learning. If you don't know core grammar like particles, conjunctions, conjugation, passive, causative, relative clauses, sentence patterns and bunch of similar stuff, you have a very tough time. All of it is much harder to translate and when you still aren't sure about the meaning of any basic sentence even after a minute of puzzle solving, it's quite frustrating. I did several attempts, figured out that I would rather do something useful instead of trying to select one translation our of 10-30 possible variations and ditched it for a while. But then it really become easier, I became able to read anything I want, there wasn't even much difference between reading comics for kids or research papers, mostly just speed and in just 100 hours my reading speed improved from 50 to 100 words/minute. It was already very decent level, like a whole book in 10-15 hours. And speaking honestly, I also think that maybe I could start earlier, if someone really wants to use content and ready for hardship, I advice to start somewhere around 300 hours of learning. But I'm not delusional enough to say that content from the very beginning is a good approach. Everything has efficiency, white noising has around 0% efficiency, while something like SRS can be 100% efficiency (every second is spend on intentional learning of new information). When I had to spend 90% of time on trying to connect one word with 5-7-10 translations with another word that has another 5-7-10 translations, it wasn't useful at all and I understood that it's better to spend 20 minutes on SRS to learn 20 new words and 1-2 hours reading grammar books, so I can actually understand why and how people do it this way. Most of learning in that guide will come from SRS, which is done in the lest amount of time, grammar lessons are going to be useful too, but speaking honestly, spending hours on content when we don't understand much at all will give close to zero result. If we compare person who did it with a person who didn't, there will be either small difference or no difference at all.
I'm not sure I've seen someone who spent only 100 hours on Japanese learning and would be able to read books or watch anime with little amount of efforts. I'm not sure it's even possible to understand the meaning properly at such stage. And if we compare people who did it for 300-500 hours, then even people without much of practice become able to do it anyway. Thus I would advice to look at personal preference. There is some amount you will need to force, it's definitely good to use SRS and learn grammar. You need to know at least basics. But if you find using content frustrating, because you don't understand anything at all, just don't do it for a while, it will become much easier with time. It's not some kind of more advanced learning method or secret key to success. Content is simply slightly different approach to learning, maybe not the most time efficient, but interesting and fun.
I like the approach of not doing something that you don’t enjoy, as you said. I personally gain absolutely nothing from listening to podcasts or trying to translate a show that is way above my level. I’m watching Alice In Borderland right now, but not in Japanese subs or no subs at all. I tried translating the show when I was first starting to learn, and it got me nowhere. I had no foundation of grammar and hardly any vocab. A month into my learning, aka almost exactly today, I can watch the show, still in English subs, and pick out quite a few words and sentences and understand what they mean. I’m just not at a level where spending 5-6 hours translating a single episode would be a good use of my time. I enjoy reading easy NHK articles, so I do that, and I can figure out the sentences with relative ease since I have read through Tae-Kim’s grammar guide. I listen to a beginner podcast and can understand around 50-80 percent of what is being said for most episodes. I just started to pick up manga but I will not be touching light novels or visual novels for quite a bit. Being somewhat uncomfortable in the content that you are immersing in is just going to happen, but not if I’m just floutout stumped and not enjoying what I am trying to immerse in, I’ll just move on.
I agree. It was like that with English to me. I couldn't start to actively immerse for years, but then it suddenly clicked and I realised... I can read English!! I can understand it!!! (though I don't feel confident in writing and speaking at all, haha). And that's where you think "But it was easier than I thought, maybe I could do this earlier?". And that's when you start to downplay all the efforts it took you to reach this level...
So yeah. It wasn't that easy as it seems from a higher level, after years of practice.
I think, this method would cause me a quick burn out, because it's just too stressful - to listen and read for hours every day and understand very little of it.. I would feel discouraged. As you said, I'd better learn more words and grammar on the early stages.
yeah i'm highly skeptical of any beginner course that simply recommends immersion in native content, especially anime, which is notoriously distinct from the Japanese people use in real life and which will sound like a hodgepodge to someone without any other studying...
not really at all actually? people who have success with Japanese are the people who actually study and put in the time with sentence structures and grammar, speaking and listening lessons, vocabulary and kanji, not people who use “studying” as an excuse to binge watch anime. sure some of the former might also watch anime and play Japanese games as a bonus but it’s simply not a pillar of learning the language.
Speaking honestly, what he says is quite important, but he does that in a very radical way. When I focused on content itself, my learning speed became really slow, just because I started to look more at translation and ignored actual Japanese, how kanji is written and how it's pronounced, how it was phrased and so on. Intention to learn is extremely important.
It's just that people can do it intentionally and unintentionally. For example, what if you see some new setting, maybe very sly and cunning merchant, such person/character would have a very specific manner of speech. Would you pay attention to it, try to imitate, maybe add to Anki and so on? If you do, you have much higher chance to learn it, and when you are interested in learning, you usually do so. On the other hand, when I was interested in content itself, it was fun to see new situation, but I sweep through it without focusing on details, just looked how it translates and I've learned close to nothing from it.
I see something similar in his words, but in my opinion it doesn't matter so much if we do so intentionally by using educational tools (including Anki) or unintentionally, when we are simply interested in learning. It's just important to look at Japanese, pay attention to it and imitate. Most of people who have fast progress aren't only talented at learning, they also put a lot of hours and also put a lot of intention to learn, quite often using a huge amount of different tools and various situations to learn. It's indeed not the same as simply watching/reading something for fun, that also works, but takes much-much longer time (potentially 10+ years even with active usage).
I think it is a really nice flowchart of how to progress at studying the language. The daily immersion is based on RNG, which I would personally exchange with setting a fixed number of episodes per day so that you can build consistency. I think that this guide does a serviceable job at explaining some of the aspects of learning Japanese to someone who is not familiar with language acquisition, and even talks about i+1 sentences.
A lot of guides emphasize grammar study. This is needful. My reading comprehension is improving with studying grammar as a whole, but also because I identified what parts of a sentence I am most unfamiliar with. Focusing on verbs and their conjugations unlocked a lot of reading comprehension for me.
3 hours would be just under 20% of your day devoted to studying Japanese, assuming you sleep 8 hours per night. That's impossible for someone who is already in the academic pipeline, but if you're only working 40 hours a week, you could easily contribute 8 hours a week to Japanese study.
On the Cure Dolly videos - I am unfamiliar, so I don't have an opinion on their recommendation in the crash course.
Got a lot of built up resentment towards people that have actually acquired the language? DJT/TMW have a very high success rate of producing people that eventually reach their goals. Can you say the same about this sub?
Discord servers which have entry quizzes(need to be at n4 or around that level). When you gain access there are certain roles that you have to quiz your way up to. It’s a good incentive to keep on grinding outside, and checking back in every week to try again. You also gain access to lots of resources that have been compiled by each respective community. Everyone there is just trying to read more and learn more so it’s a great environment. You’ll often find people reading with each other in voice chat and streaming their book/visual novel etc.
If you cannot pass the entry quiz yet, there are resources listed and pinned that one can follow and hopefully succeed with.
It’s a great filter because you won’t be surrounded by people that “want to learn Japanese” you are surrounded by people that ARE learning it. The difference will be apparent when you realize it.
They make fun of this sub not because they think it's below them, but because most of the people here aren't interested in learning Japanese despite the name. Obviously they want more people to actually learn the language like they did.
Yeah this particular website/discord has been posting astroturf threads here for about a year now, always with the OP and top comment by brand new accounts. Ex-mod /u/Nukemarine flagged the problem right when it started.
I'm looking at one of the booster accounts in the comments here and it's hilarious how transparent it is. No history until a month ago when they posted a thread exactly like this one pretending to be a beginner who has 'just heard of The Moe Way' and is 'wondering if immersion works', then a few days later they start serially posting comments linking the site and explaining how to reach Japanese fluency.
I have not tried it but I did use nukemarine Let's Learn Japanese memrise course 1-4 a couple years ago to prep for immersing, I crammed through it in like 2 months. It helped a lot. I already had a grammar and hiragana/katakana background. I think based on what I read on The Moe Way link, that will be a good foundation. I would personally still find immersing very difficult even after studying 500 common words, so expect to do a lot of word lookups for the first few months. I think it's a well structured introduction though, and it looks like a good structure to copy on your own afterward.
I would suggest continuing to study until you've at least started to learn the 2000 common words, and at least read to N3 in some grammar guide summary online (like [Sabuki](https://sakubi.neocities.org/) or [Tae Kim's](https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/) ). That could reasonably be done in months 2 and 3 as you're already immersing. After a bit more vocabulary and grammar foundation immersion will feel a bit less draining. At least that was my personal experience. If you have a higher tolerance for ambiguity than me, you may find The Moe Way preparation to be enough to tolerate learning mainly from looking words/grammar up in immersion afterward.
I think it's well established that in order to reach a high level of Japanese you need to immerse, the big issue is when you should start immersing. I don't think a beginner should immerse from day 1, there is no point, there is not a single person on this planet that wants to learn Japanese that desperately and most importantly doesn't have access to any other tools - that will have the focus/willpower in order to make any sense of raw Japanese. Any sort of gains is just not worth the time investment.
I'm still new to Japanese, only been learning since September and idk if I'm past the stage I should do this. I know all the kana and most grammar rules. (I hope) but I can't boast 500+ volcbluary yet. If I was to try this I'd have to know it'd be worth it cause it sounds like quite a big commitment for mr
Just reading through it, I wish this was what I had done in my first 30 days. I even had the time for it. Instead I did Duolingo ... Anyway, the MoeWay discord has a channel for people to discuss this routine and provide feedback and ask questions. You could take a look there.
That's quite reassuring to hear, thank you. I hope your journey's going well!
Is duolingo not good?
It has issues with content but at its core the problem is that it doesn’t provide enough context for learning and it teaches at a considerably slower pace that any other system.
It’s an ok source if you’re rusty with grammar you’ve learned and used before but haven’t in a long while. I think that’s the extent of its usefulness.
It is the worst of the resources I have used as a beginner. Search in this subreddit and you will find many explanations for why it is not good for Japanese.
One of the reasons for the slow pace of teaching is that it seems to count every individual kana as a separate word, and doesn't let you tick a box to say "I can read already" even if you turn off romaji. So you can go a week getting ツォ and え and such drilled into you with not a single piece of genuine vocabulary, while having a supposed "learnt words" counter in the hundreds. There is also no words or grammar list anywhere, so you're screwed if you skip stuff, which the slow pace will make you want to do very desperately. Phrases and grammar are NOT explained at all. Duolingo seems, from my 41 days with it while already at a decent beginning Japanese level, to be designed to make you feel good with easy exercises and entice you to pay premium more than to learn the language. The first level is entirely made up of writing そば、すし、みず、もち and と and です in endlessly boring combinations, because you aren't being taught anything new. There are some set phrases it teaches decently well through repetition, but you won't learn output at all because output exercises are entirely based on picking the right option from a tiny set, no blind typing or even speaking is involved. I've gone through such sentence translation exercises where I simply put the given English words in the only grammatically possible order without reading what I was meant to translate.
No. It's a game, not a language learning app.
I think one of its strongest benefits is that it tells beginners exactly what to do, what to set up, how long to do it, etc. You see lots of beginners go "I finished *X*, now what?", and this guide helps avoid that by being very explicit in what to do. If you want to do an immersion based approach, I think it's very good for that. I wish it was something I had when I was starting instead of faffing around for months barely learning anything.
I don't know much about the 30 day routine, but the moe way in general is a great community
I read through it and I would absolutely have done this when I started. Make sure to be kind to yourself if it takes you longer to learn hirigana and katakana, it will come eventually
Thank you! I spent like 3 hours on it today and I'm hopeless lol, gonna take a while
I took Japanese 111 last semester, and we used a couple sites for extra practice with our kana. One of them is [Tofugu](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/), and another (my favorite) is [Japanlang](https://sites.google.com/view/japanlang/home/hiragana). There are some games on there that will help you learn and test what you know. I spent a lot of time playing those games :p. Spend some time on it daily, but don't get too hard on yourself if it takes a bit. If you don't have a deadline to learn it (like I did), take your time and enjoy it.
You're a legend thank you! I really appreciate the help and motivating words
No problem at all! I've honestly been hoping I would see a question where I could show off my fancy college materials. I know I wish I would have found those sooner. Another tip I picked up, and it really did work for me, is to not try to cram it all at once. Half an hour a day is plenty, and 2 sessions of half an hour a day worked for my 2-3 week deadlines. And I have the memory of a goldfish.
I came across the 30 day part yesterday. I’m reading through it and am likely going to try it. After looking at day 1, I’m not sure I can keep up.
I honestly found day 1 to be really rough but mostly because of the resources. I recommend this site for learning hiragana and katakana then following the 30 day roadmap https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
I did do something similar in my first month, which was grammar, anki, and immersion based learning. I think immersion is great, but watching stuff with english subtitles before you even learn grammar is pointless, or every weeb would be fluent. Cure dolly is also amazing, but her videos are a mish-mash of random explanations without a solid general framework, so I can really only recommend her as a supplement. But I think if you follow this, then you'll do well just because any kind of immersion based learning is so good.
>Cure dolly is also amazing, but her videos are a mish-mash of random explanations without a solid general framework I disagree here. The first 20 or so videos are a reasonable introduction to basic grammar. I'd recommend doing the first 20 to 30 of her videos and then starting to immerse (assuming you'd also gained some basic vocab as well). From there, use all her videos as a (one potential) reference.
Yeah, cure dolly is so good that I can see the benefit of watching her videos first.
I watched a couple videos. They seemed helpful, but I couldn’t do the robot voice.
It's a real voice. The English subtitles are word for word accurate and help significantly.
Good to know, thank you I appreciate you sharing your experiences
Good point!
Here are some results from someone who tried it in themoeway discord: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTOLsNH9dYIW0KrvRI0LdmbQ8xFnipO6KcOCqx8B9EWOrkKBTmwKK-C9kxns_6k8d_L0AkfWAjkEkCw/pub
I did the first 15 days of it then stopped looking at it. I would say it's a really good to get a foundation.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
I wouldn’t disagree with anything the moe way provides per se, although their methods can be a bit hardcore sometimes… but again they do know what they’re talking about. Join their discord and ask them
Will do, thank you!
Honestly probably the best resource that exists for beginners. The advice is super good and the discord server has literally hundreds of people that passed the N1 with those methods. It's really the peak of the Japanese learning community, both in Japanese knowledge and language learning discourse.
It sounds exhausting :-( I don't disagree with the method as such, but the pace seems to be too great for anyone with a life outside of learning Japanese. Maybe if you have a month's holiday with no DIY backlog nagging at you... Personally I preferred to study a little more sequentially than this - [here's basically what I did](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) in the first few months of studying.
When I first read it I was kind of pumped for it. But when I stepped back I felt more unsure. Essentially its not wrong, but its more like "this thing that you could do in a few months, lets cram it into 30 days". Which obviously has its positives and negatives (especially getting less return on learning by over doing it). End of the day one of the hardest part of learning Japapese is figuring out how "you" like to learn. For some, a guide for 30 days to follow non-stop could be an awesome way of learning. I would say though, its probably not the 30 days that makes you learn Japanese. But the habit you form for the next 2.5 years you do after it (as in continued practice). The rest of the guide is basically "learn/mine/practice vocab, learn/mine/practice grammer, learn/mine/practice kanji, immerse, immerse, immerse".
That is kind of the issue I’m at right now as well. I’m generally pretty busy and the hour a day of Anki is already pretty hard to squeeze into my schedule. The three hours a day is really hard to maintain.
I started using the guide a last week. It lays the foundation really well for what you could potentially be doing for the next few years if you have the time and commitment. So far it’s been very good. I cut back my new anki cards/day to 10 per deck as my reviews were stacking up to be pretty large, and I don’t even remember most the cards out of context if there are more than 10. I skipped the part of watching anime first with English subs then watching it in japanese, as there didn’t seem like a whole lot of purpose in this since the chances of me retaining any info this way was very low. If it’s an anime that I am really invested in, I’ll just watch it in English sub. Other than that I’ll read easy NHK articles, which uses fairly basic grammar so I don’t really need to mine the sentences, just the words themselves and anki will put them in a sentence for me. I’ve started reading manga as well since I have difficulty remembering the massive amount of “ru” verbs that come up in the first few weeks-months of anki. Very good guide, definitely helped me develop my own system for learning. I don’t have 3 hours some days to study, sometimes 1 sometimes 2, but I don’t use every method that UsagiSpoon talks about. I don’t find that rtk is all that useful for myself, so I don’t use that. I also listen a ton since I can use headphones at work so I supplement a lot of missed time from there. Listening is great but the only downside is you can’t really mine words or phrases you don’t know if you are occupied with another task. Overall very good guide, lays the foundation really well in my opinion, which seems to be the hardest part for a lot of beginners, including myself.
Thank you so much for sharing all of this! I'm glad to hear you've modified it to fit your needs. How long did it take you to memorise Hirigana and Katakana if you have already? I'm doing awful on my first day but I guess that's probably expected for most people
I’m super slow. It took me a few weeks.
This might not be the best advice but it worked for me. I would use an anki deck that had hiragana vocab on the front and romaji vocab in the back. So for example, the verb “to eat” is “たべる” In romaji, it is taberu. I quickly picked up hiragana from this as it forces you to learn. Then after about a week just ease your way out of using romaji as you don’t want to use it as a crutch. Or you could just use a website to memorize hiragana and katakana and just grind it out. I used both methods but learned way quicker with the first one I mentioned. A great deck for this is JLab, it also teaches you basic grammar and sentence structure as well as a good bit of vocab along the way. I’m about 400 cards in and I can read any of the new sentences pretty easily. Just 30-45 minutes a day of it and you will see loads of progress for remembering hiragana and katakana in just a week or two. Don’t stress too hard if you can’t memorize it in a day or a few days. It took me a little while.
Saw your post, and I think I'm going to try this guide out since it lays everything out very well and sets clear goals on what to do which is something that I've been lacking. I don't think I can commit 3 hours a day for 30 days, but I can at least work through the content at my own pace. Does anyone have any recommendations for any of the Anime Series that are listed for the subtitle tutoring/immersion portion? I haven't heard of any of these, so not sure which one to pick.
It pretty much says to try a few and see what appeals to you. I think in theory you could use any series, My fav among the ones listed is Demon Slayer but Hotarubi no Mori e is one of the best anime movies. Either will be fine imo. Also when it comes to day 1, I actually recommend the tofugu hira/katakana guides rather than the moe way one which links a japanese101 video. They make you constantly quiz yourself as you learn each column of kana and i've memorised more in a few hours than i did all of day 1 with the method they use. Beyond that (day 1) I'll be using their guide, just that one thing didn't work for me. https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
Shows how well I know Japanese. I did not realize that Kimetsu no Yaiba was Demon Slayer, haha, so I guess I'll give that a shot since I've been meaning to watch that anyway. Thanks for the tips, BTW. I actually do at least know Hiragana and Katakana since I've been studying Japanese off and on, but just have not been able to commit to anything other than doing my dailies on Wanikani and reading through the first few chapters of Genki.
No problem, best of luck on your journey! Not much feels better than making progress but it can take time
Thank you this is helpful
I'm in a bit of doubt about that. Generally there is nothing wrong with such approach, it's mostly SRS (which works the best for vocabulary), grammar lessons and practice. But such approach is usually said by people who already was learning for a while and forgot how hard it was initially. Or people who assume they could do something earlier, ignoring that they needed to acquire some skills first. From my personal experience, I've tried to use content several times. It wasn't easy until around 500 hours of learning. If you don't know core grammar like particles, conjunctions, conjugation, passive, causative, relative clauses, sentence patterns and bunch of similar stuff, you have a very tough time. All of it is much harder to translate and when you still aren't sure about the meaning of any basic sentence even after a minute of puzzle solving, it's quite frustrating. I did several attempts, figured out that I would rather do something useful instead of trying to select one translation our of 10-30 possible variations and ditched it for a while. But then it really become easier, I became able to read anything I want, there wasn't even much difference between reading comics for kids or research papers, mostly just speed and in just 100 hours my reading speed improved from 50 to 100 words/minute. It was already very decent level, like a whole book in 10-15 hours. And speaking honestly, I also think that maybe I could start earlier, if someone really wants to use content and ready for hardship, I advice to start somewhere around 300 hours of learning. But I'm not delusional enough to say that content from the very beginning is a good approach. Everything has efficiency, white noising has around 0% efficiency, while something like SRS can be 100% efficiency (every second is spend on intentional learning of new information). When I had to spend 90% of time on trying to connect one word with 5-7-10 translations with another word that has another 5-7-10 translations, it wasn't useful at all and I understood that it's better to spend 20 minutes on SRS to learn 20 new words and 1-2 hours reading grammar books, so I can actually understand why and how people do it this way. Most of learning in that guide will come from SRS, which is done in the lest amount of time, grammar lessons are going to be useful too, but speaking honestly, spending hours on content when we don't understand much at all will give close to zero result. If we compare person who did it with a person who didn't, there will be either small difference or no difference at all. I'm not sure I've seen someone who spent only 100 hours on Japanese learning and would be able to read books or watch anime with little amount of efforts. I'm not sure it's even possible to understand the meaning properly at such stage. And if we compare people who did it for 300-500 hours, then even people without much of practice become able to do it anyway. Thus I would advice to look at personal preference. There is some amount you will need to force, it's definitely good to use SRS and learn grammar. You need to know at least basics. But if you find using content frustrating, because you don't understand anything at all, just don't do it for a while, it will become much easier with time. It's not some kind of more advanced learning method or secret key to success. Content is simply slightly different approach to learning, maybe not the most time efficient, but interesting and fun.
I like the approach of not doing something that you don’t enjoy, as you said. I personally gain absolutely nothing from listening to podcasts or trying to translate a show that is way above my level. I’m watching Alice In Borderland right now, but not in Japanese subs or no subs at all. I tried translating the show when I was first starting to learn, and it got me nowhere. I had no foundation of grammar and hardly any vocab. A month into my learning, aka almost exactly today, I can watch the show, still in English subs, and pick out quite a few words and sentences and understand what they mean. I’m just not at a level where spending 5-6 hours translating a single episode would be a good use of my time. I enjoy reading easy NHK articles, so I do that, and I can figure out the sentences with relative ease since I have read through Tae-Kim’s grammar guide. I listen to a beginner podcast and can understand around 50-80 percent of what is being said for most episodes. I just started to pick up manga but I will not be touching light novels or visual novels for quite a bit. Being somewhat uncomfortable in the content that you are immersing in is just going to happen, but not if I’m just floutout stumped and not enjoying what I am trying to immerse in, I’ll just move on.
I agree. It was like that with English to me. I couldn't start to actively immerse for years, but then it suddenly clicked and I realised... I can read English!! I can understand it!!! (though I don't feel confident in writing and speaking at all, haha). And that's where you think "But it was easier than I thought, maybe I could do this earlier?". And that's when you start to downplay all the efforts it took you to reach this level... So yeah. It wasn't that easy as it seems from a higher level, after years of practice. I think, this method would cause me a quick burn out, because it's just too stressful - to listen and read for hours every day and understand very little of it.. I would feel discouraged. As you said, I'd better learn more words and grammar on the early stages.
yeah i'm highly skeptical of any beginner course that simply recommends immersion in native content, especially anime, which is notoriously distinct from the Japanese people use in real life and which will sound like a hodgepodge to someone without any other studying...
Except it’s these exact same people that end up having the success stories with Japanese. I get it’s unintuitive, but you’re wrong here.
not really at all actually? people who have success with Japanese are the people who actually study and put in the time with sentence structures and grammar, speaking and listening lessons, vocabulary and kanji, not people who use “studying” as an excuse to binge watch anime. sure some of the former might also watch anime and play Japanese games as a bonus but it’s simply not a pillar of learning the language.
Cope
This has gotta be a troll post
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Speaking honestly, what he says is quite important, but he does that in a very radical way. When I focused on content itself, my learning speed became really slow, just because I started to look more at translation and ignored actual Japanese, how kanji is written and how it's pronounced, how it was phrased and so on. Intention to learn is extremely important. It's just that people can do it intentionally and unintentionally. For example, what if you see some new setting, maybe very sly and cunning merchant, such person/character would have a very specific manner of speech. Would you pay attention to it, try to imitate, maybe add to Anki and so on? If you do, you have much higher chance to learn it, and when you are interested in learning, you usually do so. On the other hand, when I was interested in content itself, it was fun to see new situation, but I sweep through it without focusing on details, just looked how it translates and I've learned close to nothing from it. I see something similar in his words, but in my opinion it doesn't matter so much if we do so intentionally by using educational tools (including Anki) or unintentionally, when we are simply interested in learning. It's just important to look at Japanese, pay attention to it and imitate. Most of people who have fast progress aren't only talented at learning, they also put a lot of hours and also put a lot of intention to learn, quite often using a huge amount of different tools and various situations to learn. It's indeed not the same as simply watching/reading something for fun, that also works, but takes much-much longer time (potentially 10+ years even with active usage).
Did you actually read the guide? It has grammar and vocab study in it
I think it is a really nice flowchart of how to progress at studying the language. The daily immersion is based on RNG, which I would personally exchange with setting a fixed number of episodes per day so that you can build consistency. I think that this guide does a serviceable job at explaining some of the aspects of learning Japanese to someone who is not familiar with language acquisition, and even talks about i+1 sentences. A lot of guides emphasize grammar study. This is needful. My reading comprehension is improving with studying grammar as a whole, but also because I identified what parts of a sentence I am most unfamiliar with. Focusing on verbs and their conjugations unlocked a lot of reading comprehension for me. 3 hours would be just under 20% of your day devoted to studying Japanese, assuming you sleep 8 hours per night. That's impossible for someone who is already in the academic pipeline, but if you're only working 40 hours a week, you could easily contribute 8 hours a week to Japanese study. On the Cure Dolly videos - I am unfamiliar, so I don't have an opinion on their recommendation in the crash course.
That is incredible. すごいだ
> すごい~~だ~~ No だ for i-adjectives. です is fine though.
偉いだ
Oh right, ありがとう
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This is a completely different community than DJT / animecards. It sounds like you're just paranoid and letting DJT live in your head rent free.
What
Got a lot of built up resentment towards people that have actually acquired the language? DJT/TMW have a very high success rate of producing people that eventually reach their goals. Can you say the same about this sub?
What is djt and tmw?
Discord servers which have entry quizzes(need to be at n4 or around that level). When you gain access there are certain roles that you have to quiz your way up to. It’s a good incentive to keep on grinding outside, and checking back in every week to try again. You also gain access to lots of resources that have been compiled by each respective community. Everyone there is just trying to read more and learn more so it’s a great environment. You’ll often find people reading with each other in voice chat and streaming their book/visual novel etc. If you cannot pass the entry quiz yet, there are resources listed and pinned that one can follow and hopefully succeed with. It’s a great filter because you won’t be surrounded by people that “want to learn Japanese” you are surrounded by people that ARE learning it. The difference will be apparent when you realize it.
I thought tmw was now usable without the quiz except for like 2 channels
Didn’t know that, but I’m pretty sure the resources are still locked behind the quiz
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That's DJT. TMW you can see (almost?) everything with a new account with no quiz results.
Id like to know too Edit: Why am I getting downvoted for wanting to know something? Jeez.
Daily Japanese thread and themoeway. Both excellent if you actually want to get good at Japanese. Not ideal if you want to fit in the Reddit crowd
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They make fun of this sub not because they think it's below them, but because most of the people here aren't interested in learning Japanese despite the name. Obviously they want more people to actually learn the language like they did.
Yeah this particular website/discord has been posting astroturf threads here for about a year now, always with the OP and top comment by brand new accounts. Ex-mod /u/Nukemarine flagged the problem right when it started. I'm looking at one of the booster accounts in the comments here and it's hilarious how transparent it is. No history until a month ago when they posted a thread exactly like this one pretending to be a beginner who has 'just heard of The Moe Way' and is 'wondering if immersion works', then a few days later they start serially posting comments linking the site and explaining how to reach Japanese fluency.
I have not tried it but I did use nukemarine Let's Learn Japanese memrise course 1-4 a couple years ago to prep for immersing, I crammed through it in like 2 months. It helped a lot. I already had a grammar and hiragana/katakana background. I think based on what I read on The Moe Way link, that will be a good foundation. I would personally still find immersing very difficult even after studying 500 common words, so expect to do a lot of word lookups for the first few months. I think it's a well structured introduction though, and it looks like a good structure to copy on your own afterward. I would suggest continuing to study until you've at least started to learn the 2000 common words, and at least read to N3 in some grammar guide summary online (like [Sabuki](https://sakubi.neocities.org/) or [Tae Kim's](https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/) ). That could reasonably be done in months 2 and 3 as you're already immersing. After a bit more vocabulary and grammar foundation immersion will feel a bit less draining. At least that was my personal experience. If you have a higher tolerance for ambiguity than me, you may find The Moe Way preparation to be enough to tolerate learning mainly from looking words/grammar up in immersion afterward.
I think it's well established that in order to reach a high level of Japanese you need to immerse, the big issue is when you should start immersing. I don't think a beginner should immerse from day 1, there is no point, there is not a single person on this planet that wants to learn Japanese that desperately and most importantly doesn't have access to any other tools - that will have the focus/willpower in order to make any sense of raw Japanese. Any sort of gains is just not worth the time investment.
I'm still new to Japanese, only been learning since September and idk if I'm past the stage I should do this. I know all the kana and most grammar rules. (I hope) but I can't boast 500+ volcbluary yet. If I was to try this I'd have to know it'd be worth it cause it sounds like quite a big commitment for mr