Japanese - Morg Systems

Collection of Japanese phrases your textbook won’t teach you

2023-05-06T08:37

There is often a big disconnect between the grammar points that are taught in textbooks and actual Japanese you will find in the wild. This is not to say grammar study is useless or that textbooks don’t teach you “real” Japanese, but it’s just a fact of how languages evolve naturally and how native speakers like to break the rules of grammar fairly often.

I jokingly call these grammar points N0 Grammar because they don’t show up on the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). It has nothing to do with their difficulty however. Some might be tricky and some might be very easy to understand as soon as you see them.

Below is a list of these common points with an attempted explanation of how they work. I don’t expect my explanations to be formally correct, especially from a linguist point of view, and you should not take them as such. Especially when it comes to slang native speakers might have different perspectives too.

They are just general examples of things I’ve seen myself in immersion that made me go “huh, interesting”.

The science of letting go

2022-10-27T10:46

There’s a lot of debate around language learning communities on whether extensive or intensive reading is better for acquiring languages. Without going into the benefits of either approach, I think there comes a time in the life of a language learner where they need to get comfortable with the idea that they simply cannot understand everything they come across. This becomes even more important in real time conversations where missing a few words here and there will not impact the contextual understanding of the situation but might set you back if you become obsessed in achieving complete coverage of known words all the time.

Refold calls this “Tolerate the Ambiguity” and provides a bit of a summary explanation, however I know it’s not easy to get into this mindset and to just “let go” and move on when faced with unknowns, especially for people who are used to analyzing every single word as they show up.

As for myself, I’m confident to say that I’ve applied this same exact type of approach and methodology when I was learning English as a teenager, and now as I am learning Japanese. Although the two languages are very different in syntax and grammar, the same type of technique can be used with very little variation.

Word classification

The first thing we need to understand is that words have different weights and “levels” in a sentence. As a language learner you want to cast a net as wide as possible and try to get through as many meaningful sentences as you can without being bogged down by annoying unknowns. I have already talked about content words vs function words in Optimal Reading Immersion - Narrow Reading.

Beyond those, there are also a few more levels of comprehension you can get from a sentence and after a certain threshold it’s okay to move on because most of the “important” meaning has already been conveyed to you. The rest will just be flavor words that make reading more pleasant (assuming you know those words). Think about adjectives, adverbs, descriptions, things that don’t move the plot forward but help in painting a more vivid and florid mental picture of a scene. You don’t need those to understand what you’re reading.

Within the group of content words, we can identify things like:

Nouns
Adjectives
Adverbs
Pronouns
Verbs/Predicates

Let me show you with an actual example how our (well, at least mine) brain parses a sentence with a high level of unknowns and let’s see if we can figure out a way to make it more pleasant to tolerate its ambiguity:

Start from no comprehension (aside from one name):

“John kek i gloop bleyng toop i moop clein voov pleen. Maper doop ug kek i boof ug gleem vloofi toot ug meem toot luul kloog momo veev ugi baba mep dood t uga”

Let’s add function words into the mix:

“John kek a gloop bleyng with a moop clein voov pleen. Ever since ug kek a boof ug gleem vloofi and ug meem and luul kloog every veev ugi baba mep dood at uga”

Of course this still makes no sense, but what if we suddenly understood all the adjectives and adverbs? Would it become easier?

“John kek a young bleyng with a very respectable academic pleen. Ever since ug kek a boof ug gleem vloofi and ug quickly and fearlessly kloog every veev ugi baba mep dood at uga”

Hmm this is still incomprehensible, we kind know it is talking about some “academic” stuff but we don’t know what, and it’s still pretty much up in the air.

But what if instead of adjectives and adverbs, we prioritized nouns and pronouns? Let’s forget about adjectives and adverbs and pretend we only looked up nouns and pronouns instead:

“John kek a gloop student with a moop clein voov career. Ever since he kek a child he gleem reading and he meem and luul kloog every book his parents mep dood at him”

Wow okay, suddenly we get a bit more meaning out of this. We know it’s about a student with a career, and the sentence talks about his (?) childhood and reading books with his parents… We can kinda make a “theme” out of this, but still comprehension is hard. We might be able to infer some verbs from context, like the fragment “John kek a gloop student” most likely is “John was a gloop student”.

Let’s go one step further and add verbs into the mix:

“John was a gloop student with a moop clein voov career. Ever since he was a child he enjoyed reading and he meem and luul devoured every book his parents would throw at him”

Wow okay, this suddenly became understandable really quickly, didn’t it? We still don’t know what kind of career he has, what kind of student he is, and how he would “devour” books. We might not have the nuance of what “devour” means in this context but intuition tells us it’s not literally about eating books, and obviously his parents aren’t literally throwing the books at him. Still, this level of comprehension is more than enough to follow the narrative plot and we don’t need to stop and look up all the other words (unless we really want to).

Just for completeness sake, this was the full sentence:

“John was a young student with a very respectable academic career. Ever since he was a child he enjoyed reading and he quickly and fearlessly devoured every book his parents would throw at him.”

This is exactly how I have learned English growing up. I would read a lot of books (shout out to the Wheel of Time series!) and mostly focus on core vocab which usually consisted of nouns and verbs. We have a limited amount things we are willing to put up with, spending all our energy to look up every single word we don’t know in the dictionary will get us to burn out relatively quickly, before we actually get to enjoy the contents of the story we are reading.

As you move along a story, you will sometimes find the same words repeated here and there, and if they catch your attention, looking them up can be a good thing, however more often than not, an author might drop a single unknown descriptive word in the middle of a long-winded sentence and then never use it again. It’s really not worth it to get hung up on that because it will not impact the rest of your experience anyway.

To conclude, my personal list of priority content words, in order, is as follows:

Nouns
Verbs
Pronouns
Adverbs
Adjectives

If you have a more-or-less complete understanding of 1 to 3, you are very likely already able to understand the general gist of most of the stuff you read.

Make stuff up

So what do we do when we are met with a barrage of unknown words of low core usefulness? What if we get a huge string of adjectives and adverbs like “moop clein voov career” or snippets like “meem and luul” from the passage above?

I know this sounds crazy but… make things up. You should already have a decent amount of context from what you’re reading, and generally speaking, besides a few tricky words, you should already have a decent idea if the sentence you’re reading is a positive or negative statement about something.

We don’t really need to know exactly what a certain adjective or adverb means but it’s good to know if it’s a good or bad thing in context. And context will usually get us there already without having to touch a dictionary. If you read “He stabbed him meem, before he could say a single word, with a drood sneer on his face.” You might infer that “meem” is something that describes a quick and fast action (“before he could say a single word”) and that “drood” is used to describe a word like “sneer” (which has already some negative connotation) in the context of someone getting stabbed, so it’s definitely not a positive quality.

On top of all of this, we already saw the word “meem” in the earlier passage used to describe “devouring books”, so even subconsciously, without thinking much about it, we can get a nuance of speed and fast-paced action (“quickly”).

All of this comes to us more or less naturally once we let go of the requirement that we need to understand 100% of everything we read. Our brains are pattern matching machines that work at their own pace and you cannot force them to work any faster (or more meem :)). We make guesses, we come up with assumptions, and we reinforce those with more exposure.

Making guesses and literally making stuff up is what gives us independence and mastery over the language, because we make it our own, like a child does growing up in their natural environment.

You will make mistakes, you will have to fix incorrect assumptions or get into awkward situations where you misunderstand things (especially in conversations) but that’s just the nature of how languages are. You shouldn’t be avoiding them because it’s what makes us grow.

Learning to Output

2022-09-04T15:48

Index:

Introduction

There comes a point to any “immersion heavy” language learner where they have to dip their feet into the scary land of Output. While input is more or less a “solved” problem, output seems to still be a very hot topic among language learning communities because it revolves around so many different variables, and touches on so many different emotional aspects and vibes that each student has with the language and its culture. It is hard to make general statements that will apply to everyone. This is a journey that each person has to go through at their own pace and to their own comfort level.

But first, let me define what I actually mean when I use the word output throughout this page:

Output is the ability to put together words and sentences in order to convey a message in the most natural way possible.

Let me be clear, this page on output does not touch on the phonetic aspects of the language. It is not going to talk about pitch accent (see: Getting Started with Pitch Accent (longer)), intonation, diction, etc. While those are all important parts of the language, they are not related to the actual ability to put together a sentence. They can be studied separately and there’s many other guides and pronunciation coaches out there that can help you achieve that. This is not the purpose of this page.

There can be multiple ways to output, for different kinds of platforms, audiences, and styles. Writing a chat message is output. Talking with a friend is output. Making a youtube video monologue is output. Streaming on Twitch to 0 viewers is output. Writing a blog is output. Tweeting is output. Both text and voice, synchronous or asynchronous, count as output. Each of these things have different aspects that can make them harder or easier, but they all effectively boil down to one core skill: your ability to manipulate constructs and phrases of the language that you have previously internalized (passive language), and quickly draw upon them to convey your own message (active language) in your own style.

For this reason, if you want to be able to output naturally it is absolutely mandatory to have achieved at least a solid understanding of the language and have internalized some intuitive model subconsciously. Input is a necessary prerequisite to output. After all, you cannot say things you don’t yourself already understand. As a rule of thumb, if you find yourself constantly flipping through the pages of a dictionary (like jisho.org) looking for a Japanese word to translate a certain English word you have in mind, you’re approaching this incorrectly (more on this later). On the other hand, it is also important to be aware that only relying on input with no practice will not magically make you able to output. You need to practice output to become good at outputting.

I recommend any learner who wants to integrate the output tips on this page to at least have reached the second step of the Japanese Learning Loop. Ideally, you should be at the point where you can consume some Japanese media somewhat comfortably (within your area of interest), and regularly do so in your everyday life. If you are at a point where you can read a random Japanese sentence and go “This sentence feels off to me” then you’re ready to output. You don’t need to know what feels off, or why, but you need to have that feeling within you to be able to apply it to a lot of the exercises I will be introducing later.

DISCLAIMER: While some may say you should wait to output until you’re “ready”, I don’t think this matters as much. You should not force yourself to output but there’s also no real downside if you want to engage in conversation (ideally with a native speaker) even at a low level of intuition. However, keep in mind that it will be much easier and way more beneficial if you prioritize your input early on, before you jump into output.

Three Aspects of Natural Output

Before we dive into practical advice and exercises to improve on output, it is a good idea to actually understand what output is and which aspects one needs to focus on for it to be “natural”.

As I already mentioned in the introduction, I will not touch on actual pronunciation and phonetics. These are incredibly important aspects of the language if one wants to appear natural, but they belong to an entirely different area. I’m only focusing on the production abilities of a language learner: their ability to put together pieces they acquired from immersion in a manner that appears natural.

With this in mind, we can recognize three fundamental components of natural output:

Grammatical correctness
Correct use of words and collocations
Appropriate social framing and behavior

Grammatical Correctness

This is probably the easiest part to understand and one that most people would likely already know about. Simply put, you need to be able to output grammatically correct sentences. To give a simple example, if you say something like 美味しいだ, it would come across as extremely wrong because you cannot put だ after い-adjectives. Any native speaker would be able to instantly point out that this sentence is wrong and it would give them a feeling of discomfort.

Note, however, that sometimes correct output can be grammatically incorrect. For example you might see a native speaker say things like すごい美味しい instead of すごく美味しい. While it’s technically grammatically wrong, it’s actually become normal modern Japanese usage to the point where if you were to say すごく美味しい instead it could come across as weird.

Knowing which part of grammar must be correct and which part is allowed to be more flexible also will come to you with experience and intuition. You will internalize the rules subconsciously with enough input, and often you will not even be able to explain why they work like that, just that they feel better that way.

Correct use of words and collocations

It goes without saying that even if your grammar is completely perfect and natural, your sentences can come across as extremely unnatural if you use the wrong words. On top of it being unnatural, it can even lead to actual misunderstandings, so it’s important to be very careful on this aspect.

Generally speaking, even before we internalize things as grammar, languages are built upon “chunks” or groups of phrases/expressions that a native speaker can recognize as familiar. There are a lot of phrases even in English where if you were to break them down into their own individual components and words, you might not even be able to define what they actually mean.

To give you an example, how often have you seen the verb “to bode” in English without the word “well” after it? And specifically in a negative nuance like “This does not bode well”. If you were to ask me, I would have no idea what “bode” meant in English, but I am very familiar with the expression “to (not) bode well”. Imagine you’re talking with an English learner and they said something like “The weatherman boded good weather for tomorrow”. While, yes, it’s technically a correct sentence, it feels off. At the very least it feels inappropriate for the level of speech and register we expect them to be using. This is because subconsciously our brains are just very advanced predicting machines: when we talk to someone we are constantly playing a mental game of prediction where we try to stay a couple of steps ahead of the conversation in order to know what to expect from our conversational partner. When these collocation rules are broken, we suddenly feel lost and confused, and the language will be perceived as unnatural.

This is also strengthened when it comes to set phrases and expressions like “to kill two birds with one stone”. If I said “to kill two birds with one rock” it would be wrong, despite the meaning being exactly the same.

This point is much trickier to grasp and often gets confused with the previous one about word choice and expressivity. No language exists in a vacuum. There is always some cultural baggage and shared background that every native speaker is aware of and can use as leverage during a social exchange.

Mannerisms, ways to phrase things, indirectness, politeness levels, things to say and not to say, how to ask certain questions, how to comment on certain things, how to break the ice, how to start and end conversations, etc. These are all incredibly nuanced aspects of Japanese that can often feel very alien or unfamiliar to western audiences. Furthermore, a lot of these points can be very hard to grasp for native speakers as well because they often rely on one’s own personal charisma, sociability, extrovertedness, and a lot of other factors.

However, do not confuse this with the sensationalist talking points of “exoticism” and “us vs them” mentality (Why Japanese people? etc) that certain blogs like to write about when it comes to Japan. Japanese is a language like any other and there’s nothing inherently special or magical to it. It does, however, have its own social rules and etiquette that will be different from your native language, and just like any other language you need to be able to internalize them properly if you want to have natural output.

You might be already familiar with some common mistakes like:

Answering with ありがとう to a compliment instead of being modest (まだまだ, いえいえ, etc)
Not using polite language when the situation calls for it (not using ます/です with strangers, etc)
Overusing pronouns (あなた, etc)
Using the wrong interjections (“uhmm…” instead of “えと…”)
When asking for a favor, pre-emptively thanking the other person with ありがとうございます instead of よろしくおねがいします

…and many others.

This is also often called “thinking with your English brain”. There’s nothing ungrammatical or necessarily wrong in it, it’s just… not what a Japanese person would say in that situation.

Practical activities to improve your Output

Now that all the introductory fluff is out of the way, let’s actually get down to the meat of it: how does one improve their output? Can we come up with a series of activities that, if done with enough frequency, will lead to having natural output ability?

While I cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that all of them will work for you, I can say that each of the activities I describe here have helped me improve my ability to communicate in Japanese. I’m still not quite there yet, and it’s a very long trek of continuous gradual improvement, but they are all good starting points that are worth considering.

Noticing

This is not a specific activity one needs to practice, however it is a central pillar to all the other exercises so it is important to introduce it first.

Practicing output will show you your weaknesses in the language. This is what I call “noticing”. Output practice itself is a self-feeding loop not unlike the Japanese Learning Loop and will look something like this:

In my experience I’ve met a lot of very different people when it comes to their “noticing” ability. Some can be natural talents and pick up expressions and word choices almost effortlessly by just doing input. Just like that they’ll be able to use them more or less accurately in output too. Some other people, however, need a bit more of an extra push to be able to figure out certain expressions and phrases that would otherwise go unnoticed. This is where output practice comes into play.

When you spend time practicing output, you make that jump from passive to active knowledge awareness, and that in turn kickstarts the predictive engine in your brain that will make you actively soak up new phrases to use in output via immersion. Try to be consciously aware of this process as you go through each exercise, because it will consistently benefit you a lot more if you do that.

Conversation practice

This is probably the most obvious and common exercise that most people would already be familiar with: conversation practice.

As simple as it sounds, just find someone to talk to (text chat is good too!) and just practice. Ideally, you want a native speaker or someone who’s at native level because that would give you the best example of natural conversational language. This said, practicing with other learners is not necessarily a bad thing either.

Past the very initial stages of learning (step 1 of Japanese Learning Loop), every person is fundamentally different and language learning itself is not a straight line. Someone at approximately your same level of Japanese might be much better than you at some specific thing, and you might be much better than them at some other specific thing. If you regularly chat together, you can help each other reinforce your weak points.

Just keep in mind that most of your conversation time should be dedicated to native speakers. I’ve personally met many learners who only output around other learners and even after years of doing so their Japanese still feels very unnatural (this might not be the only reason, but I bet it does not help).

A few places you can find people to talk to:

Language exchange discord servers (like EJLX)
Hire a conversational partner/tutor on italki.com
Language exchange apps like HelloTalk or Tandem
Online platforms and communities around your hobbies (If you like games, playing online on Japanese servers, etc)
VRChat

Self-corrected writing

I define “self-corrected writing” as any kind of (usually written) output that you are in charge of correcting yourself.

Self-correcting is an ability that a lot of language learners don’t seem to be aware of having. The reality of it is that getting genuine and useful corrections from native speakers is hard. Most people have no interest in correcting your mistakes as long as what you’re saying is understandable. You may be able to find teachers or tutors that can help you fix certain problems or mistakes if you send them your output compositions, but it’s not a reliable method and it doesn’t “scale” to large volumes over long periods of time (it is also not cheap if you are paying these people to correct you).

What you can do, instead, is take advantage of that internal radar you should have by now that fires “Weird Japanese detected!” alerts every time you read unnatural sentences. Just because you are the person that wrote them, it does not mean that you are not able to recognize that the language feels wrong.

For this activity, you don’t need to be able to know what is wrong and especially how to fix it. All you need to do is just point your internal radar to what you wrote and let it say “this looks good” or “this does not look good”. This is when your noticing engine will become able to pick up better phrases later during immersion. Do this for a long enough time and your ability to output will improve without requiring external assistance from native speakers.

As already mentioned, this entire exercise relies on you having a solid grasp of what natural Japanese looks like. If you have not trained that internal model yet, you will not be able to take advantage of it here.

My personal tip to make this activity worthwhile is to delay your corrections to a later time. Borrowing from the world of art (especially that of music production), we often become able to notice our mistakes only after we let them rest for a while before going back to them with a fresh mind. First, write some Japanese. Then, let it sit there for an hour or two. Go back to it again and try to answer the following questions:

Do you understand what the sentence is saying?
If not, do you at least understand what the sentence is trying to say?
Do you recognize all the words used in the sentence? Do they feel natural?
Is the flow of the passage logically consistent?

For this purpose, I usually try to get myself to write some Japanese in the morning (like a blog or personal diary, scrap notes, literally anything you feel like writing about) and then in the evening before going to sleep I go over them and see if anything stands out.

I like to write them on a google doc page because I can easily highlight the parts that feel off. Here is an example from some notes I wrote almost a year ago (terrible Japanese and all):

Notice that I don’t try to correct (what I think are) my mistakes. I just mark them and move on. There will be a lot of mistakes you will miss. A lot of stuff you won’t realize is wrong. But there will still be plenty that you will notice. That’s where the gradual improvement will happen.

Attentive Listening

Attentive Listening is a type of specific input activity that focuses on acquiring natural chunks of phrases by listening to audio of native speakers using them in natural conversation.

While during normal immersion you’d just be consuming native content for the pleasure of doing so (watching anime, livestreams, youtube videos, etc) and nothing more, with attentive listening you should be consistently on the hunt for “cool” phrases and expressions that you want to make yours.

For this type of activity, some learning methods talk about having a language parent, and if you have one it’s great, but it’s not required. However, I do recommend sticking to natural unscripted language that is conversation-driven. This means, rather than doing this with anime or movies, try using livestreams or podcasts where there’s at least two people having a natural-sounding conversation. Twitch (or similar) streams that focus on gameplay might be less optimal than categories like “just chatting” videos where the focus is more on the streamer talking to other people (or the audience). Vtubers can also be a good source for this type of content (if you’re into that, my personal recommendation is the monday morning talk videos from Ookami Mio like this one).

For normal immersion I usually recommend content that you are interested in and enjoy listening to. However, since with attentive listening you should be primarily paying attention to the form and the flow of the conversation rather than its contents, it’s okay to choose things that are boring or not as engaging to you as long as their type of language is similar to what you want to mimic yourself.

What I like to do is watch videos (ideally pre-recorded rather than live, because you can pause and rewind), and pay attention to how the speaker moves from one topic to the next. How each sentence is connected to the whole. What kind of back and forth (backchanneling, aizuchi, etc) happens between two speakers. I pay attention to things like jumps and interruptions in the conversation. What does the speaker say when it happens? How does he say it?

OPTIONAL: Using a tool like sharex I like to record a few seconds of interesting audio for every exchange I want to acquire and then I build anki cards with only the audio (no sentence, no front, no back, etc, just the audio file). Every day I go through all those anki cards and re-listen to what I recorded. Once I feel like I am familiar enough with that phrasing, I just delete the card. Over long periods of time, I notice I start using similar phrases myself in my output. It’s also okay to record similar (or the same) expressions used in slightly different contexts.

It’s good to keep in mind that this kind of activity is relatively focus-heavy as you need to be constantly paying attention and be on the hunt for such chunks of language. For this reason it’s hard to keep it up for long sessions, I recommend maybe 15 minutes a day (just my personal vibes). If you notice your mind drifting to other stuff, getting bored, or just falling back to normal listening, just stop and do something else. Don’t force it.

Predictive Listening

Predictive listening is the natural evolution of Attentive Listening. The premise is almost entirely the same, and so is the content you should be drawing inspiration from (conversational videos, etc).

The only difference is that, unlike with Attentive Listening, we are not actually looking for chunks or expressions, we’re actually trying to predict how the conversation will continue before it happens. For this reason you should be doing this on recorded videos (rather than live streams). Every time the speaker asks a question (either to the audience or someone they are interviewing, etc) pause the video and imagine yourself in that situation. How would you answer that question? I don’t mean just the contents of the question, but even the mannerisms you’d imagine yourself using. Do you handwave? Nod your head? Follow up with a はい? End with a ということで? etc

Then, once you’ve done those 10 seconds of introspection, unpause the video and notice how the other person actually answers it. See if it matches your prediction, or if they do something you didn’t think of doing. What is their facial expression? What is their reaction? Try to take in every small facet of the conversation that is not just the contents of the answer itself.

Active Production

A fundamental aspect to be able to move words you learned through immersion (passive vocab) to your everyday language (active vocab) is to be able to gauge the emotional response that they evoke in your conversational partner.

Myself personally, there’s many words I learned by reading books that I don’t feel comfortable outputting in a conversation because I’m not yet sure what kind of reaction I will get from someone listening to them. I noticed very often when the time comes that I need to use certain words that I’ve never used before, I hesitate and my sentences break down and in turn become even harder to understand for no reason other than me being uncertain about those words.

Because of this, I think there is some real benefit in trying to consciously use certain words for the sole purpose of testing the water even if we might already know those words aren’t natural in that context.

For this kind of activity I prefer a spoken conversation rather than chat, and especially with a native speaker (you can’t trust other learner’s opinions when it comes to this). Just practice with a language partner or a tutor, and try to express an idea specifically because you want to use a certain word you learned. See what their reaction is. Do they ask you to repeat the word? Do they act surprised? Do they perhaps rephrase what you just said using a different word? These are all very important signals you need to look for.

Internal Narration

I’ve struggled with my inability to do this for the longest of time and I feel like I’ve only recently started to feel like I’m able to keep up with this in Japanese like I did when I first learned English, so this kind of advice can still be somewhat hard to properly internalize and understand depending on what kind of learner you are and how far you are in your journey.

Furthermore, a huge chunk of the population apparently does not have an internal monologue at all, so if you are in that group (I am not), then this tip will probably not apply to you and you can move to the next point.

This said, the basic idea for this so-called “internal narration” activity is to consciously shift your inner monologue to be 100% in Japanese as you go through your everyday life. This is great to get you aware of certain words and phrases you don’t know how to use. Try to describe what you’re doing in real time in your head as you do it. Think “I will now brush my teeth” as you go brush your teeth, “I am now walking the dog”, “I am making some tea and then I will play some videogames”, “I wonder what I can make for dinner tonight”, etc.

This activity can be “dangerous” if you try to force it too early when your internal model is still not quite ready, because it can make you internalize certain phrases that are literally translated from English (or whatever is your native language). However, once you’re advanced enough that you already started outputting and putting into practice some of the activities I mentioned before, building yourself an internal monologue can be very useful. It can help build up your own Japanese personality and language identity which is fundamental to become able to output naturally (more on this later).

Reading before going to sleep

I admit, this is a bit weird, and it might be just me, but I’ve decided to write it here anyway because it’s been great advice for myself and I’m sure it will benefit others too (also reading is great).

There’s many well-researched benefits when it comes to reading as you’re about to fall asleep and most of them have to do with a bunch of stuff I’m not familiar with (brainwaves, etc) so I won’t get too much into those details. This said, I have noticed another huge benefit in reading Japanese books right as I am about to go to sleep, preferably on real paper or an ebook reader, not on your phone. More often than not, as I drift asleep after having read a book, I am much more aware of how my “Japanese brain” sounds. In my mind I go over various phrases and words, often subconsciously, that I have just read in the book. Sometimes when I’m very into a story (and also very tired) I notice that my brain starts dreaming that I’m still reading, and my internal monologue shifts to Japanese naturally as I fill in the gaps of whatever story I was reading at the time.

Feeling of community

A feature of the language that often gets overlooked is the feeling of belonging to a certain group or community. After years of taking conversational lessons with a Japanese tutor, I noticed that while it gave me a good base to stand on, it didn’t make my output any more natural or spontaneous. Going through rote exercises or just surface level conversation is simply not enough to acquire good natural output (at least it wasn’t for me).

A lot of defining features of what makes a language feel natural come from subculture and situational usage that is appropriate only within certain groups of peers you identify with.

We are much more apt at picking up expressions and jargon when we feel like we belong to a group. We are part of a community, we have friends, people we respect and want to imitate, and we also want to be accepted by them. All of these aspects are necessary to make the language actually yours and create your own Japanese personality. Without this, it is almost impossible to transition into natural language output. See this amazing example from Stephen Krashen on the topic. __

Just as what you’d normally do to find conversation practice occasions, try to find a place where you can “belong”. It’s probably one of the hardest tips to put into practical use as everyone is different, but it is also one of the most important things one should be aware of because just doing this will almost entirely overshadow every other point of advice I’ve given in this page.

Specifically, try to make your output activity not a function of output itself, but rather find a goal that is beyond just wanting to practice the “language”. Find people you want to talk to because you want to discuss whatever topic interests you. You want to discuss the latest anime episode you just watched, you want to coordinate a raid in an MMO, you are trying to find an easter egg in a newly-released videogame, etc. Do all of that in Japanese, but not because it’s in Japanese. Do it because from now on that is going to become your new Japanese identity and personality. Transitioning your hobbies to 100% Japanese is not only just a function of input. It needs to become a function of your output as well.

List of Bad Ideas for Japanese Study

2022-06-20T21:11

If you have been linked to this page, it’s probably because one of the following points applies to you. You may disagree with what is written here, and that’s normal, if not even expected. Things are rarely so black and white, and some things might feel like they work for you but don’t for other people.

Generally speaking, it’s good to follow whatever you find comfortable and enjoyable when it comes to language learning (see: Optimal Reading Immersion - Narrow Reading), however this needs to come from a position of informed reasoning.

In the following list, I explain why I believe these ideas about how to study Japanese are not good (or even bad). With the right amount of openmindedness and mental flexibility, try to think whether or not these apply to you.

Optimal Reading Immersion - Narrow Reading

2022-01-06T12:03

Introduction

A common topic of discussion in language learning communities is what material to read and consume as a language learner. The discussion around efficiency for vocabulary retention and word/grammar acquisition is ever so common as well.

Experts generally agree[1] that the most efficient way to acquire a high level of proficiency in a language while retaining a very large and extensive vocabulary relies on reading a lot of things over a long period of time. However, especially during the beginner stages of language learning, reading native material can be quite a struggle. It can feel like a daunting barrier that looms over you only to demoralize you further. It becomes like a language obstacle that seems impossible to break through with only limited beginner words and grammar.

For this reason, a lot of people tend to get stuck on learner material, like textbooks and dopamine-infused bird-themed language learning apps, too afraid to venture farther outside of their comfort zone. It is not uncommon to hear phrases like “It’s too early for me to read books” (despite never having tried) only to be met by more advanced learners’ dismissive replies along the lines of “just read” with very little actionable advice beyond that.

A major turning point in the career of any language learner is the moment they transition from awkwardly trying to put together weird grammatically incorrect sentences from their textbooks’ examples to smoothly reading native material with minimal aid required. There is usually a moment of “enlightenment” where your brain goes “holy shit I am actually reading Japanese” without you even realizing it.

It would be ideal for any learner to try and get to that point as early as possible. This is because getting stuck in the “eternal beginner” plateau, wandering from textbook to textbook or app to app forever, is far from advisable. Once you realize the actual practicality of the language you want to learn, a whole broader world opens in front of your eyes.

What is Narrow Reading

The idea of Narrow Reading has been heavily discussed by Krashen[2], the original proponent of the Input Hypothesis, initially in 1981[3] and later expanded and refined over decades of research.

The concept at its roots is defined by Krashen himself[1] as “the practice of reading texts by one author or about a single topic of interest, which helps ensure comprehension and natural repetition of vocabulary and grammar.”

A common talking point among language learning communities is that you should read all kinds of topics and not get stuck on the same stuff, because you want to get a broad set of words for all situations in order to become truly proficient in the language in a well-rounded manner.

Counter-intuitively, however, this does not seem to be the case especially at the early stages of learning. Sticking to a single genre or topic of interest seems to yield better and faster results with an increased amount of comfort for the learner, to such an extent that it should be encouraged and promoted early on rather than discouraged.

There are quite a few reasons why this is the case, and I’ll be going over some of them in the following sections.

First Few Pages Effect

The biggest contributor to what I usually call “reader fatigue” has to be the so-called First Few Pages Effect. I’m sure anyone who’s ever read a book or any similarly long reading passage in a foreign language is familiar with this effect, even though they might not have been able to identify it consciously.

The First Few Pages Effect is described in a Krashen paper[3] as “the first few pages of a new author’s work [that are] tough going [over]. After this initial difficulty, the rest of the book goes much easier.”

Speaking from personal experience from reading Japanese books on Kindle, I noticed that once I get to around 15% to 20% of a new book (as reported by the Kindle software), my reading experience suddenly becomes much easier. I need to look up much fewer words as I become more familiar with that author’s writing style. From then on, it’s all smooth sailing.

Due to this phenomenon, every time you switch from one material to another, you will have to get over this hurdle again from scratch. This compounds significantly into reader fatigue and can be very demoralizing in the long run. It may feel like you’re not progressing at all in your language learning journey!

This is also a very strong point against the reading exercises that are often presented to students by textbooks or apps that provide a variety of reading passages for beginners. It is common for textbooks to present you with various writing styles and topics (newspaper articles, handwritten letters, personal diaries, various conversations, children’s stories, etc). They want to expose you to a wide range of words and grammar patterns, but unfortunately by the time you become comfortable with one of them it will be over and you’ll have to go through another one again from scratch. It can be very frustrating with very limited rewards.

There is a strong case proposed for properly handpicked and curated graded reader collections[4], however in my personal experience even excellent-looking material like the Tadoku Graded Readers doesn’t really seem to cut it.

Read Whatever You Want

So then the question becomes, what should you be reading to minimize the first few pages effect, and maximize your enjoyment of reading in a foreign language?

One thing that is good to keep in mind is that interacting with things you enjoy should always be a priority. The affective filter hypothesis tells us that if we interact with the language in a manner that is stress free, enjoyable, and fun, we will acquire it better and more easily. The topic of motivation is also very important and it’s hard to stay motivated if you’re not into the stuff you are reading.

Some people have the ability to jump into very complicated stories from the get go because they want to read them so much, no matter what. On the other hand, the vast majority of people wouldn’t be able to keep such strong motivation when faced with a very steep language barrier, so it’s generally advisable to read simpler things that pique your interest.

To directly quote Krashen’s words[3]:

“Read only material […] that is genuinely fun and interesting, material that is so easy that you probably feel guilty reading it in your primary language. This is your excuse to read comics, magazines, detective stories, romances, etc. Reading […] does not have to make you a better person, does not have to give you insight into other cultures, and does not have to improve your knowledge of history or science.”

Even if you get to a point where you feel like the stuff you’re reading is too easy, you don’t need to feel compelled to read harder stuff just for the sake of it. If you want to read harder stuff, by all means go ahead. But don’t feel guilty for not wanting to do so. Stick to what you enjoy and do it for a long time.

It is easier to read simpler stuff you find interesting over long periods of time, especially if it is the same author or book series or genre. Do not worry about feeling like you’ll be forever stuck in a single genre or author: studies show that readers gradually and naturally expand their reading interests as they read more[5].

Importance of Contextual Reading

Another often underrated advantage of keeping your reading habits within the sphere of familiarity is what is called contextual reading.

If you keep your reading material constrained within an area that sparks your interests, something you are already familiar with in your native language (a hobby, a specific fandom, narrative genre, etc), you will more easily be able to relate with it on a level that goes beyond just language comprehension.

It is much easier to understand what someone is trying to tell us if we already know the general contents of the message beforehand.

Narrow reading also lets us build this familiarity[3] by sticking to a specific author/genre/series over a long period of time. We not only become familiar with the words of the author, we also become familiar with the characters, setting, way of thinking, story progression, etc. It builds intuition not only at the level of language understanding, but also within our own imagination.

There is also another added benefit to contextual reading: while we are able to intuit the meaning from pre-acquired understanding of the topic, we also reinforce certain collocations and words used by a certain author as we delve deeper into their work.

It is impossible to gain mastery of word usage by just seeing new words once, even if we make extensive use of Anki. However, by sticking to the same author or genre, there is a greater chance of coming across the same words being used in similar contexts so we can build a stronger intuition for them[6].

Content Words vs Function Words

On the topic of word awareness, we need to make a distinction between content words and function words.

A common critique against Narrow Reading is that by only reading a limited range of topics, you will not come across many new words and you will never become familiar with more general and useful vocabulary for everyday life.

While it is true that if you never branch out you risk never coming across certain domain-specific words, and you will have a harder time engaging with topics you are not familiar with, from the point of view of someone who’s trying to learn a language this should not be a big concern.

The main reason is that the biggest barrier a beginner struggles against the most when they start reading are content words rather than function words.

Function words, often also called grammatical words, are those words and parts of speech that provide a grammatical function to a sentence[6]. They are things like articles or pronouns in English. Particles or auxiliary verbs/conjugations in Japanese. They are things you will find listed for example on bunpro (Note: Fitting Bunpro in your study routine) or similar grammar learning tools.

Content words, on the other hand, are where the essence of a text comes through. It’s where you find the actual meaning.

Studies[6] show that by keeping your reading domain narrow, you also constrain the range of content words you have to learn to be able to read a certain topic smoothly. The more you read, the more familiar you become with those content words, and the more time you will have available to acquire them subconsciously in context. If you keep jumping from one topic to the next, you will encounter a much larger amount of unknown content words that will turn into a not very pleasant reading experience. This is where the first few pages effect originates from.

However, do not misunderstand. Even if you stick to only deep reading a single topic or technical field, you will quickly find that a lot of content words easily carry across domains very frequently[3][7]. Narrow reading simply gives your brain the advantage of becoming intuitively accustomed to the grammatical syntax of the language and slowly trickle exposure to more and more content words (by simply reading a lot) over a longer period of time.

Another interesting point for narrow reading, especially when it comes to Japanese, is the struggle with names. Even in English, things like proper names and titles (king, president, duke, etc) have been found to be surprisingly frustrating to read for a non native[6]. By keeping your reading narrow, you can cut off a huge source of problems as the same names and titles will often repeat, giving you more time to more easily familiarize with them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the most important thing to keep in mind is that you should really just be reading whatever interests you without worrying about efficiency or productivity. No matter what, if you read stuff, you will improve your language. You don’t need to constantly challenge yourself with new or harder things if you don’t want to. Enjoy your simple reading guilt-free, it is a great experience. Try to detach from the need to study the language and just read because you find it fun.

You want to bring your second language interaction habits at a similar level of spontaneity as your first language. This also includes reading things you want to read because you want to read them. It is interesting to think about the fact that people naturally gravitate towards reading narrowly in their native language[6], but seem to be pushed away from doing so in a language they are trying to learn. It’s rather counter-intuitive.

While in general I can’t tell you what you should be reading, I list a few manga and light novels in Beginner Japanese Immersion Material that I think are a good entry point for a beginner. I have also written down a couple of practical tips and tools that can facilitate your reading experience here: Practical Tips to Facilitate Early Reading#, especially if you have a hard time dealing with stuff like Kanji.

If you feel lost about what your study routine should look like, on the other hand, I recommend giving Japanese Learning Loop# a read, and bookmark the Unlocking Japanese: Tricks page to consult whenever you get stuck in your immersion.

References

Krashen (2018). The Conduit Hypothesis: How Reading Leads to Academic Language Competence
Cho, K.-S., & Krashen, S. D. (1994). Acquisition of Vocabulary from the Sweet Valley Kids Series: Adult ESL Acquisition. Journal of Reading, 37(8), 662–667.
Krashen, Stephen. (1981). The Case for Narrow Reading. TESOL Newsletter. 15.
Mason, Beniko. (2019). Guided SSR before Self-Selected Reading.
LaBrant (1958)
Schmitt, N. and Carter, R. (2000), The Lexical Advantages of Narrow Reading for Second Language Learners. TESOL Journal, 9: 4-9.
Cowan (1974)

Japanese Learning Loop

2021-07-16T21:29

No matter what approach you are looking at, to achieve fluency in a language the most important thing is being able to achieve learning independence. (Unlocking Japanese: Tricks#) In other words, being able to sustain your own studies and maintain a tangible process of consistent self-improvement feedback loop.

The basis of this language acquisition loop are the same for any language but the specifics may differ.

This is my approach to Japanese learning, I hope it can be useful to you as it has been to me.

If you feel lost and just want a quick tl;dr: read Japanese Primer.

Diagram

NOTE: The image has clickable links embedded. Click to expand the image to be able to click on them.

Every person has different preferences when approaching language studies and, while we all share the same baseline, we may prefer one way or the other.

At the end of the day, you should consider this loop as a loose guideline on how to orient yourself in the landscape of Japanese learning, and learn to take advantage of the various Japanese Learning Resources# at your disposal.

“I’m trying to free your mind, Neo, but I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” - The Matrix (1999)

Step 0: Foundation

Do not skip this step. It’s really simple, just learn hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ).

You really really really NEED this.

Step 1: Basics

The three areas of Grammar, Vocabulary, and Listening should be done more or less at the same time, they are independent and parallel with each other, they will all equally help you unlock the path to the next stage when you are ready.

Grammar

You want be able to recognize word boundaries, which words are particles, how to conjugate basic verbs, how to connect very basic of ideas, etc.

There’s many resources to be consulted at this step. I recommend Yokubi# because it’s a good quick read. Don’t get stuck on the details, just read through it and follow its advice and philosophy. You can only fully understand grammar after reading a lot of native material. At this stage you just want to get a general impression of how the language looks. You can come back to it later as many times as you want if you need a refresher.

On the other hand, if you want a more structured, traditional, and slower approach, you can try a textbook like Genki or Japanese the Manga Way.

NOTE: When you get to verb conjugation, I strongly recommend giving a quick watch to these two videos for a basic overview. They are very good and straight to the point.

What is important to remember here is that you are the one to decide how far you want to take this. Your goal should be to transition to Step 2 as soon as you feel ready to immerse in native material. Don’t linger too long on this, it is only a stepping stone to get you there.

Optional: Bunpro

Bunpro

Bunpro is a great helper for grammar retention. Consider giving Fitting Bunpro in your study routine a read as my personal recommendation on how to use it well. As you are still in the Step 1 of the Loop, what you want out of it is to leverage your textbook so you can get used to daily bunpro reviews in preparation for the next step, which requires more independence. If you are using a textbook, make sure to add it to your study paths to get the most out of it.

Vocabulary

Knowing what words mean and how they are supposed to look is as important as knowing when/how to use them.

Anki Core Deck

The purpose of a starting core deck for Anki is to get you started with basic words that you absolutely need to be able to start reading native material on your own. Later you will be building your own deck as you learn new words, so don’t get too attached to this one, it is but a starting point to get your feet wet in useful Japanese.

The core deck I recommend for beginners is the kaishi deck. It is a curated collection of beginner words and example sentences.

Don’t get too hung up on finishing all of the deck (it’s going to take you a while depending on your pace). Just adding a good 500-1000 words to your toolbelt will likely give you enough to get started and help you immensely for the next step.

I won’t specifically tell you to skip the next optional step, because some people seem to get a lot out of it, however I did not do it myself and I’m not very enthusiastic about it. I’m mentioning this anyway in order to not deprive you of anything that might help you. Just realize that it’s not mandatory and if you aren’t into it, you can skip it without issues.

Optional: RTK

RTK

Remembering The Kanji is a specific method of Kanji study so that you can more easily become familiar at recalling the shapes and loose meanings of each and every glyph. This is to make it easier for you to later learn the actual words as you encounter them in the language.

There’s multiple versions of it, although they’re all mostly the same. Just pick one and stick to it, but be aware of Zipf’s law (90% of words you will encounter contain only the first 1000 kanji). You don’t need to overstudy these.

This does not teach you any words, it merely teaches you the overall ideas and meanings of the symbols.

Be aware that RTK in itself is an old method/book. If you like the RTK approach, I recommend at least checking out Kodansha’s Kanji Learner Course (KKLC) which is an improvement in almost any way. Or alternatively read the next section about wanikani.

Optional: Wanikani

Wanikani

I have never used it myself, and I don’t have any strong feelings about it either way, but Wanikani seems to be a decent paid tool to help with both kanji and (some) vocabulary. It can work as paid alternative to both RTK and a core Anki deck, however the distribution of words it teaches you is not as optimal as a core deck and its slower pace might become frustrating if you just want to read stuff ASAP on your own.

Listening

Japanese is a pitch accent language. A lot of people from English or other European language backgrounds are unaware of the role of pitch in other languages and are often even unable to properly hear it unless they specifically train for it.

While this is not a big problem (you can still communicate using the wrong pitch), learning how to recognize and be aware of pitch accent early on will be immensely beneficial to your pronunciation.

I strongly recommend you get this sorted out as early as possible.

With some extremely minimal amount of effort, you can make insane gains in your pitch awareness and pronunciation, and here’s how:

Watch this Dogen video about the fundamentals of pitch accent (it’s just 10 minutes)
Go to this pitch accent test site and see how many words you can get right.

NOTE: The test requires you to sign up with an account but you can give it any random username and pass and it won’t matter. They don’t even verify it.

If you cannot maintain a score above 90% consistently, you need to train your hearing. Just keep doing the pitch accent test a little bit every day (you don’t have to be too strict, just do it whenever you have time) until you can hit the 95~100% mark. Once you are aware of pitch, try to listen for it in every word and sentence you hear, it will change your life.

While it’s always good to get acquainted with the phonetics, sounds, and pacing of the language, at this stage there’s not much else you should worry about. Passive listening won’t hurt you but it also won’t help you that much, as you lack both the grammar and vocabulary to properly immerse actively in anything yet.

If you want, you can listen to Japanese music, leave some podcasts in the background, watch anime with English subtitles and pay attention to the dialogues, etc…

Step 2: The Loop

The Loop consists of one preparatory step, and three core steps to follow.

Sentence Mining Deck (preparation)

There’s an overall guide on sentence mining and sentence cards on the Refold website.

The idea is that you read native material, find stuff that you don’t know, and add it to this deck so you can review it later.

If you want an easy way to set up your mining software, I recommend reading Xelieu’s lazy guide which walks you through the whole process.

Once you have set up your mining deck and got the workflow down, you can begin looping.

Discovery Phase

Following Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, we acquire language as we are exposed to comprehensible input.

Defining comprehensible input is tricky, but in layman’s terms it simply means don’t bite more than you can chew. You might be tempted to jump into complex material that interests you, but you are not going to have a good time if you cannot find a good balance between consumption and dictionary lookups.

Ideally you want to find material that gives you at least 90% comprehension. Having to look up one word or grammar point for every other sentence is a healthy balance in my opinion, but also don’t be too strict about it. Try to prioritize having a good time, if you’re feeling stressed out or aren’t having fun because the material is boring, too simple, too hard, or anything in-between, find something else. The affective filter hypothesis tells us that we acquire language more easily if we are having fun, so that should be your absolute priority.

Only you know what you find enjoyable, don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

If you are worried about what you should be reading, consider giving this article a read: Optimal Reading Immersion - Narrow Reading#. At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter. Just try to find stuff you enjoy and stick with it.

However, I’d recommend staying away from material specifically targeted to language learners (fake conversations, textbook readings, etc). Try to aim for young native material instead (children manga, etc).

For possible starting points, refer to Practical Tips to Facilitate Early Reading# and Beginner Japanese Immersion Material.

Consumption Phase

Once you have found what you want to consume, simply start reading.

I state reading here but there’s multiple ways to consume native content. Do not skip on listening too. There’s all kinds of native sources, both passive and active (as listed in the diagram). Do a little bit every day, don’t think of it as studying or a chore that you need to do, simply just do stuff you enjoy but do it in Japanese. Consider giving this video a watch to get an idea of what I mean.

In this step it is fundamental that you become aware that Japanese is a real language. It’s not just something you study in school and drill exercises on. You need to make it a part of your life, and enjoy doing so.

Improvement Phase

Whenever you find some word or grammar you do not understand, look it up using the approaches explained in Unlocking Japanese: Tricks#.

If you are using Bunpro, follow the advice in Fitting Bunpro in your study routine for grammar mining as well. At this step, you are in the Loop for Bunpro too, so don’t neglect it.

As you see fit, add new words or sentences to your sentence mining deck, and repeat. When you run out of material, go back to the Discovery Phase and find something new to consume.

Once you start to feel more confident in your input, and you feel like you want to challenge yourself in starting to output as well, take a look at the Learning to Output# page.

Step 3: Fluency

Here be dragons. I can show you no path to get here. The only thing that can get you here is yourself. Be consistent and keep doing at least a little every day. Language acquisition is not a sprint, it is a marathon.

Also remember that fluency means different things for different people and its objective definition is not something you should be concerned about.

Just loop.

CHANGELOG

Since this page has a lot of traffic and I’m still perfecting its contents as I go, I’m writing down here all the relevant changes I make to it. This way it’s easier to see if some new sections have been added over time.

2025-04-02: Fixed broken lazy guide link
2025-03-22: Changed sakubi to yokubi, and reworked some mining links
2024-07-02: Changed core deck to kaishi and reworked some old links
2023-04-09: Fixed broken tango deck links with ankidrone links
2022-09-04: Added reference to the learning to output page
2022-06-01: Added reference to narrow reading and early reading tips
2021-07-16: Swapped Tae Kim for Sakubi, added pitch training section, rewrote a lot of parts of the page
2021-02-13: Added bunpro-relevant sections, verb conjugation videos, and wanikani references.
2020-10-17: Added Anki recommended settings section
2020-10-08: First creation

Japanese Primer

2021-07-16T13:40

If you’re confused by the huge amount of resources and options available to you and just want to learn Japanese, here’s what I recommend.

As always, this is just my personal opinion. There’s no best way: what works for me might not work for you. Don’t stress it, if something is not working out then use something else.

If you disagree with what I’ve written here, that’s okay too. I’m not the ultimate authority on Japanese learning.

READ THIS FIRST:

FIRST:

Learn Hiragana and Katakana.

THEN:

Learn Grammar + Vocab + Kanji

Do NOT skip ahead, do kana first. Japanese will still be there after you’re done with them don’t worry.

Grammar

Read Yokubi# if you value independence and just want to read native material as soon as possible.
Read Genki if you want a textbook.

Vocab

Install and learn how to use Anki (Also read this page)
Grab a core deck and start learning core vocab. My recommendation is to get the kaishi core deck.
Once you’re finished with those, start sentence mining.

NOTE: Don’t burn out on anki, stick to ~10 new words a day for a few weeks to see how it goes.

Kanji

You don’t need to worry about kanji, they can wait for later. Focus on learning vocab (words) and you will learn to recognize kanji as you go. You’ll figure out what to do about it later, trust me.

It is much easier to learn kanji if you already know a lot of words, so just learn those words. No need to rush it. Read stuff with Furigana at first so you won’t have to worry about it. Use yomitan to read on the web. See also: Practical Tips to Facilitate Early Reading#

Extra

Bookmark Japanese - Frequently Asked Questions and Unlocking Japanese: Tricks and read them every time you are confused about something.
Read Japanese Learning Loop# if you want a more general overview.
Read Japanese Learning Resources if you want alternative options to the resources mentioned above. I also go in more details about each of them.
Read Beginner Japanese Immersion Material if you’re looking for something to read that might suit a beginner.
Join EJLX and ask questions in #japanese_questions if you need help. Tell them Morg sent you.

You’re done! Good luck and have fun.

NOTE

If you disagree with anything I’ve written here or think you can do better, then come fight me in #japanese_study on EJLX, I’m not afraid.

Japanese - Frequently Asked Questions

2021-05-26T14:35

Hanging around Japanese learning communities, I see the following questions all the time. In most cases, the answer is always the same and it involves a quick link to a page with (what I consider) the best explanation currently available.

Since this process of linking these pages is often automatic (most of these are bot commands in the #japanese_questions channel in the EJLX server), I figured I’d just collect all of them here too for people to browse.

NOTE: If you think you have a better resource to link, please let me know via any kind of social media (Morg) and I’ll give it a look/update this page.

If what you’re looking for is not here, consider also reading the Unlocking Japanese: Tricks# page.

General Questions

How do I learn Japanese?

See Japanese Learning Loop.

How do I learn hiragana and katakana?

Hiragana: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
Katakana: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/

Is Genki / Tae Kim good?

Yes and yes. They are some of the most common learning resources, you can’t go wrong with them. Don’t worry too much about finding what is best, just start learning and stick to it.
See also: Japanese Learning Resources

What is the difference between は and が?

Watch this video (seriously, do it)
Alternatively, read this page

Why is こんにちは pronounced konnichiwa?

こんにちは used to be part of a longer sentence in which は was the particle, so when it got shortened to just a greeting it stayed like that.
Same for こんばんは.

What are onyomi and kunyomi? Why is this kanji read this way?

Read this tofugu article
Also see Onyomi and Kunyomi

What is the difference between formal and polite?

Grammar Questions

What is the difference between 小さい and 小さな / 大きい and 大きな?

Read this stackexchange post
Quick summary: the “な variant” can only go before a noun, not after.
The meaning is almost the same, don’t worry too much about it.

Trivia Questions

Why is “lol” w or 草?

To laugh is 笑う
笑う -> わらう -> warau -> w
Lots of laughs, lots of w
wwwwww kinda looks like grass
Grass = 草

How are じ, ぢ, ず, づ pronounced?

It depends on the region of Japan/local dialect
Read this wikipedia page

Kanji

2021-05-15T16:42

This section is still getting expanded as I do more research and collect my thoughts, however if you want a kickstart course on kanji I recommend reading the following links:

What are Kanji?

You can think of kanji as something similar to very specialized emojis. If you take the Japanese spoken language and put it into writing, you can decide to write words in hiragana, katakana, or add extra flavor with kanji.

Kanji have a lot of different uses, but probably the most evident one is to make it easier to distinguish word boundaries (as traditional Japanese does not use spaces) and to differentiate between homonyms (words pronounced the same but with different meanings).

It is common to teach kanji to foreigners by assigning an English keyword/meaning to each symbol. However, I think it’s more appropriate to think of them as individual components that act as replacement for already existing words in the language. While an individual kanji can carry certain meanings and connotations, in reality it will always be a representation of a real Japanese word.

Some words can be replaced with a single individual kanji:
- にく(meat) can be replaced with just 肉にく.
Some other words can instead be composed of multiple kanji in sequence:
- くも (spider) can be written as 蜘くも蛛.
Some take the form of combinations of a fixed kanji “root” and some additional conjugations in hiragana (called okurigana):
- The verb のむ (to drink) is 飲のむ and its conjugations modify the む part of the word (飲のまない, 飲のめる, 飲のんで, etc)

It is important to understand the relationship that the kanji symbols have with the actual readings of the words they represent, otherwise you might end up thinking that kanji are words. Kanji are not words, they are a typographical representation of a spoken language.

Origin of Kanji (short version)

NOTE: This is a very brief summary, it’s not meant to be a historically accurate and thorough explanation.

A long time ago, the ancestor language of modern Japanese existed only as spoken language within the island of Japan. It did not have a writing system. One day a bunch of scholars arrived from China and brought into the country a multitude of Chinese scriptures and other ornamental tools full of kanji.

Japan, needing a writing system for itself, decided to adopt these symbols for its own literature (see: Japanese writing systems). A bunch of transformations happened to the language over the centuries and we ended up with hiragana and katakana as simplifications of man’yogana (phonetic kanji) and hentaigana.

Despite all this, the kanji system remained and eventually split from the original Chinese version. Today you will see that Japanese kanji are often different from (modern) Chinese symbols (called hanzi), although they still share a lot of similarities.

Fundamentals of Kanji

Unlocking Japanese: Tricks

2020-10-10T12:15

As described in Japanese Learning Loop#, achieving learning independence is fundamental to unlocking language acquisition.

The most important thing is being able to navigate the vast amount of resources available to you on the Internet without getting lost or incorrect advice.

These are the steps that I follow whenever I get stumped by something new in Japanese that I cannot understand.

Also I recommend reading Practical Tips to Facilitate Early Reading# if you are looking for more general practical tooling to help you read.

Japanese Learning Resources

2020-08-29T13:11

This is a mostly scattered collection of sites, tooling, and all kind of things that can help you learn Japanese.

Comprehensive Guides

This site’s very own Japanese Learning Loop
TheMoeWay
Refold
Awesome Japanese Beginner Guide
r/LearnJapanese Beginner Wiki
Wasabi’s Japanese Self-Learning Guides

Textbooks

Genki

The go-to de-facto textbook for Japanese beginners that want to learn in a classroom-like setting with structured lessons and workbook exercises.

Pretty much everyone will tell you to get Genki if you want to start learning Japanese. Personally, I’m not a big fan and I prefer the Japanese for Busy People series, however I seem to be in the minority.

Japanese For Busy People

Another textbook like Genki with a classroom-like lesson structure. It covers about the same topics as Genki, and personally it’s what I’ve used myself. I would recommend it over Genki as I found it to have a better format, but overall they are very similar. Get the kana version, don’t even bother with the romaji one(Japanese writing systems).

Japanese the Manga Way

This textbook is very interesting to me. It attempts to provide some kind of crash course to Japanese grammar by real world examples of manga snippets. It’s great for beginners and covers a surprisingly large amount of grammar condensed into a relatively low number of pages. I used it mostly to learn basic particles and sentence structure as a beginner and it carried me a long way, surprisingly.

An Introduction to Modern Japanese

Relatively old (2004?) and hard to come by textbook. I include it here because albeit extremely expensive for what it’s worth and hard to find online, it provides a very “different” approach to modern Japanese learning practices. The book itself is very intensive and is not afraid to jump into complex Japanese from the get go, every chapter is introduced with a quite meaty block of conversation/text to immerse in. No furigana, extensive use of kanji. It definitely does not hold a beginner’s hand through its material, but I found it to be very interesting and appreciated it for what it is.

Definitely not essential, but if you can get your hands on a copy as a side read it can be quite an experience.

Tobira

Following Genki, this seems to be the de-facto material to use. I see this being recommended every time after someone finishes with their Genki studies, although I have never tried it myself.

Grammar

Yokubi

A re-write of sakubi written by yours truly. It has a very hands on approach. It is similar to Tae Kim with the difference that it’s much more brisk and straight to the point. The main core of the guide is to get you to become aware of certain grammar structures and sentence style so you can become more independent and start reading as early as possible without getting stuck on overly complex explanations or textbook exercises. It’s not for everybody but it really resonates strongly with me and I think it’s a good idea to read over it at least once.

Imabi

This site is crazy. There’s pretty much everything you may want to know about the Japanese language grammar.

However, it’s extremely verbose and can be very confusing/convoluted in the explanations even for the simplest grammatical concepts. It’s great to look up individual grammar points if you want to get the finer intricacies and subtleties of the language, but I wouldn’t use it as a textbook alone.

Tae Kim

Often proclaimed as the entry point to learn Japanese grammar for beginners. I personally haven’t used it much and I’ve read a lot of criticism about the way he approaches some explanations (sometimes even incorrectly). Overall, it seems to work really well for a lot of people so it must be doing some things right at least.

An Introduction to Japanese

Probably one of my favorite grammar overviews of the Japanese language when it comes to information density and format. It’s great for looking up structure and grammar to get a thorough mental map of how some aspects of the Japanese language works.

It is not to be used as a beginner resource or as a learning textbook. I like to re-read it once in a while as my language knowledge improves to further cement the fundamentals and broaden my understanding.

Just note that it’s been written by a non native and I’ve actually found a few inaccuracies or incorrect statements here and there. It’s not a big deal but just be aware of it and don’t get too attached to everything that’s written there.

Cure Dolly’s Video Series

While I am not a fan of the video format and the way Dolly speaks, she has a lot of content out there that a lot of people seem to enjoy, so maybe it’s worth it giving it a look. A big disclaimer is that there are quite a bit of inaccuracies and explanations that don’t quite match how Japanese actually works. They might be white lies for beginners, which is not entirely a bad thing, but some stuff can be a bit puzzling.

If it works well for you, by all means use it to learn Japanese, but be careful not to take everything she says at face value and be ready to re-adjust your assessment of the language in the future as you improve.

A dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar

These three books are exactly what the name implies. A literal dictionary of all possible grammar points in the Japanese language. Use them to look up individual grammar points, they are really good.

I believe if anyone is even remotely serious about learning the language, these are absolutely essential to have. I prefer them on paper but there are digital version too.

A Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns

This book is the complementary of the dictionaries of Japanese grammar mentioned above. It is a very hands-on dictionary-like approach to a huge number of various Japanese grammar patterns. Integrating both of them together provides you with an almost 100% coverage of all Japanese grammar points. The explanations are very extensive with plenty of examples too. If you are feeling confident in your Japanese abilities, there’s also a Japanese version (the original I think) which I would recommend as it is how this index was meant to be experienced.

To be honest I prefer this over the dictionary of basic/intermetdiate/advanced Japanese grammar mentioned above, but if you get both it’s even better.

Useful Sites to Bookmark

Core6000 Neocities’s and Itazuraneko’s aggregates

This is not a single resource per-se, but they are aggregates/index lists of all the dictionaries of japanese grammar and handbook of japanese grammar patterns entries (mentioned above) into a single place for easy browsing. If you could only bookmark and save a single website, either one of these would be it. This is really almost all you’ll ever need.

Japanese Counter Index

This site has a list of various counters to look up based on what words you need to count. It’s a very useful resource to have at hand.

The Jaded Network SFX

Amazing website to look up onomatopoeias and onomatopoeic words. It is unfortunately unmaintained and very old. If it breaks for you, make sure you are accessing the site using http instead of https.

jpdb

Very interesting project, it tries to be some kind of Japanese-learning/study tool, but where it really shines in my opinion is the curated and well maintained list of novels, visual novels, anime, etc sorted by complexity and word frequency. It lets you create your own decks, export to anki, and a bunch of other fancy stuff.

massif

Sentence search over a corpus of a lot of light novels written on narou. Very useful if you want to look for certain phrases to see if something is common or how a word is used in context.

Apps

Anki

Self-explanatory, just read the linked page.

Wanikani

I have personally never used it myself, so I can’t give a personal opinion on it. However, I know plenty of people that vouch for it as a really good alternative to RTK/Core anki decks both for kanji learning and for core vocabulary SRS practice. It is a paid resource though, so be aware of that, but it seems worth it. If I were starting from scratch myself now I’d probably give it a go.

Bunpro

Another paid resource. Bunpro in my opinion does an excellent job at grouping up all (most?) grammar by JLPT levels and providing you a somewhat clear study path depending on what textbook you are following (or you are free to build your own study plan too). You can just look up grammar points you come across in your studies and add them to reviews, and you will be drilled SRS style every day on them. Some sentences and English hints are a bit awkward and it won’t give you a comprehensive explanation of the grammar patterns, but overall it is more useful than it is not and I would personally recommend it even for more intermediate learners.

If you’re interested, I recommend reading how I approach studying with bunpro at Fitting Bunpro in your study routine#.

Yomitan

This is a must-have browser extension. It tells you how words are read and what they mean with dictionary definition as you move your mouse cursor over them in your browser.

Japanese - Morg Systems

Collection of Japanese phrases your textbook won’t teach you

The science of letting go

Word classification

Make stuff up

Learning to Output

Index:

List of Bad Ideas for Japanese Study

Optimal Reading Immersion - Narrow Reading

Introduction

What is Narrow Reading

First Few Pages Effect

Read Whatever You Want

Importance of Contextual Reading

Content Words vs Function Words

Conclusion

References

Japanese Learning Loop

Diagram

Step 0: Foundation

Step 1: Basics

Grammar

Bunpro

Vocabulary

Anki Core Deck

RTK

Wanikani

Listening

Step 2: The Loop

Sentence Mining Deck (preparation)

Discovery Phase

Consumption Phase

Improvement Phase

Step 3: Fluency

CHANGELOG

Japanese Primer

READ THIS FIRST:

Grammar

Vocab

Kanji

Extra

NOTE

Japanese - Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

How do I learn Japanese?

How do I learn hiragana and katakana?

Is Genki / Tae Kim good?

What is the difference between は and が?

Why is こんにちは pronounced konnichiwa?

What are onyomi and kunyomi? Why is this kanji read this way?

What is the difference between formal and polite?

Grammar Questions

I don’t undersand this verb conjugation

What is the difference between だ and です?

What is the difference between these conditionals? (たら vs ば vs と vs …)

What is the difference between の and こと?

What does の means at the end of a sentence?

How do ていく and てくる work?

What is the difference between 小さい and 小さな / 大きい and 大きな?

Trivia Questions

Why is “lol” w or 草?

How are じ, ぢ, ず, づ pronounced?

Kanji

What are Kanji?

Origin of Kanji (short version)

Fundamentals of Kanji

Unlocking Japanese: Tricks

Japanese Learning Resources

Comprehensive Guides

Textbooks

Grammar

Useful Sites to Bookmark

Core6000 Neocities’s and Itazuraneko’s aggregates

Apps