Learning Japanese From Zero

[golyplot]

I didn't miss it. Although I'm slightly puzzled, because it's not like I just stumbled upon your log, I've been here and regularly engaging with you in your log right from the start, and I was the one who originally suggested LingQ to you early on, so it would be rather impossible for me to miss it (in that light, your request is kind of funny)

Sorry about that. I knew you've been commenting on my log, I just thought maybe you missed the page where I talked about LingQ or something. I forgot that you were the one who suggested it!


Anyway, speaking of audio learning, yesterday I decided to start listening to Nihongo con Teppei while eating. For the last (almost) four months, I've been listening to Japanese music while eating meals. I didn't think it would actually help much, but I figured I might as well. Yesterday, I came up with the idea of replacing that with Nihongo con Teppei (using player.fm to play them one after another automatically). Hopefully this will super-charge my listening skills, since the later is at least somewhat comprehensible and not just background noise.

[devilyoudont]

If you like the idea of lingq but can't do a paid subscription, two free alternatives exist:

Foreign Language Text Reader and Learning with Texts

Unlike others, I have no idea who I have recommended what to before, so sorry if I have already told you about these programs.

[golyplot]

I didn't do as much Japanese study this weekend as I would have liked (I mostly focused on non-Japanese activities), but as of today, I have completed all N5 grammar points on Bunpro, so that's pretty cool. It makes me wonder if I'd be capable of passing the N5 exam yet. I think vocabulary and listening comprehension would still be major weak points for me.

[golyplot]

Sunday night and Monday morning, I read two more N5 articles on Watanoc. I was a bit frustrated that I often completely misunderstood the meaning of a sentence even when I understood all the components. I wish there was somewhere that explained why things meant what they did better.

Monday night, I had trouble sleeping, so I got up again and did some Japanese practice to try to fall asleep. I decided to try reading Yotsuba again. I got about twelve and a half pages in in half an hour (including the pages with no text!). I still couldn't understand anything, but I could at least recognize more bits after reading the English translation of each sentence. I don't understand why people recommend it for beginners at all though. It's harder to read than say, NHK News Easy. It has lots of colloquial language and very few kanji, which is good for Japanese children but the opposite of what Japanese learners need. It might be easy to read as far as manga go, but if so, that's not saying much.


Update: I read another two stories on Watanoc this morning. I think I'm getting better at it. It's interesting how often I mouse over to get the definition of a word, only to realize it is a word I learned way back on WK, just written with kana instead of kanji.

[crush]

If you have one or two questions, i've found that a great place to ask is the LearnJapanese subreddit. Every week they have a pinned thread called "シツモンデー"/ShitsuMonday where you can ask any questions you like. It's up all week long, not just on Monday. I've asked things there a few times and every time there have been at least two or three people take the time to answer. Especially now when our questions are more "beginner" questions.

I can relate to feeling lost when reading texts, i'm currently reading a manga (that was the basis for an anime i watched) and it's rough going, especially with regards to pronunciation as most of the kanji are at least familiar to me. But reading is something i neglected with Mandarin and i really regret it so i just grit my teeth as i work my way through. I actually enjoy the story, but being inundated with so much undecipherable text is just overwhelming a lot of the time.

[golyplot]

My Wanikani lesson session tonight had three different words pronounced こうとう (高等, 喉頭, and 叩頭). I noticed the second was pronounced with a different stress than the others, kind of like the speaker was worried or in pain, while the the other two sounded neutral. Perhaps this is a sign of the much ballyhooed pitch accent. The third one is also pronounced slightly different than the first, but the difference was subtle enough that I couldn't tell except by switching between the two repeatedly, and I'm not entirely positive it's a real difference.

P.S. In order to type those words out, I had to flip through 75 different options in the IME to find 叩頭! Typing Japanese must be a pain. Though I imagine in normal circumstances, you would write the words in context instead of randomly listing words, and I'm guessing Google is smart enough to rank the suggestions based on the context of your writing.

[vonPeterhof]

My Wanikani lesson session tonight had three different words pronounced こうとう (高等, 喉頭, and 叩頭). I noticed the second was pronounced with a different stress than the others, kind of like the speaker was worried or in pain, while the the other two sounded neutral. Perhaps this is a sign of the much ballyhooed pitch accent. The third one is also pronounced slightly different than the first, but the difference was subtle enough that I couldn't tell except by switching between the two repeatedly, and I'm not entirely positive it's a real difference.

According to all the dictionaries I consulted all three of those words have the exact same pitch pattern in standard Japanese. Specifically the "accentless", "zero" or "flat" pattern (which doesn't mean it's literally monotonous, just that there's no downstep).

[golyplot]

As of tonight, I've officially been studying Japanese for four months, so I guess it's time for a status update.

Wanikani: Level 19. Guru+ items: 623漢字 1886単語
Bunpro: Level 23. 111/111 N5 items and 12/178 N4 items studied
Watanoc: Read a total of 12 articles to date. I think it's getting a bit easier. I haven't gotten around to asking for grammar explanations on Reddit as suggested earlier though.
Nihongo con Teppei: Listened to somewhere around 160 episodes over the last week.

To try to gauge my progress, I took some practice N5 quizzes online tonight. I was really hoping that after four months of study, I'd at least be in a position to comfortably pass the N5, but it seems that I'd still fail miserably.

I started with this test. I'd already seen the first three questions previously, so those don't count. Out of questions 4-6, I only got one right (5) and even that was just an (educated) guess, so I gave up after that. In the case of questions 4 and 5, the key word in the question was one I hadn't seen before (勤める and そうじ respectively). Or at least I probably saw そうじ on Lingodeer at some point, but Lingodeer's lack of SRS review meant that there was no hope of actually remembering it. My hope with doing the Core2k deck on Anki was to shore up my weakness in common vocabulary that WK didn't happen to cover, but as I mentioned before, I got frustrated and gave up on Anki. Question 6 was a grammar question, which I had no idea on, despite actively studying grammar and having completed all the N5 grammar points on Bunpro. Unfortunately, it seems that Bunpro can't prepare you for the N5 practice questions, let alone real world grammar usage. I'd already started to suspect that the only real way to "study" grammar was to soak it up the hard way via immersion.

After that, I did the quiz here and got 13/15 right. However, I don't think that actually counts for anything, since their questions are obviously much easier than the ones at the first link, which are supposed to be representative of the real questions. The ones at nihongomaster by contrast had a lot of easy questions asking you stuff like "What does め mean?" or "What is the Japanese word for see" which are pretty trivial to anyone who's done any Japanese study at all. And I still had to make an educated guess on the one reading comprehension and listening comprehension question at the end of that quiz due to not being familiar with some of the words involved.

P.S. Lately I've been thinking about trying to take the N3 JLPT this December just for fun. I knew it was an ambitious goal, but after tonight, it seems downright hopeless. Oh well. As long as I don't give up, I'll make progress in Japanese eventually.

[kelvin921019]

As of tonight, I've officially been studying Japanese for four months, so I guess it's time for a status update.

Wanikani: Level 19. Guru+ items: 623漢字 1886単語
Bunpro: Level 23. 111/111 N5 items and 12/178 N4 items studied
Watanoc: Read a total of 12 articles to date. I think it's getting a bit easier. I haven't gotten around to asking for grammar explanations on Reddit as suggested earlier though.
Nihongo con Teppei: Listened to somewhere around 160 episodes over the last week.

To try to gauge my progress, I took some practice N5 quizzes online tonight. I was really hoping that after four months of study, I'd at least be in a position to comfortably pass the N5, but it seems that I'd still fail miserably.

I started with this test. I'd already seen the first three questions previously, so those don't count. Out of questions 4-6, I only got one right (5) and even that was just an (educated) guess, so I gave up after that. In the case of questions 4 and 5, the key word in the question was one I hadn't seen before (勤める and そうじ respectively). Or at least I probably saw そうじ on Lingodeer at some point, but Lingodeer's lack of SRS review meant that there was no hope of actually remembering it. My hope with doing the Core2k deck on Anki was to shore up my weakness in common vocabulary that WK didn't happen to cover, but as I mentioned before, I got frustrated and gave up on Anki. Question 6 was a grammar question, which I had no idea on, despite actively studying grammar and having completed all the N5 grammar points on Bunpro. Unfortunately, it seems that Bunpro can't prepare you for the N5 practice questions, let alone real world grammar usage. I'd already started to suspect that the only real way to "study" grammar was to soak it up the hard way via immersion.

After that, I did the quiz here and got 13/15 right. However, I don't think that actually counts for anything, since their questions are obviously much easier than the ones at the first link, which are supposed to be representative of the real questions. The ones at nihongomaster by contrast had a lot of easy questions asking you stuff like "What does め mean?" or "What is the Japanese word for see" which are pretty trivial to anyone who's done any Japanese study at all. And I still had to make an educated guess on the one reading comprehension and listening comprehension question at the end of that quiz due to not being familiar with some of the words involved.

P.S. Lately I've been thinking about trying to take the N3 JLPT this December just for fun. I knew it was an ambitious goal, but after tonight, it seems downright hopeless. Oh well. As long as I don't give up, I'll make progress in Japanese eventually.

If you wish to test on your N5 knowledge, you can try the "MyTest" app which I have been using for my preparation of JLPT exams:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eup.mytest&hl=en
The format of its tests are exactly the same as the JLPT format and the only downside is that it may contain some (probably 1-2) questions with N4 contents.

And regarding Lingodeer, one thing you can try is to put the title of the lessons into Anki (tho I prefer creating my own schedule in excel) and whenever the name pops up you do a review of that lesson. Basically using Anki as a SRS schedule reminder. Alternatively, I knew that there's a Lingodeer JP1 deck available on Anki. Lingodeer JP1 together with the first 8 lessons of JP2 should cover what general regarded as the "syllabus" of N5 if you have digested all its materials (not the stories, they are too advanced sometimes).

[golyplot]

Today my free trial of Bunpro ended again. I think it is somewhat helpful, but not helpful enough to justify paying at the moment, so I'll put it on hold for now.

I also decided to give Anki another try, since I still need to find a way to learn the kana-only words I won't get from WK. At first, I thought I would have to figure out how to filter the deck to kana-only words somehow using Anki's python interface, but then I came up with a much simpler solution: Whenever I see a word with kanji, I immediately mark it as easy, regardless of whether I know it or not. It's almost as good as having a kana-only deck to begin with. I also adjusted the intervals. Unfortunately, I still find it very hard to learn new words from Anki.

If you wish to test on your N5 knowledge, you can try the "MyTest" app which I have been using for my preparation of JLPT exams:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eup.mytest&hl=en
The format of its tests are exactly the same as the JLPT format and the only downside is that it may contain some (probably 1-2) questions with N4 contents.

Thanks! I'll have to check that out.