Hi i'm Alivia and today i'm going to tell you how you can get to a point where you can read
beginner japanese books in less than six months i started learning japanese six months ago and i'm
far from being fluent at beginning i was really overwhelmed with all the different resources
all the different people telling you how to different things like i'm doing right now
so keep watching my videos please um but i know from experience how overwhelming it can be to get
started so today i want to show you exactly what i did my first six months of learning japanese and
what i wish i'd done differently right now i'm at about an n4 level and in six months i'm planning
on taking the jlpt n3 so hopefully if you follow what i did in the first six months you'll be able
to be there too there's three things you need to know to build up your foundational knowledge of
japanese there's grammar there's vocab and there's kanji for grammar i decided to go with the genki
textbook series so there's two volumes and there are also two workbooks they're really good place
to start because they give you good structure and really hold your hand in the first steps of
learning the language which i really liked i did do all the exercises for the first couple chapters
in the first textbook but i found a lot of it really repetitive i think that there's only so
many grammar drills that you can do and the point of the grammar textbook is more just to get you
familiar with the language and know what to look out for but i don't think doing drills is the most
effective way of learning the grammar points it definitely won't hurt you definitely can if that's
something that you enjoy but reading how grammar point is used over and over again isn't going to
cement it in your brain you're going to remember it by seeing it in context maybe stumbling a
couple of times forgetting what it's used for and then over time it will become second nature
what you're doing in the textbook is you're just learning the foundation of how to use the language
overall they're a solid textbook series but they are a bit pricey so if you have the money i would
recommend them but there are definitely ways that you can learn the same content for cheaper
and i'll talk about that more in another video in more depth okay so next is vocab and as a beginner
you absolutely need to create a good foundation for vocabulary i would say around 2000 words
because when you start reading it's going to be really annoying to have to look up every second
word when you're trying to read when i started i was using a website called memrise which i'll link
below and i used that to learn the vocabulary that came in the genki textbooks i thought this was a
really good place to start because it really eases you into getting used to seeing words in japanese
but because it's like that i don't think it's the best thing to stick with long term because
it doesn't really test you on recalling words it only tests you on recognition so most of the
questions will be giving you the word in japanese and then you'll have four options to choose from
of what it means in english in the long term this isn't going to lock it into your long-term memory
so memrise is a good thing to use for your first couple of weeks to a month
of learning japanese but then i would switch to a different learning system
so what i'm using now for vocabulary is something called anki and anki is really powerful and really
good to use but it is a total headache to get started with and it's a space repetition system
this is really good for training your long-term memory because anki will only show you a word
when it thinks you're just about to forget it and then if i get it wrong i'll be showing that word
more often until i start to get them right again and then those intervals will get longer at the
beginning i think it's really important to have a dedicated way of learning vocabulary because
you're starting from scratch but as you learn more words it's going to be easier to pick up
words just as you're reading i didn't start using anki until i was maybe three or four
months into studying japanese and i wish that i had started sooner anki is a really versatile
application but it's not very user friendly and can be intimidating to get started with so i'm
going to make another video showing you how to get started with it one important thing to know though
is when you are learning vocabulary yes you want to learn a lot of vocabulary but don't go too fast
each word that you learn you're going to have to review on another day and if you have too many
reviews that all happen to fall in the same day you're going to become overwhelmed a good area
is to do 5 to 20 words a day because there's only so much new vocabulary you can learn in a day and
at a certain point your retention is just going to go downhill the third thing i want to talk about
is kanji which is really important when you're learning japanese and with kanji i would recommend
getting started with it as soon as possible because the amount of kanji that you know is
really going to affect when you can start reading native content if you don't know enough kanji even
if you know a lot of grammar rules and a lot of vocabulary that uses hiragana if you don't know
enough kanji it's going to be really frustrating when you start reading so what i used for learning
kanji from day one was a website called wanikani and i really love wanikani and i've been using
it every day since i started using it it's an online program that teaches you kanji in a really
digestible way it doesn't overwhelm you it teaches you kanji from the most simple kanji that use the
least amount of lines and it slowly builds up to using more complicated kanji that have a ton
of lines and can look really confusing so it really builds your confidence slowly and it's
a really sustainable way to learn kanji wanikani really spoon feeds you how to remember the kanji
and gives you these fun little riddles that will help you remember what it is and it sounds really
silly but it actually really helps you with your memory if you have a connection to what it is
another thing that i really like about wanikani is that it breaks up everything that you're learning
into different levels and it sounds silly but having these levels really motivate me
and make me feel like i'm progressing every time i get to a new level at first i know a lot of people
complain that wanikani starts out really slow but trust me that goes away in like a month and
the reason it does this is because reviews start to pile on at the beginning you only are learning
maybe 20 words so you're only seeing those 20 words in your review cycles but as you keep
going you're gonna add more words to those reviews and then the amount of reviews that you have every
day is going to increase and wanikani is also an srs system which is a space repetition system so
wanikani will adjust what words you see depending on how well you're doing every time you get a
word right the time it takes for you to see that word again increases it really optimizes the way
of remembering kanji because the words that you don't know very well you'll see more often and the
words that you do know really well you'll see less often one reason that people don't like wanikani
is because it is a paid service it's about nine dollars a month if you have the nine dollars a
month it's really worth it because wanikani has a really nice user interface it's really easy to use
it will have a native speaker saying the word in japanese to you and it sounds really superficial
but it just looks nice which just makes me more willing to do it every day and i'll do a video
that talks about wanikani in more depth because there's a lot i can say about it but i really
recommend it and wanikani does have a free trial period which will last about two to three weeks
if you haven't decided on a way to learn your kanji as yet try wanikani's free trial and then at
the end you can decide if you want to keep with it or if you want to switch to something else those
were the basic resources i used for my grammar vocabulary and kanji and that was what i was
using for the first couple of months of learning japanese another thing that i was doing from when
i first started is i was watching a lot of stuff in japanese to get used to listening to language
so i was listening to some podcasts i was watching anime in japanese i would recommend to stop
watching with english subtitles as soon as you can because you're not going to really be listening to
the japanese your brain is going to kind of tune it out as you're reading the english subtitles
so i'd recommend watching something that you've already seen and you already understand what's
going on and re-watch it in japanese without subtitles or with japanese subtitles at the
beginning you're not going to understand anything that's being said at all so don't feel discouraged
you're just trying to get your brain used to listening to japanese so those were the basic
things i was doing during my first about three to four months but at this point i was feeling a bit
demotivated because i felt like i had put in all this time all these months of japanese
but i didn't really feel like i could actually use it i could read my passages that were in my
genki textbook but then i would try something like nhk easy news which is a website that has
news articles written for children in japanese but i could barely read one of those without getting
frustrated so i felt like after all this time of studying i hadn't really made any progress and
felt really demotivated so that takes us to the most important part of learning japanese which is
immersion immersion just means you are surrounding yourself in the language so i was already sort
of doing this with listening to my podcasts and watching anime but it wasn't enough immersion and
it wasn't something that was comprehensible for me so at this point i decided okay
i want to read my very first book in japanese all i can do right now is just read these really short
stories these short paragraphs that were in my genki textbook but i want to be able to actually
read a full book in japanese that was written for japanese speakers i use things like lingQ and
satori reader to get started they're not native resources but they are a really great place to
start reading longer paragraphs of text. content that's made for japanese learners is absolutely
great but at a certain point you do have to start getting your feet wet with things that are harder
and for people who speak japanese and it was about five months in when i read my very first
book and it was a manga that i'll pop up here i had about two thousand vocabulary words under
my belt and about 500 kanji i definitely didn't understand every single sentence when i first
read it through i would look up a couple of words if i didn't understand but if i understood what
was going on overall i would just keep moving on and after i got through this first book i i felt
really happy that i accomplished this and i really liked it because i felt like i really made a lot
of progress even in just that one book so the five month mark i read my very first book and by the
end of my sixth month i had read five books so i really revved up how much i was reading and i can
really feel how much i'm improving i think manga is the best place to start because you're going
to have images so you can follow what's going on it's not going to be these long sentences that are
hard to understand it will just be what people say day to day consuming japanese content is the best
way to improve the fastest way to improve so i do wish i started learning earlier but i recognized
that if i had it would have been a lot harder at the beginning it's going to feel really hard at
first no matter how many words you know because it's your first time really trying to understand
something that was written for someone who already knows japanese you're not reading something that
is trying to spoon feed you things you already know just start somewhere and start small and it
will be really hard at first but the more you do it the easier it will get because yeah i really
think that immersion is the key to learning any language not just japanese but because japanese
is so different than english it definitely takes a lot more upfront to be able to do that so i hope
this video gave you an idea of what to expect when learning japanese and kind of gave you a road map
to build your own study plan off of now what i did you could definitely do a lot faster
and that's the point of my channel is i really want to help people get to where i am faster
than i did because i know that there's a lot of mistakes that i did a lot of things that i could
start sooner a lot of resources that i wish i found i'd love to hear down below how long you've
been learning japanese for what kind of resources you're using if you have any tips that you'd love
to mention to other people if there's something that you're really struggling with with japanese
that you'd like me to talk about in another video and i think that's all for now thanks
bye