Get 1 extra month of Migaku access for free by signing up using my reflink: migaku.io/free-month/Livakivi Check out Migaku on TH-cam: th-cam.com/users/ImmersewithMigaku Anyway, hopefully this video helps with learning Japanese! If you have any questions, leave them down below and I'll try to answer as much as I can! Stay tuned for the follow-ups to this video, where I go more in depth about Anki, sentence mining, immersion, and so on!
@Livakivi Love your Videos Man. I started learning Japanese in 2020 because I watched alot of Anime, but it was hard for me reading the Subtitles and stuff, so I was like, "Well, if I learn Japanese, then I won't need the Subtitles, and I can understand what they're saying on my own." So I started on Duolingo. Since then, I've quit learning Japanese for multiple Months, about 10 times, due to lack of motivation. But this time, I'm determined to learn Japanese everyday. Rn, I've been good for about 4-5 Weeks. But anyway, the point is that I'm poor. I cannot afford Netflix, for the Japanese Subtitles to be able to immerse. And at the level I'm at now, I tried to turn my Games to Japanese Dub, and Sub, but I cannot understand ANYTHING. Is there a better way for me to immerse for free?
Update: Yo, this Core2k/6k Deck is HARD. I went from the JLPT N5 Tango Deck with learning to say, 1 person, 2 peopele, I have a Dog, I have a Brother, stuff like that to, Core2k/6k with, "She has 3 Children" or "I have Four Wristwatches" I literally almost deleted it on the First Card because it was so hard. But Imma try to push through, and finish it. I don't see how you do it bro. You do this for HOURS on end, and I can barely do it for 5 Minutes.
Possibly not the right place to ask but, Have you seen the videogame Project Zomboid? I watched ur runescape video and have been on the look out for games that kind of have that feel and surplace of a bunch of words and I think it'd be interesting to hear ur thoughts on it and its Japanese translation (and if itd be good to learn some Japanese with)
@@seventytew Are you using the core 2k/6k deck in some sentence card format? Its generally a vocabulary deck where the words are i+1, but the sentences are not i+1 because they're meant to serve as an example, not the target of the card.
@@Salchichas38 I saw your other comment, it's your 2nd month right now right? Yeah basically, I can now comfortably read both hiragana and katakana. It took me a month to "memorize" hiragana. By memorizing I mean I literally just got used to it. I used hate memorizing, for the first three weeks I refused to use Anki. So I just forced my way into knowing it, just like immersion but on a smaller scale. Weirdly, for katakana it only took me 4 days. I started katakana when I memorized like 90% of hiragana.
@@Salchichas38 Don't be discouraged though, I got my slow start too! Keep grinding those xp and you'll memorize it in no time. I really struggled in the first month, but I found my own methods, something clicked in my brain and now I really enjoy spending my time learning Japanese.
@@Salchichas38 if u use tofugu's method to learning hiragana and katakana you can learn both with ease in 4 days (as well as their combination kana), thats how I did it and after those 4 days you don't really need to study it further unless you feel like you still have trouble with it because you will be seeing it everyday anyways.
I think one of the dangers regarding the routine of new cards to review, is that one can get overcoonfident after a period of time, which leads to one increasing the amount of new cards per day too drastically. This in turn can develop into too many reviews piling up overtime, and losing control of the previosly developed routine, because one is still accustomed to the previous rate of new cards. Hence, increasing new cards by small amounts and getting accustomed to that routine, can help to avoid getting too overwhelmed and procrastinating.
That's exactly why I warned that even 8 to 10 cards may start taking an hour in a few weeks. Definitely worth noting! Start small rather than big, and see from there!
@@Livakivi a good rule of thumb is that it takes about 2 weeks to reach the time its from then on going to take consistently. So if I start with 20 words a day, the time it takes me to complete my anki session will increase day by day until it takes me around 1.5h on day 14. From then on the time usually stays consistent and I can expect most sessions to take a similar amount of time after that. Another good rule of thumb is, that around 50% more cards will take about double the time, so if 10 cards a day take me half an hour, 15 cards a day might take me an hour eventually (because cards compound its not linear).
That’s the only reason why I didn’t increase my new cards count. I have lots of time right now but I’m so afraid of the reviews that I’m keeping it down to 20 - 25 😅 I’ll find something else to spend my summer break on
I started in June 2023, it's been around 7 months of daily learning. I can proudly say that the progress made is massive. I am able to understand nearly 60% of anime content and phrases easily. I practice reading Japanese almost daily and practice atleast 15 Anki Cards.
can u pls tell me where to start from basics and y dafaq ppl hate kanji i think its difficult there r 3 lang in japan is kanji imp in daily life pal? ^_^
@@fedrickksogyi4813 I will answer again. Learn Hiragana and Katakana first. They are like ABCD of Japanese ( hardly takes 2-3 weeks and are easy) Try to learn 40-50 few N5 level basic Kanjis. Initial 100 kanjis are not that difficult, in fact easy. Kanjis are essential if you really wanna learn Japanese, but they take forever to learn and start to make less sense after some amount. But still they are like building blocks of words and you need them if you want to read Japanese and learn vocabulary. After you have learned the initial 40-50 kanji, you should start applying your gathered japanese knowledge right away. What I did was, I read Children's books in Japanese. They are not too long nor too complex. And they help in practice and boost your confidence. I will tell you the website in the next comment. After that, you should continue your Japanese learning, by learning new kanji and vocab everyday. Japanese is a tiresome job but it is fun when you really go past the initial hardships. I can assure you the days I spent learning Japanese were full of hardships, but I only regret those days where I skipped studying nothing else. All the best.
I started learning Japanese a month ago after I found myself wondering what the characters in Naruto are really saying (not just what the English subtitles tell me). I was catching on to a few words and phrases that kept coming up and decided that I should look into it. To my surprise, I found that the sentence structure in Japanese is almost the same as that in my native language Bengali. Encouraged by this coincidence and having been enamored by Japanese culture for so long, I decided to start running this ultramarathon in earnest. So here's what I did: 1. I started learning hiragana and katakana on Duolingo. I took it slow and finished maxing out the characters list today. 2. I started using Anki to learn kanji with the NihongoShark deck (based on the Heisig and koohii mnemonics method) 10 days ago. I have already studied (but not memorized completely) 200 kanji. 3. Yesterday, I added the optimized Core 2k 6k deck and started learning 10 vocab words (with 10 sentences each paired with one word) per day. 4. I plan to start studying basic grammar from Tae Kim over the next couple of days and start reading and listening to more beginner-friendly native content (which are kinda hard to come by). For anybody who is here and planning to start learning this wonderful language, remember that it's not a sprint but an ultramarathon. This is how I have made all my good habits stick in life. Let's make this one stick too!
I'm 13 years old and I started learning japanese at the age of 12. Your videos help me to keep learning and to move on with japanese. You are amazing. どうもですよ！
I took Japanese for 2 years in high school and have since unfortunately forgotten much of what I've learned. Japanese is a beautiful language and this video got me hyped to start studying it again!
I highly recommend studying Spanish too! It's a lot easier to grasp as an English speaker and it's really practical. I've been living in South America for the last 6 months and prior to my trip I tried to cram in as much Spanish as I could and I was able to get to basic communication in a few months. On one hand it would have been nice if I had taken it in high school, but I also don't regret studying Japanese at all. At the moment I find time to do a little of both. The methods of studying a language are mostly the same in every language, so the skills you learn by studying one transfers to any language you learn. And if Spanish is the only language your school offers, you should take it, and study Japanese on your own time. The two are distinct enough that you will be able to make progress in both. Best of luck either way :)@@ヤモです
The last part about the effectiveness of input vs. output practice in terms of recalling information is exactly the message immersion learners need to understand when they get to that stage. Reading and listening will help but you have to eventually start outputting for it to feel natural and automatic. Unfortunately so many people who have otherwise massive passive vocabularies are scared to output because they think they don’t have enough input. But it’s really simple: input is a type of recognition exercise and output is a recall exercise. As you explain in the video, you can improve your recall through more recognition exercises, but it’s less effective. If you want to get good at recall, practice recall. Seriously great video on learning Japanese.
I am fluent in 5 languages and started learning Japanese on Duolingo last summer. I fell into the gamification trap and ended up focusing more on the game than on learning. I came across your channel today and binge-watched many of your videos, even some not Japanese-related, because I find them that interesting. I am really thankful for this discovery, the guidance, and the instruments. I will finally stop running around like a headless chicken.
@@عبدالسلامالشهراني-ن8ف Not doing anything is a waste of time. I still learn new vocabulary daily thanks to Duolingo. Whenever I come across a new word in Duolingo I search it on Romajidesu and put it in Anki. And I learned to speed read Kanas thanks to Duolingo.
Incredibly early in my language journey but being able to read the text from 2:22 out loud and get a translation from Google Translate was surprisingly joyous. Much more satisfying than taking a picture with my phone and getting google to translate it like that.
I have something to say as an N2 passer with perfect listening score. Immersion is probably the biggest reason as to why I was able to pass the JLPT, but at the same time, immersion has messed me up because I am enjoying so much content in Japanese, that I am barely doing a dent on my kanji knowledge. My listening, and grammar is getting really good, but I am so bad at kanji, its kinda funny if I look at myself from another point of view. TLDR : immersion is the best, but too much immersion might trap you from learning kanji.
You can also immerse with reading :^) But I also barely do any reading, but I don't have much of an issue with kanji (my kanji knowledge is appropriate for my Japanese level I mean), but that's because of Anki.
EDIT: ....You answered this in the next video in your series! Thank you :). Looks like I will just do a bit of RRTK deck alongside. Fantastic vids. @@Livakivi Did you learn all of your Kanji through Anki core 2k/6k? For example, did you look up the Kanji character the first time you saw a new Kanji in Anki - or simply learned the pronunciation/mentally made a note of how it looks on the Anki card and moved on? If just using Anki that seems like a very highly efficient method of learning Kanji and much more interesting to me than say RTK which seems good but perhaps not the most efficient method - although I see some people use RTK and core 2k/6k combined..
@@XHiimcharlieX im very late but i and alot of people i know just do a vocab deck since u will naturally pick out the meaning of kanji, while also learning vocab so its 2 in 1.
This is the video that made me finally get serious about learning Japanese. Can't thank you enough. I used to think apps like Duolingo and Lingodeer would be enough, and that with enough time, I'd get to a good enough level, but wow, that Anki deck, along with Kim Tae's textbook, just absolutely accelerated my learning to an explosive level. Below is my "progress report" after 100+ days. As of the time of writing this, I have done the 6k deck in Anki for 103 straight days. I started with 10 words per day just to get a feel for it, but after a week, it just seemed like it would take forever to get through the whole thing, so I bumped it up to 20 words per day. I felt comfortable with that amount, and have kept doing that since. I have only just gotten past the 2k card milestone yesterday. It takes an average of 30-35 minutes to do the daily review, with an average of 130 cards per day, along with the 20 new cards. I like to keep the Again count percentage below 15-20%. If it ever goes over 30%, that's a sign I should do some extra reviewing, but that's only happened twice, because sometimes you just have bad days. As for Kim Tae's textbook, that was a god-send. My knowledge of grammar was vastly improved in a very short time, and I didn't have to spend a single cent, or have to pirate anything. I've been kinda slacking on it for the last few weeks and just using Anki, but I am working on getting through more of it. At this point, my vocabulary level is too ahead of my grammar level. As for immersion, I've been doing some. Mostly just manga at this point. I've been prioritizing my reading skills over my listening skills, but I plan on getting them on equal levels soon. I recommend the manga Asobi Asobase, which is not only super entertaining, but has a lot of diversity in speaking styles. No furigana for every kanji, though, but I prefer it that way, personally. So, after 103 days of learning, what do I have to show for it? Well, I can ace the N5 sample questions in the JLPT website, so that's good. That means I'm comfortably on the N5 level. As for N4, I tried it just now and got 80% of the questions right, but I also didn't fully understand everything, even when I got the questions right, especially in the listening part. I guess I have a foot in N4 then. But in my defense, they use hiragana on words I already know the kanji for, so it kinda throws me off. My weakest point by far is the listening skills. But I think I'm at a good point to start doing some comprehensible audio immersion now, so I'll be working on that.
Can anyone please help me? After following the link provided to download anki core 2 djtguide I follow the download link there and takes me to an empty page and nothing get downloaded :(
How are things going now man? Also how can you do 20 cards a day? I feel like death doing 10 even after knowing a good 150~ words from previous attempts. It just doesn't stick. Not even same day.
Update: It is day 302. I have never missed a day, and today I have uncovered the last 20 cards of the deck. The last word was... 便箋. Great... Still have 887 cards listed as Young, so it's gonna take like 4-5 more weeks to get the deck to 100% Mature. The path so far had been clear-cut. Just do the Anki deck, and discover 20 new words each day. But now that path has ended. There's no "Post-6k" deck available that has thousands more words. Guess I gotta create a new deck and start adding my own cards. From my experience during immersion, there's no shortage of words that aren't found in the 6k deck. I also did the JLPT N3 sample questions just now. Got 11/17. Well, I guess I'm kinda in N3. My Japanese has yet to become self-sufficient. By that, I mean I won't require an "external language" to learn it. I could just look up words in a proper Japanese dictionary instead of relying on translations. Hopefully I get there sometime this year.
@@_P2M_thanks for the update. I just started learning. Diving in headfirst and it’s nice to see someone else’s progress report and what they did and where they’re at now so I can have an idea
I just want to thank you for being such an inspiration for me, while the language I am currently learning isn't Japanese your videos have still played a major part in inspiring me to start learning my target language, while I am still in the very early stages of learning the language I am already very thankful that I started learning, you're awesome!
Thanks a lot for this, I've been studying for 2 years now and never clicked with Anki nor textbooks, eventually got demotivated, but this video gave me motivation to try again and use the tools properly
Been learning Japanese for 8 years, I feel these tips are pretty solid, I've never been able to use anki consistently but I'm curious to try it with something like migaku for other languages I plan on learning
It makes me remember how I learned English, I was mostly ok at input understanding but just bad at output when in the equivalent of secondary school, but as my in put was good, I just needed a good personal teacher to help me on the output part. For once, I'm feeling a bit more hopeful about language learning with this video, even if I don't think I can for now for multiple reasons.
Another amazing video! On another note some other good ways of getting early output would be to write a diary in Japanese going over what you learned that day, another good way that I've found extreamly helpful for me and is what allows me to speak pretty well even only after 5 months of immersion is simply speaking to myself in Japanese while I'm taking a shower or going to bed. I wouldn't recommend these to super beginners since forming a sentence when you first start off could take a few minutes but once you reach a certain level I'd recommend trying them out and seeing how much you can improve!
When you are losing motivation for learning, just remember why you wanted to start it. And how excited you were wanting to learn it, then look back and see how much progress you made! Also, if you don’t practice enough, you are going to see a green owl in the middle of the night….🦉
March 1st marks my 2nd year of learning Japanese. After an unfortunate fail for my N4 exam this definitely helped motivate me to get back on the wagon and start clearing out the loooooong backlog of anki cards that have built up!
Lots of people seem to be happy with Migaku in the comments, which I'm very glad to hear myself as well. Personally happy too, does make sentence mining so much smoother!
I just reached day 150 the other day!!! I felt so proud 😄☺️ Thank you Livakivi for motivating me to even start this journey, and I shall not give up and lose my streak!!! I have been on a motivational decline for the last month - waiting until 10pm to do my anki, but nevertheless I am doing it. I’ll also be going on a high school exchange to Japan at the end of this year, so I hope to get out of this un-motivational time and go ham on study so I can understand as much as possible over there :DD Thank you once again Livakivi!! ☺️☺️
Today is my 731th day of learning English. Honestly, without these methods (AJATT, MIA, ANTIMOON) i wouldn't have made it. I'm starting to output a little, even though i still have a lot to learn. Your interesting content helps a lot with listening!
I can't thank you enough for making your videos, they've been a huge motivation for me! Just to share a bit of my expirience I wanna say that Duolingo and Lingodeer (I tried both) might not suit you with all the game elements and awkward pacing. A big step in the right direction for me was starting to use Anki. It really filled me with a sense of freedom and my motivation became internal, not some streaks or xp points, so it was much easier to do and I found it to be a lot more helpful too. I now have more than 70 day streak and still going strong. After making one habit (like reviewing Anki in my case), you can build other habits on top of that as they will be easier to get into and maintain. The only thing I find difficult at that point is finding out what the best next step might be. Thank you so much for your content, love from Russia!
awesome, almost on day 200 of daily japanese. (with previously hiragana/katakana knowledge and basic vocab/grammar from before) with you as a major inspiration, I've progressed more in these last 200 days than i have ever since i started learning on and off 10 years ago :) thanks a bunch!
also like to add- i’ve only taken around 900 ish cards from the 2k/6k deck, but sentence mining has still been super helpful, finding those 1T sentences EVERYWHERE in slice of life anime, up to like 60 new cards per episode …
ngl my motivations for learning japanese are so wishy-washy at the moment that I can’t even dedicate myself for more than a couple of days without feeling overwhelmed by everything else in my life as well as japanese itself. that said, you and your channel keep me wanting to go back and, in all truthfulness, this video came up in my feed at the perfect time as I’d been looking for something to put it all into perspective for me. so, thank you for that :)
Great video! I'm in my 3rd year of learning Japanese now and basically followed this same path, though a little less intense overall. I do make time to at least do my anki reviews each day and have gotten better about studying grammar and increasing immersion. I've already beaten one game in Japanese (Shenmue) and am currently playing Shenmue II, Ni No Kuni, and Star Ocean 2 and having a blast. I really enjoy your content and have been following you almost as long as I've been learning the language :)
I really wish I had your Videos as a resource to structure my learning plan when I started learning japanese 2,5 years ago. It's so hard to figure out what you need to do to archieve fluency and everyone seems to have a different opinion on what works and what doesn't work which adds even more to the confusion. I'm glad you report fairly on your experience with learning resources. Thank you!
It hit really close to home when he spoke about the real reason why learning Japanese is hard. Myself a student of mandarin Chinese got to know this problem all to well. They always tell you east Asian languages are hard. But the mainstream fears and opinions of why it is hard are so wrong. They always fail to talk of accurately reflect on this point. "Learning an east Asian language is hard not because it is complicated in it of itself but because they are so different from our own mother tongues they will take 4 times the amount of time that I could take for us to learn a related language." Of course I was not prepared and have struggled with consistency since I started. I have put time and effort believe me. But when I saw that effort was not up to par with my desires I quit. And that was my failure I got lost in the forest of language learning. Try to apply the methods that had worked for me in the past and seeing that they didn't pay off got me pissed off. It took me five or so years into my language learning endeavor into mandarin to fina comprehend this aspect and what was necessary for it to work. I decided to comit myself. But with new outlook. The forest no longer seem so cramped. I wish any one who may read this. That you may succeed in yours too. :3
I watched this video a year ago and it motivated me to start studying Japonese. Today, I´m watching it again to try to study it again (I failed last time). Hope this time I achieve what I want to. Thx for the vids, really love them! :D
great video been studying since 2018 but stuff like this always gives me motivation thorugh seeingn how much I've actually already done it'ss easy to forget that
Thanks to you a little more than half a year ago I started doing Anki every single day. Few days ago I hit 50% reviewed cards. It's not much and I'm planning to do more decks, finish Guide to Japanese, but still progress feels great. I'm starting to understand more and more. Looking forward to your next video!
Today is my 15th day learning Japanese following your advice. I have been wanting to learn Japanese for over a year but didn't start earlier because I was scared I would give up too fast or just not have enough time to study Japanese since I was about to finish high school, get a job and go to college. But then I realized that if I always have this mindset of "not starting to do something new because I might not continue doing it for x reasons" I would never start doing *anything* new. And if right now I'm able to do it then why worry if I'm gonna keep doing it in the future? Why worry if I'm gonna give up after a couple of months? Especially now at the beginning. If I really want to learn Japanese I should just start learning it already and worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes. I went through the same situation when I started to learn English 5 years ago. I also used flashcards on Anki to improve my English vocabulary (stopped doing them at 8000 cards) and did lots and lots of input/immersion. I'm really happy that I started to learn Japanese and I'm looking forward to see how far I will get. I'm really thankful for you making these videos cause they really helped me start learning Japanese and also having the right mindset. You and your channel are truly a hidden gem. Thank you so much for all the effort and time you put in your videos. I wish you the best and hope that more people will find your TH-cam channel.
Finally started taking advantage of my brain juice and young age while it last and started learning japanese 2 months ago, I started with hiragana and will still keep going at it for a few weeks more, I am still proud that I can read about 60% of hiragana characters, that being said I don’t know if I am ready for katakana I am afraid I may forget what I learned previously, when do you think I am ready to take a new step.
Katakana has no prerequisites, you can learn it next to Hiragana if you want to as well. Maybe you can just grind a bit on Hiragana, and start using Anki, which should help too, if you feel confident that you can keep on learning consistently/daily!
@@chiefsosaya7869 as of December 3 yes, but I wasn’t consistently grinding and at times slacking off, I would had probably known the hiragana table by memory by now if I wasn’t lazy at times.
@@Salchichas38 ah, still I wouldn't advise to stick with hiragana for a few weeks more, the kanas are really easy but also boring, you could easily completely memorize kata- and hiragana in a week bro.
In first place, learn all the common use kanji thought Heisig's Remembering the Kanji textbook with a spaced repetition system. That will make you able to write chinese characters by hand and understand their general meaning, making it much easier to learn vocabulary.
Day 452 since starting Japanese. I’ve had lots of ups and downs, stopped learning for a while, wasted a lot of time (rtk) but I’ve gain experience which I’m happy about. My goal this year is to get at least 700 hours of immersion! not including passive
i’ve been struggling for about a year or so now to get past the early stages of learning japanese, but coming back to your videos always gives me a fresh mindset and makes me want to try again, even if i may fail. thank you for these videos
This is like my third week learning japanese and this video was really helpful as i was confused on what to do next, than you so much Livakivi and keep up the great work!! :)
ngl i watched a lot of these videos when they came out, and i would give up because i felt like i wasnt making good progress, and then realize in the time i gave up i couldve been so much further into learning japanese
Great video as always, you can really tell how much work you put into making them! Must watch for anyone new (or somewhat experienced) to learning japanese!
No idea why you don't have more subscribers or atleast views. Something tells me your channel is going to absolutely explode, because I can definitely see the step up in quality in your videos. You're on the road to success!
For the ones having problem with Hiragana a big tip that helped me a lot was to print a hiragana chart with Dakuten and handakuten + the combo combinations, put in your wall in front of your pc or just put in the places you spend more time in the house. even looking at the chart for 2 minutes a day will help you memorize and if you are studying you can always look at your wall to confirm a reading. You don't need to really memorize in one go just leave it there and at some point you will become fluent naturally.
Sorry for the slight vent but back in 2020 i was hyperfixated on learning japanese (im autisic so absolutely obsessed) and had so much motivation to learn,but my parents told me to quit it over and over again and that learning ruasian was better (im from eastern Europe) Ive lost 4 years of progress because of my parents ignorance I decided to pick this up again,and i hope I can start learning again...thank you for this video.
One of the things this video made me realize was that I am too darn slow lol, I'm already on my 20th day of Duolingo and still haven't fully got hiragana. Anyways, thank you so much for this guide! I'm planning to do an exchange year in Japan next year, so having a learning plan until then is super helpful!
As passionate language learner, I would add that output can be partially trained by just vocalazing (aka saying out loud/trying to repeat phrases you just heard in anime/etc) Trying to say and mimic is natural way to learn and it boost comprehension as you decipher even unknown words. (When you listen something and heard unknown sentence, try to repeat it several times, I will help) And if you would be regularly pronouncing language - it will help to start speaking way faster. Also learning pronunciation and intonation can be started from first days of learning language. Some people hire couches, but at least even process of listening carefully, trying to mimic, listening again is very helpful. And as I said - it boosts your learning and comprehension speed. Don't be completely mute, while learning language. Vocalize. But listen more, listen carefully as you don't want to learn Japanenrish instead. Listen many times then try to vocalize, then listen and compare. You can do it when learning core 2k. Start slow as you ability to hear and pronounce is still bad. Do it in small portions to make more good than bad. Some people hire couches to evaluate and correct. Good idea, but not necessarily at the beginning if you are careful and diligent enough.
sharing tips i know to learn katakana and hiragana for those who prefer this method, i used monkeytype's japanese mode to practice typing basic words, up until i could type around 20 words per minute. at first, you might need to have a chart next to your window as you type, but eventually, you will begin to memorize how to type each hiragana. by making yourself type faster, you'll have to memorize each character in order to keep this faster speed. i used this to learn hiragana in less than about 3 days, and now i can type around 20 words per minute, only struggling with ぬ、め、わ、ね、れ、さ、 and き . hope this can help someone
I'm really glad you started with motivation. Coming off of fighting games, I've found that that's easily the most important part of learning a skill and it's one that's horribly understated in videos like these. Like you said, efficiency or anything else doesn't matter if you give up, so motivation should always be top priority for these sorts of things
im now goin in tae kim's guide reading through a whole chapter, just to get an understand of the grammar points presented. and then i pick the vocab that the chapter presents and put it into a vocab deck in anki, only words, and the back of the card that has a sentence for example context. then if the chapter has a grammatical explanation bout something, i also made a tae kim's guide anki deck to save these explanation and displays of what they are.
This is my first day! I already knew hiragana and katakana, so I got into the first anki vocabulary sets and the first grammar study. I will start doing Immersion when I feel comfortable with some words so I can understand at least something, and then I will get into sentence mining. Thanks for this video and I hope that in a few years could I speak and understand this curious language.
I just wanna add that for Anki and similar it's most important to stay consistent. About 8 months ago I started to learn Korean with Anki with ~5 new words + all repetitions per day and it was insanely stressful after 3-4 weeks. I wasn't able to remember meaning of words so all repetitions were basically new words. And they were growing every day. So I gave up in about 2 months. In December I returned back to it, same deck with ~200 words I have to repeat (basically new words at that point). So I added intervals of 3, 5 and 8 days and started to limit total words to ~30 per day by changing values for new and repetitions every day. First month or so it was same 10-30 words (with 0 in new and but then it kinda "clicks". I'm keeping streak for almost 3 months with only 3 days missing. In January I upped it to 40 per day and now thinking about 50. I'm long past those 200 words that I had to relearn but now I'm actually able to understand them. Even recall some of them. And its usually taking me ~5-15 minutes a day. So yea, to summarize - consistency is way more important than amount and if you can't keep up - just lower amount of words! Or mess with other configs, for instance - Anki allows you to set up alarm after some learning time passed. This one is not for me but I can see it working for someone.
Absolutely amazing guide. Even though I'm leaning Korean and not Japanese I made sure to watch the whole thing I will definitely be applying these methods to my learning. THANK YOU...
I'm surprised tofugu's hiragana guide wasn't in here. They make you memorize hiragana by pointing out weird things the symbols resemble, usually the more complicated the mneumonic the easier they were to remember, and after doing it enough it would be engrained deeply enough you wouldn't need to recall the mneumonic anymore to remember something. Although I gave up on it three days later that was still enough time for me to learn and remember 48 hiragana. Almost 6 months later I tried their quiz again for fun could still remember 26/48 of them
Great video as always, one thing though, I don't agree with you on immersion. If we just immerse and look up words then we'll eventually get the language. No point in using an SRS if immersion is kind of a natural SRS. I'm learning Spanish right now and for me music, tv shows and some light reading has taught me a ton. Yeah sure you don't really get anything in the beginning but music is still music and jojo is still jojo (even if in the beginning you only get one word during an entire episode) A tip for all of you who are trying to immerse: change everything to your target language: your phone, computer, games, chrome, steam and even netflix's ui language. Trust me it helps a lot.
Learning Spanish is a completely, utterly different story from learning Japanese. Spanish doesn't have kanji - if you learn a word, it always has a consistent reading/meaning, you don't need to know/guess the meaning from kanji. Indeed, I learned English through school + (but mostly) immersion as well, without ever using Anki, but its just really different because of the lack of Kanji, similar words, etc. You can learn without Anki, definitely, I'd recommend reading and doing dictionary lookups for that, however, you need to do a TON of reading for that, and not everyone likes reading, especially as a beginner. Anki is a time saving tool in the end.
I'm totally with you on this, I've been learning for 3 years and Anki is totally useless for me. It messes with my head and makes me anxious and I just find it to be the most boring and horrible tool. Being obligated to do something every day is pretty toxic for me especially when it's something I hate. That's never going to change, I just have to accept it. Just doing dictionary look up and lists of words for reference is working for me at the moment. Forgetting is not a crime and I find even relearning something having completely forgotten it is very powerful. No need for SRS.
Been learning about 3-ish months through Pimsleur and TH-cam. Learned a few words from context in 'The Boy and the Heron' in theaters. Such an amazing feeling. I can't wait til I become a more contextual input learner. It's slowly coming along.
Thanks bro for helping me started , I started Anki on August and now I just hits 1k words plus I am also reviewing on an outside source and pretty much I've already learn 1.2 k words Thanks for the encouragement and inspiration!!
Cool video! I have been one japanese for 7 months now and I just started reading one piece and it's going really smooth. I can pretty much undertsnad almost every sentence. but ig one piece is really simple manga at least in the beggining idk later. I pretend to start reading novels but I cant yet it is too many text and vocab that idk. Gotta pratice bit more! Good luck to everyone on this beautiful journey! As Livakivi said it is better to have consitency and reach further than being really eficient and then stoping, its great advice yeah, I had many friends who started japanese with me and they stopped, imo the main reason is they thought they would be fluent in little time but when reality stroke they quited. It takes long time, but most importantly is to enjoy what we are doing, this way we will never stop doing it.
I am going to Japan for my senior trip next year. I’m going to learn as much Japanese as I can until then. You are kind of the reason I chose to go to Japan lol
I recommend the app “Japanese!” on the App Store. It has a blue background and has “あ” on it. It is great for teaching hiragana and katakana, along with the basics for the language like grammar. It forces you to learn how to write kana, not just type it. You could also use the app “Kanji” from the same people, but I haven’t bought that one yet. It looks like it is more focused on increasing your vocabulary once you have Kana and the basics down. Only an $8 one time fee for “Japanese!” And a $10 one time fee for “Kanji”
how much progress would you say youve made by now? Im looking into learning Japanese because its something ive wanted to start learning for quite a while now but never had the motivation to actually start
really good tips. Though I'd recommend against using pre-built decks because context is very important when learning and when using premade decks, there is no context. Instead, grab words straight from immersion. "you should do anki every day because otherwise the reviews from the previous day are going to stack up" while this is true, you should never be afraid to let them stack up. While I was using anki I had thousands of words that I had never reviewed, and I just kept going without a care in the world...remember anki, while extremely helpful in the beginning stages, is not a requirement to learn any language. Anki is only a supplement to actual learning. while i agree exposure is the ultimate way to learn the language, learning multiple languages has opened my eyes that the right approach depends on how I ultimately feel about the language. I will use Japanese and Korean as examples - Japanese: I am obsessed with the language and culture. Though I have never set foot in Japan, I've always been involved with Japanese related content since I was a kid from anime to music to JDramas to manga to games etc. When I first started learning Japanese, I just could not stop...I had to fight with the urge to want to keep learning for that day so that I could actually get other things done..I would study 8-12 hours every day during my first 2 years and it would barely feel like only a couple of hours...This made it incredibly easy for me to: - study kanji 4 hours daily - study vocab, grammar - review kanji, vocab and grammar with anki - immerse with anime, JDrama, games, manga, light novels, etc. - Korean: I barely know anything about the language and culture. I recently started watching kDramas with Korean audio and JSubs to increase my Japanese reading speed and that made me realize that maybe I should also learn korean (of course, using Japanese). I think it's worth mentioning I've dropped korean twice already, usually because I expect so much in so little time. But this is why this time I won't make the same mistakes. I barely spend 2 hours learning. that includes review with SRS app (using lingQ only for srs reviews) and my study time is only LingoDeer Japanese->Korean course...nothing else. I can't commit to anything else at the moment...I just don't feel the same for Korean as I do Japanese but I also don't feel like I want to drop it. I like how it sounds and the similarities between Japanese and Korean languages. all this to say how you feel about the language and culture will have a huge impact on the best way to learn it for yourself
I used the WaniKani deck on Anki, with a daily workload of 50 new cards. There were some 17.3k cards in there, so it took almost a year to complete, but I somehow managed to power through it and am down to only about ~250 reviews a day, when at its peak, I was doing upwards of 350 or even 400 reviews, on top of the 50 new ones lol. Suffice it to say, it was a hefty grind, but I always feel it a revelation every time I revisit an old song or anime and can suddenly comprehend a sentence I could not before! That said, even though I've already advanced past the thick of the Anki grind, thanks very much for this series :)
Man, this is the best and most wholesome guide to learn Japanese. I've been tapping into the idea of learning it for real this time, and you are my main inspiration to start this journey. Consistency and fun over perfection. I also have a question. Regarding to listening to music as a source for immersion, many people say it's bad and pointless. What is your opinion on that? I love Japanese music and listen to it all the time, but I usually don't focus on the lyrics
Thank you! And about music, it doesn't hurt, but its also pretty sparse in terms of immersion as its not as packed compared to pure text or conversations. It can also be very poetic/"unnatural" so it can be much harder than regular content if you start reading the lyrics.
May or may not read this but my little brother was able to get ankideck running thanks to your tutorials as he hopes to live in japan one day. He managed to get anki deck running all on his own thanks to you and he isn't as accustomed to using computers as am.
Weather or not either of us make it to even n5 I'm very thankful for your videos because without these videos I may not have even tried studying any language on my own.
This guide is very good. I very much agree with this. I made a guide in your server once and it was similar to yours. Mine was simpler and missed some points though. It's awesome you address the motivation/base for the process
Great video, right now I'm about to start learning Russian on my own (I study Russian philology but it's hard to learn everything at the uni), and THEN maybe in 2 years time I'm starting Japanese. The model which you've presented seems to be working, so I'll follow!
Get 1 extra month of Migaku access for free by signing up using my reflink: migaku.io/free-month/Livakivi
Check out Migaku on TH-cam: th-cam.com/users/ImmersewithMigaku
Anyway, hopefully this video helps with learning Japanese! If you have any questions, leave them down below and I'll try to answer as much as I can!
Stay tuned for the follow-ups to this video, where I go more in depth about Anki, sentence mining, immersion, and so on!
@Livakivi Love your Videos Man. I started learning Japanese in 2020 because I watched alot of Anime, but it was hard for me reading the Subtitles and stuff, so I was like, "Well, if I learn Japanese, then I won't need the Subtitles, and I can understand what they're saying on my own." So I started on Duolingo. Since then, I've quit learning Japanese for multiple Months, about 10 times, due to lack of motivation. But this time, I'm determined to learn Japanese everyday. Rn, I've been good for about 4-5 Weeks. But anyway, the point is that I'm poor. I cannot afford Netflix, for the Japanese Subtitles to be able to immerse. And at the level I'm at now, I tried to turn my Games to Japanese Dub, and Sub, but I cannot understand ANYTHING. Is there a better way for me to immerse for free?
Update: Yo, this Core2k/6k Deck is HARD. I went from the JLPT N5 Tango Deck with learning to say, 1 person, 2 peopele, I have a Dog, I have a Brother, stuff like that to, Core2k/6k with, "She has 3 Children" or "I have Four Wristwatches" I literally almost deleted it on the First Card because it was so hard. But Imma try to push through, and finish it. I don't see how you do it bro. You do this for HOURS on end, and I can barely do it for 5 Minutes.
Possibly not the right place to ask but, Have you seen the videogame Project Zomboid? I watched ur runescape video and have been on the look out for games that kind of have that feel and surplace of a bunch of words and I think it'd be interesting to hear ur thoughts on it and its Japanese translation (and if itd be good to learn some Japanese with)
@@dededededeha6935 Haven't heard of it, but if you can learn a few words from it and play it in Japanese instead of English, go for it!
@@seventytew Are you using the core 2k/6k deck in some sentence card format? Its generally a vocabulary deck where the words are i+1, but the sentences are not i+1 because they're meant to serve as an example, not the target of the card.
Today is my 40th day of learning Japanese, and you're one of the main reason why I decided to take the plunge. Keep up the great work Livakivi!!!
I also started around that time
I wonder how much progress you made
Especially with the hiragana table, supposedly it takes about a week to learn
the kana is the easy part, grammar is the true enemy
@@Salchichas38 I saw your other comment, it's your 2nd month right now right?
Yeah basically, I can now comfortably read both hiragana and katakana. It took me a month to "memorize" hiragana. By memorizing I mean I literally just got used to it. I used hate memorizing, for the first three weeks I refused to use Anki. So I just forced my way into knowing it, just like immersion but on a smaller scale. Weirdly, for katakana it only took me 4 days. I started katakana when I memorized like 90% of hiragana.
@@Salchichas38 Don't be discouraged though, I got my slow start too! Keep grinding those xp and you'll memorize it in no time.
I really struggled in the first month, but I found my own methods, something clicked in my brain and now I really enjoy spending my time learning Japanese.
@@Salchichas38 if u use tofugu's method to learning hiragana and katakana you can learn both with ease in 4 days (as well as their combination kana), thats how I did it and after those 4 days you don't really need to study it further unless you feel like you still have trouble with it because you will be seeing it everyday anyways.
I think one of the dangers regarding the routine of new cards to review, is that one can get overcoonfident after a period of time, which leads to one increasing the amount of new cards per day too drastically. This in turn can develop into too many reviews piling up overtime, and losing control of the previosly developed routine, because one is still accustomed to the previous rate of new cards. Hence, increasing new cards by small amounts and getting accustomed to that routine, can help to avoid getting too overwhelmed and procrastinating.
What happened to me was i bumped it up very quickly was miserable but then I got used to it 😀
That's exactly why I warned that even 8 to 10 cards may start taking an hour in a few weeks. Definitely worth noting! Start small rather than big, and see from there!
@@Livakivi a good rule of thumb is that it takes about 2 weeks to reach the time its from then on going to take consistently. So if I start with 20 words a day, the time it takes me to complete my anki session will increase day by day until it takes me around 1.5h on day 14. From then on the time usually stays consistent and I can expect most sessions to take a similar amount of time after that. Another good rule of thumb is, that around 50% more cards will take about double the time, so if 10 cards a day take me half an hour, 15 cards a day might take me an hour eventually (because cards compound its not linear).
That’s the only reason why I didn’t increase my new cards count. I have lots of time right now but I’m so afraid of the reviews that I’m keeping it down to 20 - 25 😅 I’ll find something else to spend my summer break on
A good rule of thumb is how many new cards you do a day x10 is how many reviews you will have to do in a month.
I started in June 2023, it's been around 7 months of daily learning. I can proudly say that the progress made is massive. I am able to understand nearly 60% of anime content and phrases easily.
I practice reading Japanese almost daily and practice atleast 15 Anki Cards.
How many hours would you say you studied Japanese every day on average?
@@SirAuron777 earlier 3-4 hours daily. Nowadays only an hour using Anki decks.
can u pls tell me where to start from basics and y dafaq ppl hate kanji i think its difficult there r 3 lang in japan is kanji imp in daily life pal? ^_^
@@fedrickksogyi4813 i tried to reply to you. But it got deleted somehow. Maybe because I had mentioned a link in it 🤔
@@fedrickksogyi4813 I will answer again.
Learn Hiragana and Katakana first. They are like ABCD of Japanese ( hardly takes 2-3 weeks and are easy)
Try to learn 40-50 few N5 level basic Kanjis.
Initial 100 kanjis are not that difficult, in fact easy.
Kanjis are essential if you really wanna learn Japanese, but they take forever to learn and start to make less sense after some amount. But still they are like building blocks of words and you need them if you want to read Japanese and learn vocabulary.
After you have learned the initial 40-50 kanji, you should start applying your gathered japanese knowledge right away.
What I did was, I read Children's books in Japanese. They are not too long nor too complex. And they help in practice and boost your confidence.
I will tell you the website in the next comment.
After that, you should continue your Japanese learning, by learning new kanji and vocab everyday.
Japanese is a tiresome job but it is fun when you really go past the initial hardships.
I can assure you the days I spent learning Japanese were full of hardships, but I only regret those days where I skipped studying nothing else.
All the best.
I started learning Japanese a month ago after I found myself wondering what the characters in Naruto are really saying (not just what the English subtitles tell me). I was catching on to a few words and phrases that kept coming up and decided that I should look into it. To my surprise, I found that the sentence structure in Japanese is almost the same as that in my native language Bengali. Encouraged by this coincidence and having been enamored by Japanese culture for so long, I decided to start running this ultramarathon in earnest. So here's what I did:
1. I started learning hiragana and katakana on Duolingo. I took it slow and finished maxing out the characters list today.
2. I started using Anki to learn kanji with the NihongoShark deck (based on the Heisig and koohii mnemonics method) 10 days ago. I have already studied (but not memorized completely) 200 kanji.
3. Yesterday, I added the optimized Core 2k 6k deck and started learning 10 vocab words (with 10 sentences each paired with one word) per day.
4. I plan to start studying basic grammar from Tae Kim over the next couple of days and start reading and listening to more beginner-friendly native content (which are kinda hard to come by).
For anybody who is here and planning to start learning this wonderful language, remember that it's not a sprint but an ultramarathon. This is how I have made all my good habits stick in life. Let's make this one stick too!
you’ve saved me a bunch of time mate, thanks :)
@@aquasiox and without even knowing lol
A fellow Bengali learning Japanese!!
@@lazy_biscuits08 I'm already 4 months into my journey now. Great to know you're on that same road too!
How are things so far to you, bruh?
I'm 13 years old and I started learning japanese at the age of 12. Your videos help me to keep learning and to move on with japanese. You are amazing. どうもですよ！
My books litterally just came in I can't express how perfect the timing is.
I'm in exactly the same situation. They just came in 30 minutes ago
which book?
@@carsonblack3540 which book are you talking about?
@@kuldeepchoudhary65 Tae Kim's book
Livakivi, you are one of the best TH-camrs out there. Never stop making videos, please.
@@gardariker what the fuck.
As a two year learner, this guide summarized all of the stuff that I should've and would've done. To any new Japanese learner, follow this.
I took Japanese for 2 years in high school and have since unfortunately forgotten much of what I've learned. Japanese is a beautiful language and this video got me hyped to start studying it again!
My high school only has Spanish :(
Good thing I’m learning now!
I highly recommend studying Spanish too! It's a lot easier to grasp as an English speaker and it's really practical. I've been living in South America for the last 6 months and prior to my trip I tried to cram in as much Spanish as I could and I was able to get to basic communication in a few months. On one hand it would have been nice if I had taken it in high school, but I also don't regret studying Japanese at all. At the moment I find time to do a little of both. The methods of studying a language are mostly the same in every language, so the skills you learn by studying one transfers to any language you learn. And if Spanish is the only language your school offers, you should take it, and study Japanese on your own time. The two are distinct enough that you will be able to make progress in both. Best of luck either way :)@@ヤモです
@@oishiine6781 okay! Thanks for the recommendations
The last part about the effectiveness of input vs. output practice in terms of recalling information is exactly the message immersion learners need to understand when they get to that stage. Reading and listening will help but you have to eventually start outputting for it to feel natural and automatic. Unfortunately so many people who have otherwise massive passive vocabularies are scared to output because they think they don’t have enough input. But it’s really simple: input is a type of recognition exercise and output is a recall exercise. As you explain in the video, you can improve your recall through more recognition exercises, but it’s less effective. If you want to get good at recall, practice recall.
Seriously great video on learning Japanese.
I am fluent in 5 languages and started learning Japanese on Duolingo last summer. I fell into the gamification trap and ended up focusing more on the game than on learning. I came across your channel today and binge-watched many of your videos, even some not Japanese-related, because I find them that interesting. I am really thankful for this discovery, the guidance, and the instruments. I will finally stop running around like a headless chicken.
Doulingo is really a waste of time
@@عبدالسلامالشهراني-ن8ف Not doing anything is a waste of time. I still learn new vocabulary daily thanks to Duolingo. Whenever I come across a new word in Duolingo I search it on Romajidesu and put it in Anki. And I learned to speed read Kanas thanks to Duolingo.
Incredibly early in my language journey but being able to read the text from 2:22 out loud and get a translation from Google Translate was surprisingly joyous. Much more satisfying than taking a picture with my phone and getting google to translate it like that.
I have something to say as an N2 passer with perfect listening score. Immersion is probably the biggest reason as to why I was able to pass the JLPT, but at the same time, immersion has messed me up because I am enjoying so much content in Japanese, that I am barely doing a dent on my kanji knowledge. My listening, and grammar is getting really good, but I am so bad at kanji, its kinda funny if I look at myself from another point of view.
TLDR : immersion is the best, but too much immersion might trap you from learning kanji.
You can also immerse with reading :^)
But I also barely do any reading, but I don't have much of an issue with kanji (my kanji knowledge is appropriate for my Japanese level I mean), but that's because of Anki.
EDIT: ....You answered this in the next video in your series! Thank you :). Looks like I will just do a bit of RRTK deck alongside. Fantastic vids.
@@Livakivi Did you learn all of your Kanji through Anki core 2k/6k? For example, did you look up the Kanji character the first time you saw a new Kanji in Anki - or simply learned the pronunciation/mentally made a note of how it looks on the Anki card and moved on?
If just using Anki that seems like a very highly efficient method of learning Kanji and much more interesting to me than say RTK which seems good but perhaps not the most efficient method - although I see some people use RTK and core 2k/6k combined..
@@XHiimcharlieX im very late but i and alot of people i know just do a vocab deck since u will naturally pick out the meaning of kanji, while also learning vocab so its 2 in 1.
This is the video that made me finally get serious about learning Japanese. Can't thank you enough.
I used to think apps like Duolingo and Lingodeer would be enough, and that with enough time, I'd get to a good enough level, but wow, that Anki deck, along with Kim Tae's textbook, just absolutely accelerated my learning to an explosive level.
Below is my "progress report" after 100+ days.
As of the time of writing this, I have done the 6k deck in Anki for 103 straight days. I started with 10 words per day just to get a feel for it, but after a week, it just seemed like it would take forever to get through the whole thing, so I bumped it up to 20 words per day. I felt comfortable with that amount, and have kept doing that since. I have only just gotten past the 2k card milestone yesterday.
It takes an average of 30-35 minutes to do the daily review, with an average of 130 cards per day, along with the 20 new cards. I like to keep the Again count percentage below 15-20%. If it ever goes over 30%, that's a sign I should do some extra reviewing, but that's only happened twice, because sometimes you just have bad days.
As for Kim Tae's textbook, that was a god-send. My knowledge of grammar was vastly improved in a very short time, and I didn't have to spend a single cent, or have to pirate anything. I've been kinda slacking on it for the last few weeks and just using Anki, but I am working on getting through more of it. At this point, my vocabulary level is too ahead of my grammar level.
As for immersion, I've been doing some. Mostly just manga at this point. I've been prioritizing my reading skills over my listening skills, but I plan on getting them on equal levels soon. I recommend the manga Asobi Asobase, which is not only super entertaining, but has a lot of diversity in speaking styles. No furigana for every kanji, though, but I prefer it that way, personally.
So, after 103 days of learning, what do I have to show for it? Well, I can ace the N5 sample questions in the JLPT website, so that's good. That means I'm comfortably on the N5 level. As for N4, I tried it just now and got 80% of the questions right, but I also didn't fully understand everything, even when I got the questions right, especially in the listening part. I guess I have a foot in N4 then. But in my defense, they use hiragana on words I already know the kanji for, so it kinda throws me off.
My weakest point by far is the listening skills. But I think I'm at a good point to start doing some comprehensible audio immersion now, so I'll be working on that.
Can anyone please help me? After following the link provided to download anki core 2 djtguide I follow the download link there and takes me to an empty page and nothing get downloaded :(
How are things going now man? Also how can you do 20 cards a day? I feel like death doing 10 even after knowing a good 150~ words from previous attempts. It just doesn't stick. Not even same day.
Update:
It is day 302.
I have never missed a day, and today I have uncovered the last 20 cards of the deck.
The last word was... 便箋. Great...
Still have 887 cards listed as Young, so it's gonna take like 4-5 more weeks to get the deck to 100% Mature.
The path so far had been clear-cut. Just do the Anki deck, and discover 20 new words each day.
But now that path has ended. There's no "Post-6k" deck available that has thousands more words.
Guess I gotta create a new deck and start adding my own cards. From my experience during immersion, there's no shortage of words that aren't found in the 6k deck.
I also did the JLPT N3 sample questions just now. Got 11/17.
Well, I guess I'm kinda in N3.
My Japanese has yet to become self-sufficient. By that, I mean I won't require an "external language" to learn it. I could just look up words in a proper Japanese dictionary instead of relying on translations.
Hopefully I get there sometime this year.
@@_P2M_thanks for the update. I just started learning. Diving in headfirst and it’s nice to see someone else’s progress report and what they did and where they’re at now so I can have an idea
@@_P2M_ so just do the anki deck? No duolingo?
I just want to thank you for being such an inspiration for me, while the language I am currently learning isn't Japanese your videos have still played a major part in inspiring me to start learning my target language, while I am still in the very early stages of learning the language I am already very thankful that I started learning, you're awesome!
Thanks a lot for this, I've been studying for 2 years now and never clicked with Anki nor textbooks, eventually got demotivated, but this video gave me motivation to try again and use the tools properly
Yo, didn't expect to see you here! :D We're in it together, mate.
It really explains the whole system.
This is what I missed on Matt vs Japan's channel.
Just started my multi year journey! I am not quitting till I can understand anime without subtitles lol
Been learning Japanese for 8 years, I feel these tips are pretty solid, I've never been able to use anki consistently but I'm curious to try it with something like migaku for other languages I plan on learning
1:01 finally... After almost 11 months of studying I could understand this message without any problem! Thank you for the tips
It makes me remember how I learned English, I was mostly ok at input understanding but just bad at output when in the equivalent of secondary school, but as my in put was good, I just needed a good personal teacher to help me on the output part.
For once, I'm feeling a bit more hopeful about language learning with this video, even if I don't think I can for now for multiple reasons.
Another amazing video!
On another note some other good ways of getting early output would be to write a diary in Japanese going over what you learned that day, another good way that I've found extreamly helpful for me and is what allows me to speak pretty well even only after 5 months of immersion is simply speaking to myself in Japanese while I'm taking a shower or going to bed. I wouldn't recommend these to super beginners since forming a sentence when you first start off could take a few minutes but once you reach a certain level I'd recommend trying them out and seeing how much you can improve!
We need videos likes this for every language. Clear start to a language and good resources beginners can pick up. Great video thank you.
When you are losing motivation for learning, just remember why you wanted to start it. And how excited you were wanting to learn it, then look back and see how much progress you made!
Also, if you don’t practice enough, you are going to see a green owl in the middle of the night….🦉
I remember it now... It was for a richer JAV experience. Thanks stranger.
To get japanese girls thank stranger
@@hemantjoshi7871 noo wayy me tooo
March 1st marks my 2nd year of learning Japanese. After an unfortunate fail for my N4 exam this definitely helped motivate me to get back on the wagon and start clearing out the loooooong backlog of anki cards that have built up!
I'm a big fan of the Migaku tools for Korean. Been using it since it was just a dictionary add on. It's come a long way and it's definitely worth it.
Lots of people seem to be happy with Migaku in the comments, which I'm very glad to hear myself as well. Personally happy too, does make sentence mining so much smoother!
In my opnion this is the most important episode of the series
Nice video as always! Good luck on your journey everyone!
Thanks Migaku san :)
Both of you deserve the promotion/sponsorship
I just reached day 150 the other day!!! I felt so proud 😄☺️ Thank you Livakivi for motivating me to even start this journey, and I shall not give up and lose my streak!!! I have been on a motivational decline for the last month - waiting until 10pm to do my anki, but nevertheless I am doing it.
I’ll also be going on a high school exchange to Japan at the end of this year, so I hope to get out of this un-motivational time and go ham on study so I can understand as much as possible over there :DD
Thank you once again Livakivi!! ☺️☺️
Today is my 731th day of learning English. Honestly, without these methods (AJATT, MIA, ANTIMOON) i wouldn't have made it. I'm starting to output a little, even though i still have a lot to learn. Your interesting content helps a lot with listening!
I can't thank you enough for making your videos, they've been a huge motivation for me! Just to share a bit of my expirience I wanna say that Duolingo and Lingodeer (I tried both) might not suit you with all the game elements and awkward pacing. A big step in the right direction for me was starting to use Anki. It really filled me with a sense of freedom and my motivation became internal, not some streaks or xp points, so it was much easier to do and I found it to be a lot more helpful too. I now have more than 70 day streak and still going strong. After making one habit (like reviewing Anki in my case), you can build other habits on top of that as they will be easier to get into and maintain. The only thing I find difficult at that point is finding out what the best next step might be.
Thank you so much for your content, love from Russia!
awesome, almost on day 200 of daily japanese. (with previously hiragana/katakana knowledge and basic vocab/grammar from before)
with you as a major inspiration, I've progressed more in these last 200 days than i have ever since i started learning on and off 10 years ago :)
thanks a bunch!
also like to add- i’ve only taken around 900 ish cards from the 2k/6k deck, but sentence mining has still been super helpful, finding those 1T sentences EVERYWHERE in slice of life anime, up to like 60 new cards per episode …
Today will be my first thay learning Japanese wish me luck
Good luck.
How are you doing with your japanese learning?
I've watched this guide several times, it has definitely helped me seriously improve my Japanese study
ngl my motivations for learning japanese are so wishy-washy at the moment that I can’t even dedicate myself for more than a couple of days without feeling overwhelmed by everything else in my life as well as japanese itself. that said, you and your channel keep me wanting to go back and, in all truthfulness, this video came up in my feed at the perfect time as I’d been looking for something to put it all into perspective for me. so, thank you for that :)
Great video! I'm in my 3rd year of learning Japanese now and basically followed this same path, though a little less intense overall. I do make time to at least do my anki reviews each day and have gotten better about studying grammar and increasing immersion. I've already beaten one game in Japanese (Shenmue) and am currently playing Shenmue II, Ni No Kuni, and Star Ocean 2 and having a blast. I really enjoy your content and have been following you almost as long as I've been learning the language :)
I'm half a year in, only because of you, no regrets so far!
The best content creator of the 21st century 💪🔥
Migaku has been a game changer.
I really wish I had your Videos as a resource to structure my learning plan when I started learning japanese 2,5 years ago. It's so hard to figure out what you need to do to archieve fluency and everyone seems to have a different opinion on what works and what doesn't work which adds even more to the confusion. I'm glad you report fairly on your experience with learning resources. Thank you!
I love migaku!!!! It's what I do every day for learning French!!! Super helpful. Glad them sponsor this video.
It hit really close to home when he spoke about the real reason why learning Japanese is hard.
Myself a student of mandarin Chinese got to know this problem all to well.
They always tell you east Asian languages are hard. But the mainstream fears and opinions of why it is hard are so wrong. They always fail to talk of accurately reflect on this point. "Learning an east Asian language is hard not because it is complicated in it of itself but because they are so different from our own mother tongues they will take 4 times the amount of time that I could take for us to learn a related language."
Of course I was not prepared and have struggled with consistency since I started.
I have put time and effort believe me. But when I saw that effort was not up to par with my desires I quit.
And that was my failure I got lost in the forest of language learning.
Try to apply the methods that had worked for me in the past and seeing that they didn't pay off got me pissed off.
It took me five or so years into my language learning endeavor into mandarin to fina comprehend this aspect and what was necessary for it to work.
I decided to comit myself. But with new outlook. The forest no longer seem so cramped.
I wish any one who may read this. That you may succeed in yours too. :3
I watched this video a year ago and it motivated me to start studying Japonese. Today, I´m watching it again to try to study it again (I failed last time). Hope this time I achieve what I want to. Thx for the vids, really love them! :D
Yooo Liva, I'm so happy you uploaded again
Thanks for the comment, glad to hear your journey is going well, and good luck with the rest of it!
great video
been studying since 2018 but stuff like this always gives me motivation thorugh seeingn how much I've actually already done
it'ss easy to forget that
10th day of learning japanese. So far, i'm having so much fun with it.
Btw, great video! Keep up the good work.
for immersion, switching my phone's default language to japanese helped alot
Thank you so much! I’ve been struggling to learn Japanese and was about to give up. This video gave me hope❤
I try to learn japanese last year for a month, but I quit, and today with your video I decide to try again, thanks and good luck for everyone.
Thanks to you a little more than half a year ago I started doing Anki every single day. Few days ago I hit 50% reviewed cards. It's not much and I'm planning to do more decks, finish Guide to Japanese, but still progress feels great. I'm starting to understand more and more. Looking forward to your next video!
Today is my 15th day learning Japanese following your advice. I have been wanting to learn Japanese for over a year but didn't start earlier because I was scared I would give up too fast or just not have enough time to study Japanese since I was about to finish high school, get a job and go to college. But then I realized that if I always have this mindset of "not starting to do something new because I might not continue doing it for x reasons" I would never start doing *anything* new. And if right now I'm able to do it then why worry if I'm gonna keep doing it in the future? Why worry if I'm gonna give up after a couple of months? Especially now at the beginning. If I really want to learn Japanese I should just start learning it already and worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes. I went through the same situation when I started to learn English 5 years ago. I also used flashcards on Anki to improve my English vocabulary (stopped doing them at 8000 cards) and did lots and lots of input/immersion. I'm really happy that I started to learn Japanese and I'm looking forward to see how far I will get. I'm really thankful for you making these videos cause they really helped me start learning Japanese and also having the right mindset. You and your channel are truly a hidden gem. Thank you so much for all the effort and time you put in your videos. I wish you the best and hope that more people will find your TH-cam channel.
Definitely my biggest inspiration (along with Ikenna) for learning Japanese. Keep it up man! 👍
Really glad you discovered Migaku
I was using their tools from the start and always loved it
I would place a bet that Migaku discovered him XD
Finally started taking advantage of my brain juice and young age while it last and started learning japanese 2 months ago, I started with hiragana and will still keep going at it for a few weeks more, I am still proud that I can read about 60% of hiragana characters, that being said I don’t know if I am ready for katakana I am afraid I may forget what I learned previously, when do you think I am ready to take a new step.
Katakana has no prerequisites, you can learn it next to Hiragana if you want to as well. Maybe you can just grind a bit on Hiragana, and start using Anki, which should help too, if you feel confident that you can keep on learning consistently/daily!
did it actually take you 2 months to read 60% of hiragana?
@@chiefsosaya7869 as of December 3 yes, but I wasn’t consistently grinding and at times slacking off, I would had probably known the hiragana table by memory by now if I wasn’t lazy at times.
@@Salchichas38 ah, still I wouldn't advise to stick with hiragana for a few weeks more, the kanas are really easy but also boring, you could easily completely memorize kata- and hiragana in a week bro.
@@chiefsosaya7869 never knew they took that short of a time to learn
In first place, learn all the common use kanji thought Heisig's Remembering the Kanji textbook with a spaced repetition system.
That will make you able to write chinese characters by hand and understand their general meaning, making it much easier to learn vocabulary.
Day 452 since starting Japanese. I’ve had lots of ups and downs, stopped learning for a while, wasted a lot of time (rtk) but I’ve gain experience which I’m happy about. My goal this year is to get at least 700 hours of immersion! not including passive
How are you doing now?
i’ve been struggling for about a year or so now to get past the early stages of learning japanese, but coming back to your videos always gives me a fresh mindset and makes me want to try again, even if i may fail. thank you for these videos
This is like my third week learning japanese and this video was really helpful as i was confused on what to do next, than you so much Livakivi and keep up the great work!! :)
ngl i watched a lot of these videos when they came out, and i would give up because i felt like i wasnt making good progress, and then realize in the time i gave up i couldve been so much further into learning japanese
Great video as always, you can really tell how much work you put into making them! Must watch for anyone new (or somewhat experienced) to learning japanese!
No idea why you don't have more subscribers or atleast views. Something tells me your channel is going to absolutely explode, because I can definitely see the step up in quality in your videos. You're on the road to success!
For the ones having problem with Hiragana a big tip that helped me a lot was to print a hiragana chart with Dakuten and handakuten + the combo combinations, put in your wall in front of your pc or just put in the places you spend more time in the house.
even looking at the chart for 2 minutes a day will help you memorize and if you are studying you can always look at your wall to confirm a reading.
You don't need to really memorize in one go just leave it there and at some point you will become fluent naturally.
Sorry for the slight vent but back in 2020 i was hyperfixated on learning japanese (im autisic so absolutely obsessed) and had so much motivation to learn,but my parents told me to quit it over and over again and that learning ruasian was better (im from eastern Europe)
Ive lost 4 years of progress because of my parents ignorance
I decided to pick this up again,and i hope I can start learning again...thank you for this video.
One of the things this video made me realize was that I am too darn slow lol, I'm already on my 20th day of Duolingo and still haven't fully got hiragana. Anyways, thank you so much for this guide! I'm planning to do an exchange year in Japan next year, so having a learning plan until then is super helpful!
As passionate language learner, I would add that output can be partially trained by just vocalazing (aka saying out loud/trying to repeat phrases you just heard in anime/etc)
Trying to say and mimic is natural way to learn and it boost comprehension as you decipher even unknown words. (When you listen something and heard unknown sentence, try to repeat it several times, I will help)
And if you would be regularly pronouncing language - it will help to start speaking way faster.
Also learning pronunciation and intonation can be started from first days of learning language.
Some people hire couches, but at least even process of listening carefully, trying to mimic, listening again is very helpful.
And as I said - it boosts your learning and comprehension speed.
Don't be completely mute, while learning language.
Vocalize.
But listen more, listen carefully as you don't want to learn Japanenrish instead. Listen many times then try to vocalize, then listen and compare.
You can do it when learning core 2k.
Start slow as you ability to hear and pronounce is still bad.
Do it in small portions to make more good than bad.
Some people hire couches to evaluate and correct.
Good idea, but not necessarily at the beginning if you are careful and diligent enough.
sharing tips i know to learn katakana and hiragana for those who prefer this method, i used monkeytype's japanese mode to practice typing basic words, up until i could type around 20 words per minute. at first, you might need to have a chart next to your window as you type, but eventually, you will begin to memorize how to type each hiragana. by making yourself type faster, you'll have to memorize each character in order to keep this faster speed. i used this to learn hiragana in less than about 3 days, and now i can type around 20 words per minute, only struggling with ぬ、め、わ、ね、れ、さ、 and き . hope this can help someone
I already knew all of this, I'm only watching because it's new Livakivi content
I'm really glad you started with motivation. Coming off of fighting games, I've found that that's easily the most important part of learning a skill and it's one that's horribly understated in videos like these. Like you said, efficiency or anything else doesn't matter if you give up, so motivation should always be top priority for these sorts of things
im now goin in tae kim's guide reading through a whole chapter, just to get an understand of the grammar points presented. and then i pick the vocab that the chapter presents and put it into a vocab deck in anki, only words, and the back of the card that has a sentence for example context. then if the chapter has a grammatical explanation bout something, i also made a tae kim's guide anki deck to save these explanation and displays of what they are.
Finally i see someone's talking about Tae Kim and not minna no nihongo or something else 😄
This is my first day! I already knew hiragana and katakana, so I got into the first anki vocabulary sets and the first grammar study. I will start doing Immersion when I feel comfortable with some words so I can understand at least something, and then I will get into sentence mining. Thanks for this video and I hope that in a few years could I speak and understand this curious language.
Congrats on the sponsor man. This video is literally what I've felt I needed for a while now. Thanks
I just wanna add that for Anki and similar it's most important to stay consistent. About 8 months ago I started to learn Korean with Anki with ~5 new words + all repetitions per day and it was insanely stressful after 3-4 weeks. I wasn't able to remember meaning of words so all repetitions were basically new words. And they were growing every day. So I gave up in about 2 months. In December I returned back to it, same deck with ~200 words I have to repeat (basically new words at that point). So I added intervals of 3, 5 and 8 days and started to limit total words to ~30 per day by changing values for new and repetitions every day. First month or so it was same 10-30 words (with 0 in new and but then it kinda "clicks". I'm keeping streak for almost 3 months with only 3 days missing. In January I upped it to 40 per day and now thinking about 50. I'm long past those 200 words that I had to relearn but now I'm actually able to understand them. Even recall some of them. And its usually taking me ~5-15 minutes a day. So yea, to summarize - consistency is way more important than amount and if you can't keep up - just lower amount of words! Or mess with other configs, for instance - Anki allows you to set up alarm after some learning time passed. This one is not for me but I can see it working for someone.
Absolutely amazing guide. Even though I'm leaning Korean and not Japanese I made sure to watch the whole thing I will definitely be applying these methods to my learning. THANK YOU...
I'm surprised tofugu's hiragana guide wasn't in here. They make you memorize hiragana by pointing out weird things the symbols resemble, usually the more complicated the mneumonic the easier they were to remember, and after doing it enough it would be engrained deeply enough you wouldn't need to recall the mneumonic anymore to remember something.
Although I gave up on it three days later that was still enough time for me to learn and remember 48 hiragana. Almost 6 months later I tried their quiz again for fun could still remember 26/48 of them
Love your content man, I feel cheesy just typing this but you're a source of inspiration. Also being able to read 1:01 felt great.
Great video! Consise steps to take into beginning learning Japanese, appreciate the effort!
using this playlist to help learn korean and so far your sentence mining video has been very useful to me. love this !
Your content is incredibly underrated, you deserve so much more subscribers.
Great video as always,
one thing though, I don't agree with you on immersion. If we just immerse and look up words then we'll eventually get the language. No point in using an SRS if immersion is kind of a natural SRS. I'm learning Spanish right now and for me music, tv shows and some light reading has taught me a ton. Yeah sure you don't really get anything in the beginning but music is still music and jojo is still jojo (even if in the beginning you only get one word during an entire episode)
A tip for all of you who are trying to immerse: change everything to your target language: your phone, computer, games, chrome, steam and even netflix's ui language. Trust me it helps a lot.
Learning Spanish is a completely, utterly different story from learning Japanese. Spanish doesn't have kanji - if you learn a word, it always has a consistent reading/meaning, you don't need to know/guess the meaning from kanji. Indeed, I learned English through school + (but mostly) immersion as well, without ever using Anki, but its just really different because of the lack of Kanji, similar words, etc.
You can learn without Anki, definitely, I'd recommend reading and doing dictionary lookups for that, however, you need to do a TON of reading for that, and not everyone likes reading, especially as a beginner. Anki is a time saving tool in the end.
I'm totally with you on this, I've been learning for 3 years and Anki is totally useless for me. It messes with my head and makes me anxious and I just find it to be the most boring and horrible tool. Being obligated to do something every day is pretty toxic for me especially when it's something I hate. That's never going to change, I just have to accept it. Just doing dictionary look up and lists of words for reference is working for me at the moment. Forgetting is not a crime and I find even relearning something having completely forgotten it is very powerful. No need for SRS.
Been learning about 3-ish months through Pimsleur and TH-cam. Learned a few words from context in 'The Boy and the Heron' in theaters. Such an amazing feeling. I can't wait til I become a more contextual input learner. It's slowly coming along.
3:15 i NEED to know why there is a learn japanese in 4 hours
Like, i dont think you can even say all the japanese words required in that time
Thanks bro for helping me started , I started Anki on August and now I just hits 1k words plus I am also reviewing on an outside source and pretty much I've already learn 1.2 k words Thanks for the encouragement and inspiration!!
Cool video! I have been one japanese for 7 months now and I just started reading one piece and it's going really smooth. I can pretty much undertsnad almost every sentence. but ig one piece is really simple manga at least in the beggining idk later. I pretend to start reading novels but I cant yet it is too many text and vocab that idk. Gotta pratice bit more! Good luck to everyone on this beautiful journey! As Livakivi said it is better to have consitency and reach further than being really eficient and then stoping, its great advice yeah, I had many friends who started japanese with me and they stopped, imo the main reason is they thought they would be fluent in little time but when reality stroke they quited. It takes long time, but most importantly is to enjoy what we are doing, this way we will never stop doing it.
This honestly needs a few hundred thousand more views. Really good video! Highly informal, entertaining, and quite well edited!
You awesome! Keep making videos, I enjoy them a lot!
I am going to Japan for my senior trip next year. I’m going to learn as much Japanese as I can until then. You are kind of the reason I chose to go to Japan lol
I recommend the app “Japanese!” on the App Store. It has a blue background and has “あ” on it. It is great for teaching hiragana and katakana, along with the basics for the language like grammar. It forces you to learn how to write kana, not just type it. You could also use the app “Kanji” from the same people, but I haven’t bought that one yet. It looks like it is more focused on increasing your vocabulary once you have Kana and the basics down. Only an $8 one time fee for “Japanese!” And a $10 one time fee for “Kanji”
just downloaded ty
I've been learning Japanese for a little over a year, and honestly subbing to you and Tokini Andy was some of the best choices I've made.
how much progress would you say youve made by now? Im looking into learning Japanese because its something ive wanted to start learning for quite a while now but never had the motivation to actually start
Really looking forward for your tips for mining, keep it up, you're doing god's work my dude.
really good tips. Though I'd recommend against using pre-built decks because context is very important when learning and when using premade decks, there is no context. Instead, grab words straight from immersion.
"you should do anki every day because otherwise the reviews from the previous day are going to stack up"
while this is true, you should never be afraid to let them stack up. While I was using anki I had thousands of words that I had never reviewed, and I just kept going without a care in the world...remember anki, while extremely helpful in the beginning stages, is not a requirement to learn any language. Anki is only a supplement to actual learning.
while i agree exposure is the ultimate way to learn the language, learning multiple languages has opened my eyes that the right approach depends on how I ultimately feel about the language. I will use Japanese and Korean as examples
- Japanese: I am obsessed with the language and culture. Though I have never set foot in Japan, I've always been involved with Japanese related content since I was a kid from anime to music to JDramas to manga to games etc. When I first started learning Japanese, I just could not stop...I had to fight with the urge to want to keep learning for that day so that I could actually get other things done..I would study 8-12 hours every day during my first 2 years and it would barely feel like only a couple of hours...This made it incredibly easy for me to:
- study kanji 4 hours daily
- study vocab, grammar
- review kanji, vocab and grammar with anki
- immerse with anime, JDrama, games, manga, light novels, etc.
- Korean: I barely know anything about the language and culture. I recently started watching kDramas with Korean audio and JSubs to increase my Japanese reading speed and that made me realize that maybe I should also learn korean (of course, using Japanese). I think it's worth mentioning I've dropped korean twice already, usually because I expect so much in so little time. But this is why this time I won't make the same mistakes. I barely spend 2 hours learning. that includes review with SRS app (using lingQ only for srs reviews) and my study time is only LingoDeer Japanese->Korean course...nothing else. I can't commit to anything else at the moment...I just don't feel the same for Korean as I do Japanese but I also don't feel like I want to drop it. I like how it sounds and the similarities between Japanese and Korean languages.
all this to say how you feel about the language and culture will have a huge impact on the best way to learn it for yourself
I used the WaniKani deck on Anki, with a daily workload of 50 new cards. There were some 17.3k cards in there, so it took almost a year to complete, but I somehow managed to power through it and am down to only about ~250 reviews a day, when at its peak, I was doing upwards of 350 or even 400 reviews, on top of the 50 new ones lol. Suffice it to say, it was a hefty grind, but I always feel it a revelation every time I revisit an old song or anime and can suddenly comprehend a sentence I could not before! That said, even though I've already advanced past the thick of the Anki grind, thanks very much for this series :)
Man, this is the best and most wholesome guide to learn Japanese. I've been tapping into the idea of learning it for real this time, and you are my main inspiration to start this journey. Consistency and fun over perfection.
I also have a question. Regarding to listening to music as a source for immersion, many people say it's bad and pointless. What is your opinion on that? I love Japanese music and listen to it all the time, but I usually don't focus on the lyrics
Thank you! And about music, it doesn't hurt, but its also pretty sparse in terms of immersion as its not as packed compared to pure text or conversations. It can also be very poetic/"unnatural" so it can be much harder than regular content if you start reading the lyrics.
@@Livakivi Thanks!!
May or may not read this but my little brother was able to get ankideck running thanks to your tutorials as he hopes to live in japan one day. He managed to get anki deck running all on his own thanks to you and he isn't as accustomed to using computers as am.
Weather or not either of us make it to even n5 I'm very thankful for your videos because without these videos I may not have even tried studying any language on my own.
Glad to hear!
Heres a tip when you finish Tae Kim guide get the saotome N3 then N2 and N1
This guide is very good. I very much agree with this. I made a guide in your server once and it was similar to yours. Mine was simpler and missed some points though. It's awesome you address the motivation/base for the process
thanks for being a reason as to why i got into learning my native language and for all the quality videos you put out
Great video, right now I'm about to start learning Russian on my own (I study Russian philology but it's hard to learn everything at the uni), and THEN maybe in 2 years time I'm starting Japanese. The model which you've presented seems to be working, so I'll follow!
Being a developer in a company like Migaku is my dream job.