@@narsplace It took me about a month to be functional, 5 years to be conversational, 10 years to be fluent and 15 years to become high school level literate
@@gordonbgraham in Japanese? 10 years would be right. The reason that he is wrong is that he doesn't understand memory consolidation. The 2200 hours that the FSI says is base on doing class 6 to 8 hours a day. Doing less hours a day means that you more time for your brain to forget what you have learnt meaning that you need more repetition than someone who is studying more time densely. So 10 years for someone who is working and maybe doing other studies is about right.
@@narsplace Yes, Japanese. And that's living in Japan where all one hears is Japanese 24/7. As you've mentioned that is with having a full-time job, so basically I studied anywhere from an hour to two hours a day, 5 days a week. I've heard plenty of foreigners claim fluency in under 2 years online. I've yet to actually meet one. When put to the test most can get by with the basics in terms of functional language, meaning ordering food, asking for directions etc. but lack the ability to have a conversation beyond any topic outside of their own hobbies, interests or daily life activities. Conversations meander and when they do most foreigners who have lived in Japan for less than 5 years get lost. It takes a tonne of time to become conversational...and more to become fluent.
Ah.. sometimes I felt like giving up learning japanese, but then I remember how I learned English , it was definitely a long process too. years of textbook, years of practice.. there is no easy way to master a language.. so for everyone who is currently learning new language, I wish all of us the best!
learning for fun definitely feel different than learning to pass JLPT test. i need to reach n4 minimum to apply work in jp as blue collar workers kanji is hell~
@@jonathanyehezkiel2528 honestly, compared to many other things, kanji one of the easiest parts of Japanese and it makes it way easier to read in my opinion than if it was just hiragana/katakana You don't even have to write them in most cases during daily life or at the very least you can get by without writing any so it's just a matter of remembering what it looks like, remembering the most common words attached to the kanji you want to remember, the different meanings that some of the words with that kanji have, the sound of how each word is pronounced, and the memories of each section will support each other to not be forgotten
@@UzumakiHarutoJP maybe your memorization skill is better than most ppl most ppl said remembering kanji is hard. for kana, it's okay because pretty straightforward like a=あ you can use mnemonic as well to memorize but if あ = read as "a" あ- = read as "cow" あ+ = read as "aeroplane" あ# = read as "happy" i would be confused af why あ- read as cow? from where's the basis? ( the chart ) that's how i feel atm. kanji feel more like an another language entirely
@@jonathanyehezkiel2528 what he means it that Japanese without kanji would be much harder to reading, imagine reading something like すもももももももものうち and tell me what it means
That is very true, I've been learning English for around 15 years now, and more often than not I come across something I didn't knew, a new word, a new idiom... I can express myself fluently and understand any kind of topic even if I'm not necessarily knowledgeful in that topic
@@CirnoWasHere I can tell that you are clearly fluent in English, but I just wanted to help you correct two things in your comment. 1. When you said " I come across something I didn't knew", the correct way to say that would be "I come across something I didn't know". Knew is the past tense of the positive form of "Know", so if you were saying " I knew you liked me", or "I always knew...something" then those would be the ways to use it in a positive sentence. When you're going for a negative sentence, it's "I didn't know". In order to use "Knew" in a negative sentence, you'd need to negate it by saying "I NEVER knew". 2. This one is a much smaller correction. You said "even if I'm not necessarily knowledgeful in that topic". You would actually want to use the word "knowledgeable". Overall, your comment is still completely intelligible and native speakers would obviously completely understand what you are saying! I hope this comment was helpful to you, my friend!
@daenackdranils5624 Watching videos of a place on UA-cam and actually visiting that place are entirely different. It's not even remotely similar. You're not obligated to go to Japan, but you don't need to disrespect the people because you think they need to speak English. They don't. They are their own country, with their own language, history, traditions, and culture, and you should respect that. They don't owe you anything. Also, if you think Japanese people are "boastful", then you know nothing about them.
@@Words-of-encouragement.-. anyway japan is too expensive. plus japan got indeed a strong american influence like the philippines and when it became a super touristy place it's normal to expect it a little of english spoken. if they refuse to adapt themselves to the foreigners, even a little , they shouldn't be surprised to be blamed. sorry but with the amount of videos nowadays about such places as well as vlogs, it's still greatly immersive. it's his right to say that. why also respecting rigid and unfair traditions? it's too much.
Basically if you're gonna learn a language you have to incorporate and make it part of your daily life if you want to achieve atleast fluent understanding. You can go the extra mile and use that language as your monologue voice so you can become more comfortable speaking the language
I mean, as somebody who is a German native speaker, like 90% of my English was learned because of UA-cam, WWE, non-dubbed English shows and movies, and games. The English we learned in School was a good way to help with that, but that alone would have NEVER made me fluent. So the idea of learning a Language by using native media is absolutely not a foreign concept to me. As for the little Japanese I have learned up until now, only a tiny bit is from using a language learning app. Most of what I understand comes from Anime, Japanese songs, and your videos. I would not claim any sort of fluency in Japanese, but just from what I do understand I sometimes pick up inaccuracies in subtitles, for instance, cause I understood what a character was saying, and then read the subs and thought, "Well, that's not really what they said." Little things like that are great for being motivated to keep learning. And all that is with me not really putting tons of effort into learning Japanese, since starting to actually learn it about 3 years ago. Mostly cause I had hardly any energy or motivation to put into that during most of 2020/21 for reasons of the pandemic, and very little time last year, for reasons of starting a new job. I don't know whether already being bilungual or having German as a native language makes any difference in terms of time it takes to learn Japanese, but I'd assume if I had put in more time, and daily practicing, I'd probably be on a somewhat decent level by now. I've only just started to put more effort in now, so I guess we'll see how well I speak the language next year.
I'm french and that was the same for me in english. Actually i've learn english for more than 10 years without really trying to learn it. When i started using internet(2005-2010) there was lot of meme in english, we didn't have them in french(or it was just poorly translated and not funny) and we shared a lot of them with my (french) friends online. Then i started watching shows, subtitled in french but i could understand enough english(also french and english are so close grammaticaly, with many common words like communication, or close l translation/traduction) to get some phrases like you in japanese and learn many worlds(i still remember the exact moment when i learn the verb "to fish", i already knew fish of course, but i didn't know we could say "to fish", it bugged me and i never forgot this word, there's many like this :D). Finally over the years i started using more and more english, the example i use the most is wikipedia, it's insanely more detailed in english than in french(except for pages like french personalities and such) and also i started watching anime subbed in english because i've watch soo much it became hard to find new ones. It was difficult at first, i remember being very reluctant and was like "no i'm to tired today i don't feel like i could read that much english", but shows like all the seasons of Monogatari Series helped me to be insanly good at reading english fast(that'smy best skill atm, i still suck at writing, even more at speaking because i've alsmot never spoken english :/). Today i'm rewatching old anime that i almost forgot, but not enough to not be spoiled, without subtitle to learn japanese and i hope it's be the same as for english. I still know the general plot so it's not as frustrating as watching new show that i've never watch because i'm too afraid to miss important information and "spoil" most of the story ...
@@Whillyy Hi, i hope this doesn't come across as rude, i just thought since we're talking about learning languages i would correct some of your sentences. (I ignored misspellings and just focused on grammar etc) "When i started using internet" should be "When i started using the internet" missing the article "the" "there was lot of meme in english" should be "there were lots of memes in english" 'was' should be 'were' and missing plurals "i've watch soo much it became" should be "i've watched soo much it became" missing past tense "watched" "no i'm to tired today " should be "no i'm too tired today " "too instead of "to" "without subtitle to learn japanese" should be " without subtitles to learn japanese" missing plural "i hope it's be the same as for english. " should be "i hope it'll be the same as english" reworded sentence "it's" changed to "it'll" and removed unnecessary "for" "watching new show " should be either "watching new shows" for plural OR " watching a new show" for singular. Over all still really good english, your mistakes like dropping articles and not pluralising words are very common with French speakers so nothing to feel bad about. Good luck learning Japanese! 😊
@@DavidCruickshank thank you ! Yes I make mistakes because I'm not used to write, even if I'm reading English for years now, I'm not writing that much(just few comments like this one and for a few months). I'm often lost when I have to explain too complicated things like that 😅 but I'll never improve if I never try
@@Whillyy It was super fascinating to read your perspective. While you made some small mistakes in your writing, I find your ability to convey complex thoughts in English very impressive! I found your assessment of your different skills (reading, writing, speaking) very interesting as well. In an odd way it motivates me to keep trying with Japanese.
@@JRBison23 thank you !!! I won't lie, writing something like this is still difficult to me, i'm struggling for many sentences and i have to check translations for few words, rewriting some sentences because even if in french i could say exactly what i want to say, i think it sounds weird and i'm not sure if it's correct. And i still make mistakes x) If i can say one thing, don't be afraid to make mistakes when you're making "output". I've watch many video of Xiaomanyc, it's a youtuber from new york, he has learnt chinese for years and now he sounds like a native, he loves to learn languages and makes many videos like "i try to speak with natives after studying for 2 weeks", everyone is impressed even though he's struggling to make sentences, stutters a lot ect ... but nobody cares and everyone still love to speak with him. I think it's very motivating :) Good luck with your japanese, it's a long journey, but if you really want to learn it's defenitly worth it.
About studying grammar I can confirm from experience. It's much more productive to study grammar while immersing at the same time in media in the language you are studying. I watched a great deal of anime before I actively started studying Japanese, and so when I began looking up grammar it was pretty easy to understand and remember because I had already encountered all these grammatical forms countless times before. It was almost like recalling things you already knew unconsciously rather than memorizing from scratch which made things much easier to learn. I really didn't have to force myself to remember anything, it just intuitively made sense because it was familiar. Also for people who are on the opposite side and argue that immersion alone can make you fluent, that doesn't work either from my experience, because I've made so much progress in a short amount of time by reading about grammar and doing duolingo lessons, compared to the pace at which I was learning new things by passive immersion. But it wasn't useless either because I've familiarized myself with the sound system of the language and learned a great deal of vocabulary, which gave me a very solid basis to begin more serious studying. The key is to find the right balance between the two. I would also advice not to sweat over complicated grammatical rules or concepts, only read stuff you can understand and leave the rest to immersion. The more of the language you know the easier it is to understand difficult grammatical concepts, so it will come naturally with time. For example, one book I was studying (the excellent 80\20 Japanese by Richard Webb) advised not to try and memorize all the rules for verb conjugation, just to pay attention to the verb forms when they are used by native speakers until you become familiar with the different conjugations, just like people remember irregular verbs in English. Of course if you are good at memorizing grammar rules it can never hurt if you can remember all the rules, but if you dislike studying just don't worry about it.
I spent two years of highschool taking japanese courses and in that time all i learned was how to read kana, introduce myself and ask what the time was. In the past month of simply just deliberately exposing myself to Japanese, ive managed to learn already how to express most of what I think/feel throughout the day by watching various anime and chatting with real japanese people online. It really doesnt feel like study 90% of the time
I wonder how much you would have learned during the past month without that prior study, though? I've got hundreds, maybe over a thousand hours of Japanese input (games and TV series) and no Japanese study, and learned virtually nothing. :) I think study is necessary to begin with.
@@Karlington2 what kind of input do you talk about ? I've also like months of time worth of watching anime, but it's all subbed, so ofc i didn't learn anything except some words like baka, ittekimasu, tadaima, ohayou and such. But since i started watching anime without any sub and actually trying to understand it, i've learn a lot.
@@Karlington2 Study and media input/chatting is all important. If you do not have any study, then most often you could spend hundred of hours to only figure out one or two words. Same for only study and no media input/chatting, the person would instead have more trouble with try to speak and be understood. The person will know what to say, but it will sound unnatural and difficult to understand. Study is important for laying down basic structure and parts of grammar, the media input/chatting allows more practical usage while introducing more vocabulary as well practice for more complex sentence structures. They are both important to learning a language.
I should add that I do also study with a textbook that I downloaded, but that maybe makes up less than 1/4 of the studying that I do I learned most of what I know by translating things my friends say with jisho or Google translate
as someone who's been attending a language school in japan for over a year now i do have to agree, putting yourself out there, actually listening lots and lots is invaluable. textbooks will only get you so far. there are times when i think they would serve better as a supplement rather than anything
Big tip for beginners: childrens TV! I used to think you needed to study a lot, my son is 4- he doesn't do much "study" whatever study really means. We talk to him, read to him, he watches pre-school TV, he has pretend play where he enacts everyday situations he sees us engauge in and plays out the conversations, but he is always having fun! If you have childrden think about how they developed their ability to speak! He is learning by using langauge and playing with it, he's 4 so he makes a lot of mistakes with grammar, conjugations and irregular verbs, but his progress is fast. Thing is that his priority is to prioritize what is either useful or interesting, which is what we adults neglect. He is interested in letters, numbers and reading, but he puts more energy into speaking and listening- which we also often forget is important, and he isn't concerned about learning to have perfect grammar, use tense and conjugation accurately or making mistakes, he describes things or makes up words (often compound-words) for things he doesn't know but wants to describe- if you have access to a native speaker, these are also good things to do- a four yearold can make their wishes known! If you can speak like a 4 year old, you will be able to communicate to some degree and you will then get to build on it over time the way a child does, probably make you more fluent too as you will be imitating those around you, not learning from a rigid plan! I think we should do most of our learning as a child would and supplement with traditional study.
I totally agree with Yuta San.. one has to immerse oneself in different and various souces while studying a language.. the more sources are better is the chance of learning the language quickly.. I'm self studying Japanese and I couldn't emphasize more on this point how helpful it has been to catalyse my learning.. and Japanese is the 4th language that I am learning..
That’s really dope, so I’m learning Spanish right now. Should I take my time for another year or 2 getting fluent in that and then tackling Japanese or go ahead and start my katakana journey?
2200 hours is a good figure. It took me one year to be able to speak 日常生活 Japanese. This happened especially when I moved to Japan in April 2022 (last year). Before that, I had been studying with teachers online, but because I live in Japan now and I force myself to only use Japanese, I’ve been pretty much practicing all day every day. From a tourist perspective, I have enough Japanese to enjoy what Japan has to offer. From the perspective of someone living in Japan and wanting to build a life here and integrate as much as possible, I still have a LOOOONG way to go! 日本に引っ越してくる前に日本語あまり喋りませんでした。去年、読み書きも全然できませんでした！でも今、日本に住んでるので上手くなってきました。 thanks for your wonderful videos, I hope to cross paths with you one day in 新宿 or 渋谷！
I am learning Japanese myself and since using duolingo: my reading and texting is getting better using hiragana and katakana characters. I also have friends that I've known for years that I speak to in both English and Japanese. I'm a kinetic learner (learn by doing, watching/listening and reading). One thing I haven't improved is calligraphy and speaking (visually impaired and deaf). I do have a small amount of sight and have aids to hear. I don't let it stop me though 😊. I hope that one day I can use what I've learnt and already use in person rather than just online. I am also learning Turkish which I find is harder than learning Japanese lol. Hope you are well yuta-san. Leon 🇬🇧 xx
I never understood why it has to be all or nothing for so many. The one thing I learned about studying languages is that making it fun for yourself is what really helps the most. It just makes you naturally engage with the language and in what way you do that doesn't matter too much. Getting input of almost any kind is valuable. Of course watching [FAMILY FRIENDLY ANIME] without subtitles without understanding any Japanese is likely not going to help much but there is a rather wide margin of what types of materials are useful and the only thing that matters is that you do something.
I an learning Japanese for nearly half a year now but only like 10-25 min a day, so I am not than far into it (yet) but I totally agree with everything you said cuz that’s literally the way I learned English. I am German school I learned English and French. However my French is shit. In real life environments like conversations/movies etc. I miss like half on the context and are rarely lost sometimes. With English however, it’s the opposite. I mean my grammar isn’t that good and I still make mistakes, however I never had any problem with reading/understanding and unlike in French, I can just start talking and have a conversation in English just like I would do in German, in French however I can’t just casually talk cuz every time I want to say something I first need to think of how I could say it. And the reason for this is that like 40% of my day is in English, since many games, movies, and overall most things I do on the internet are…well you guessed it…in English. And that’s also how a learned a lot of the „casual“ English, I never learned in school. That you can simply say/write cause or cuz instead of „because“, you can say „gonna“ instead of „going to“, and overall how to talk a bit more casually. The English in school was (in my opinion) way to formal, with French I never had any experience outside of school, so that’s probably the reason why I am so bad in it. With Japanese it isn’t that extreme as with English. However I would say that my day consists of like 5-8% Japanese (and it increases a bit every week) so I hope that my Japanese will turn out like my English and not like my French xD
I can't speak any more than basic Japanese...simply because I don't practice speaking Japanese as it was never my focus...yet it is sooo easy understanding anime, manga and even Visual novels and light novels. Before starting Japanese, I had never read a light novel or watched JDramas and barely read manga. Now I do all of that all the time, depending on what I feel like consuming...according to practice tests I've taken I'm at N1, at least when it comes to understanding the language....its just a matter of creating a habit to study daily (by consuming media)...I do agree with Yuta in a lot of points in this video..... I personally started consuming content meant for natives right after learning kana. And it wasn't even graded readers....it was games, and my own hand picked games (not suggestions from the internet)...you just have to be patient. If your goal is to learn simply to watch anime or read manga....just read and listen a lot...if your goal is to communicate as soon as possible, start doing that early on. No matter what your goal is, its just a matter of repetition doing a certain skill...no amount of textbook or classes/course (sorry Yuta) will ever get you to understand Japanese by itself... On may 3, 2023 it will be officially 3 short years since I even learned my first hiragana character....and now I can't imagine my life without Japanese :D. I do have to note that since I wanted to consume media as soon and as painless as possible I did study Kanji for 4 hours daily...very intensively....and grammar using 日本語総まとめ (にほんご そう まとめ/nihongo sou matome) both kanji and grammar all the way to N1 level...and used anki for words I didnt understand....but all this studying I did WHILE consuming content that I wanted to consume daily....its basically what kept me going....Now, I only read and listen daily...no more hard core studying....except maybe anki still (but not nearly as much as I used to)..and everything just "clicks"...i love it :D
I started learning Japanese about 3 years ago. I have to say, that I tend to be a quite fast learner in general - but still, although I can pretty much speak about most topics and have fun times over extended periods of time with my Japanese friends, I still have the feeling I make a lot of mistakes and use really unnatural expressions at times. I am just "good enough" to understand pretty well how to express myself in a manner that others understand me. So to say, I have somewhat "mastery over my unnaturalness and mistakes", as it basically never happens that I am not understood. I guess I should be happy with that. :P
Something people tend to forget when asking "How long does it take to learn x language" is that it also really depends on your own ability to learn a new language. If you've spoken only one language for your entire life, chances are it'll be be pretty rough and quite time consuming. I consider myself lucky enough to be trilingual from a very early age, and I tend to pick up new languages very easily, even if they're totally different from the ones that I know. But one thing is true for everyone learning a new language, and that is that with enough work, practice and patience, you can master a new language! So to everyone out there who feels like they're stuck sometimes or feel like they can't improve: It's okay! Take a break, and return to it the next day! You got this 💪!!
THANK YOU. I hate when people say you cant use anime to learn Japanese. It feels like Gatekeeping. But I learned most of my Japanese from watching anime and Japanese streamers mixed with actual studying.
Yeah, I guess I can understand because there some words and phrasing used in Japanese anime/dramas that are never used in real life. That being said, Japanese people will still understand you even if you speak like a cartoon- you might get an odd look but it's still useable Japanese. Plus the more you study proper grammar alongside authentic materials, the more you'll be able to notice when the Japanese isn't natural. Besides, textbooks are notorious for having awkward or very old fashioned speech... Speaking in "Textbook Japanese" alone sounds weird, too. I remember my Spanish teacher reminding us constantly that, while mostly correct in translation, the Spanish used in our textbooks was kinda old and formal. She said it was like the equivalent of an American 50s housewife lol
3:16 taking Japanese in high school made it easier for me to study by myself as an adult. I already know some kanji and all the kana and basic things like that, I’m familiar with the language, so it’s easier to pick things up. It’s good for getting a foundation but it can’t be your only resource for sure. The sad part about it is because it had been so long between then and now I lost a lot of speaking confidence and I don’t know what level I’m at as beginner materials is too easy but intermediate can often be above my level. I think the biggest benefit to things like watching shows and livestreams is that it’s either real people or actors playing real characters so you can get more familiarity with various forms of speech and hear a larger variety of native speakers.
Between your course, Busuu, LingQ, iTalki, all the manga and anime I've got, games with Japanese language tracks, etc., I'm having more fun learning the language versus what I had to do for two years with Spanish in high school. (My school had Japanese as an option, but they dropped it the very year I was able to take it. German too.)
For comparison, it takes about 2400 hours to max in Old School Runescape. Thought that was interesting. You can do it sub 2000, but you need to use high intensity methods.
8:42 in my experience if you have just a basic familiarity you can still enjoy these things! There’s kanji puns/jokes in the ENG dub of Bleach I found hilarious cuz I took Japanese and I’m not very competent in Japanese and yet I saw the entirety of Born to Be a Flower in Japanese with only Japanese subs and I really liked it!
I've had some inspiration about learning Japanese but I've always given up but you're the first person I've been able to learn something about the Japanese language and made it really simple to understand im on the email thing to and so far its fun and easy to understand
So I am learning something like 50 hours till now... I get a lot of hiragana and katakana, and I even recognize about 30 or 40 kanji. In May I will be in Tokyo. That will be fun. And I subscribed to your E-Mails. Looking forward for the input. And I agree. I learned most of my vocabulary in English and go a feeling for the natural sound of that language by reading Star Trek novels. About 200 of them.
I've learned Japanese language for a year and now I am in Japan as foreign student. I used to think that Japanese language is one of the hardest languages in the world. But when I arrived in Japan and started to live here, I realized that japanese is easier in terms of speech, expressions and sounding more natural as the letters are easier to make compared to other languages. I'm saying this as a person who became pretty much fluent in russian and learned german, italian, english languages.
1:27 I feel like I can’t skip this without talking about it. I started learning Spanish a year ago, and I currently have 768 hours, mostly focused on comprehensible input. And yes, I haven’t skipped a single day because I’m jobless. However, I don’t think these numbers are entirely accurate. I can have small conversations with native Spanish speakers, and I can understand them very well without needing them to adjust their speed. I can also listen to podcasts, watch UA-camrs, and enjoy cartoons in Spanish-all without subtitles or slowing down the audio. So, even if someone speaks really fast, I can understand about 90% of what they’re saying. However, I still wouldn’t consider myself fluent. Understanding the language is one thing, but speaking it is a completely different challenge! so Idk what they meant by learning a language in a specific amount of time? I'm sure they also meant being able to speak the language since it's an important skill.
Yeah, this kinda reflects my own experience in learning English and that of friends. I personally had a very long time in private English language school, plus the basic English lessons that are given on regular schools, but I only really learned how to write in English by forcing myself to use it a lot. My spoken English is still pretty poor because I don't use it a lot, but I can write words up to extremely long comments pretty easily, because I do it so much on the Interwebs. xD The main reason why I never got to learn Japanese is because I didn't follow a similar path, so to this day, despite having Japanese ancestry, I still don't know a whole lot of Japanese. Basically because I was never forced to read, write, and consume content in pure Japanese. As for friends, I have noticed over the years that even people who got to the same level of learning in schools and getting to the same level of proficiency as myself, if they didn't use English everyday and didn't consume content in English, their skills have degraded a lot overtime. Mind you, the private school I went to is considered among the hardest in terms of grammar here... by the end of the course we take a test that gives you a certificate that is required to stuff like teaching classes in US and UK universities, or teach advanced English courses here. But that was like... over 20 years ago now? If you don't use the skills, it just fades overtime. In a sense, I think this is why it gets harder to learn a language when you get older... it doesn't exactly have to do with biology or brain physiology, though this might play a part. It's because the older you get, the more set in stone you culturally get. I just don't have the same openness and willingness to get into say... Japanese trends, content and music as much as I had for English when I was younger. I still do watch a whole ton of anime and read a ton of manga, but it's all with English subtitles, which is how I got used to doing it from start. It helped me learn English a lot, but in turn it certainly damaged my ability to learn Japanese instead. xD Oh well...
I learned English almost exclusively from watching movies, reading text in videogames (NES) and then looking up words I didn't understand in a dictionary. In school I only learned a very small portion of my general knowledge of English. After a few years I was at a level where I could think and read in English, instead of thinking about translating everything I've heard.
That's really interesting, and actually relieving. For the longest time, I just assumed textbooks and classes with strict tests were the ONLY ways to learn. But I guess fun can be the best teacher in many cases.
The perfect video! Many thanks to the author of the channel for the recommendations! The problem with many people is that they want to take a "magic pill" or get "secret knowledge" and immediately have skills and abilities. However, the truth of life is that knowledge, skills, and abilities do not come by themselves. You can't learn a foreign language without doing anything, without wasting your time and effort, just like you can't learn to ride a bike lying on a comfy couch, listening to lectures and watching videos about "modern methods of learning" on a bike. To really learn something, you have to really practice every day. You're going to fall down while you're learning, and you're going to get bumps - that's normal! The ups and downs of learning are an integral part of our lives. Motivation from success and depression from failure will always be your study companions. However, every student has problems in his or her studies that he or she lacks the knowledge to solve. It can be: poor memorization of words; no progress in language learning; the student can speak, but does not understand speech by ear; misunderstanding of grammar; incorrect pronunciation, etc. Agree that a problem you don't know how to solve is very demotivating. In order to find the answer to our question we have to spend a lot of time to read videos, articles and books by polyglots. In today's world, we have to solve problems as quickly as possible. I don't have time to study and analyze a huge amount of information. My goal is to master the basic knowledge of a foreign language as quickly as possible and already start earning money effectively in the international arena. I settled on the practical guide by Yuriy Ivantsiv " Polyglot's Notes: practical tips for learning foreign language". This book is always in my bag. If I have a problem while learning a language, I quickly find the answer in this book. There are many different techniques and tips for learning a foreign language in Polyglot Notes. I have made my own individual schedule and plan for language learning. Now I know what I am going to study, how I am going to study, when I am going to study and what results I am going to achieve. No problem could stop me! With an effective language learning plan my professional skills are more and more in demand internationally every day. Friends, don't stop there! Everyone has talents that millions of people around the world need! Learn the language and make your ideas and dreams come true! Thanks to the author of the channel for the informative and useful video! Your videos motivate me.
My current method of learning Japenese is do all the daily quest on duo lingo at minimum then do some more units of duo lingo if I have time for it. Knock out 1-2 kanji lesson's on Duo lingo - those take 1-2 minutes maybe do some Katakana practice cause I still suck at katakana. Then do all my Wani-Kani reviews followed by a half hour of native content. Ideally this should all be done within 2 hours.
I remember back when I was about 10 or 11, being the average internet-obsessed Baltic kid, I learned English through being interested in just watching English content on UA-cam. Started speaking to a Canadian kid online back when I was 12, and at this point (I am about to turn 20 this month), I speak English at a level where people cannot distinguish an Accent and they think I'm from America until I mention my timezone. I still have fond memories of me watching Yogscast back then. All you have to keep in mind is that you gotta start somewhere. It's easier to learn if you can do it while speaking to somebody who knows the language, or if you watch content that is in that language.
I just started learning Japanese, for the first step, my friend who is a Japanese language teacher here in Bali told me, Master at least 50-150 basic vocabulary then break them down into which one is verb or noun, then master Hiragana & katakana (It's a must). then for some grammar, he used a song to teach me about Te~kei (て形) , The song goes like this : Minna-san Te-kei yo benkyou simasho I, Chi, Ri = Tte Bi, Mi, Ni = Nde KI = Ite Gi = Ide Shi = Shite 😄
4:18 There's another anime this season which I think is very good for learning, 事情を知らない転校生がグイグイくる。 I totally agree with this video, understanding everything is not a need, if it is, people will only be able to consume content meant for revision, people should be less afraid of starting immersion, I was also very hesitant for the first year of study and got no where, so I suggest everyone to just do it.
Yess input guys. I've been watching anime then japanese youtuber without sub I started to understand the gist of what they're talking about then I start japanese class it just help me understand the grammar part, all of my vocab is from my input
I feel like this is why I've forgotten most of my French (which is part of the school curriculum here). It always felt unintuitive to just memorise all the words & phrases.
I thought the passive, causative, and passive-causative were just textbook forms that nobody actually used. But I was surprised to learn from UA-camrs that people really use those forms. "Don't make me laugh" is 笑わせないで, using the causative form. .初めて言われました means "the first time anyone ever said that to me", using the passive form. Also, I learned that when native speakers say 'pantsu', the katakana pronunciation of "pants", they mean underpants. Long pants is ズボン (zubon), which I think is a katakana word from French ("jupon"), though it has a kanji (洋袴), which I think katakana words don't usually have kanji, do they?
I only started learning Japanese recently and I still have a difficulty telling difference between some similar looking hiragana characters, like わ/ね, め/ぬ, る/ろ, す/む and く/へ. I have my first exam in tuesday and I really hope I'll pass but I have difficulty concentrating and remembering what I've learned lol. Is there any trick to stay motivated to study every day?
If you have problèms with the hiragana wait to see the kanji. "やった‼️カナはとても簡単です‼️" 漢字: お前はもう死んでいる☠️" (Eng V : Yeah ‼️ kana are very easy ‼️" Kanji : you re already die ‼️) You Can use your japanese keyboard on your phone (not the romaji but with hiragana) Write them and write basic words ね : ねこ、む: むずかしい for example 日本語の勉強頑張って下さい。
i used a website that you can select groups you want to focus on and it randomizes their order after that you answer in romanji under it one by one, i got hiragana and katakana really fast by doing these a couple of times every day, you can find by searching "tofugu learn kana quiz" i'm sure there are others similar too
I think the best way is to integrate it into your everyday routine. For hiragana, maybe make flash cards and find a time that you can study for a few minutes everyday until you're ready to move on to the next things!
@@smallball4 That sounds like it should be an easy way. But the 'problem' with flashcards is that they rely on 'visualisation', right? Which is something I can't do.
@@alexcorvin3612 Who says you can't? It may take some time, but if you keep practicing them, you should eventually learn how to differentiate the characters, and it should eventually become something you will not have to concentrate on. I've found a program called 'Anki' that allows you to create flashcards and review them using spaced repetition, which can help with this. You just have to make sure you use it every day. When studying kana or kanji, I've also sometimes found it useful to create some English phrase or image (aka a mnemonic) that could relate to some main shape of the character that helps to temporarily improve the short-term memory for that item. Another method that could be useful is to try typing them or writing them out by hand.
i've learned english with youtube, having conversations with streamers and other forms of entertainment without ever really studying it, unfortunately i couldn't do it with japanese and had to seek a school to start learning it not that you can't do it but because if i have to actually study by myself i just won't i would love to learn more with anime and children's books but still is a bit too difficult at the moment
The thing that kills me about learning Japanese is trying to understand the grammar. Everyone always rants on about the kanji but when exposed to it enough, kanji isn’t that hard. The grammar on the other hand is like giving a sugar hyped 3 year old who has ADD a bottle rocket and trying to predict where it will fly for me. It’s been so hard on me that as someone whose been studying for almost 5 years and I can say that I’m barely in and N4 level, like that’s how hard it is for me.
Stop focusing on grammar at all. Just go into immersion, maybe start with a book or series you've already read/watched in your native language. It's enough if you can grasp the meaning of some sentences. Specially with yomichan, it's not that hard. It will be very slow at the beginning, but you will get better. Your brain will eventually get used to the Japanese grammar.
9:10 That’s true. I usually don’t speak English IRL because per day I have to speak another 3 languages. Means I can also be practicing Japanese while speaking other languages.
Im hungarian and im learning japanese and i think its easier for me to learn japanese than english speakers for example the grammar is a bit similar for example: hungaran: Osakában sushit ettem this means i ate sushi in osaka the japanese de partice in is ban is in this case osakáBAN sushiT the t means wo and ettem means i ate so tabemashita.
My view on the japanese learning process has always been, that trying to learn it as a complete beginner is rather unpractical. This is not to discourage, if you really want to learn thats great and dont let anyone say otherwise. However I do think that some may bite off more than they can chew, this is quite possibly the worst thing a new person learning japanese could do. Some will just give up as they are testing their self dicepline, patience and learning ability all at once, this without help will not go well at all, if the person is not up to the task. I think its even more important to prevent dropouts than to pretend that this will be easy. Basically dont go into it trying to do everything and be frustrated when you dont have the patience to do so. If you just keep at it trying to read untranslated manga, putting on kanji subtitles instead of english subtitles and just in general engage in the language you will find yourself to be fluent. If you are learning japanese, im sure you can succeed just keep at it and maybe one of these days you yourself can do the teaching, until then just remember that there is no correct way of learning japanese. As long as you learn something. I concider that the correct way of learning japanese. (Cant say im an expert on the subject since im avarage at best. But there has been alot of dumb bs I have heard recently, basically trying to make japanese sound like this unreachable sumit that is just pretensious trying to reach. So I wrote this for some reason.)
I wrote and drew a short manga the first semester I started learning Japanese. My sensei was impressed. I think making my own materials and having any mistakes explained really helped!
Omg I did something similar!!! I used to write extra short stories for my Japanese teacher to check most weeks. After I would re-write (and re draw) my short stories. It was so useful.
I learned English watching movies and playing games with english voices over in just 6 months. After that, i was able to read everything in english and talk fluently. In school, i have english for 12 years (since kindergarten), and i never understand it there.
I learned english by watching UA-cam/cartoons and learning English at the same time, I can probably learn Japanese by watching anime and learning Japanese at the same time
As a spanish anime fan, once I decided to dip my toes into japanese I thought it was cool that I new some vocabulary and expresions. I hated english SO MUCH when I was in primary school, after watching and reading and playing games in english, I manage to improve a lot. Having fun is an important factor because otherwise you are going to drop it (like I have dropped japanese 3 times jsjsj)
It took me 3-4 years to learn the English I'm still learning English if I don't know some English words I translate them into my own language though google translate app, I didn't learn from school or coaching classes because English teacher don't know English themselves some coaching start own English spoken classes to make profit on people hesitation because English is clearly alien language to them, how I learn the English, first I have noted 500+ verbs forms in regular and irregular verbs, start to watch Hollywood movie with subtitles because I wasn't used to English accent where I take notes of some English words and remember it some words like Gonna Or wanna which doesn't exist in English Grammar text books, but it's mostly used by English man while they are speaking to other character I understand those words means, gonna means "going to" And wanna means "wants to ", because English man use shortest words possible to save energy and complete the sentence , later I came cross video games series called persona series which had 100 hours of gameplay and tons of English dialogue where I have invested in this series for 100-500 hours where I learn to read English, even understand meaning of them which helps to lots on understand English, I have watch lots of English UA-camr which helps used on English voice where I can easily understand them without help of subtitles, I used to Type lots in English too. Talk with others on chat which helps me with English communication with others even to foreign people , but I am Not good with talking to people in English because I'm very introverted in nature who talks only related to the topic and nothing else , now I am. Bored with English I'm interested in learning Japanese because it's close to my mother language and it's easy to remember someone's name is unlikely with Korean names where I still don't remember the name of the main character of solo leveling manhwa
As a French native speaker, I was introduced to English through video games before taking formal English classes. As a result, I already knew a lot of vocabulary and expressions that weren't taught until years later. For example, I learned words like "hammer," "fire," and "thunder" from playing Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga. Although I have been studying English my entire life, it never felt like I was studying. Now, I am trying to learn Japanese by playing Pokemon Fire Red in Japanese. It's nice because I can read at my own pace and choose when to open a text box. I spend more time playing the game, and it's easy to read. I don't try to translate everything, but instead focus on what I already know and pick up new vocabulary and grammar as I go. Sometimes I even skip the text altogether because the point of the game is to play. ゼニガメ is the best ;)
Yuta! My sister wants to go back to Japan next year and for me to come too, I need to save some money!!! 2:40, that reminds me of watching Star Trek Next Generation with the Japanese dub, unfortunately I only have the first (worst) 2 seasons on Blu-Ray. It reminds me so much of Gundam. It’s the naval ranks and voice acting. Worf 中尉､ はしん！
I'd love to learn a language, but I struggle even with easy ones like French. I think my learning disability makes it hard to understand and absorb, which just breaks my heart - so many people in the world I can't communicate just because my brain doesn't want to be trained in the ways I have available.
Im going to japan on 2025 july and i want to interact to the fullest. I found this channel and was very happy, this is my 4th language to learn as my main language is Spanish ☺️ thank you for this looking forward
2nd comment: YUTA WHERE'S KYUBEY?!?!?! Yuta, you have a great series of how anime characters speak Japanese. Please do Itsuki Nakano from the quintessential quintuplets or any or all the 7 main characters in TQQ. How they speak Japanese I believe is very important to understanding the plot eg the honorifics, the lost in translation stuff (eg when they say things like tsurui, hatsukoi, uso, tachi, fukuzatsu Vs taihen, mote etc that are removed from the dub). I compiled a lot of the lost in translation stuff in r/gotoubun Something to consider about Itsuki: The Quintessential Quintuplets' character types are: Ichika - Onee-san / ara ara, Nino - tsundere, miku - kuudere / dandere, Yotsuba - genki Itsuki - ?? - Tsundere like Nino? - Eat-suki? - Imouto? - Someone who speaks keigo to their siblings, to Fuutarou and to Raiha and to everyone basically? Actually, the main thing I learned from Yuta's videos that keigo is basically just desu, masu & their variations. I swear when I learned elementary Japanese in bachelor's (foreign language classes are required in universities in the Philippines) we were never even taught the word keigo. All this time I had no idea Itsuki was the only quint and actually only main character who was talking keigo to EVERYONE. Anyway, I have a theory as to what Itsuki's type is, but you're not gonna like it...
fun fact: the kanji and sometimes even the reading of the quintuplets' names are in order with 1 being oldest to 5 being youngest, for example ichika - ichi means one nino - ni means two miku - the kanji is 三something yotsuba - yot is kind of a variation of yon meaning four itsuki - again kanji is of go(五)
@@t_aikutsu lol they're both kuudere? Even people say Itsuki is tsundere but less than Nino. That's why I have a theory that makes Itsuki a different type from the other 4. Tsundere & kuudere can be sub-types. Look up 'r/ItsUesugi' or 'r/Raitsuki'
@@soreto314 no offense but anyone who knows mandarin, Cantonese or even knows that ichi means 1 in Japanese knows this...? You can even tell the kanji/hanzi for 1 2 3 look like sticks 1 2 3...
recently decided to finally start learning Japanese for now only starting to learn hiragana, for me tbh is much harder then must English speakers cuz for me it 3d language and im NOT native English speaker
Okay so this video sorta struck me. Ive been learning japanese on my own for over 3 years spending maybe an hour a few times a week learning and being inconsistent as hell throughout my time. And whenever I asked people how they learned they always say. "I just listened to a lot of japanese conversations" or "I just watched a lot of anime" This really is frustrating because whenever I try this, I can never pick up anything. I don't understand how people can turn there brains into sponges and soak and teach themselves words just from hearing it. I get that based of what your seeing you could maybe pick up a word here and there but to pick up enough to be able to hold conversations is mind boggling. My only method of learning is dumping my face in the Anki app and reading boring flash cards. Learning japanese has never been fun for me and its why I haven't studied it in 2 months.
Here's some tips as someone who reached the one year mark of learning Japanese consistently: This is one of the most important things - *always* have something running in Japanese, even if you're asleep, let it infiltrate your dreams. When they say immerse yourself, literally become a skinny dipper in the japanese language pool. I know it's not easy and frustrating when you can't understand but if you have things on at almost all times and remotely pay attention at least 50% of the time, you'll see at least some results by the first year. It's still important to learn grammar while you consume content. Even though people say they just watch anime all day and look up words and all of a sudden understand Japanese after a year or two, it doesn't always work that way for everyone. For example, I have ADHD which may make it more difficult to focus and catch onto the new structure of the Japanese language at times, so even if I know all the words, sometimes I have trouble piecing it together. It's okay, we're still making progress, and getting better, even if it's slower than others. Personally, I'm someone that always has to struggle to do things that everyone else can do easily, so while others are learning Japanese for 2-3 hours a day in order to be fluent in a couple years, I'm learning Japanese for 10-12 to even 16-20 hours a day in order to catch up to that pace. If that resonates with you, I suggest you turn on podcasts like ユユの日本語ポッドキャスト on UA-cam or a Teppei podcast series (there are many), the first being more natural yet not too difficult Japanese for near intermediates, and the second being for beginners still in the N5 category. Even I've failed to keep them on for 100% of the time, but if you can do at least 70% or more, I think you will achieve results. The key is that you should also watch grammar videos which explain grammar points in detail. These can help you gain an understanding on the things that don't make sense even when you have recognized all the words. Furthermore, it'll help you recognize sections in the sentence to help you parse it better. For example: I watch a video on the 「なのに」grammar point, maybe a few other grammar videos, then I'm tired cause I've been learning all day and looking at new words, then I listen closely to my podcast playing and suddenly sometimes なのに jumps out at me, and I can be like "oh, I at least know that part" Doing this repetitively has sort of started a "torrent download" of Japanese if you will, in my mind. The random parts are slowly getting filled in, but the more I fill it in, the more I start to understand. Also, it's exponential but it has plateaus as well. So you might grow exponentially in two days and then all of a sudden you feel stuck for a week or two, like you're not making any progress. Sometimes that's actually true or sometimes just a feeling. Sometimes you're just tired, but either way you'll eventually be able to pick up the pace again and exponentially improve. Also, you don't actually need to use Anki. Anki is based off spaced repetition, but spaced repetition can happen naturally (and I've been doing it naturally before I realized what SRS meant) Essentially, you learn some words, then you hear them again, and you recognize them in natural context (watching anime, reading manga, you come across the word you've seen before). You usually won't remember the meaning at first, but you look it up again and then go "oh yeah, that's right, I remember now!" And you repeat that two or three times if necessary and that word is guaranteed to stick in your head from then on (unless you have a mental issue that prevents it, but if it's not as bad as ADHD, I'm guessing it won't be a problem since I can manage to do it with ADHD in my personal experience, although everyone's different) Alright so lastly I will recommend some apps that can help. Kanji Tree app helps so much for recognizing kanji characters then reading kanji words which can be applied to real sentences. You don't have to use it that often but make sure you're regularly introducing new kanji and words to your brain to recognize, cause the key is for it to repeatedly appear after you've seen or heard it before, then recall that memory and along with it, the meaning eventually, after a few tries. The whole point of all of what I said is to create a sort of "feedback loop" that gives you infinitely more Japanese content than you need, a surplus of content that you can bite a piece off of at any time, and then you keep biting pieces off until you recognize the flavor of some pieces. Soon enough there will be very few things that you haven't tasted yet (at least in terms of native-like level, and if you're insane like me you can even aim for beyond native level) Alright so that was my messy Ted talk, hope you enjoyed and sorry it was long. If you have any questions or disputes, I'd like to discuss them with you 🤝 best of luck on your Japanese journey, and please!! Find something interesting that makes you want to learn Japanese, not the other way around! That's the only thing that can drive you to continue learning, if there's a reason behind it that can't be extinguished.
By the way, in case you want to know how far I've gotten for context: Just 1 year ago, I was barely able to use the は particle, just mainly able to use one or two word phrases. At around the 8 month mark is when I started understanding things for real. I hit the convergence point and a tiny little Japanese flame started to ignite... It was very weak and almost got blown out many times, but I kept clinging onto trying to continue to understand, and now after about 14 months, I can understand basic content. Because of my unorthodox learning methods, I didn't learn N5 and N4 and such in that order, but just the 1000 most common words (I know about 1400 right now, after a year) Sometimes, there are even N5 words that I don't know, but not every N5 word is more common than some N4 or N3 words, so I suggest you just learn in the order it comes to you. If I had to rate myself on a JLPT level, I'm between N4-N3 level, steadily nearing N3. At that point it gets more difficult to actually surpass N3 without speaking to natives so it's important for me to either talk to people online or go to Japan and immerse for a few months while doing other stuff. I believe after I've reached around 2000 words and learned enough grammar points to understand roughly what connects them, it'll be time to throw myself in the deep end and go into survival mode in Japan. Everything that I know will have no choice but to activate if I want to survive. So I feel that once you have consumed enough content to at least gain a decent understanding, even if you can't yet conversate, you may benefit from immersing directly in Japan at that point, or at the very least trying to talk to natives as much as possible through speech, either in real life, or if not possible then through voice texts, voice chats, etc. Just whatever you can get to use what you've learned. Important: if you freeze up and it's like you learned nothing when you go to talk to someone, it's okay, just don't give up and you'll be able to conversate smoothly eventually, but it's extremely important to keep at it in that stage to tell your brain that this is something that you need to make use of in your daily life.
I think the biggest problem with your approach is you are trying to passively learn Japanese when you are not at that level. The solution is simple: try learning actively with authentic materials, as I repeatedly explained in many of my videos.
@@UzumakiHarutoJP Great advice indeed (although I personally cannot sleep with anything on, else I will not get quality sleep, and that is incredibly important for language acquisition). Anki gets reaaaly useful once you know all the frequently used words. Because then in order to see the more rare ones repeatedly in the wild, you need to read much more in order to encounter them as with the common words. I may as well ask...have you got some advice on what to do when you get easily tired? Despite being interested in the content I very often am unable to sustain my attention for it, because after around 10-20 minutes I start getting really tired and have to take a break since I am sort of "passing-out" :D While during summer I was doing around 5 hours a day, once uni started, I generally did not get more than 3 hours and often barely 1 hour. I took a small break from input now, since I feel like I was burning out. I am roughly N4/N3 level, but still there are those sentences where I struggle with understanding them despite knowing everything (or looking it up with Yomichan). Also, how do you have it with translation, if you do not understand the context? Do you just skip it, move on, or...
@@mordraug6662 alright so first, for the tiredness thing, that's extremely relatable because when I focus on certain things too long, even if I am interested, unless I'm actively doing something I get tired too. I can physically do something or interact with something for 20 hours, but doing that for just listening and trying to pick out every word is extremely tiring, so I get that. The way to tackle the problem: for me, (and this also answers your last question) I translate/look up some words, and leave others. I leave it to my own judgement whether it's okay to leave a word behind or not, because it's generally impossible to pick literally every single word out of the content you're trying to understand. I think even Japanese people might miss a word or two when watching or reading content, so as learners, it's okay to disregard a few and focus on what you can handle. If you can only handle picking out 15-20 words from a 20 minute video, then just pick out the 20 words that appear most repetitively in the show, like if you hear a word more than once, that's usually a sign to translate it if you don't know it already. Part two of not getting tired is still applying the same concept to the whole process. If you get tired from focusing too intently for a long time, then don't let yourself fall asleep, instead do something else that you can actively participate in, for example you can join servers on discord and message friends in Japan, talk to them in a voice chat, etc. There are times where I've literally spent all my energy and all I could do was sit there and lay, so in that case just still play stuff in the background. This also takes me to the sleeping thing. Honestly, if you're like me, I bet you'll turn off the content in the background thinking "alright I'm so tired I'm about to sleep right now!", and as soon as you turn off that content you somehow end up with 30 minutes, an hour, or even more of energy to do other stuff before sleeping. And that's all time that you could use to at least have something in the background. It's of course important to get good sleep, so if it can't be helped, don't play things in the background, but it's important to maximize your time as much as possible if you want to make the most of it and get far faster. You might have to make the sacrifice of not sleeping well for a while, but I think you'll actually find that you'll get used to it after a week or two. I actually like it when the podcasts pierce my dreams and become part of it. And if I wake up, then I listen to it till I fall asleep again. Understandably, most people can't do what I do since I have no school and no physical job right now, so I can sleep whenever and wake up whenever, but whatever your schedule is, try to make the most of it. And overall, when you can't handle one thing, move to a less intense version of it so you can handle it. Maybe after 20 minutes you can't translate lots of words, but you can still just watch something intently or even passively. It's better than nothing! Or maybe you do 20 minutes of intently watching content, then you do interactive content for an hour or two on discord, actively trying to meet friends on there (by the way, if you need Japanese friends on discord I recommend going on disboard ja site and you'll find so many active servers with plenty of Japanese people looking for friends including foreigners). Either way you do it, as long as you're exposing yourself to the language and interacting with it, you're learning in some way. Don't disregard the small things like "oh, I noticed he used *this word* in a slangy way that I haven't seen before" cause even that can be a learning experience to help you. For example, サーバー is often called 鯖 on discord (at least between all the people I talk to). 鯖 means mackerel, but since it's pronounced saba, they often use that instead since サーバー is long. Those little things you learn can be invaluable to your experience so don't feel guilty for learning that way!
9:23 No sir, I most definitely am not a normal human. I have debilitating social anxiety 😂😂 great video though, I would love to learn Japanese someday. It's just hard to keep yourself motivated sometimes.
I have studied japanese for almost 6 or 7 years by myself on the internet , I'm still struggling when it comes to speaking the language , I understand some anime , music and videogames I feel very confident when it comes to my listening but when I try to say something people say that I sound like a robot, and I guess that's because I'm always trying to follow the grammar rules and pretending like japanese is like english grammar , I guess it is just a matter of time , really awesome language maybe I can't speak like a pro but at least I can watch some of the things that I like and understand in the native language
So true. I went months convinced this immersion thing was all bs and it can only work when you’re a kid. I watched a ton of anime without subs and barely saw any progress (I thought). Lo and behold, I went to Japan last week and I could actually understand everyone. It was like magic, I couldn’t believe it. I did 10x better than I thought I would. All my friends were shocked by my progress, saying things like “how did you understand what that person just said?” And I would just say “I don’t know…I watched a lot of anime I guess lol”. I even kept up with my friend who had studied Japanese in school for three years…and all I did was watch anime for a few months lol. This method works. It feels like you’re making no progress for weeks, but your brain will learn the patterns, just trust the process.
Can you make a video on your thoughts of learning Japanese by watching Japanese VTubers and how easy would be to do so? I watch Inugami Korone and Nekomata Okayu, but would you say other vtubers would be easier to learn Japanese from?
I can say this statement of watching your favorite shows with no subs does teach you as I had hindi speaking neighbors and we were kids at the time so we didn't know each other and couldn't communicate with each other so it was hard to tell them toys and stuff so I started watching hindi cartoons like zig sharko doremon ninja hattori stuff like that and I didn't know any hindi back then and slowly after 2 months of watching the cartoons and stuff I was able to speak with them And understand them my hindi then was nothing good but for my age was good as 7 year old's aren't expected to speak profound ones and I had gotten along better I'm from south India so idk how much south languages helped in Hindi
They go to language school because having a student visa would allow them to work albeit part time, and by the time they graduate they can easily apply for a work visa. It may be unnatural Japanese they teach in those language schools, but it is the legal way to find work in Japan, and legal issues are everything, that's why the Chinese, Nepalese, Vietnamese, Indians etc. are enrolling in these expensive schools, because they can almost be like a job agency.
Going to a language school doesn't really make it easier to apply for a work visa (unfortunately), being in Japan does :/ People go because then they can go to a university in Japan, and get a degree, which is what makes it easier to get a job in Japan. Language school on a student visa will let you work part time up to 28 hours, but you'll find just as much difficulty as without the student visa trying to get a work visa sponsored if you have no degree. If you already have a degree, you can get a job in Japan without language school anyway
I think language learning is a long process, and beginners think it won’t take long at all, and they give up. I started learning Japanese 10 years ago this year. I passed N3 of the JLPT in 2019. I used to only use textbooks and apps, which helped with formal Japanese and learning the basics and sentence structure and all that. But ever since I passed the test, I’ve only been doing this version of “studying.” I watch Japanese movies with Japanese subtitles, and listen to Japanese podcasts while I’m driving to work. I watch Japanese UA-camrs, listen to Japanese music. Most of my free time is spent listening to Japanese in some way. I don’t really need subtitles anymore, and I usually say “That’s not what they said” to my husband when he’s watching anime with subtitles 😆 That’s another level of language learning is being unhappy with the subtitles. I definitely think that learning Japanese through native material is the best way once you’ve gotten to an intermediate level. Because like you said, you start seeing that a lot of formal study material is sort of “Japanese for foreigners” and not how real Japanese people speak.
People who learn more than one language early are much better at learning. There are Armenians here - everyday people - who are fluent in at least six languages!
Well, I’ve gotten some of my Japanese back. Oh I’m able to speak a little bit but I want to get better so I’ve been practicing every day and I am still finding that I’m having trouble and then I’m also taking a class but we have to read it to speak it and write it all in one which is really hard but so much fun. What is the best way to become fluent in Japanese😊❤
Oh man, it's going to take me forever. I know kana and a few kanji, but I don't have time to do 3 hrs every day lol, not on the days I work, anyway. But I will try! It's not like I don't have free time (my work-lifr balance is decent), I just have other hobbies, too.
Wouldn't "mezurashiku ne?" mean "isn't it rare?" If it's the negative form using nai, seems like she would be saying, 'it isn't rare?' maybe out of surprise or something And how would I know that that colloquially means, "what a coincidence" or "isn't that strange"? I'd like to do immersion but I typically just read the English subtitles. Maybe it's just me because you think it's easy, but I think it's difficult to pick up on inflection and guess the interpretation. I might catch a word or two, but without subtitles, I'd be totally lost.
My difficulty in learning to speak and thus more effectively learn Japanese is that I don’t have a Japanese tongue…by that I mean I have to say/repeat sentences really slowly compared to natives, and sometimes it makes me scream through my teeth in frustration. All the endings like dayo, dane, etc.
at sompoint i reached the stage where sometimes i didn't even look at the subtitles while watching my hero for simpler sentences. The hard part for me is learning vocab since all i know is what i retaned from Japanese class a few years ago.
depends on your definition of "to learn japanese": took me 5 years to finally pass the Kanji Kentei level 1 and Nihongo Kentei level 1 - i guess i can say that i have "learnt" it
Learn Japanese with Yuta: bit.ly/3M2Llmy
The 2200 hours is 100% wrong.
It takes way longer.
Your whole video is wrong.
@@narsplace It took me about a month to be functional, 5 years to be conversational, 10 years to be fluent and 15 years to become high school level literate
@@gordonbgraham in Japanese? 10 years would be right.
The reason that he is wrong is that he doesn't understand memory consolidation.
The 2200 hours that the FSI says is base on doing class 6 to 8 hours a day.
Doing less hours a day means that you more time for your brain to forget what you have learnt meaning that you need more repetition than someone who is studying more time densely.
So 10 years for someone who is working and maybe doing other studies is about right.
@@narsplace Yes, Japanese. And that's living in Japan where all one hears is Japanese 24/7. As you've mentioned that is with having a full-time job, so basically I studied anywhere from an hour to two hours a day, 5 days a week. I've heard plenty of foreigners claim fluency in under 2 years online. I've yet to actually meet one. When put to the test most can get by with the basics in terms of functional language, meaning ordering food, asking for directions etc. but lack the ability to have a conversation beyond any topic outside of their own hobbies, interests or daily life activities. Conversations meander and when they do most foreigners who have lived in Japan for less than 5 years get lost. It takes a tonne of time to become conversational...and more to become fluent.
Ah.. sometimes I felt like giving up learning japanese, but then I remember how I learned English , it was definitely a long process too. years of textbook, years of practice.. there is no easy way to master a language.. so for everyone who is currently learning new language, I wish all of us the best!
I learned to read from comic books and MAD magazine. That kind of stuff works.
learning for fun definitely feel different than learning to pass JLPT test.
i need to reach n4 minimum to apply work in jp as blue collar workers
kanji is hell~
@@jonathanyehezkiel2528 honestly, compared to many other things, kanji one of the easiest parts of Japanese and it makes it way easier to read in my opinion than if it was just hiragana/katakana
You don't even have to write them in most cases during daily life or at the very least you can get by without writing any so it's just a matter of remembering what it looks like, remembering the most common words attached to the kanji you want to remember, the different meanings that some of the words with that kanji have, the sound of how each word is pronounced, and the memories of each section will support each other to not be forgotten
@@UzumakiHarutoJP maybe your memorization skill is better than most ppl
most ppl said remembering kanji is hard.
for kana, it's okay because pretty straightforward
like a=あ
you can use mnemonic as well to memorize
but if
あ = read as "a"
あ- = read as "cow"
あ+ = read as "aeroplane"
あ# = read as "happy"
i would be confused af
why あ- read as cow? from where's the basis? ( the chart )
that's how i feel atm.
kanji feel more like an another language entirely
@@jonathanyehezkiel2528 what he means it that Japanese without kanji would be much harder to reading, imagine reading something like すもももももももものうち and tell me what it means
In my opinion you never stop learning a language, you can become fluent in a few years but you will learn it almost all your life
That is very true, I've been learning English for around 15 years now, and more often than not I come across something I didn't knew, a new word, a new idiom... I can express myself fluently and understand any kind of topic even if I'm not necessarily knowledgeful in that topic
Як казав Тарас іноземну мову можна вивчити за 6 років а свою все життя 😁
@@CirnoWasHere I can tell that you are clearly fluent in English, but I just wanted to help you correct two things in your comment.
1. When you said " I come across something I didn't knew", the correct way to say that would be "I come across something I didn't know". Knew is the past tense of the positive form of "Know", so if you were saying " I knew you liked me", or "I always knew...something" then those would be the ways to use it in a positive sentence. When you're going for a negative sentence, it's "I didn't know". In order to use "Knew" in a negative sentence, you'd need to negate it by saying "I NEVER knew".
2. This one is a much smaller correction. You said "even if I'm not necessarily knowledgeful in that topic". You would actually want to use the word "knowledgeable".
Overall, your comment is still completely intelligible and native speakers would obviously completely understand what you are saying! I hope this comment was helpful to you, my friend!
@daenackdranils5624 Watching videos of a place on UA-cam and actually visiting that place are entirely different. It's not even remotely similar. You're not obligated to go to Japan, but you don't need to disrespect the people because you think they need to speak English. They don't. They are their own country, with their own language, history, traditions, and culture, and you should respect that. They don't owe you anything. Also, if you think Japanese people are "boastful", then you know nothing about them.
@@Words-of-encouragement.-. anyway japan is too expensive. plus japan got indeed a strong american influence like the philippines and when it became a super touristy place it's normal to expect it a little of english spoken. if they refuse to adapt themselves to the foreigners, even a little , they shouldn't be surprised to be blamed. sorry but with the amount of videos nowadays about such places as well as vlogs, it's still greatly immersive. it's his right to say that. why also respecting rigid and unfair traditions? it's too much.
Basically if you're gonna learn a language you have to incorporate and make it part of your daily life if you want to achieve atleast fluent understanding.
You can go the extra mile and use that language as your monologue voice so you can become more comfortable speaking the language
bravo you just discourage us.
@@giannilyanicks1718 What is discouraging about making your TL part of your life?
Took me 4 years to go from N5 to N2. I currently live and work in Japan
I mean, as somebody who is a German native speaker, like 90% of my English was learned because of UA-cam, WWE, non-dubbed English shows and movies, and games. The English we learned in School was a good way to help with that, but that alone would have NEVER made me fluent. So the idea of learning a Language by using native media is absolutely not a foreign concept to me.
As for the little Japanese I have learned up until now, only a tiny bit is from using a language learning app. Most of what I understand comes from Anime, Japanese songs, and your videos. I would not claim any sort of fluency in Japanese, but just from what I do understand I sometimes pick up inaccuracies in subtitles, for instance, cause I understood what a character was saying, and then read the subs and thought, "Well, that's not really what they said." Little things like that are great for being motivated to keep learning.
And all that is with me not really putting tons of effort into learning Japanese, since starting to actually learn it about 3 years ago. Mostly cause I had hardly any energy or motivation to put into that during most of 2020/21 for reasons of the pandemic, and very little time last year, for reasons of starting a new job. I don't know whether already being bilungual or having German as a native language makes any difference in terms of time it takes to learn Japanese, but I'd assume if I had put in more time, and daily practicing, I'd probably be on a somewhat decent level by now. I've only just started to put more effort in now, so I guess we'll see how well I speak the language next year.
I'm french and that was the same for me in english. Actually i've learn english for more than 10 years without really trying to learn it. When i started using internet(2005-2010) there was lot of meme in english, we didn't have them in french(or it was just poorly translated and not funny) and we shared a lot of them with my (french) friends online.
Then i started watching shows, subtitled in french but i could understand enough english(also french and english are so close grammaticaly, with many common words like communication, or close l translation/traduction) to get some phrases like you in japanese and learn many worlds(i still remember the exact moment when i learn the verb "to fish", i already knew fish of course, but i didn't know we could say "to fish", it bugged me and i never forgot this word, there's many like this :D).
Finally over the years i started using more and more english, the example i use the most is wikipedia, it's insanely more detailed in english than in french(except for pages like french personalities and such) and also i started watching anime subbed in english because i've watch soo much it became hard to find new ones. It was difficult at first, i remember being very reluctant and was like "no i'm to tired today i don't feel like i could read that much english", but shows like all the seasons of Monogatari Series helped me to be insanly good at reading english fast(that'smy best skill atm, i still suck at writing, even more at speaking because i've alsmot never spoken english :/).
Today i'm rewatching old anime that i almost forgot, but not enough to not be spoiled, without subtitle to learn japanese and i hope it's be the same as for english. I still know the general plot so it's not as frustrating as watching new show that i've never watch because i'm too afraid to miss important information and "spoil" most of the story ...
@@Whillyy Hi, i hope this doesn't come across as rude, i just thought since we're talking about learning languages i would correct some of your sentences. (I ignored misspellings and just focused on grammar etc)
"When i started using internet" should be "When i started using the internet" missing the article "the"
"there was lot of meme in english" should be "there were lots of memes in english" 'was' should be 'were' and missing plurals
"i've watch soo much it became" should be "i've watched soo much it became" missing past tense "watched"
"no i'm to tired today " should be "no i'm too tired today " "too instead of "to"
"without subtitle to learn japanese" should be " without subtitles to learn japanese" missing plural
"i hope it's be the same as for english. " should be "i hope it'll be the same as english" reworded sentence "it's" changed to "it'll" and removed unnecessary "for"
"watching new show " should be either "watching new shows" for plural OR " watching a new show" for singular.
Over all still really good english, your mistakes like dropping articles and not pluralising words are very common with French speakers so nothing to feel bad about.
Good luck learning Japanese! 😊
@@DavidCruickshank thank you !
Yes I make mistakes because I'm not used to write, even if I'm reading English for years now, I'm not writing that much(just few comments like this one and for a few months). I'm often lost when I have to explain too complicated things like that 😅 but I'll never improve if I never try
@@Whillyy It was super fascinating to read your perspective. While you made some small mistakes in your writing, I find your ability to convey complex thoughts in English very impressive! I found your assessment of your different skills (reading, writing, speaking) very interesting as well. In an odd way it motivates me to keep trying with Japanese.
@@JRBison23 thank you !!! I won't lie, writing something like this is still difficult to me, i'm struggling for many sentences and i have to check translations for few words, rewriting some sentences because even if in french i could say exactly what i want to say, i think it sounds weird and i'm not sure if it's correct. And i still make mistakes x)
If i can say one thing, don't be afraid to make mistakes when you're making "output". I've watch many video of Xiaomanyc, it's a youtuber from new york, he has learnt chinese for years and now he sounds like a native, he loves to learn languages and makes many videos like "i try to speak with natives after studying for 2 weeks", everyone is impressed even though he's struggling to make sentences, stutters a lot ect ... but nobody cares and everyone still love to speak with him. I think it's very motivating :)
Good luck with your japanese, it's a long journey, but if you really want to learn it's defenitly worth it.
About studying grammar I can confirm from experience. It's much more productive to study grammar while immersing at the same time in media in the language you are studying. I watched a great deal of anime before I actively started studying Japanese, and so when I began looking up grammar it was pretty easy to understand and remember because I had already encountered all these grammatical forms countless times before. It was almost like recalling things you already knew unconsciously rather than memorizing from scratch which made things much easier to learn. I really didn't have to force myself to remember anything, it just intuitively made sense because it was familiar.
Also for people who are on the opposite side and argue that immersion alone can make you fluent, that doesn't work either from my experience, because I've made so much progress in a short amount of time by reading about grammar and doing duolingo lessons, compared to the pace at which I was learning new things by passive immersion. But it wasn't useless either because I've familiarized myself with the sound system of the language and learned a great deal of vocabulary, which gave me a very solid basis to begin more serious studying. The key is to find the right balance between the two. I would also advice not to sweat over complicated grammatical rules or concepts, only read stuff you can understand and leave the rest to immersion. The more of the language you know the easier it is to understand difficult grammatical concepts, so it will come naturally with time. For example, one book I was studying (the excellent 80\20 Japanese by Richard Webb) advised not to try and memorize all the rules for verb conjugation, just to pay attention to the verb forms when they are used by native speakers until you become familiar with the different conjugations, just like people remember irregular verbs in English. Of course if you are good at memorizing grammar rules it can never hurt if you can remember all the rules, but if you dislike studying just don't worry about it.
I spent two years of highschool taking japanese courses and in that time all i learned was how to read kana, introduce myself and ask what the time was. In the past month of simply just deliberately exposing myself to Japanese, ive managed to learn already how to express most of what I think/feel throughout the day by watching various anime and chatting with real japanese people online. It really doesnt feel like study 90% of the time
I wonder how much you would have learned during the past month without that prior study, though?
I've got hundreds, maybe over a thousand hours of Japanese input (games and TV series) and no Japanese study, and learned virtually nothing. :) I think study is necessary to begin with.
@@Karlington2 what kind of input do you talk about ? I've also like months of time worth of watching anime, but it's all subbed, so ofc i didn't learn anything except some words like baka, ittekimasu, tadaima, ohayou and such. But since i started watching anime without any sub and actually trying to understand it, i've learn a lot.
@@Karlington2 Study and media input/chatting is all important. If you do not have any study, then most often you could spend hundred of hours to only figure out one or two words. Same for only study and no media input/chatting, the person would instead have more trouble with try to speak and be understood. The person will know what to say, but it will sound unnatural and difficult to understand.
Study is important for laying down basic structure and parts of grammar, the media input/chatting allows more practical usage while introducing more vocabulary as well practice for more complex sentence structures. They are both important to learning a language.
I should add that I do also study with a textbook that I downloaded, but that maybe makes up less than 1/4 of the studying that I do
I learned most of what I know by translating things my friends say with jisho or Google translate
@@39822 would you mind sharing what textbook you downloaded, im looking for more materials to study with.
皆、頑張れ！ゆた先生のアドバイスはいつも便利だべさ！
as someone who's been attending a language school in japan for over a year now i do have to agree, putting yourself out there, actually listening lots and lots is invaluable. textbooks will only get you so far. there are times when i think they would serve better as a supplement rather than anything
Big tip for beginners: childrens TV! I used to think you needed to study a lot, my son is 4- he doesn't do much "study" whatever study really means. We talk to him, read to him, he watches pre-school TV, he has pretend play where he enacts everyday situations he sees us engauge in and plays out the conversations, but he is always having fun! If you have childrden think about how they developed their ability to speak!
He is learning by using langauge and playing with it, he's 4 so he makes a lot of mistakes with grammar, conjugations and irregular verbs, but his progress is fast. Thing is that his priority is to prioritize what is either useful or interesting, which is what we adults neglect. He is interested in letters, numbers and reading, but he puts more energy into speaking and listening- which we also often forget is important, and he isn't concerned about learning to have perfect grammar, use tense and conjugation accurately or making mistakes, he describes things or makes up words (often compound-words) for things he doesn't know but wants to describe- if you have access to a native speaker, these are also good things to do- a four yearold can make their wishes known!
If you can speak like a 4 year old, you will be able to communicate to some degree and you will then get to build on it over time the way a child does, probably make you more fluent too as you will be imitating those around you, not learning from a rigid plan! I think we should do most of our learning as a child would and supplement with traditional study.
I totally agree with Yuta San.. one has to immerse oneself in different and various souces while studying a language.. the more sources are better is the chance of learning the language quickly.. I'm self studying Japanese and I couldn't emphasize more on this point how helpful it has been to catalyse my learning.. and Japanese is the 4th language that I am learning..
That’s really dope, so I’m learning Spanish right now. Should I take my time for another year or 2 getting fluent in that and then tackling Japanese or go ahead and start my katakana journey?
2:45 nice save bro
I just started your email lessons. So much good info and I never expected to laugh as much as I did. You're a very funny dude.
2200 hours is a good figure. It took me one year to be able to speak 日常生活 Japanese. This happened especially when I moved to Japan in April 2022 (last year). Before that, I had been studying with teachers online, but because I live in Japan now and I force myself to only use Japanese, I’ve been pretty much practicing all day every day. From a tourist perspective, I have enough Japanese to enjoy what Japan has to offer. From the perspective of someone living in Japan and wanting to build a life here and integrate as much as possible, I still have a LOOOONG way to go!
日本に引っ越してくる前に日本語あまり喋りませんでした。去年、読み書きも全然できませんでした！でも今、日本に住んでるので上手くなってきました。
thanks for your wonderful videos, I hope to cross paths with you one day in 新宿 or 渋谷！
I am learning Japanese myself and since using duolingo: my reading and texting is getting better using hiragana and katakana characters. I also have friends that I've known for years that I speak to in both English and Japanese. I'm a kinetic learner (learn by doing, watching/listening and reading). One thing I haven't improved is calligraphy and speaking (visually impaired and deaf). I do have a small amount of sight and have aids to hear. I don't let it stop me though 😊. I hope that one day I can use what I've learnt and already use in person rather than just online. I am also learning Turkish which I find is harder than learning Japanese lol. Hope you are well yuta-san. Leon 🇬🇧 xx
I never understood why it has to be all or nothing for so many. The one thing I learned about studying languages is that making it fun for yourself is what really helps the most. It just makes you naturally engage with the language and in what way you do that doesn't matter too much. Getting input of almost any kind is valuable.
Of course watching [FAMILY FRIENDLY ANIME] without subtitles without understanding any Japanese is likely not going to help much but there is a rather wide margin of what types of materials are useful and the only thing that matters is that you do something.
I an learning Japanese for nearly half a year now but only like 10-25 min a day, so I am not than far into it (yet) but I totally agree with everything you said cuz that’s literally the way I learned English.
I am German school I learned English and French. However my French is shit. In real life environments like conversations/movies etc. I miss like half on the context and are rarely lost sometimes. With English however, it’s the opposite. I mean my grammar isn’t that good and I still make mistakes, however I never had any problem with reading/understanding and unlike in French, I can just start talking and have a conversation in English just like I would do in German, in French however I can’t just casually talk cuz every time I want to say something I first need to think of how I could say it.
And the reason for this is that like 40% of my day is in English, since many games, movies, and overall most things I do on the internet are…well you guessed it…in English. And that’s also how a learned a lot of the „casual“ English, I never learned in school.
That you can simply say/write cause or cuz instead of „because“, you can say „gonna“ instead of „going to“, and overall how to talk a bit more casually. The English in school was (in my opinion) way to formal, with French I never had any experience outside of school, so that’s probably the reason why I am so bad in it.
With Japanese it isn’t that extreme as with English. However I would say that my day consists of like 5-8% Japanese (and it increases a bit every week) so I hope that my Japanese will turn out like my English and not like my French xD
I can't speak any more than basic Japanese...simply because I don't practice speaking Japanese as it was never my focus...yet it is sooo easy understanding anime, manga and even Visual novels and light novels. Before starting Japanese, I had never read a light novel or watched JDramas and barely read manga. Now I do all of that all the time, depending on what I feel like consuming...according to practice tests I've taken I'm at N1, at least when it comes to understanding the language....its just a matter of creating a habit to study daily (by consuming media)...I do agree with Yuta in a lot of points in this video.....
I personally started consuming content meant for natives right after learning kana. And it wasn't even graded readers....it was games, and my own hand picked games (not suggestions from the internet)...you just have to be patient. If your goal is to learn simply to watch anime or read manga....just read and listen a lot...if your goal is to communicate as soon as possible, start doing that early on. No matter what your goal is, its just a matter of repetition doing a certain skill...no amount of textbook or classes/course (sorry Yuta) will ever get you to understand Japanese by itself...
On may 3, 2023 it will be officially 3 short years since I even learned my first hiragana character....and now I can't imagine my life without Japanese :D.
I do have to note that since I wanted to consume media as soon and as painless as possible I did study Kanji for 4 hours daily...very intensively....and grammar using 日本語総まとめ (にほんご そう まとめ/nihongo sou matome) both kanji and grammar all the way to N1 level...and used anki for words I didnt understand....but all this studying I did WHILE consuming content that I wanted to consume daily....its basically what kept me going....Now, I only read and listen daily...no more hard core studying....except maybe anki still (but not nearly as much as I used to)..and everything just "clicks"...i love it :D
I started learning Japanese about 3 years ago. I have to say, that I tend to be a quite fast learner in general - but still, although I can pretty much speak about most topics and have fun times over extended periods of time with my Japanese friends, I still have the feeling I make a lot of mistakes and use really unnatural expressions at times. I am just "good enough" to understand pretty well how to express myself in a manner that others understand me. So to say, I have somewhat "mastery over my unnaturalness and mistakes", as it basically never happens that I am not understood. I guess I should be happy with that. :P
write in chatGPT and ask to it correct to you. Now you know where are you being unnatural
Something people tend to forget when asking "How long does it take to learn x language" is that it also really depends on your own ability to learn a new language. If you've spoken only one language for your entire life, chances are it'll be be pretty rough and quite time consuming. I consider myself lucky enough to be trilingual from a very early age, and I tend to pick up new languages very easily, even if they're totally different from the ones that I know. But one thing is true for everyone learning a new language, and that is that with enough work, practice and patience, you can master a new language! So to everyone out there who feels like they're stuck sometimes or feel like they can't improve: It's okay! Take a break, and return to it the next day! You got this 💪!!
THANK YOU. I hate when people say you cant use anime to learn Japanese. It feels like Gatekeeping. But I learned most of my Japanese from watching anime and Japanese streamers mixed with actual studying.
Yeah, I guess I can understand because there some words and phrasing used in Japanese anime/dramas that are never used in real life. That being said, Japanese people will still understand you even if you speak like a cartoon- you might get an odd look but it's still useable Japanese. Plus the more you study proper grammar alongside authentic materials, the more you'll be able to notice when the Japanese isn't natural. Besides, textbooks are notorious for having awkward or very old fashioned speech... Speaking in "Textbook Japanese" alone sounds weird, too.
I remember my Spanish teacher reminding us constantly that, while mostly correct in translation, the Spanish used in our textbooks was kinda old and formal. She said it was like the equivalent of an American 50s housewife lol
you can but anime japanese is different from regular speaking japanese
3:16 taking Japanese in high school made it easier for me to study by myself as an adult. I already know some kanji and all the kana and basic things like that, I’m familiar with the language, so it’s easier to pick things up. It’s good for getting a foundation but it can’t be your only resource for sure. The sad part about it is because it had been so long between then and now I lost a lot of speaking confidence and I don’t know what level I’m at as beginner materials is too easy but intermediate can often be above my level. I think the biggest benefit to things like watching shows and livestreams is that it’s either real people or actors playing real characters so you can get more familiarity with various forms of speech and hear a larger variety of native speakers.
So, if I study for 24h every day it will only take 3 months
And in 3 day you fell dead 💀
Between your course, Busuu, LingQ, iTalki, all the manga and anime I've got, games with Japanese language tracks, etc., I'm having more fun learning the language versus what I had to do for two years with Spanish in high school. (My school had Japanese as an option, but they dropped it the very year I was able to take it. German too.)
For comparison, it takes about 2400 hours to max in Old School Runescape. Thought that was interesting. You can do it sub 2000, but you need to use high intensity methods.
With mobile OSRS now it’s not a chore anymore! Very passive haha
8:42 in my experience if you have just a basic familiarity you can still enjoy these things! There’s kanji puns/jokes in the ENG dub of Bleach I found hilarious cuz I took Japanese and I’m not very competent in Japanese and yet I saw the entirety of Born to Be a Flower in Japanese with only Japanese subs and I really liked it!
It's not a sprint, it's a life long learning, mind expanding growth process. It's fun!
I've had some inspiration about learning Japanese but I've always given up but you're the first person I've been able to learn something about the Japanese language and made it really simple to understand im on the email thing to and so far its fun and easy to understand
Thanks for the videos ❤
So I am learning something like 50 hours till now... I get a lot of hiragana and katakana, and I even recognize about 30 or 40 kanji.
In May I will be in Tokyo. That will be fun.
And I subscribed to your E-Mails. Looking forward for the input.
And I agree. I learned most of my vocabulary in English and go a feeling for the natural sound of that language by reading Star Trek novels. About 200 of them.
Off topic, but I see that you are a Chainsaw Man fan with the Pochita stuffed animal on your desk. I love Chainsaw Man and it is ❤🔥
I've learned Japanese language for a year and now I am in Japan as foreign student. I used to think that Japanese language is one of the hardest languages in the world. But when I arrived in Japan and started to live here, I realized that japanese is easier in terms of speech, expressions and sounding more natural as the letters are easier to make compared to other languages. I'm saying this as a person who became pretty much fluent in russian and learned german, italian, english languages.
1:27 I feel like I can’t skip this without talking about it. I started learning Spanish a year ago, and I currently have 768 hours, mostly focused on comprehensible input. And yes, I haven’t skipped a single day because I’m jobless. However, I don’t think these numbers are entirely accurate.
I can have small conversations with native Spanish speakers, and I can understand them very well without needing them to adjust their speed. I can also listen to podcasts, watch UA-camrs, and enjoy cartoons in Spanish-all without subtitles or slowing down the audio. So, even if someone speaks really fast, I can understand about 90% of what they’re saying.
However, I still wouldn’t consider myself fluent. Understanding the language is one thing, but speaking it is a completely different challenge! so Idk what they meant by learning a language in a specific amount of time? I'm sure they also meant being able to speak the language since it's an important skill.
Yeah, this kinda reflects my own experience in learning English and that of friends.
I personally had a very long time in private English language school, plus the basic English lessons that are given on regular schools, but I only really learned how to write in English by forcing myself to use it a lot.
My spoken English is still pretty poor because I don't use it a lot, but I can write words up to extremely long comments pretty easily, because I do it so much on the Interwebs. xD
The main reason why I never got to learn Japanese is because I didn't follow a similar path, so to this day, despite having Japanese ancestry, I still don't know a whole lot of Japanese.
Basically because I was never forced to read, write, and consume content in pure Japanese.
As for friends, I have noticed over the years that even people who got to the same level of learning in schools and getting to the same level of proficiency as myself, if they didn't use English everyday and didn't consume content in English, their skills have degraded a lot overtime. Mind you, the private school I went to is considered among the hardest in terms of grammar here... by the end of the course we take a test that gives you a certificate that is required to stuff like teaching classes in US and UK universities, or teach advanced English courses here. But that was like... over 20 years ago now? If you don't use the skills, it just fades overtime.
In a sense, I think this is why it gets harder to learn a language when you get older... it doesn't exactly have to do with biology or brain physiology, though this might play a part. It's because the older you get, the more set in stone you culturally get. I just don't have the same openness and willingness to get into say... Japanese trends, content and music as much as I had for English when I was younger.
I still do watch a whole ton of anime and read a ton of manga, but it's all with English subtitles, which is how I got used to doing it from start. It helped me learn English a lot, but in turn it certainly damaged my ability to learn Japanese instead. xD
Oh well...
I learned English almost exclusively from watching movies, reading text in videogames (NES) and then looking up words I didn't understand in a dictionary. In school I only learned a very small portion of my general knowledge of English. After a few years I was at a level where I could think and read in English, instead of thinking about translating everything I've heard.
That's really interesting, and actually relieving. For the longest time, I just assumed textbooks and classes with strict tests were the ONLY ways to learn. But I guess fun can be the best teacher in many cases.
Encouraging advice!
The perfect video! Many thanks to the author of the channel for the recommendations! The problem with many people is that they want to take a "magic pill" or get "secret knowledge" and immediately have skills and abilities. However, the truth of life is that knowledge, skills, and abilities do not come by themselves. You can't learn a foreign language without doing anything, without wasting your time and effort, just like you can't learn to ride a bike lying on a comfy couch, listening to lectures and watching videos about "modern methods of learning" on a bike. To really learn something, you have to really practice every day. You're going to fall down while you're learning, and you're going to get bumps - that's normal! The ups and downs of learning are an integral part of our lives. Motivation from success and depression from failure will always be your study companions. However, every student has problems in his or her studies that he or she lacks the knowledge to solve. It can be: poor memorization of words; no progress in language learning; the student can speak, but does not understand speech by ear; misunderstanding of grammar; incorrect pronunciation, etc. Agree that a problem you don't know how to solve is very demotivating. In order to find the answer to our question we have to spend a lot of time to read videos, articles and books by polyglots. In today's world, we have to solve problems as quickly as possible. I don't have time to study and analyze a huge amount of information. My goal is to master the basic knowledge of a foreign language as quickly as possible and already start earning money effectively in the international arena. I settled on the practical guide by Yuriy Ivantsiv " Polyglot's Notes: practical tips for learning foreign language". This book is always in my bag. If I have a problem while learning a language, I quickly find the answer in this book. There are many different techniques and tips for learning a foreign language in Polyglot Notes. I have made my own individual schedule and plan for language learning. Now I know what I am going to study, how I am going to study, when I am going to study and what results I am going to achieve. No problem could stop me! With an effective language learning plan my professional skills are more and more in demand internationally every day. Friends, don't stop there! Everyone has talents that millions of people around the world need! Learn the language and make your ideas and dreams come true! Thanks to the author of the channel for the informative and useful video! Your videos motivate me.
My current method of learning Japenese is do all the daily quest on duo lingo at minimum then do some more units of duo lingo if I have time for it. Knock out 1-2 kanji lesson's on Duo lingo - those take 1-2 minutes maybe do some Katakana practice cause I still suck at katakana. Then do all my Wani-Kani reviews followed by a half hour of native content. Ideally this should all be done within 2 hours.
OMG YOU HAVE A POCHITA PLUSH!!! 🧡🐕⛓️🪚
🪚🐕
🪚🐕
I remember back when I was about 10 or 11, being the average internet-obsessed Baltic kid, I learned English through being interested in just watching English content on UA-cam. Started speaking to a Canadian kid online back when I was 12, and at this point (I am about to turn 20 this month), I speak English at a level where people cannot distinguish an Accent and they think I'm from America until I mention my timezone. I still have fond memories of me watching Yogscast back then. All you have to keep in mind is that you gotta start somewhere. It's easier to learn if you can do it while speaking to somebody who knows the language, or if you watch content that is in that language.
I just started learning Japanese, for the first step, my friend who is a Japanese language teacher here in Bali told me,
Master at least 50-150 basic vocabulary then break them down into which one is verb or noun, then master Hiragana & katakana (It's a must).
then for some grammar, he used a song to teach me about Te~kei (て形) , The song goes like this :
Minna-san Te-kei yo benkyou simasho
I, Chi, Ri = Tte
Bi, Mi, Ni = Nde
KI = Ite
Gi = Ide
Shi = Shite
😄
4:18 There's another anime this season which I think is very good for learning, 事情を知らない転校生がグイグイくる。
I totally agree with this video, understanding everything is not a need, if it is, people will only be able to consume content meant for revision, people should be less afraid of starting immersion, I was also very hesitant for the first year of study and got no where, so I suggest everyone to just do it.
Yess input guys. I've been watching anime then japanese youtuber without sub I started to understand the gist of what they're talking about then I start japanese class it just help me understand the grammar part, all of my vocab is from my input
I feel like this is why I've forgotten most of my French (which is part of the school curriculum here). It always felt unintuitive to just memorise all the words & phrases.
Really helpful thank you
I thought the passive, causative, and passive-causative were just textbook forms that nobody actually used. But I was surprised to learn from UA-camrs that people really use those forms. "Don't make me laugh" is 笑わせないで, using the causative form. .初めて言われました means "the first time anyone ever said that to me", using the passive form.
Also, I learned that when native speakers say 'pantsu', the katakana pronunciation of "pants", they mean underpants. Long pants is ズボン (zubon), which I think is a katakana word from French ("jupon"), though it has a kanji (洋袴), which I think katakana words don't usually have kanji, do they?
I only started learning Japanese recently and I still have a difficulty telling difference between some similar looking hiragana characters, like わ/ね, め/ぬ, る/ろ, す/む and く/へ. I have my first exam in tuesday and I really hope I'll pass but I have difficulty concentrating and remembering what I've learned lol. Is there any trick to stay motivated to study every day?
If you have problèms with the hiragana wait to see the kanji.
"やった‼️カナはとても簡単です‼️"
漢字: お前はもう死んでいる☠️"
(Eng V : Yeah ‼️ kana are very easy ‼️"
Kanji : you re already die ‼️)
You Can use your japanese keyboard on your phone (not the romaji but with hiragana)
Write them and write basic words
ね : ねこ、む: むずかしい for example
日本語の勉強頑張って下さい。
i used a website that you can select groups you want to focus on and it randomizes their order after that you answer in romanji under it one by one, i got hiragana and katakana really fast by doing these a couple of times every day, you can find by searching "tofugu learn kana quiz" i'm sure there are others similar too
I think the best way is to integrate it into your everyday routine. For hiragana, maybe make flash cards and find a time that you can study for a few minutes everyday until you're ready to move on to the next things!
@@smallball4 That sounds like it should be an easy way. But the 'problem' with flashcards is that they rely on 'visualisation', right? Which is something I can't do.
@@alexcorvin3612 Who says you can't?
It may take some time, but if you keep practicing them, you should eventually learn how to differentiate the characters, and it should eventually become something you will not have to concentrate on. I've found a program called 'Anki' that allows you to create flashcards and review them using spaced repetition, which can help with this. You just have to make sure you use it every day.
When studying kana or kanji, I've also sometimes found it useful to create some English phrase or image (aka a mnemonic) that could relate to some main shape of the character that helps to temporarily improve the short-term memory for that item. Another method that could be useful is to try typing them or writing them out by hand.
i've learned english with youtube, having conversations with streamers and other forms of entertainment without ever really studying it, unfortunately i couldn't do it with japanese and had to seek a school to start learning it
not that you can't do it but because if i have to actually study by myself i just won't
i would love to learn more with anime and children's books but still is a bit too difficult at the moment
I didn’t have time for you tube for a while but since the last video I seen your English got very good, I feel shy of my Japanese level
The thing that kills me about learning Japanese is trying to understand the grammar. Everyone always rants on about the kanji but when exposed to it enough, kanji isn’t that hard. The grammar on the other hand is like giving a sugar hyped 3 year old who has ADD a bottle rocket and trying to predict where it will fly for me. It’s been so hard on me that as someone whose been studying for almost 5 years and I can say that I’m barely in and N4 level, like that’s how hard it is for me.
Stop focusing on grammar at all. Just go into immersion, maybe start with a book or series you've already read/watched in your native language. It's enough if you can grasp the meaning of some sentences. Specially with yomichan, it's not that hard. It will be very slow at the beginning, but you will get better. Your brain will eventually get used to the Japanese grammar.
Extensive reading will give you more input and real world context of how the grammars are used c: あきらめないてください😊
9:10 That’s true. I usually don’t speak English IRL because per day I have to speak another 3 languages. Means I can also be practicing Japanese while speaking other languages.
Im hungarian and im learning japanese and i think its easier for me to learn japanese than english speakers for example the grammar is a bit similar for example:
hungaran: Osakában sushit ettem
this means i ate sushi in osaka
the japanese de partice in is ban is in this case osakáBAN
sushiT
the t means wo
and ettem means i ate so tabemashita.
My view on the japanese learning process has always been, that trying to learn it as a complete beginner is rather unpractical. This is not to discourage, if you really want to learn thats great and dont let anyone say otherwise. However I do think that some may bite off more than they can chew, this is quite possibly the worst thing a new person learning japanese could do. Some will just give up as they are testing their self dicepline, patience and learning ability all at once, this without help will not go well at all, if the person is not up to the task. I think its even more important to prevent dropouts than to pretend that this will be easy. Basically dont go into it trying to do everything and be frustrated when you dont have the patience to do so. If you just keep at it trying to read untranslated manga, putting on kanji subtitles instead of english subtitles and just in general engage in the language you will find yourself to be fluent. If you are learning japanese, im sure you can succeed just keep at it and maybe one of these days you yourself can do the teaching, until then just remember that there is no correct way of learning japanese. As long as you learn something. I concider that the correct way of learning japanese.
(Cant say im an expert on the subject since im avarage at best. But there has been alot of dumb bs I have heard recently, basically trying to make japanese sound like this unreachable sumit that is just pretensious trying to reach. So I wrote this for some reason.)
I wrote and drew a short manga the first semester I started learning Japanese. My sensei was impressed. I think making my own materials and having any mistakes explained really helped!
Omg I did something similar!!! I used to write extra short stories for my Japanese teacher to check most weeks. After I would re-write (and re draw) my short stories. It was so useful.
I learned English watching movies and playing games with english voices over in just 6 months. After that, i was able to read everything in english and talk fluently. In school, i have english for 12 years (since kindergarten), and i never understand it there.
Another good show to watch to learn some is Chobits, since Hideki has to teach Chii words.
I learned english by watching UA-cam/cartoons and learning English at the same time, I can probably learn Japanese by watching anime and learning Japanese at the same time
As a spanish anime fan, once I decided to dip my toes into japanese I thought it was cool that I new some vocabulary and expresions. I hated english SO MUCH when I was in primary school, after watching and reading and playing games in english, I manage to improve a lot. Having fun is an important factor because otherwise you are going to drop it (like I have dropped japanese 3 times jsjsj)
It took me 3-4 years to learn the English I'm still learning English if I don't know some English words I translate them into my own language though google translate app, I didn't learn from school or coaching classes because English teacher don't know English themselves some coaching start own English spoken classes to make profit on people hesitation because English is clearly alien language to them, how I learn the English, first I have noted 500+ verbs forms in regular and irregular verbs, start to watch Hollywood movie with subtitles because I wasn't used to English accent where I take notes of some English words and remember it some words like Gonna Or wanna which doesn't exist in English Grammar text books, but it's mostly used by English man while they are speaking to other character I understand those words means, gonna means "going to" And wanna means "wants to ", because English man use shortest words possible to save energy and complete the sentence , later I came cross video games series called persona series which had 100 hours of gameplay and tons of English dialogue where I have invested in this series for 100-500 hours where I learn to read English, even understand meaning of them which helps to lots on understand English, I have watch lots of English UA-camr which helps used on English voice where I can easily understand them without help of subtitles, I used to Type lots in English too. Talk with others on chat which helps me with English communication with others even to foreign people , but I am Not good with talking to people in English because I'm very introverted in nature who talks only related to the topic and nothing else , now I am. Bored with English I'm interested in learning Japanese because it's close to my mother language and it's easy to remember someone's name is unlikely with Korean names where I still don't remember the name of the main character of solo leveling manhwa
As a French native speaker, I was introduced to English through video games before taking formal English classes. As a result, I already knew a lot of vocabulary and expressions that weren't taught until years later. For example, I learned words like "hammer," "fire," and "thunder" from playing Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga. Although I have been studying English my entire life, it never felt like I was studying.
Now, I am trying to learn Japanese by playing Pokemon Fire Red in Japanese. It's nice because I can read at my own pace and choose when to open a text box. I spend more time playing the game, and it's easy to read. I don't try to translate everything, but instead focus on what I already know and pick up new vocabulary and grammar as I go. Sometimes I even skip the text altogether because the point of the game is to play.
ゼニガメ is the best ;)
Yuta! My sister wants to go back to Japan next year and for me to come too, I need to save some money!!!
2:40, that reminds me of watching Star Trek Next Generation with the Japanese dub, unfortunately I only have the first (worst) 2 seasons on Blu-Ray. It reminds me so much of Gundam. It’s the naval ranks and voice acting. Worf 中尉､ はしん！
Sounds good.
6:31 i feel like the particles in this table are a bit too oversimplified
They are, but it's just a quick taste of what to expect for beginners.
great lesson
3:36 poland mentioned 🥳
I hope my Japanese is good as your English someday.
I'd love to learn a language, but I struggle even with easy ones like French. I think my learning disability makes it hard to understand and absorb, which just breaks my heart - so many people in the world I can't communicate just because my brain doesn't want to be trained in the ways I have available.
Im going to japan on 2025 july and i want to interact to the fullest. I found this channel and was very happy, this is my 4th language to learn as my main language is Spanish ☺️ thank you for this looking forward
I was almost expecting to hear “Let me give you an example, using my favourite anime for beginners: The Monogatari Series”💀
2nd comment: YUTA WHERE'S KYUBEY?!?!?! Yuta, you have a great series of how anime characters speak Japanese. Please do Itsuki Nakano from the quintessential quintuplets or any or all the 7 main characters in TQQ.
How they speak Japanese I believe is very important to understanding the plot eg the honorifics, the lost in translation stuff (eg when they say things like tsurui, hatsukoi, uso, tachi, fukuzatsu Vs taihen, mote etc that are removed from the dub). I compiled a lot of the lost in translation stuff in r/gotoubun
Something to consider about Itsuki:
The Quintessential Quintuplets' character types are:
Ichika - Onee-san / ara ara,
Nino - tsundere,
miku - kuudere / dandere,
Yotsuba - genki
Itsuki - ??
- Tsundere like Nino?
- Eat-suki?
- Imouto?
- Someone who speaks keigo to their siblings, to Fuutarou and to Raiha and to everyone basically?
Actually, the main thing I learned from Yuta's videos that keigo is basically just desu, masu & their variations.
I swear when I learned elementary Japanese in bachelor's (foreign language classes are required in universities in the Philippines) we were never even taught the word keigo.
All this time I had no idea Itsuki was the only quint and actually only main character who was talking keigo to EVERYONE.
Anyway, I have a theory as to what Itsuki's type is, but you're not gonna like it...
miku: kuudere (クーデレ)
itsuki: kuudere (食うデレ)
fun fact: the kanji and sometimes even the reading of the quintuplets' names are in order with 1 being oldest to 5 being youngest, for example
ichika - ichi means one
nino - ni means two
miku - the kanji is 三something
yotsuba - yot is kind of a variation of yon meaning four
itsuki - again kanji is of go(五)
@@soreto314 三つ mittsu = 3 (items)
四つ yottsu = 4 (items)
五つ itsutsu = 5 (items)
@@t_aikutsu lol they're both kuudere?
Even people say Itsuki is tsundere but less than Nino. That's why I have a theory that makes Itsuki a different type from the other 4. Tsundere & kuudere can be sub-types. Look up 'r/ItsUesugi' or 'r/Raitsuki'
@@soreto314 no offense but anyone who knows mandarin, Cantonese or even knows that ichi means 1 in Japanese knows this...?
You can even tell the kanji/hanzi for 1 2 3 look like sticks 1 2 3...
recently decided to finally start learning Japanese for now only starting to learn hiragana, for me tbh is much harder then must English speakers cuz for me it 3d language and im NOT native English speaker
Okay so this video sorta struck me. Ive been learning japanese on my own for over 3 years spending maybe an hour a few times a week learning and being inconsistent as hell throughout my time. And whenever I asked people how they learned they always say. "I just listened to a lot of japanese conversations" or "I just watched a lot of anime" This really is frustrating because whenever I try this, I can never pick up anything. I don't understand how people can turn there brains into sponges and soak and teach themselves words just from hearing it. I get that based of what your seeing you could maybe pick up a word here and there but to pick up enough to be able to hold conversations is mind boggling. My only method of learning is dumping my face in the Anki app and reading boring flash cards. Learning japanese has never been fun for me and its why I haven't studied it in 2 months.
Here's some tips as someone who reached the one year mark of learning Japanese consistently:
This is one of the most important things - *always* have something running in Japanese, even if you're asleep, let it infiltrate your dreams. When they say immerse yourself, literally become a skinny dipper in the japanese language pool. I know it's not easy and frustrating when you can't understand but if you have things on at almost all times and remotely pay attention at least 50% of the time, you'll see at least some results by the first year.
It's still important to learn grammar while you consume content. Even though people say they just watch anime all day and look up words and all of a sudden understand Japanese after a year or two, it doesn't always work that way for everyone. For example, I have ADHD which may make it more difficult to focus and catch onto the new structure of the Japanese language at times, so even if I know all the words, sometimes I have trouble piecing it together. It's okay, we're still making progress, and getting better, even if it's slower than others. Personally, I'm someone that always has to struggle to do things that everyone else can do easily, so while others are learning Japanese for 2-3 hours a day in order to be fluent in a couple years, I'm learning Japanese for 10-12 to even 16-20 hours a day in order to catch up to that pace. If that resonates with you, I suggest you turn on podcasts like ユユの日本語ポッドキャスト on UA-cam or a Teppei podcast series (there are many), the first being more natural yet not too difficult Japanese for near intermediates, and the second being for beginners still in the N5 category. Even I've failed to keep them on for 100% of the time, but if you can do at least 70% or more, I think you will achieve results.
The key is that you should also watch grammar videos which explain grammar points in detail. These can help you gain an understanding on the things that don't make sense even when you have recognized all the words. Furthermore, it'll help you recognize sections in the sentence to help you parse it better. For example: I watch a video on the 「なのに」grammar point, maybe a few other grammar videos, then I'm tired cause I've been learning all day and looking at new words, then I listen closely to my podcast playing and suddenly sometimes なのに jumps out at me, and I can be like "oh, I at least know that part"
Doing this repetitively has sort of started a "torrent download" of Japanese if you will, in my mind. The random parts are slowly getting filled in, but the more I fill it in, the more I start to understand. Also, it's exponential but it has plateaus as well. So you might grow exponentially in two days and then all of a sudden you feel stuck for a week or two, like you're not making any progress. Sometimes that's actually true or sometimes just a feeling. Sometimes you're just tired, but either way you'll eventually be able to pick up the pace again and exponentially improve.
Also, you don't actually need to use Anki. Anki is based off spaced repetition, but spaced repetition can happen naturally (and I've been doing it naturally before I realized what SRS meant)
Essentially, you learn some words, then you hear them again, and you recognize them in natural context (watching anime, reading manga, you come across the word you've seen before). You usually won't remember the meaning at first, but you look it up again and then go "oh yeah, that's right, I remember now!" And you repeat that two or three times if necessary and that word is guaranteed to stick in your head from then on (unless you have a mental issue that prevents it, but if it's not as bad as ADHD, I'm guessing it won't be a problem since I can manage to do it with ADHD in my personal experience, although everyone's different)
Alright so lastly I will recommend some apps that can help. Kanji Tree app helps so much for recognizing kanji characters then reading kanji words which can be applied to real sentences. You don't have to use it that often but make sure you're regularly introducing new kanji and words to your brain to recognize, cause the key is for it to repeatedly appear after you've seen or heard it before, then recall that memory and along with it, the meaning eventually, after a few tries. The whole point of all of what I said is to create a sort of "feedback loop" that gives you infinitely more Japanese content than you need, a surplus of content that you can bite a piece off of at any time, and then you keep biting pieces off until you recognize the flavor of some pieces. Soon enough there will be very few things that you haven't tasted yet (at least in terms of native-like level, and if you're insane like me you can even aim for beyond native level)
Alright so that was my messy Ted talk, hope you enjoyed and sorry it was long. If you have any questions or disputes, I'd like to discuss them with you 🤝 best of luck on your Japanese journey, and please!! Find something interesting that makes you want to learn Japanese, not the other way around! That's the only thing that can drive you to continue learning, if there's a reason behind it that can't be extinguished.
By the way, in case you want to know how far I've gotten for context:
Just 1 year ago, I was barely able to use the は particle, just mainly able to use one or two word phrases.
At around the 8 month mark is when I started understanding things for real. I hit the convergence point and a tiny little Japanese flame started to ignite... It was very weak and almost got blown out many times, but I kept clinging onto trying to continue to understand, and now after about 14 months, I can understand basic content. Because of my unorthodox learning methods, I didn't learn N5 and N4 and such in that order, but just the 1000 most common words (I know about 1400 right now, after a year)
Sometimes, there are even N5 words that I don't know, but not every N5 word is more common than some N4 or N3 words, so I suggest you just learn in the order it comes to you.
If I had to rate myself on a JLPT level, I'm between N4-N3 level, steadily nearing N3. At that point it gets more difficult to actually surpass N3 without speaking to natives so it's important for me to either talk to people online or go to Japan and immerse for a few months while doing other stuff. I believe after I've reached around 2000 words and learned enough grammar points to understand roughly what connects them, it'll be time to throw myself in the deep end and go into survival mode in Japan. Everything that I know will have no choice but to activate if I want to survive. So I feel that once you have consumed enough content to at least gain a decent understanding, even if you can't yet conversate, you may benefit from immersing directly in Japan at that point, or at the very least trying to talk to natives as much as possible through speech, either in real life, or if not possible then through voice texts, voice chats, etc. Just whatever you can get to use what you've learned. Important: if you freeze up and it's like you learned nothing when you go to talk to someone, it's okay, just don't give up and you'll be able to conversate smoothly eventually, but it's extremely important to keep at it in that stage to tell your brain that this is something that you need to make use of in your daily life.
I think the biggest problem with your approach is you are trying to passively learn Japanese when you are not at that level. The solution is simple: try learning actively with authentic materials, as I repeatedly explained in many of my videos.
@@UzumakiHarutoJP Great advice indeed (although I personally cannot sleep with anything on, else I will not get quality sleep, and that is incredibly important for language acquisition). Anki gets reaaaly useful once you know all the frequently used words. Because then in order to see the more rare ones repeatedly in the wild, you need to read much more in order to encounter them as with the common words.
I may as well ask...have you got some advice on what to do when you get easily tired? Despite being interested in the content I very often am unable to sustain my attention for it, because after around 10-20 minutes I start getting really tired and have to take a break since I am sort of "passing-out" :D While during summer I was doing around 5 hours a day, once uni started, I generally did not get more than 3 hours and often barely 1 hour. I took a small break from input now, since I feel like I was burning out. I am roughly N4/N3 level, but still there are those sentences where I struggle with understanding them despite knowing everything (or looking it up with Yomichan).
Also, how do you have it with translation, if you do not understand the context? Do you just skip it, move on, or...
@@mordraug6662 alright so first, for the tiredness thing, that's extremely relatable because when I focus on certain things too long, even if I am interested, unless I'm actively doing something I get tired too. I can physically do something or interact with something for 20 hours, but doing that for just listening and trying to pick out every word is extremely tiring, so I get that.
The way to tackle the problem: for me, (and this also answers your last question) I translate/look up some words, and leave others. I leave it to my own judgement whether it's okay to leave a word behind or not, because it's generally impossible to pick literally every single word out of the content you're trying to understand. I think even Japanese people might miss a word or two when watching or reading content, so as learners, it's okay to disregard a few and focus on what you can handle. If you can only handle picking out 15-20 words from a 20 minute video, then just pick out the 20 words that appear most repetitively in the show, like if you hear a word more than once, that's usually a sign to translate it if you don't know it already.
Part two of not getting tired is still applying the same concept to the whole process. If you get tired from focusing too intently for a long time, then don't let yourself fall asleep, instead do something else that you can actively participate in, for example you can join servers on discord and message friends in Japan, talk to them in a voice chat, etc. There are times where I've literally spent all my energy and all I could do was sit there and lay, so in that case just still play stuff in the background. This also takes me to the sleeping thing. Honestly, if you're like me, I bet you'll turn off the content in the background thinking "alright I'm so tired I'm about to sleep right now!", and as soon as you turn off that content you somehow end up with 30 minutes, an hour, or even more of energy to do other stuff before sleeping. And that's all time that you could use to at least have something in the background. It's of course important to get good sleep, so if it can't be helped, don't play things in the background, but it's important to maximize your time as much as possible if you want to make the most of it and get far faster. You might have to make the sacrifice of not sleeping well for a while, but I think you'll actually find that you'll get used to it after a week or two. I actually like it when the podcasts pierce my dreams and become part of it. And if I wake up, then I listen to it till I fall asleep again. Understandably, most people can't do what I do since I have no school and no physical job right now, so I can sleep whenever and wake up whenever, but whatever your schedule is, try to make the most of it. And overall, when you can't handle one thing, move to a less intense version of it so you can handle it. Maybe after 20 minutes you can't translate lots of words, but you can still just watch something intently or even passively. It's better than nothing! Or maybe you do 20 minutes of intently watching content, then you do interactive content for an hour or two on discord, actively trying to meet friends on there (by the way, if you need Japanese friends on discord I recommend going on disboard ja site and you'll find so many active servers with plenty of Japanese people looking for friends including foreigners).
Either way you do it, as long as you're exposing yourself to the language and interacting with it, you're learning in some way. Don't disregard the small things like "oh, I noticed he used *this word* in a slangy way that I haven't seen before" cause even that can be a learning experience to help you. For example, サーバー is often called 鯖 on discord (at least between all the people I talk to). 鯖 means mackerel, but since it's pronounced saba, they often use that instead since サーバー is long. Those little things you learn can be invaluable to your experience so don't feel guilty for learning that way!
9:23 No sir, I most definitely am not a normal human. I have debilitating social anxiety 😂😂 great video though, I would love to learn Japanese someday. It's just hard to keep yourself motivated sometimes.
I have studied japanese for almost 6 or 7 years by myself on the internet , I'm still struggling when it comes to speaking the language , I understand some anime , music and videogames I feel very confident when it comes to my listening but when I try to say something people say that I sound like a robot, and I guess that's because I'm always trying to follow the grammar rules and pretending like japanese is like english grammar , I guess it is just a matter of time , really awesome language maybe I can't speak like a pro but at least I can watch some of the things that I like and understand in the native language
Terrace house (Netflix), is very good for Japanese. Possibly the best show in the world to learn from.
So true. I went months convinced this immersion thing was all bs and it can only work when you’re a kid. I watched a ton of anime without subs and barely saw any progress (I thought).
Lo and behold, I went to Japan last week and I could actually understand everyone. It was like magic, I couldn’t believe it. I did 10x better than I thought I would. All my friends were shocked by my progress, saying things like “how did you understand what that person just said?” And I would just say “I don’t know…I watched a lot of anime I guess lol”. I even kept up with my friend who had studied Japanese in school for three years…and all I did was watch anime for a few months lol.
This method works. It feels like you’re making no progress for weeks, but your brain will learn the patterns, just trust the process.
3:27
Hey, Yuta San, that's my native language. 😅Have you ever had an experience with that language?
It feels like your channel has turned into a Commercial Channel
Can you make a video on your thoughts of learning Japanese by watching Japanese VTubers and how easy would be to do so? I watch Inugami Korone and Nekomata Okayu, but would you say other vtubers would be easier to learn Japanese from?
In my personal opinion, Aki Rosenthal and AZKi in Hololive have clean and clear Japanese.
I've been studying for 10 years and I just became conversational, lol
I can say this statement of watching your favorite shows with no subs does teach you
as I had hindi speaking neighbors and we were kids at the time so we didn't know each other and couldn't communicate with each other so it was hard to tell them toys and stuff
so I started watching hindi cartoons like
zig sharko
doremon
ninja hattori
stuff like that and I didn't know any hindi back then and slowly after 2 months of watching the cartoons and stuff I was able to speak with them And understand them
my hindi then was nothing good but for my age was good as 7 year old's aren't expected to speak profound ones and I had gotten along better
I'm from south India so idk how much south languages helped in Hindi
They go to language school because having a student visa would allow them to work albeit part time, and by the time they graduate they can easily apply for a work visa. It may be unnatural Japanese they teach in those language schools, but it is the legal way to find work in Japan, and legal issues are everything, that's why the Chinese, Nepalese, Vietnamese, Indians etc. are enrolling in these expensive schools, because they can almost be like a job agency.
Going to a language school doesn't really make it easier to apply for a work visa (unfortunately), being in Japan does :/
People go because then they can go to a university in Japan, and get a degree, which is what makes it easier to get a job in Japan. Language school on a student visa will let you work part time up to 28 hours, but you'll find just as much difficulty as without the student visa trying to get a work visa sponsored if you have no degree. If you already have a degree, you can get a job in Japan without language school anyway
I think language learning is a long process, and beginners think it won’t take long at all, and they give up.
I started learning Japanese 10 years ago this year. I passed N3 of the JLPT in 2019. I used to only use textbooks and apps, which helped with formal Japanese and learning the basics and sentence structure and all that. But ever since I passed the test, I’ve only been doing this version of “studying.” I watch Japanese movies with Japanese subtitles, and listen to Japanese podcasts while I’m driving to work. I watch Japanese UA-camrs, listen to Japanese music. Most of my free time is spent listening to Japanese in some way. I don’t really need subtitles anymore, and I usually say “That’s not what they said” to my husband when he’s watching anime with subtitles 😆 That’s another level of language learning is being unhappy with the subtitles.
I definitely think that learning Japanese through native material is the best way once you’ve gotten to an intermediate level. Because like you said, you start seeing that a lot of formal study material is sort of “Japanese for foreigners” and not how real Japanese people speak.
when it comes to learning Japanese, I consider it easy. as with most languages, retaining it is the hardest part.
Learning on Duolingo, I wanna talk to locals in Japan SO BAD AHH
Duolingo japanese is not very good!! I would reccomend a core 2k deck a long with Cure Dollys grammar for beginners
2:46 I love family friendly hen
People who learn more than one language early are much better at learning. There are Armenians here - everyday people - who are fluent in at least six languages!
5:47 I was so ko fused looking on romaji, but after looking on hiragana I understood everything 😂
Well, I’ve gotten some of my Japanese back. Oh I’m able to speak a little bit but I want to get better so I’ve been practicing every day and I am still finding that I’m having trouble and then I’m also taking a class but we have to read it to speak it and write it all in one which is really hard but so much fun. What is the best way to become fluent in Japanese😊❤
I'm very passionate about Japanese and Japan, I think when I'm done with high school, I want to go to a Japanese school and learn Japanese
I learnt the hime means princess in japanese using authentic material ...and thats before i started learning the language
Oh man, it's going to take me forever. I know kana and a few kanji, but I don't have time to do 3 hrs every day lol, not on the days I work, anyway. But I will try! It's not like I don't have free time (my work-lifr balance is decent), I just have other hobbies, too.
Wouldn't "mezurashiku ne?" mean "isn't it rare?"
If it's the negative form using nai, seems like she would be saying, 'it isn't rare?' maybe out of surprise or something
And how would I know that that colloquially means, "what a coincidence" or "isn't that strange"?
I'd like to do immersion but I typically just read the English subtitles. Maybe it's just me because you think it's easy, but I think it's difficult to pick up on inflection and guess the interpretation. I might catch a word or two, but without subtitles, I'd be totally lost.
My difficulty in learning to speak and thus more effectively learn Japanese is that I don’t have a Japanese tongue…by that I mean I have to say/repeat sentences really slowly compared to natives, and sometimes it makes me scream through my teeth in frustration.
All the endings like dayo, dane, etc.
Only 750 hours for German, but 2200 hours for Japanese? I can’t believe it…
it’s a lifelong journey…
at sompoint i reached the stage where sometimes i didn't even look at the subtitles while watching my hero for simpler sentences. The hard part for me is learning vocab since all i know is what i retaned from Japanese class a few years ago.
depends on your definition of "to learn japanese": took me 5 years to finally pass the Kanji Kentei level 1 and Nihongo Kentei level 1 - i guess i can say that i have "learnt" it