#Learning fluent japanese for beginners series
#Learning fluent japanese for beginners free

Others might disagree and you can make up your own mind, but I personally think learning the Kanji is essential. So I personally would say learn 15 a day, every day, until you finish - that will have you finishing in around 5 months, you'll be on target with the 6 months I'm plotting out for Genki I + II even if you miss a few days.

He suggests to completely put learning Japanese on hold till you finish the 2200 Kanji in this deck in 97 days, but I think that's ambitious as is, and eats too much of your year up. make an account at Kanji Koohii (a site where people work together progressing through Heisig, mainly by sharing the mneumonics they make for the kanji), and otherwise follow the instructions on Nihongo Shark's Blog.

#Learning fluent japanese for beginners series

I'm currently taking the first 'advanced' level Japanese course at my uni, meaning that I have had the opportunity to talk with other 'advanced' (apostraphes meaning take with a grain of salt, looking at myself) learners about how they learned Japanese, and the Genki series is by and large the crowd favorite.īuy Heisig, or you can probably find a version somewhere on the interwebs. This will walk you from knowing absolutely no Japanese at the beginning of Genki I, and while mileage varies, I was personally able to make sense of ShiroKuma Cafe (see the link in the next section) upon completing Genki II. Plus, this is a model for your year as a whole - contextually acquiring passive understanding that stretches your boundaries, then diving back inwards and working to solidify passive knowledge that has become useful for your current situation or will allow you to express something you want to express currently, into knowledge that gradually becomes active.īuy Genki I, its workbook, Genki II, and its workbook. We're just shooting to prime your passive memory so that you'll see a word written, have your curiosity irked, and be able to work it out, connecting that forgotten information to more and more recent memories to help remember them. It's okay if you forget a few or several or even most of them at first you're going to see these things so often that they'll be impossible to forget before long. It just throws flash cards at you with each of the symbols you can probably commit them to memory in a few hours. One is for Japanese-origin words, the other is for loan words and other random things).

#Learning fluent japanese for beginners free

Make a free account, use it to learn the Hiragana and Katakana (two of Japanese's three alphabet systems 48 characters each and phonetic. Read The Kanji - don't use this for kanji. but I still think you can learn enough in a year to thoroughly enjoy yourself, at the very least.

Granted, you don't have the luxury of multiple Japanese people needing to communicate with you in order to do their job, and thus adjusting their language to your level to communicate with you all day every day. I didn't try nearly as hard as I could have, so I honestly think you could reach my level of 'fluency' if you make a religion of it - a research student at my university came speaking nothing one year ago and now speaks notably better than I do across the board (on behalf of being forced to communicate with people for like 12 hours a day). At this point no conversation is a problem, I can read modern literature for enjoyment (older stuff literally employed a partially different language and requires its own study), and follow movies/comedy shows/anime without subtitles if I'm pay attention. I have lived in Japan (for school) for two years, speaking nothing before I arrived (fully intended on going to Spain instead lol).and am now somewhere between N2/N1, which is the level of fluency required to work with Japanese businesses/join a Japanese-conducted program. Intro - textbook stuff - post-textbook stuff - tutoring - loose timeline Japanese is weird in that there are literally resources for everything, so I'm sure there's something that fits you. Google around and see if my suggestions fit your learning style or not. I'm personally learning Japanese for its literature, and the vast majority of what I did was aimed at getting into books as fast as possible (cough Heisig cough) - if you don't care about reading, I'll be the first to say that a lot of what's here might not be interesting to you. so I'll say: this isn't an in depth zero-to-hero guide for Japanese, this is just a tidy gathering of the path I took to learn Japanese to my current level (minus a few textbooks), which is definitely still very far from fluent. Hope it's useful for you.ĮditII: Didn't expect so many people to look at this, either. Please refer to that one, instead.Įdit: Apparently I had nothing better to do than this evening, so here's a wall of text. Note: I've put together a better organized and greatly expanded version of this post.