Japanese learning resources

Gamb's Guide

Gamb's guide is the main resource that I was using to give an order to learn things in. It's focused on being able to read untranslated visual novels in Japanese. It proposes:

• Learning hiragana and katakana first
• Learning grammar from reading a textbook as fast as possible
• Then learning vocabulary from flashcards until you know 2000 - 6000 words
• Then reading native material (namely, VNs)

djtguide Learn Kana

A kana recognition training game. Shows you a kana and scores you on whether you recognize it, with the ability to choose which kana are shown (so you can fully learn five, and then the next five, and so on). This is the way I used to learn kana.

Anki

Anki is spaced repetition software. Shows you cards, and if you remember the card, waits longer to show you it. In this manner, arbitrary numbers of facts can be learned.

My recommendations are to make sure that leeches are being suspended, else they will come to take up most of the time - leeches are cards that, for whatever reason, Anki isn't working to teach you, and so you should learn them elsewhere. Limit the number of new cards per day, I found that doubling the number of new cards per day doubled the amount of time I was spending looking at cards and doubled my error rate on cards that weren't new. I use 5 new cards per day, though the precise number depends on the person.

I currently have these Anki decks running:

• Core 2k/6k Optimised Japanese Vocabulary, recommended by Gamb's guide. Contains the top 6000 Japanese words in order as sampled from ten years of issues of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in the 90s (so it has some dated words; reddit points out that it contains 日ソ, meaning "Japan and the Soviet Union" [two syllables in Japanese]). Core 2.3k is a smaller deck that Gamb's guide also recommends, made up of 2k/6k filtered to remove uncommon and redundant words.
• A deck where I add random Japanese words and phrases it seems like it would be useful to know. Generally my heuristic for this is that if I want to say something in Japanese, or read something in Japanese, that I encounter in real life, I add it to the deck. The first word I added to the deck was 辛口, from an untranslated menu; the most recent word I've added is 首輪, meaning collar.
• A deck for hiragana and a deck for katakana. These decks are mostly learned.
• A small deck that contains the most common particles. I have this separate from other vocab decks so that I know that I'm looking at a particle and not a word. Core 2k/6k excludes particles, which I think is a good idea; particles are more "grammar" than "vocabulary".

Duolingo

Duolingo's focus on teaching is listening practice for individual Japanese sentences, and handwriting practise for kana and kanji. They make the poor choice for learning to read Japanese of beginning teaching sentences transcribed only in kana (e.g. みずとごはんです rather than the much more readable 水とご飯です), which forces one to listen to the spoken sentences.

Famously, Duolingo is optimising for monthly active users rather than language learning, and so trades off language learning in favour of monthly active users.

WaniKani

WaniKani teaches reading individual words, focusing on reading kanji, hence the name.

The advice for learning Japanese kanji given in Gamb's guide is that kanji don't appear on their own and don't have pronunciations independent of being in words; in Japanese, kanji are just sememes. There's hence no meaningful notion of "learning kanji" seperately from learning vocabulary.

WaniKani disbelieves this, and instead

• teaches a set of WaniKani platform-specific kanji-parts, called radicals, that each appear in many kanji. Because these are formed from the same generator of breaking down kanji, WaniKani's radical list has overlap with other lists of radicals
• once a radical has been learned, teaches the kanji that contain that radical, with their primary meaning and the list of possible pronunciations that it can take when it appears in a word
• once the kanji and its pronunciations have been learned, teaches words that contain that kanji.

Each radical, kanji and word come with associated mneumonics for the shape and where relevant pronunciation.

This means that rather than learning kanji as being drawn from the infinite space of possible squiggles, they're learned as draws from a more finite space of easier-to-learn WaniKani radicals; and rather than learning words as being drawn from a large space of valid strings of Japanese phonemes, from a more finite space of possible readings for their component kanji; at the cost of adding a lot of additional scaffolding to learn that isn't used at higher levels or outside of WaniKani.

By the time I started using WaniKani, I already knew most of the beginner words, so I can't quite vouch for the value of WaniKani's method, though it is fairly canonical as far as

Dictionaries

Wiktionary contains basically every Japanese word. The benefit I find from Wiktionary is that, for each word, it includes the Japanese word, and the Chinese etymology of the kanji, which can make the meaning clearer or more memorable. For example, the page for 食 has

• every definition and reading of 食 used in Japanese
• the Kangxi radical and composition; in this case, it's 食 (the radical for eating) with no extra strokes
• the etymology; it explains that 食 in the Oracle Bone script was a picture of a mouth over a bowl of rice.

The Oxford Beginner's Japanese Dictionary has a subset of Japanese words, because dictionaries are finite in size. It's a paper dictionary, which I like. It's bilingual between Japanese and British English. Words with some rare meanings or connotations are only described in terms of their most common meaning, which I think is useful for beginners.

Jisho

NHK News Easy

NHK News Easy is a news website by the Japanese public broadcaster Japan Broadcasting Corporation with news articles simplified to use vocabulary and grammar at JLPT 4-JLPT 3 level. I like this because it's real Japanese text produced to serve a non-learning purpose (communicating news to foreign residents of Japan), novel samples of which are constantly being produced.