How to ACTUALLY study Japanese in 2024…

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Practical, in-depth not sugarcoated. The only video you need.

👉 LINKS (referred to in the video)
・Discord:

・Twitch:

・Japanese Writing System:

・Grammar Resources:

Chat GPT:

・Anki:

・Anki Setup Guide:

・Vocab Lists:

・Dogen (intro to pitch accent):
→ use these videos to understand the different pitch patterns, how they sound and how to pronounce them. Once you can do that you should be able to study proper pitch accent at the same time as you study vocabulary.
→ for notation in Anki I use numbers corresponding with the 'mora' at which the pitch drops. ex: cat ね↓こ = 1, bridge はし↓ = 2. For accentless (平板) words I use 0.

・OJAD (pitch accent dictionary):

👉 LINKS (EXTRA)
・Popular J↔E Dictionary:

・Dictionary app I use:

Chapters:
0:00 How to study Japanese in 13 minutes
0:10 Mindset and Motivation
1:27 The Actual Studying - Intro
1:54 Hiragana & Katakana
2:32 Grammar: Intro
2:54 Grammar: Source/Roadmap
3:34 Grammar: How to study, ChatGPT
4:51 Vocab/Kanji: Intro
5:08 Vocab/Kanji: Kanji 101
6:00 Vocab/Kanji: Anki Deck Building
7:34 Vocab/Kanji: Which Words, Vocab Lists
8:20 Vocab/Kanji: Studying Vocab
9:08 Pitch Accent: the WHY and HOW
9:48 Pitch Accent: Finding Pitch Accent
10:12 Post Foundation Building
10:56 How long until I'm fluent?
11:26 Intermediate level: speaking, reading, listening, writing
12:35 All you now, king/queen!

DISCLAIMER:
This video is for those who ACTUALLY want to study Japanese. It’s lengthy with an overload of info, presented with my unfortunately monotone voice. It’s not to trap you into a loop of superficial tips and best practices videos, baiting you with my self proclaimed fluency that I acquired in unprecedented speed. These people are lying.

There is good language learning content out there, like Dogen, but the most popular content unfortunately is exactly the type I described above. Reason being: it’s the type of content people watch to convince themselves they’re doing their best, without actually being ready to put in the effort. And since these people are the majority, this content gets watched the most and picked up by the algorithm. It’s unfortunately how Youtube works.
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Didn’t think this video would take off like this all of the sudden. Hope it is reaching the right audience and it helps. Subs are appreciated, but this’ll most likely be the only Japanese language related vid I make.

TallGuyJimmy
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Recommending ChatGPT to new learners that lack any ability to discern wether ChatGPT gives you the correct answer or if it just appears correct is probably a mistake.

xXDESTINYMBXx
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I really don’t think enough people talk about Cure Dolly’s grammar series when making videos like this. I found it better and more efficient at getting a deeper understanding of grammar points than Tae Kim or anything else.

buck
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I'm about to hit 2 years of 日本語勉強 and, as someone has really poor mental imagery, *starting WaniKani a couple months ago has been one of the most helpful decisions I've made so far.* My ability to remember new vocabulary and prevent mixing up words has improved significantly

It may sound stupid, but I want to point this out for anyone else like me. You might find a lot of value in using Remembering the Kanji or WaniKani

(I recommend WaniKani bc Remembering the Kanji is extremely old and the mnemonics are reminiscent of the age of the book)

dethswurl
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Nice video. I've also used Japanese 20 years (been fluent about 15 ), and I agree with a lot of the points.
One thing I would change if I had to do it again, is just way more reading. I was lucky enough to have some Japanese exchange student friends to practice with a bit back then too. I probably did a bit too much output at the beginning, and made some bad habits, so would highly recommend just doing more reading around whatever level you are at and slightly harder. Can focus on particular genres at first or a bit of everything (doesn't really matter as long as you read a lot, exposure to many words is so important) Instead of looking up a bunch of words, just focus more on being able to read the kanji correctly at first or use the site hinative to ask Japanese people for readings or meanings on words you weren't able to look up (or a certain combination with special readings, because there will be words that will be tricky to look up if you don't already know Japanese. like coined expressions, words that exist only in that particular novel, slang characters use)
Once you can read more fluently it'll be way easier to keep your Japanese solid. This is something I still have to do more, since although my Japanese is fluent conversationally, books have way more words than daily conversation (but I can look up things in seconds now or understand sometimes without looking up from context alone) .
Anki is okay if you're just starting out too, but it's better to get more exposure to native content. Or just use Anki in the background while you're passively listening to Japanese if you're still a beginner. Better to be able to use the same word in several different sentences than only by itself or in one type of context if you want to reach fluency.
Some words have multiple meanings so if you just use Anki, you will miss out on a lot. For example the verb かける
Has over 30 meanings :) (you can have gpt4 or bing attempt to translate all those if you're interested lol)
There's no way you would write all of those meanings on the back of 1 card, that would be really tedious to review that way.

If you use GPT4 or Bing, use them to help you with reading comprehension if you aren't using hinative to ask native speakers (or use all 3).
That's the safest way to use GPT4 or Bing(with native sentences and context surrounding the words), and ask both the same questions since they both might give different answers.
Bing is sometimes better at translation that GPT4 and GPT4 even told me that lol
GPT4 is really good at roleplay (Bing won't try it with me lol), if you prompt it to act like a Japanese high school student or a certain type of person in Japanese, you'll get a pretty nice result. Scared the crap out of some Japanese friends by showing my conversations with it, and they all thought it was Japanese.
But yeah, just read and listen a ton if you want to reach a fluent or native level. Some people study pitch accent or get technical and that's fine, but if you listen thousands of hours you'll probably just naturally pick everything up (and if you shadow a lot or record your voice and listen, then it's easy to improve too. It feels weird studying individual words sometimes, unless they are hard for you to pronounce). Guess it depends on your goals though. Pitch accent could be a shortcut to sounding more fluent and hearing better maybe, but a big vocabulary is necessary for understanding everything...
When I think of people that study pitch accent for months (like Dogen), I highly respect them, but they are super perfectionists too :)

phen-themoogle
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Last year I was studying super hard for maybe 5 straight months. The first two were on my own and the last 3 I had a study partner. My study partner got busy (as did I), and I gradually stopped studying all together. I've been wanting to get back into it again this past week and this video popped up in my recommended at just the right time it seems! Thank you for the great resources and invaluable information!! 🙏

mmaaxxkk
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This is very encouraging. I'm still in my beginner phase but it's very helpful to me. I love getting a realistic, serious assessment of the amount of work I need to put in. Right now I am extremely motivated and dedicated to learning.

oEllery
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4:35 also brief warning (+sorry for the long-winded comments) I know you mean well but ChatGPT’s answers only *appear* correct. It doesn’t actually know the answers to most grammar questions you ask it and (at least in my experience) frequently gets the answers to even basic grammar questions like verb groups incorrect. (It put 食べる in the same group as like 会う) It’s far better to just Google your questions. It’s unlikely to invent what people haven’t already said about Japanese, and at least with Google you know where the information is coming from. There are some tricks you can use to make Google work better for you too like using it as a corpus to see how common your phrasing is using the quotation marks (which is often but not always tied to how likely it is to be grammatical)

Your answer for sentence 1 was actually completely fine. You can use 日本語を話します to say you can speak Japanese. It appears to potentially even be about 6x more common than either 日本語が話せます or 日本語を話せます (Although I don’t have any way to distinguish use cases, there shouldn’t be that many other use cases. But for good measure, with か at the end 話します is still somewhat more common)

日本語を話します? also doesn’t mean “am I speaking Japanese?” That would be 日本語を話しています. 話します alone would be asking about the action of speaking or about speaking in the future (like “do I speak” or “will I speak”)

There’s also the additional complication of there not being a single correct answer to a lot of Japanese grammar questions. There are multiple ways the same Japanese concept is described by different sources and it’s not like the AI always follows a specific one. (For instance, some use V+ます as plain form while others use dictionary form, some say ます-form or て-form while it’s also described as a verb plus the ます helping verb or て conjunction/particle). There are also some sorta historical oddities (left overs?) that change how grammar is described like the status of だ・です・である or the nature of the Japanese subject

はなびがく花火学
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I only started to learn japanese because I wanted to learn to use anki

Deibi
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Great video although I will die on the hill that Heisigs RTK is a good system for people who can be bothered/are masochistic enough to want to learn kanji in depth (people like me). For a lot of people Kanji is an obstacle but it's one of my favourite aspects of the language and I enjoy learning kanji more than any other aspect of japanese studying.

Also a good grammar resource is Cure Dolly. Her medium is... odd to say the least, but if you put her videos to 1.25x or 1.50x speed then her videos can be extremely helpful and she offers a lot of great explanations of the intricacies of Japanese grammar.

no.
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There's a digital textbook called Human Japanese that I have used for a while. It's pretty good and also teaches a lot of the cultural influences as well as the grammar and vocabulary.

coolbrotherf
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7:09, frog, he called me out. i'm watching this on my second monitor while making an osu skin rn

janmagtoast
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As someone who is pretty bad with just straight memorizing vocabulary and having gone through RTK, i have to say it has helped me a ton with memorizing and reading words comprised of kanji. Even if you don't know the exact meaning of the word, having memorized basic meanings of kanji gets you there a good part of the time.
The fact that I struggle so much more with vocab written in hiragana than those in kanji is a testament to that, especially when compared to me trying to just cram kanji when I first started trying to learn japanese.

I will say that if you are in a hurry to learn japanese, then it might not be the most time-efficient way to learn, but it makes the entire process for me a lot more enjoyable, especially for people who are bad with straight memorization like myself.

dasuper
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for grammar, i absolutely love bunpro, its paid but if you can afford it i woud get it. also get yomichan to automatically make an anki deck as youre reading things online. also i personally love wanikani but its EXPENSIVE

naomijenkins
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Thank you for pointing out the instant gratification. Immersion sounds great but it is so hard with today’s tech use.

hollowedboi
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Really liked the anki setup guide you made. Simple and straight to the point. Thanks!

masterbowler
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Nice video man! Thanks for the tips. I've been on and off for quite some time with the language, never really fully committed and as such I've never really built a solid foundation to go from. Hoping to start again with a more decisive mindset.

pedroalves
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Great video! I started learning Japanese last September, nearly 9 months ago. Rather than months or years, I think the crucial factor is the number of HOURS, which is why I decided to write down how many hours I studied every day. So far I have done exactly 332 hours, which works out at roughly an hour and a quarter per day on average. This isn't a lot, but I have a family and a full time job, so I cannot realistically manage much more.

I have been using Wanikani for the kanji and vocabulary. Grammar I have covered with an app called Busuu, but I think I have gone too fast, because it hasn't really stuck in my brain. Right now I'm reviewing all the lessons from the past few months. And to top everything up, I use Duolingo. It's free, it's fun, and there's a bit of everything in there: kanji, grammar, vocab, useful phrases, etc.

At my present rate, I expect it to take me a bit over a year to get past the beginner stage and start just immersing; reading and listening. In July I have the JLPT n5 exam, which I expect to pass. After that I will no longer consider myself a beginner. I'm not worried about output, so I won't be trying to talk to Japanese people, or writing out the kanjis. For the foreseeable future I will be limiting myself to input.

By the way, I recognize the Dutch accent from when I lived in Belgium. Like most Dutch speakers, your English is excellent.

christopherfleming
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4:00
For more beginner grammar points like te form, past tense etc, I think you don't need much practice, just immersion like in beginner podcasts or anywhere. The grammar that doesn't show that often like different type conditionals, might need more practice, but since you are going to hear "conjugated verbs" all the time, it's going to naturally fit in the brain really fast.
Still not an advanced or maybe even intermediate learner, but I find beginner/learner podcasts are really a helpful thing at this stage because native material has too many unknown words. With things for learners you still can find unscripted native speakers sentences but they are simpler, slower, easier to get and comprehensible, until you get to the place where you understand enough for native level material.
While watching even easier anime episodes (Like Agrettsuko), that are like 15 minute long, I get at least 30 unknown words list (there are many more, but Im mostly writing down those that I can guess from context, or sentence they're in is understandable for me), thanks to these beginner podcasts listening has improved and they're a nice preparation for real life content anyways.

awoteim
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one of the more cohesive 'how to have a go at learning Japanese' videos on Youtube, good job 👍

Rohcket