Where to start again with Japanese?

[kathleen]

So I want to know your advise on where I can start again with my Japanese.
I have textbooks that are still unused (they are a bit to high for my level at the moment) or I used them before but they don't get me to the point of where I want to be since these are romanized. That's not really how I want to learn it. 

I know that you need to start with hiragana and katakana. But learning sounds/letters is quit boring if you don't know any vocabulaire to practice with it. 
So now is my question. How to get over the whole "I don't know a single word in Japanese but I want to use it on the internet problem?"

I have a lang-8 account which I used before, but without a vocabulaire it's hard to post something on there. 

Do you suggest by learning the basics like colors, directions, fruits etc or go directly to the daily things like talking about your life/day.
Any tips or suggestions are welcome, even if you just say stick with the boring stuff.

I appreciate your help already.

[menakatep]

You should pick some vocabulary lists on www.memrise.com to learn! You can even find your own words and make a memrise vocabulary deck yourself. Someone told me that aside from basic essential vocabulary for everyday conversation (basic verbs, colors, objects you encounter on a daily basis etc.) that you should learn words related to your own interests. Maybe someone else on the forum has some other opinions too! They'll probably reply soonish


Logan

[LittleGaijin]

I like Logan's advice!

I think that this is a very common problem for Japanese learners. If you've read my personal staff page on the homepage, you'll know that I first learned Japanese in 2006, dropped it, and had to completely relearn everything from scratch 4 years later! And it was tough, I'm not gonna lie! But the second time, I had even more of a reason to study harder.

Anywho, I started with the kana (hiragana/katakana), rewriting the letters over and over again until it stuck. It's insanely important to have your kana down before even officially starting to "learn Japanese" so that you can write and read. My method for this is boring, and it doesn't work for everyone, but I first learned Japanese at a school and this is how it was taught to me.

 ＊ The idea was to write the characters again and again until I was sick of them.
I started with the first row.　　 あ　い　う　え　お
Then, move onto the next row. 　か　き　く　け　こ
Go back to the first row.　　　　　あ　い　う　え　お
Second row again.　　　　　　　　　か　き　く　け　こ
Now, third row.　　　　　　　　　　　さ　し　す　せ　そ
Go back to row 1, and repeat and repeat and repeat!


I did this during all my highschool classes, during my breaks, while watching TV—every single day until it stuck permanently in my brain. I learned all my kana in under two weeks. If this is too boring, you can always write down the characters while listening to vocabulary videos on youtube from either JapanesePod101 or PuniPuni.

However, with your books that are all in romaji, you could have some fun with this! I think you should really dive into those books again, and write down the hiragana/katakana above all the romaji-fied words. For instance, if you see "taberu" in your book, write down "たべる" and make a mental note of the English meaning.

Also, I wrote an article last year about my top 5 study tip recommendations, and I think these tips could really help you out in this case. Some simple ways to have fun with your studying, even if you have a busy schedule! 

After you've learned your kana, your next step is to find a book (perhaps a new book with NO romaji in it), and allow that book to teach you beginner vocab, verbs, kanji, and basic grammar. It really doesn't matter what book you choose, but after re-learning all the basics you should be able to have basic conversations in Japanese online again! Hopefully all these tips can give you some ideas how to go about re-learning Japanese!

[魔]

Apr 9, 2014 6:48:37 GMT LittleGaijin said:

 ＊ The idea was to write the characters again and again until I was sick of them.
I started with the first row.　　 あ　い　う　え　お
Then, move onto the next row. 　か　き　く　け　こ
Go back to the first row.　　　　　あ　い　う　え　お
Second row again.　　　　　　　　　か　き　く　け　こ
Now, third row.　　　　　　　　　　　さ　し　す　せ　そ
Go back to row 1, and repeat and repeat and repeat!

I did it a little differently
あああああああ　あ
いいいいいいい　あい
ううううううう　あいう
えええええええ　あいうえ
おおおおおおお　あいうえお

[chocopie]

Are you starting over completely from scratch?

For learning hiragana and katakana, I recommend an online flashcard program like www.realkana.com/

"I don't know a single word in Japanese but I want to use it on the internet problem?"

There is unfortunately no way past this problem until you know a certain amount of vocab and grammar. I think here grammar is more important. If you know the structure of the sentence you want and how to conjugate the verbs etc then looking up vocabulary and just slotting it into the sentence is very easy.

Do you suggest by learning the basics like colors, directions, fruits etc or go directly to the daily things like talking about your life/day.

Any tips or suggestions are welcome, even if you just say stick with the boring stuff.

When you're starting from the beginning you need basically all the vocab you can get. I think especially in the beginning it's better to work with a textbook as they give you structure. It's easy to spend a lot of time trying to work out how to study rather than actually studying. So my recommendation is find a beginner's textbook and study it. Once you have basic grammar and sentence patterns down, it will be easy to supplement the textbook's vocabulary with whatever words are relevant to your interests.

[Underlig]

There's a lot of sources on the internet, you should like they mentioned above try to learn everything you can come by, and don't forget to set up small goals all the time, like "today I will try to learn basic colours" or whatever

[LittleGaijin]

Underlig and chocopie have some really great advice here!

Too often do people worry about "how to start learning" instead of actually doing it! So grab a Japanese textbook, set some daily goals for yourself, and just have fun with it! (^_~)

[kathleen]

Thanks everyone for the wonderful tips! It really helps a lot to read all the advices. I started yesterday with the kana again, I'm setting my goal on two weeks max to learn them again. So far I study 10 character a day over and over again like you said LittleGaijin it's super boring but while I do it I listen to some music or japanese stories to keep me focused.

I also use the memrise site now to study a bit more, so thank you for that menakatep it's a great site!

[LittleGaijin]

No problem, just glad I could help! Oh, and maybe download some podcasts (especially JapanesePod101) to listen to for when you're writing the kana. Keep us updated!

[Bokusenou]

Well, I only know what worked for me...

For kana I found a kana chart and wrote each one down a few times, then I played a kana quiz game on a website which is no longer around, but I'm sure there are others.
Then I did Remembering the Kanji, followed with Tae Kim's grammar guide, & the Core 2000 and 6000 anki decks (nowadays there is a core 10k deck which might be even better). After that I used the JLPT vocabulary decs and grammar descriptions from this site.

After all that I had enough vocabulary to understand the news, as well as most things in Japanese. I tried textbooks but they didn't really work well for me, however you should probably at least try them out to see if they work better for you. If you can, try to find a textbook meant for self-studyers instead of people taking a class.

[Jembru]

Apr 9, 2014 16:25:12 GMT chocopie said:

It's easy to spend a lot of time trying to work out how to study rather than actually studying. 

Haha, I cringed when I read this. It's soo true ^^ 

I'm sort of a 'linguistic alchemist', in that I seem to spend the bulk of my study time seeking out some magic ingredient that will accelerate my Japanese development. I've tried so many weird and wonderful techniques, yet never really found that philosophers stone.  It's just my personality, and I doubt I'll ever stop searching and testing out various language learning theories, but I often wonder if the magic ingredient I seek is simply 'open your textbook, shut up and study'. 

There is a learning theory, I can't recall the name just now but someone reading this will surely know it too, that the bulk of your learning happens in just 20% of the effort you put in. It's this that I'm always trying to beat. My study is highly streamlined and at risk of sounding arrogant, pretty well organised. It's like an intertwining web with a core of study methods, that all interact and overlap. The idea is that it focuses my activity when I study, so that the time I'm wasting is lessened. 

Sounds great right? Well.. unfortuntely, when this thread was started, I was in the middle of designing a system that allows me to design short 'courses' based on my long and short term goals. I basically break my long term goal into key skill areas, then identify the skills I most urgently need to improve on. I can then follow a flow chart that quickly puts together a 2, 4, 8 or 10 week course that focuses primarily on that one skill, so that I don't waste time on activities that aren't directly geared towards my current goal. 

I said, 'unfortunately' though didn't I? Well.. yeah. This system is quite sophisticated and now it is up and running, I'm loving it, but it is all hand-written on pop-out sheets and took literally hours to put together. I even took it to work one night so I could work on it there. Just think of how much Japanese I could have learnt while I was colour-coding the sections and decorating the charts with stickers!  When you consider the time and effort I put into getting more than 20% result for my effort, I end up back to just 20% of my time resulting in learning, because the other 80% was spent colouring in! ^^


Anyway, I hope you've found a good place to start now. I also had to re-learn from scratch. It only took me 3 months to get back to where I had been before I quit (mid beginner, or a few chapters into the second book of the Japanese for Busy People series). That was considerably less time than it took me the first time around!

If you want to see some other ideas for how to study, you could take a look at our daily study routines  to see how those of us with family and work commitments squeeze Japanese into our lives. You might also be interested in a thread Jacob recently started. He originally started it to talk about his difficulties getting motivated to study, and we later changed it to a place where we can share our current learning goals to encourage us to stick to them, lest we lose face in front of our fellow learners ^^  

[AlanP]

Apr 9, 2014 16:25:12 GMT chocopie said:

When you're starting from the beginning you need basically all the vocab you can get. I think especially in the beginning it's better to work with a textbook as they give you structure. It's easy to spend a lot of time trying to work out how to study rather than actually studying. So my recommendation is find a beginner's textbook and study it. Once you have basic grammar and sentence patterns down, it will be easy to supplement the textbook's vocabulary with whatever words are relevant to your interests.

Hi all I'm Alan, new member today.
Can totally relate to the above, I must have spent about 30 hrs surfing trying to find the best ways to learn. Think what I could have "actually" learnt if I'd studied. Though I have found some excellent methods which have been mentioned here. Anki which is brilliant and RealKana both installed on my phone, excellent for on the bus to work. The books I'm currently using are the Japanese for busy people bk 1.
Self-studying at the moment which is difficult, I will be using Lang-8 once I can speak a little and have mastered Kana.

Thanks for the link Jembru

Alan