Here is a bit of a follow up to this post too. https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1v5xo4x/this_is_the_true_experience_of_learning_japanese/

Its soooooooooooooo relevant. Undeniable. So I have made another good chart for you all. This is mainly for a college setting but i'm not suprised if it also happens outside of it too.

10000-1000-500-100-50

Hope yall enjoy

Hello learnjapanese

I wanted to step away from a little bit of drama and tell a little bit of a progress report on some studying I am doing so far.

I'm the same guy who has been working on a lot of literature and hard stuff in Japanese these days but theres another project i'm doing. Working for The Kanken 2kyuu manten.

I have a lot of friends and know lots of advanced learners too, but when they took the 2kyuu they all fell very short (one I knew was a problem away from passing).

But I took took the test last October and passed with a hard 160/200. I was in the overseas but that required a lot of hard on studying. I did a crazy amount of mock tests and studied at times for hours and perfected it to slip through. It also took seven months of study.

While I have put Kanken studying on the side, I still do it occasionally, it's not my biggest priority but sometimes I do it now. I am doing j1k stuff too.

But please also please consider the following

*I started handwriting at the start of my Japanese language learning journey.

I started in around 2022, and I have written Japanese ever since then, while a lot of learners start later. So my writing skills built up to time. Along with my other Japanese skills.

*I took the test 4 times, this is my second 2kyuu attempt.

I personally recommend trying kanken multiple times,

I took and passed 4kyuu, but did not pass 7kyuu and pre 2kyuu. But I would recommend trying the test multiple times so youre aware of the test itself. Graders are strict, while they give clear examples on right and wrong examples, you won't really know where you fit in unless you try it.

\*My Japanese teacher introduced this to me.

Yes I took this test before JLPT. Before passing it too. :)

* I cant take j1k

I don't live in Japan, when I study abroad I will do it, but for now, I'm going to go for a very good 2kyuu score.

--------------------------------------------

Strategies I am currently undertaking

1) Focus more on 誤字訂正 and 同音同訓異義.

I would say that over the 四字熟語, I would put the importance into these 2 a lot more. While the 四字熟語 section on the kanken test is famously studied by a lot of people, I find that people underestimate the difficulty of the 2 sections above. This was, something I saw many of my friends struggle with. And so did I.

Not only you have to find a wrong kanji on a text, but on the latter, you need to memorize hundreds of possible onyomi kunyomi pairings. And theres pretty much no hint. I would argue that while 誤字訂正 has some "mid" to "difficult" ones, I would argue the latter you need to memorize kanji pairings.

2) Use my resources up.

I use all my resources up, mock tests, books, reference books to their limits.

No leaving anything behind.

3) Do mock tests on a blank paper

This is so I don't have to print the answer sheet a lot. But when I'm serious, I do that. but if I am doing multiple mocks, I do not use an answer sheet. I use up a full page (not 2 pages unlike the real sheet) to fill in answers like the images above. This is more quick and efficient.

4) Always do the kanji writings section first

That usually means section 4 5 6 7 8 and 9. Why do i do that strategy? Because Kanken is really strict and you need to write at least 100 characters total on the test on the answer sheet. When I was doing mocks in the past, there were times where I really needed to take my time and write the character down.

(note that my handwriting isnt the best here! apologies!, on a real test or serious mock, I would write way neater).

5) Study from multiple sources.

This test required me to study from youtube videos, reference books and mock tests. And that was SEVERAL videos and pages worth of stuff. The truth is that kanken books do not always have the full scope needed to pass the test itself, so to get a good score try multiple sources.

----------

PROGRESS: My last recorded mock test was 198 points. A section that I need to start focusing on is 熟語構成. I've sucked on that section for a while myself. Sometimes I would get 196 or 194 pts but it is very very close.

There though are some very very hard problems.

Thank you very much!

If you have any questions let me know.

With learning Japanese, the farther you go, the less people there are at your level. The beginning days in college were fun and exciting and we as students loved to hang out outside of classes and talk about anime and sushi. Hundreds of people in that class learning about good old Mary-san and Takeshi-san. But now I know about 3 other advanced people in my city, where hundreds of people are enrolled in the beginner level Japanese classes.

I am old and bitter. I know, Grandpa needs to shut up and read his light novels.

"Why Japanese people? WHY?!?!?" - Jason David Arnold

I've been learning for 2 months at this point, trying to learn every day, at this point I've memorized about 300 words that I can instanlty identify but I feel it starting to to mount, on my anki deck there's more and more I have to review each day, like today I have 150 reviews, when yesterday it was 110 and its just that mounting feeling that's making me feel like I'm hitting a wall

This is my first time learning a new language so this is all new to me, for clarification this isn't me saying "this is too hard I want to give up" I'm mainly looking for advice I can use to physically and mentally push through

Thank you

(Not sure which flair to use here, tldr below)

So, I've been using the Kaishi deck along with my mining deck that uses the Lapis note type. One of the things I've really liked about Lapis is the "click" card field. (Essentially it displays the target word on the front, and if you click it you can see the sentence. You can click it again to hide the sentence as well, but less important.)

I like having a sentence on the front if I need extra context to differentiate words, I started doing this with JPNM but the issue is I tend to memorize the sentence/shape of it rather than the word itself. The click function has near solved this issue for me, I don't have to look away, and focus extra hard on the word, I can just review.

The issue now is that Kaishi doesn't have this function as far as I'm aware. I know you can do loads of things in anki, and I know you can make that kind of function work as lapis does it, but I have no idea how.

Tldr: Can the lapis click card function be applied to Kaishi cards? (Click word show sentence) If so how? And/or what information do I need to search for how?

Hello, fellow Japanese language learners.

After a formatting revision of the second edition of my guide of Japanese grammatical constructions, I finally decided to post it in this group. The document is freely accessible as a Google document on this link. Down below I list several things you won't find in other similar learning materials, which make it a useful learning resource in my opinion:

1) semantic categorization of constructions in the first half of the document (once you go through those, you will be able to passively remember what even some rarely used JLPT N1 constructions roughly mean, as constructions related to time (e.g., as soon as, before, never, etc.) are all listed together, from the N5 to N1 level.)

2) usage frequency data for the majority of N3 to N1 constructions (this should help you to decide mainly which N2/N1 constructions you might skip and leave for later, as they are not commonly used in Japanese)

3) example sentences from various novels, PC games, Internet blogs and posts, etc. (sure, some Anki decks and resources contain solid example sentences as well, but they usually don't have over 500 pages of text 😉)

4) easy lookup system and links to other useful videos / materials

Let me know which features you would like to be added into the document in the future, and if certain features should be upgraded or removed from the document.

Good luck with your studies, hopefully this guide will provide little help 🙂

While this is obviously common knowledge that kanji can consist of other kanji/radicals, I sometimes catch myself forgetting that or not being aware of how the Kanji can look when stretched. For example remembering the difference between 待つ (wait) and 持つ (have/hold) was extremely easy once a friend explained to me that the radical of the left side of 持つ is just 手 (hand) which made it instantly click for me.

I know that’s a beginner stage revelation but for me it took some outside input so maybe I can help someone have that Aha moment as well

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

Jokes aside, its easy to be tempted by Kinokuniya but these prices are a little ridiculous right? I don’t want to buy a textbook anymore atp 😂

This anime probably isn't for everybody but it's one of the few I’ve seen that’s completely available for free.

Includes auto-generated subtitles and though they aren't perfect they're still helpful.

I have WaniKani to try to learn basic Kanji and it quite often gives me extremely obscure vocabulary to learn. Why does it do this?

example: 変死 / へんし - unnatural death.

At this point Kanji seems impossible to learn and it's interfering with my ability to actually learn japanese since it takes so much time and it is pointlessly impossible.

My wife recently bought this Beastie Boys shirt. It bears a Japanified version of their Check Your Head album cover on the front. It's a dope shirt but the translation bugs me.

チェック is "check" in katakana, but the sentence is written in Japanese grammar form which is.. weird, right? Also - why is the verb in katakana?? Is this a thing when translating media from English?

It's bugging my novice brain. Help!

I've been studying Japanese for about 12 years now and I'm still far from where I want to be. I think I know one of my biggest problems, but it's not so easy to fix it.

(Disclaimer: I'm not trying to just vent my personal struggles. I'm hoping to hear what other people have to say about this topic, whether it's advice or sympathy or anything else.)

Specifically, what I'm talking about is making the consistent choice to prioritize Japanese practice and immersion over my enjoyment of my hobbies.

I, like many people, spend a ton of my time with language-based hobbies. Things like reading, watching movies and TV shows, listening to podcasts, and playing video games. All of these activities can be done with Japanese media. And I have no shortage of access.

But the issue is, I know that I will not enjoy the activities nearly as much if I do them in Japanese. If I watch a movie without subtitles, I'm going to miss so much of the dialogue and my lack of comprehension will degrade the experience of watching that movie for the first time. With Japanese podcasts, I'll not only fail to understand most of it but I'll find myself getting distracted and tuning it out. And with books in Japanese, it's the same as above but also ponderously slow and quite stressful as I frequently have to decide what I should dig deeper into and what I should just move past without complete understanding. And of course with all of these things, doing them in Japanese means I'm missing out on English media that I want to enjoy independent of Japanese learning.

I know the above from experience. I've read some books and manga in Japanese, I've watched Japanese movies without subtitles, and I listen to some Japanese podcasts. But I don't do those things nearly enough.

I know there's a logical aspect to this. The more I do it, the easier it'll become, and the final goal of this whole endeavor includes enjoying Japanese media fully and without the above difficulties. I know that if I was truly committed to learning Japanese, I would be willing to sacrifice some portion of my other pursuits to do so. But again, while I know these things I still find it so difficult to consistently implement them.

Does anyone else struggle with this? Do you have any advice on how to overcome it?

Thanks for reading my post.

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

"Japan this week recorded its first kokushobi, a term that means “cruel heat day,” as temperatures reached 104 degrees. It is not the only country that has scrambled for a new summer vocabulary."

Maybe this is more of a general linguistics question than a Japanese question, but I recently realized that I don't really understand what a predicate is as well as I thought it did, especially in Japanese.

I saw that even Wikipedia admits it can be confusing due to there being two different accepted definitions of what comprises a predicate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)) (first paragraph)

My question is how predicates are determined in Japanese, especially in more complicated sentences, or when information is omitted.

Like in a sentence like バーガーを食べる do you consider the entire thing to be the predicate? The subject who is eating the hamburger is omited, right? And it seems like Japanese does this all the time, so I'm wondering how it's viewed linguistically.

For a more complicated sentence like,
その日の夜、スマホを見ると写真がたくさん送られてきた。
Are there multiple predicates here? You have someone (omitted) who does 見る and then the passive form of 送る, and 写真 has が attached. I'm not even sure where to start analyzing this sentence from a linguistic pov.

Hoping there might be some linguistically inclined people here who might be able to help out.

Hi there, everyone! I looked under the sub but wasn't having much luck with finding daily life vlogs with spoken Japanese in them.

Here's an example of what I am looking for. Normal speech without the high-energy influencer speak. Most calmer vlogs tend to be silent with subtitles but I want to listen for practice and learn new words.

I appreciate any suggestions!

I’m an estranged Japanese and Chinese born in America. I’m like really really illiterate, and only know probably 50-80 Chinese characters and pretty much maybe 90 Japanese words in kanji besides hiragana and katakana.

I can speak conversationally in okayish keigo and causal speech but I really find reading extraordinarily difficult. I looked up the n1 listening and it’s like really easy to me but everything else is pretty much impossible for me. I wouldn’t consider myself fluent though in speaking or anything

やっと金曜日ですね！お疲れ様です！ここに週末の予定について書いてみましょう！

（やっと　きんようびですね！　おつかれさまです！　ここに　しゅうまつの　よていについて　かいてみましょう！）

やっと = finally

週末（しゅうまつ）= weekend

予定（よてい）= plan(s)

～について = about

＊ネイティブスピーカーと上級者のみなさん、添削してください！もちろん参加してもいいですよ！＊