Stumbling Japanese
Stumbling Japanese
Lauri Hahne
Buy on Leanpub

Intro

The purpose of this book is to document me learning the Japanese language. I intend to discuss the tools and techniques that I use and how I’ve found them beneficial.

Setup

I use Anki to quiz me and help me remember new words and constructs. Anki works by presenting me flashcards that contain something that I want to remember. These flash cards are repeated using a spaced repetition system (SRS).

Anki has a concept of fields and cards. A word will have an entry of its own that is composed of fields. Fields connect concepts in different languages together and may contain other relevant info. For example my entry for bicycle might include the English word bicycle in one field and other fields such as picture (a picture of a bicycle), kanji spelling (自転車), and phonetic kana spelling (じてんしゃ). In addition to words and pictures, Anki cards may contain audio.

Anki generates the actual flash cards based on these fields and markings. For example I may specify that Anki shows me picture of a bicycle and I should remember that it is pronounced じてんしゃ. Any number of card mappings may be specified so it is easy to generate tons of simple unitary flash cards using Anki’s automation.

How Anki works is described in great detail on their own webpage at http://ankisrs.net/docs/manual.html.

My cards

My cards basically include the following fields: pronunciation (kana), writing (kanji), picture, and variations of the word with different kanji characters blacked out. I also include an example sentence with the word blacked out.

Note that I do not include a translation. This is to mentally decouple my Japanese from other languages that I know. Whether this is useful is debated but I like it. Therefore the picture is my translation in this case.

I have set up the actual flashcards in the following order:

  1. Pronunciation (with audio) to picture
  2. Picture to pronunciation
  3. Variations of the word with one kanji blacked out at a time.
  4. Full kanji spelling to pronunciation and picture.
  5. Example sentence with the word blacked out to full example sentence.

This allows me to chunk the word in pieces. I do not need to immediately remember full kanji reading but I may progress more slowly and in smaller chunks.

My example sentences typically also include some new grammatical construct. I prepare separate entries for these and black out the new constructs.

It should be noted that Anki makes managing these kinds of massive amounts of cards feasible.

How to get example sentences

I take a few words that I intend to learn and make up an English language example sentence. I get a translation for this from Gengo. Typically these translations also contain grammatical constructs that I haven’t studied yet, so I create separate cards for these also.

Getting started

For absolute beginners:

  1. Get a kanji radical deck and start studying it https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1044119361. This will allow you the chunk in real kanji easier later.
  2. Get Fluent Forever’s Japanese pronunciation trainer https://fluent-forever.com/bundles/. This will teach you hiragana and katakana with the proper pronunciation. This deck is much better than any of the free Anki decks that claim to do the same.
  3. Study around 30 new cards from each deck per day. This should take around 30 to 60 minutes daily once the reviews start rolling. I like to use Anki’s bury related cards feature that will postpone showing cards that are based on a card you have already seen that day.