My Worst Mistakes Learning Japanese (7 Years to JLPT N1)

U did a lot of wrong you had to do something right

Appreciate you sharing your experience, but it’s very hard to hear you speak. I’m sure your content is good but the way you speak makes it very hard to hear you.
Please try to speak a little slower especially near the end of a sentence. You muddle. Also open you mouth a little wider when you speak. The sound will come out much better 👍

Lovely video but you’re very very difficult to understand - just audio level wise.

I have studied for 8 months, and I can't even have a natural introduction conversation with someone. This is due to the WILDY inefficient way I started. I did what you were talking about. I learned Hiragana and Katakana first, but then went down a 6 month rabbit hole where I just wrote Kanji in a book over and over and over. I have no vocab, no examples of natural speech, no grammar knowledge. I finally just started the core 2k with Anki, and hired a tutor. Now I am focusing on Vocabulary and !!!CONTEXT!!! I also think there's really no other way around immersion and natural interaction with natives than to just go there for a year or two.

Help gimme anki flash card deck to study.

I think you're awesome dude

I have a similar experience when it comes to self sabotage and that nasty voice telling me “what’s even the point of learning anything “ … it all goes to wast anyways. Really annoying…

I have become nearly fluent in English just by consuming hundreds of hours of content in 2020/2021.

My2cents
The music is way too loud compared to your voice

You said you quit for ~2 years? I'm curious what level you were at when you quit, and about how long did it take you to get back to the same level when you started again? For me, I studied two years, got to a ~low B1 where I can have conversations, but pretty clunky and still a lot of stuff I don't know, and then I quit for about 16 months already. I can still understand a lot of the Japanese learner podcasts I used to listen to, but I know I would be horribly slow and missing soo much vocab if I tried to have conversations again. I'm curious how long it would take to get back to where I was. Steve Kaufmann says it comes back kinda quickly when you return to a language, but I'd be interested to hear your experience.

Hey bro ,can I ask what’s not right about the sentence“レイさんはもう食べましたか” and why your girlfriend seems confused ?

The honesty and courage already got my attention. Thank you for making this video ⭐️

Your turkey on tree for me is chair gather come from tree.gather

I'm sure I have wasted more time than you I'm 5 years in and Im not even n5

Honestly I'm so glad to see these kind of video's. Everyone has their own journey and not everybody is able to learn the same way. It's frustrating to see the "it's easy" types because they act as if you're too lazy or not productive enough. While that's ridiculous. If I look back on how I learned English, it started when I was a little 5-6 yo kid when Cartoon Network had subtitles. I was barely old enough to read subtitles. It took me until I was 14 years old to have normal conversations and I was 17 when I was fully fluent. And this is while half my surroundings is in English (television and the internet mostly). That's not the case for Japanese.

The biggest search for me wasn't so much learning the language. but figuring out how I - as a person myself - learn best. It's different for everyone. All some people need is a book. And others need audio and others need some kind of gamification. The biggest struggle in my opinion isn't the language but finding how you yourself work.

the nativshark art style thingy jump scared me cuz i didn't realize you were THAT niko from nativshark lmaoooo

For some reason, I started learning Japanese, but Katakana doesn't stick in my memory at all, I can speak English, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish fluently, but this is the first time I've gone through this, hiragana and kanji haven't been a problem so far, I started a little over a week ago, but I'm not able to do katakana at all

What greatly helped me get better at writing Kanji was this mobile game called Kanji Swipe (I believe it is available for Android and iOS)

I'm moving to Japan early next year, and I've been trying to teach myself Japanese for about a year now in preparation. I wanted to start by learning hiragana and katakana, because I thought that just learning the characters wouldnt take too long and would make things easier. I tried multiple apps and flashcards and nothing ever really stuck. It was so boring that I would take breaks and forget to practice, which I'm sure didn't help.

But recently I decided to do the thing that is "too advanced" for a beginner, playing video games in Japanese. In just about a month I've learned almost all hiragana characters, many katakana, a few kanji, and have a grasp of sentence structure and know some particles. I've also started to understand the sort of rhythm of the way Japanese is spoken.

I still have a long way to go, but I've learned more in a month than I did in year doing things the way I was "supposed" to.

I think that it's important to do things that work for you, rather than how you're "supposed" to. But also that learning in context is super helpful and is so much more interesting than just trying to memorize too.

Is Duolingo useful for Japanese and tips for newbies and apps that actually help

u gota distinguish between
textbook Japanese(formal)
and spoken Japanese(informal)

i did not watch this video and i will not watch, you are f'kng dumb ass.. how could you waste your 1000 plus time for learning a new language... you are a f'ckng stuid. hahahahahha

I get discouraged everytime I run into phrases full of Kanji lol, I am not sure if I am studying the "rigth" way... I think my learning process is also messy because I am a native spanish speaker and I study with english/japanese materials, I flow between spanish and english while studying... Anyway! I just wanted to say that I actually recognized the kanji you put on your tshirt! As soon as I saw it, I was able to read it, I am a beginner so this is the first time it happens to me with that Kanji, I got so excited hahaha ;;! Thanks for your advice... You have a relaxing voice

The difference in tone and advice between this and that N1-in-2-years guy is huge. This is the kind of advice I hear from friends and colleagues who eventually finished grad school, or those who went through something grueling.

My English is not perfect, but learning Japanese make me to listen, to write, to read more english content, and that's why I'm not trying to "rush" japanese, the basics are fun, and is teaching me more about english.

Is it still worth learning japnese?? I love japan and wanted to live there forever.

overemphasizing SRS, we all did that mistake 😅 These days I only study either by watching something in japanese without subtitles or by reading all the dialogues in a game (completed 67 in japanese) - I think SRS place is in the beginning when you have no vocab knowledge because it would be too tedious and frustrating having to open the dictionary for every word or every other word while playing or watching something. But after that stage one has to let SRS go 😋

Those mistakes are really not good to make with so much information online, this sequence of mistakes tells a lot about yourself and it is also easy to get a single class with teachers in the last 10 years or more... But of course, it is also good to know that now you get better, I also want to see you speaking naturally Japanese, I'd love to see some videos.

Do you really speak that fast? I'm Italian and I find your talk very comprehensive but I have to slow to .75 to take a breath 😅 I am struggling with Japanese too and I thank you for this video.

Not just Japanese but any foreign languages are hard to learn. It can be so frustrating from time to time. I have been there, too.......Whenever I feel stuck, I take a break from it and do something else for a while until my love for the language comes back to me again.

After you quite…how did you pick back up?

Flash Card = Complete Waste of Time

I have this "unusual" philosophy of "memorization is not learning". Of course, I have the luxury of not being subjected to standardized testing. I suspect that you might be missing out of the calligraphy aspect of Kanji (or other glyphs that were designed to be written with a brush). Let me explain:

集 : Gather = 隹 Bird on 木 Tree ← This is common knowledge but what is not common is why is the bird written like that?

There are two ways to understand this and both ways are essential. The first is the historical route where we can trace back the evolution of the glyph all the way to the oracle bone script. The second way to "feel" each and every stroke in order to understand what the current form is trying to depict. In calligraphy, there is no wasted stroke movement (I am well aware of the irony of this statement, just bear with me).

隹 bird - 8 strokes
Stroke 1,2 = 亻depicting the bird head
Minor stroke 3 = tip of the wing of a fluttering bird
Stroke 4,5,6 = the wings. Probably symbolizes the domains of a bird in/on the air, sea, and ground.
Stroke 7 = horizon stroke: the principle that binds the 3 domains
Stroke 8 = vertical stroke: the body that connects the wings to the bird's body, completing the glyph

So, 隹 = 🕊 and 木 = 🌲

Did you take like Japanese 101 for college that you were saying was a waste of time? Was thinking of taking

Good video, but the background music is a bit too loud. As a non-native English speaker, it’s hard for me to understand what you’re saying, and not only because the background music is a bit too loud, but also because your pronunciation is a bit challenging for non-native speakers. That said, it’s still a good video!

Your voice sounds so calm

Background music is too loud that i can't understand what you're talking about 😢😢😢

You're not wrong about taking college language classes lol. They're bad. Not just because the pace is too slow, but because the education system (at least here in the U.S.) isn't designed for language learning and most professors are not engaging or have outdated methods of instruction. Hell, I took 6 classes and all we did was just follow Genki I-II, which shouldn't take 6 semesters to do!

I've been studying for 3 years now and I realize I probably could've gotten to a higher level and in half that time if I didn't rely so much on university and experimented with online resources sooner. I've been trying to incorporate the language more in different parts of my life (song lyrics, anime, language exchange apps, etc.).

Another thing I realized is that to get the most out of these is to not fixate too much on one task because:
A. things that take too long to learn may not be that important and you may not see certain grammar used at all
B. all of those study options have pros and cons. You don't JUST do textbook chapters, or just talk to native speakers, or just watch anime. You do all of the above. How people talk when acting, how people talk irl, spoken vs texting language, and most importantly, making outcomes for yourself. Example: What type of vocab do you expect to learn from watching this anime or listening to that genre of music? Will it be common vocab that's useful irl?

The hardest part is time-management and burnout.
So, TL;DR take initiative in your learning, get creative, be aware of whether or not a resource is really valuable and if it's not find new ones, and don't let colleges waste your money/time.

Thank you!

What software do you use for these videos? Awesome animation

i grew up in a community with a lot of japanese people, i was used to hearing it and seeing kanji. so when i started formally studying it in college it felt very natural to me. however i’ve hit a plateau i just can’t get over even now, 3 years after graduating. it’s kind of like, i know what i know and i don’t know what i don’t know, if that makes sense 😅 so it feels good knowing that someone else struggled and worked for 7 years to get this great achievement. I’m not interested in taking the JLPT, but I want to have conversation deeper than “今日何をしましたか？” 😭😭

Anki is a great, 1.5 kaishi teaches you the single words in context with sentences

Mnemonic combined with SRS is the most powerful way to memorize words esp kanji word, and by learning the radical makes it even more superior, most anki decks only provide vocabulary with meaning, reading and example sentence, but to be able to read unknown kanji you need to learn the radicals that forms the kanji, by learning it you can somehow predict what are those unknown kanji means or how they pronounced, i don't know how many times i got amazed by able to read a kanji that i only seen the first time, while the meaning sometimes way off than what i think it would be but still, even native japanese don't remember all the kanji means, or how they pronounced, but they learn the essential thing about kanji, therefore they able to predict what are those kanji, or what they related to(illness, building, etc)

I'm Japanese,
Japanese grammar and honorifics are so complicated that everyone, even native speakers, are loosely looking for the right answer😅.

Just when you think you've learned Japanese grammar correctly, it's considered rude in business Japanese.

In the first place, Japanese is a high context language (even native speakers have trouble understanding how it should be understood),

I'd rather open a book and understand formal Japanese as a theory,
It is more natural to imitate a native Japanese speaker by conversing with him or her rather than to open a book and understand formal Japanese as theory.

Japanese people cannot write or speak English.
It is the same paradox.

It cannot be expressed in terms of 0 or 1, because it is analog and the meaning of words always wavers,
I think you will improve your Japanese far more if you speak with native speakers.

This is correct because it is defined.
It cannot be said that it is correct, and language is a living thing that is always fluctuating.

I learnt all of the hiragana in 1 1/2 days, and then went to katakana, started it and learnt it all in 2 days. I was using the app dr.moku. Now i’m onto learning the talking, which i know is going to take a LOT longer than a day, which is why I was leaving it until I had learnt the characters (other than kanji, i’m too scared to attempt that yet),but now I can learn straight from using the characters rather than romaji, while also doing reviews of the hiragana and katakana at the same time. I think i’m at an advantage this way because I can read, I just have to figure out what the words are saying.

Aren't u in fight club

Great video! I'm learning Japanese and have already made some of your "mistakes."

Japanese will be my fourth language, but I'm struggling to find a resource that meets my needs and has a structured path. Thanks to this video, I discovered NativShark, which seems to check all the boxes because it covers reading, grammar, and vocabulary in one tool. I tried using the code in the video description to subscribe, but it says it's been used. Is there another one I could use?

You're (well, we are 😅) getting older too. Learning new things - especially a language that has almost nothing in common with your native language - gets harder and harder. Every bit of progress should be seen as a success.

To be honest, for me it’s already a success if I still remember what I learned two weeks ago. I started learning Japanese (seriously) 2 1/2 months ago, and I’m happy to know hiragana, katakana, a bit of grammar, and a few kanji. Reading is still a nightmare. All those so-called masters and their 'Look what I achieved in record time' videos... this whole social media circus just gets on my nerves and makes you feel like you're not doing enough.

Just aim to be a slightly better version of yourself tomorrow than you were yesterday.

Whats your take on playing games like Persona 4 ?