Alexandria
Helllooooo!......My names Alexandria and I'm feeling a little overwhelmed!!

Hey guys,

 

Hope this message finds you well! I really want to start learning Japanese and Mandarin. I have been learning Mandarin for about a year but still only really no the basics so hope to really improve my conversational skills. But does anyone have any advise or tips for me to help me learn? Is it better to just dive into it and learn as I go on here and take lessons online? Are they any books or programmes etc that are worth getting? I'm going to go to Japan in January for a year so I hope will improve by then!

 

 

Thanks :)

 

Have a nice day xx

Jun 10, 2015 3:06 PM
Comments · 8
2

For japanese i will recommend japanesepod101.com. This site is quite awesome, follow their course and do some practice with people here on italki. Meanwhile if you can develop a taste for anime i think it would be good. 

June 10, 2015
1
What's been amazingly helpful for me and helps me to keep on track is Anki. It's a free flashcard program. The official website is http://ankisrs.net/. There are standard flashcards that can be used, or you can create new customized templates if you know a little bit of html ad css, but knowing a web language is not necessary for the basic stuff. The really good thing about Anki, is, after you first finish learning a flash card, it times your next review of the card based on how well you did with previous reviews of that card. It supports foreign language scripts as well as media (images, audio, and video). What's really great about it is that you can include furigana in the cards, so you can create the cards with Kanji so your kanji recognition increases, but you don't have to worry about forgetting the pronunciation.
July 25, 2016
1

:)

June 10, 2015
1

Japanesepod101.com is the best, I agree with Ali.

 

And wow, if you learn japanese from now to January, (conversational at least) you will be my super hero forever...

June 10, 2015

I want to give a shout out to tara's suggestion of Anki.  Really good tool.  Anyways, in my opinion, the steps to learning Japanese are:  1, learn kana and then never ever use romanji 2, use a textbook to get basic grammar and vocabulary, 3 try to start having conversations.  Maybe try to speak only Japanese for 5 minutes, and then eventually work your way up to an hour.  4, start learning Kanji as early as possible.  I personally like using wanikani, but the principle is the same with anki.  5, continue for about 2-3 years. 6, also, try immersing yourself with as much content as possible.  Books, tv, changing your computer settings and social network settings to Japanese.  7, wonder why you even started in the first place 笑笑笑笑.

July 25, 2016
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