I study 10 minutes of an anime in several passes. 1. Japanese audio with English subtitles. ( So you know what's going on. ) 2. Japanese audio with NO subtitles. ( Immerse yourself in the sounds and images. ) 3. Japanese audio with Japanese subtitles and pause every line to take down the vocabulary and kanji. I also shadow the speakers and repeat everything they say, exactly as they say it. ( Get the pitch accent too. ) 4. Load everything you copied in step 3 into Anki and study it. 5. Re-watch the anime in Japanese with the Japanese subtitles. ( You will understand everything this time. ) Shadow the anime line for line. ( I put my mouse next to my chair and pause frequently so I can have time to repeat everything. ) 6. When you finish the anime, come back and re-watch it every other week with shadowing. You will get bored with the anime, but you will own every line 100% . Input only works if it is comprehensible input. When your mind recognizes that it has some memory of a word or phrase, you know it immediately and get excited. After a few months, you will have learned hours of natural Japanese dialogue.
no worries mate, he is speaking faster than most and not the clearest but of course it is easy for me to understand as a native english speaker. Most people, by far, speak slower. Keep at it, it only takes time. Btw your english writing is great.
Don't agree, i have all those things and i can still sneak in half an hour every day. I just don't waste too much of my time watching tv or playing games. Plus if it's something you love doing then you'll find time for it
I’m in my third month studying Japanese. I’m a 75 year old retired educator…determined to learn the language as a mental challenge. My wife and I will visit Japan this summer. Using Italki tutor.. lesson 3 Genki… lots of other apps. I can read hiragana and katakana, but I can’t write it. IS IT NECESSARY FOR ME TO BE ABLE TO WRITE THE KANA? It is a challenge to learn all of the new vocabulary, and to wean off of romagi. I’m also trying to use Japanese readers, and I am looking into the Satori reader. Thank you for the video…. Any suggestions for me will be much appreciated. Best, John
Satory reader it's really good! Im still using it after a year, it really helps to learn a lot of different vocabulary, ways to speak, express yourself, kanji and so on. You shouldn't worry about writing kanji unless you find a meaning in doing so. Just keep doing it and have fun. That's how I learnt English back then, but well actually japanese it's quite harder but not impossible.
Writing can be fun for personal development, or for memorization techniques. but probably similar to your home country, there's not a lot of times in your daily life you're going to need to be writing things down outside of schooling. I would say if you're trying to maximize your understanding in a shorter time, don't worry about writing them so much, unless you feel like writing them out helps you memorize them.
THANK YOU! A child doesn't learn a language by reading or writing at first, that comes after 5 or 6 years, but I see many videos pushing for it which I disagree on. I learned english by listening and speaking bits at times. Took me a good 8 years I kid you not to be fluent and be able to translate and interpret 😊 Now at 54 I am on the quest to learn Japanese but at my own pace and no pressure. I appreciate you clarifying this point😊 Cheers from Panamá 😊
I am living in Japan and am in my same conversation and word patterns since a while. So your tips how to break out of them sound really helpful. Hope they will work
This might be the absolute best advice I’ve ever heard for learning Japanese, and frankly, in my opinion, any language. I’ve been living in Japan for years now, I’ve been stuck at an intermediate level forever and I didn’t quite know how to punch myself up to the next level. That last third of the video is perfect advice. I showed it to some friends fluent in both languages and they enthusiastically approved. I will be fluent in kanji reading in a year thanks to you.
Nice video man. I started learning via textbooks in 2022, did Genki 1 and 2 but then gave up due to other commitments after 3-4 months. I started again in January this year, however going down the full immersion route. So far I have done 5+ hours of intensive immersion per day and have been mining sentences for grammar/vocab. I feel like I have made 10x as much progress from this method, however, the early grammar from the textbooks definitely gave me a good head start. Keep up the videos and godspeed to you.
I haven't had any fun lately, 😭 so it was fun. You bring me joy!❤🙂I love the kind and generous heartwarming atmosphere that you create, your kind, easygoing, warm vibe. ❤
I…just randomly out of the blue decided to check this channel again as I was looking for listening practice material, figuring there wouldn’t be anything new since the last upload was a year ago. But surprisingly I see “Uploaded 3 hours ago”. That timing is craaazy. It’s early in the morning and I have a test later so I’ll have to watch this later but just wanted to say welcome back! 🎉 I missed this channel
Honestly you could and probably should make a whole vid on a change of mindset, it’s applicable not just to Japanese (surely) but there are so many people who are frustrated and on the verge of/have given up and I think it would really encourage people that it really is possible to attain fluency
This is really good advice. I think the notion of working on domain comprehension (mentioned during the game plan part of the video) is something that most people are not even aware of, and is severely underrated in general. It's a shame it was only mentioned in passing. Another thing that I wish you would've elaborated on is the mindset shift. That section was so short you'd moved on to the next before I even quite understood what the simple action actually entailed. For example, what do you really mean when you say ‘actually commit’? I personally don't think it's a good idea to make a flashcard of every single word you come across that you don't know, but on the whole, this is arguably the best video on learning Japanese (and probably any language in general, since it's basically the same process) that I have seen. Great job!
You can learn japanese in 1 year if: you have no family, you have no kids, you have no full time job - and so you can immerse 24/7 using ajaat or something
2:26 as someone who took Japanese in high school, the way we had that set up was the first week (along with beginning to learn to communicate in general) was dedicated to hiragana, and the second week katakana. To learn both, including reading and writing with proper stroke order and combo sounds, shouldn’t take more than a month (not withstanding something like dyslexia)
I like that you promote immersion a lot because it really is super important. I went to school to learn Hawaiian, if not for the fact that I could talk with my friends/teachers I would only be gaining vocab from music or old voice recordings. The main thing I would do after reaching some baseline of speaking proficiency was asking how to spell a word they used, define it (in that language), or write it down to look up later. Studying the vocab itself was largely useless without it ever coming up in conversation. Always start with the words that you are actually going to use first and ignore EVERYTHING ELSE for the time being.
Thanks for the inspiration bro. I'm gonna try these tips to learn japanese myself. I've been learning for about 4 months but I haven't rly seen much progress (know about 300-800 kanji, but i've been slacking in grammar). But I feel like I'm much more ready to learn it now.
Isnt it wrong to say you learned Japanese in a year when you have been studying for many years yet went hard core in one year ...? It not like it was 0 from 100
I've been grinding japanese for 2-3 weeks from 0. ajatting 90% for a week. Game Gengo, Khatz and this KoreKara keep me going. ♥️ I don't recommend ajatting from scratch. Just learn hiragana and katakana, then learn grammar and sentence structure. While you're learning those two things, you're gonna pick up vocab naturally. Most important tip: DON'T DO THINGS THAT FEEL LIKE A CHORE! Always make it fun, otherwise you're not gonna remember anything important. I literally just finished playing re4 remake in japanese and that was fun af even though I didn't understand 95% of it. That means 5% I understood and I'm proud of that. Don't give up. If my dumba** can do it, so can you.
So be fair, the re4 remake has a lot of super post n1 biblical terms Unless you’ve seen that stuff in something else, I wouldn’t feel bad about not understanding a lot of it, especially all the writings. I just finished it myself in Japanese and there was stuff I didn’t remember the reading of but I used kanji to cheat 😅
Thank you so much for the references! I’m still in phase 1 but I was struggling to figure out how to come across native Japanese speakers without seeming like a complete weirdo. Thank you so much!
Super perfect timing on this video since I’ve just committed my year to learning Japanese after visiting Japan and absolutely loving it, but being frustrated not being able to communicate. Aiming on taking the JLPT at the end of the year! Love the content. New sub!
I think for me personally the last tip - to commit - is the most important advice that i had to hear. Because my interest in Japanese is quite light compared to, for example, Korean that i have achieved a speaking level after learning for 3 years and still counting. So i didn't have time to think that i actually gotta commit to Japanese if i really want to learn it. Thank you for this video and i will go think about how i want my Japanese journey to look like
Dude... talk about a motivational video. I'm still very new, like Duolingo new and this was exactly what I needed to see. I haven't been passionate about really anything in a long time but learning a language has been surprisingly fun. I know my pronunciation is probably horrible but the fact that I can even say the words and sentences I do know roughly is such a good feeling. I've never been good at learning especially in school but now that I'm doing it on my own time willingly I've found a passion for that, so I don't think I'm gonna have a issue on the commitment side of learning the language. My biggest hurdle is gonna be when I hit the full immersion stage, I have really bad social anxiety and don't do good talking to people even in my own language so that's gonna be something that's gonna be more trying. Sitting in my room learning and watching anime will be no issue though.
Thanks for all the tips! As a full time working dude with a family 1 year is as good as impossible for me. But I'm happy I finally commited myself to learn japanese. It's been a lifelong dream of mine, and last summer I actually made japanese a daily habit of my life. On good days I invest 2h a day, but 15min is my absolut minimum. The first try to learn it was 2010.. I was young and had the time. But lacked the Conviction to really want it. 😄
Great video Eric! I'm blown away by the quality of the content you guys put out on this channel. I love the tip that you gave about making sure to get speaking practice in in addition to immersion. I'd definitely practice speaking more if I could redo my journey too.
Learning the grammar is relatively easy learning hiragana and katakana is very easy i cant say the same for kanji but ive managed altogether i like seeing how different people explore our language and learn in the best way they can keep up the good work
man i feel so demotivated whenever i see "guy learns to N1 level in just 8 months!" type of stuff. also makes me want to rush the learning process and makes me feel like i am never doing enough. eventually i burn out and quit. happened like 4 times now. go strong for 4-6 months and just burn myself out trying to do as much as possible.
It seems to me that most people who make such claims are not 100% truthful and honest about their starting point. My advice would be: learn at your own pace.
These apply to every language as well! Did this with Spanish which was super easy due to coworkers speaking it, recommending me dramas and movies, every show on the planet having a Spanish dub and there being a plethora of textbooks and material.
This is good content. I will use these tips in my language learning. Something to note: You are speaking unnecessarily fast and slurring some of your words. I am a native English speaker and this really stood out to me. Also, the music is too loud at several points which is competing with what you are saying. You may want to consider these points for the future, especially since the content you are offering is about language learning (and communicating) and is valuable.
Great tips. That ‘Japanese’ dictionary app you recommended is amazing. It has greatly sped up my study flow. I used romajidesu up until now.. it’s outdated and slow comparison. Have you guys made a video about what keyboard to use a smartphone? I use Romaji on iPhone right now, but it makes me wonder if I should switch to the full Japanese keyboard based on your recommendation to switch all your devices to Japanese. Thanks again for the tips. This video has inspired me to fully commit to learning Japanese!
I so agree with your points and moving from the beginner stage. I noticed with Japanese, unlike other languages, that one beginner grammar point opens so many other beginner grammar points - small ones, and it is so easy to go in circles and fall into some kind of Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole where you repeat the same beginner material when you feel like you are forgetting something slightly - you never progress.
for example, if I watched this vid just a year ago, i would have not been able to understand anything due to your fluency in english despite the fact i really know english. But I bought a vr headset and spent all of my days with natives englishes and that can sound kind of weird but I usually talk to myself in english (Im french) so I gained much more fluency. Im prolly going to do this for Japanese. Anyways thanks for the video
my problem is 1.that I am 14 witch means I'm always with my family so I can't do any type of call so I have to find another way 2. english is my 2nd language and I'm translating from Japanese to english mostly witch noticeably slows me 3.I can't just figure out how to use anki and those card stuff
I have been learning for 6 weeks. I learnt Hiragana and Katakana within 2 weeks. I'm going to classes and finding remembering vocabulary really hard. I don't have the best memory in general, so I'm concerned I'll never be able to do it well.
I like this video so much. If you don't mind, I would like to ask your permission to share this video to the other website in China for the embarrassing reason that RU-vid is blocked fromac cessing in China. Of course, I will give sources of the original website. Thank you very much.
Could you please recommend some RU-vid channels! I consume so much RU-vid but have a hard time finding similar channels to my interests. Japanese RU-vid is such a different place haha. I’m looking for video essays on economics, game analysis, and pop culture ✨
The video and the way it’s explained is the best.. But can you share with us whats your daily/weekly learning schedule for japanese? Like the apps or books you use and how you apply it?
Great advice imo. And really great job on music choice and timing. Editing was enjoyable. I got flashbacks watching the part about using the language before you are fluent. I too would recommend this. I've been living in japan for half a year and at least once a month i embarrass myself heaps and i can always laugh about it although it can be a bit traumatizing. Know i think of using the language is the same as trying to sell something to someone, the more failures you have the closer you are to success.(a sale or in language - fluency or something near it). This and learning to say that you don't understand and ask someone to repeat themselves (politely ofc), if that fails learn to ask for the meaning or similar words. When you get into this pattern you are truly learning on the spot and just as he says - your brain will do whatever it takes to remember what is being said in order to avoid embarrassment in the future. Currently my hairstylist and i speak for an hour straight and he almost knows zero english so it's always a bit nerve-racking knowing that i will be expected to use japanese for an hour straight even when im not in the mood to struggle, but most often we both end up having some good laughs and it goes better than expected.
This is overall a great video and I respect what Eric/KoreKara created and have done with the podcast and it's cool to see a return, that said, I'm gonna pushback on something that I think has been a toxic part of the language learning community (especially in the Japanese learning community, *in my opinion*) and that I wish would be left behind or more critically dissected. And that's to "give up the timeline (to fluency)". I get it, it's necessary clickbait (how else could you structure this sort of video), but the sea of "In under a year/fluent in X months" videos have done nothing but set the wrong expectations about what the language leaning journey and experience is. And I'm speaking as someone who is trying to do this as fast as possible myself lol (I'm on N3-level content after 8 months, and aiming for this December's N1 -or N2 if I don't feel ready when sign-ups open in August lol-). Even the people that KoreKara have interviewed, some have been learning for over 5-10 years! From watching all these videos the only thing that has ever mattered is pushing your limits and near-daily consistency, everything else is noise. Showing up every day to do the work is already hard enough, remove the pressure of the "fluent in only X year(s)/months" timeline. I'm definitely not trying to say it's an impossible feat at all or that you shouldn't set high standards. But "fluency" has such a nebulous definition already and you can make the perfect plan, but life happens and things can get in the way. I mean, this channel itself literally went on an almost 2 year hiatus lol. Again, that's my only gripe with this video I don't want to sound like I'm trying to rip it apart. I'm also not trying to say that Eric is setting up bad expectations here btw! Encouraging early output is refreshing to see when the old AJATT thinking was "NEVER OUTPUT UNLESS YOU'RE PERFECT", which is just categorically wrong. And "immersion is training for a fight, while speaking (outputting) is like being in an actual fight" is an excellent analogy.
Yeah I agree with you, thank you for your comment. The idea with setting a time-bound goal is to help motivate people to step up their Japanese game, but of course at the end of the day truly learning a language to near native fluency is likely going to take a decade or a lifetime. That being said I think N1 in 1 year is definitely doable in a year if that's the goal from the beginning and having N1 opens up a lot of doors, like being able to move to Japan. A handful of people that I interviewed have reached that level in 1 year (like the Doth or Harry) Functional fluency in 1 year is also doable in my opinion especially if you have the opportunity to be in a Japanese environment. It's obviously harder if you're outside the country but when I was in Japan I saw plenty of study abroad students get to full fluency after just 1 year in Japan immersing in Japanese non stop. (Functional fluency meaning 0 problems in the country, will never get lost in any situation, can communicate any idea and understand most things) I definitely think you should take breaks if life gets in the way, nothing wrong with that. But if someone is trying to get fluent as fast as possible taking breaks in the beginning really makes the whole process slower since you might have to go back and re-learn words concepts. But once you get to a certain threshold of fluency taking breaks is a lot more manageable since you already have "acquired" the language to a certain extent. The same way how a beginner lifter might have to hit the gym multiple times a week for multiple years to build up a base, but once they build up a base it only takes 1 day per week to maintain that muscle mass.
I know that this is mostly bull and he definitely did not do the n1 in one year but I am trying to get conversational within the next year and 5 months so I can communicate when I go to Japan for a six month Highschool student exchange, people of the comments please tell me if this might be doable
I gotta admire your determination. Inspires me. As an older learner whose closest connection to anime is my 24 yo grandson, where should I look other than youtube for Japanese content to watch? That I might be able to comprehend? I'm thinking of watching sumo matches in Japanese but I don't think they have subtitles. Or watch Japanese singers perhaps as I like the Enka music.
I’m kinda stuck in the endgame where I have enough vocabulary to have a conversation and I know enough to understand everything I need to whenever I watch a drama or an anime in full Japanese, but I don’t have anyone to practice with consistently and nobody to net enough focus to expand my vocabulary vastly enough to reach past business level. I could be consistent on my flashcards, but it’s weird because you don’t want to farm flashcards all the time and just want to learn words you know you’ll actually use organically.
Well, i had a question. I have learned hindi native by merely chatting and watching cartoons and movies. I can't read or write as i've never tried to learn the characters.But I can hold a conversation very well. The same goes for English. I first learned it for educational purpose but when i started watching Eng cartoons and movies (as well as songs). I pretty much got the native tone. I tried to talk to a native Eng speaker for the first time, I clearly understood whatever he was saying. So my question is if this same method will work for the Japanese or not. Thank you if anyone answered.
