I unfortunately don’t know what level of Japanese you have or your personal interests, so I’ve gone out and organized a variety of content that I think is suitable for someone just beginning to get into native content. Step 1: Working through your first piece of native Japanese content. LingQ is the best way to learn Japanese online because it lets you learn from content you enjoy! Not only does this save you a lot of time, it also helps minimize any disruption and helps you get through Japanese content faster. Rather than pausing to look up each word or phrase, if you use LingQ you can simply tap on the word (or phrase) to pull up its meaning. No matter what, you’re going to come across new vocabulary that is completely foreign to you. The biggest benefit of using LingQ, especially for beginners, is its convenience. Each lesson also comes with audio to improve your listening skills. These pieces of content use the most common types of vocabulary to help you get used to Japanese. LingQ’s Mini Stories and beginner content are other great resources for beginners. It’s as if a teacher were standing over your shoulder and providing a line-by-line explanation of everything that you’d just read. This is the closest you’ll get to training wheels. I bring them up time and time again, but so far as I’m concerned, Read Real Japanese: Fiction and its counterpart, Read Real Japanese: Essays, are worthy of worship and worth their weight in gold.Įach book is a compilation of several unadulterated Japanese short stories or essays with added furigana, a running dictionary and a grammatical breakdown of each sentence.
In my case, I was somewhere between an N3/N2 level when I found myself at Step 0, a point at which I was able to look at Japanese text and humor the possibility of one day understanding it. At what point these two extremities balance depends on your personal patience and tolerance for ambiguity. The earlier you begin, the more study will be required. At one extremity is study and at the other is leisure. There is no clearly defined point at which your Japanese becomes good enough, this is very much a spectrum. This is a question that only you can answer. Image courtesy of mscircumstance.wordpress When am I ready to take the step into native content? My goal today is to help you find this first stepping stone. If you can get through one solid piece of content then you can get through a second and a third until eventually you realize that you’re indeed on the other side: you can understand Japanese! I believe that it only takes one good piece of content to get across this road. This crossing is a journey in and of itself, an awkward state where Japanese media can be touched but not quite grasped. There is also a hazy period of time in which this road must be crossed – to go from learning Japanese to living Japanese. Upon crossing it, consuming native content will have become possible and the pursuit of fluency becomes a matter of exposure, patience and refinement.
Consuming native content isn’t feasible before reaching it, so we stick to textbooks, flashcards and guided learning materials. Languages are not learned for the sheer sake of accumulating a stack of vocabulary words or conquered grammatical ideas, they’re learned to be lived and breathed.Įverybody studying Japanese will eventually come to this crossroads.
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