2024-11-21
I'm not an expert on language learning. I barely speak my native English, and sometimes I don't do the good speak the English. But I did spend a bunch of time doing internet searches and making Anki decks instead of actually studying, so hopefully some of that is helpful.
It doesn't matter how you study, it matters that you study. If you do the worst study method there is, but you enjoy it and you do it for 5,000 hours, you will become fluent.
With that said, the most effective study methods I found are reading combined with spaced repetition. Reading is fun, spaced repetition not so much, but it's essentially a multiplier for all the other studying that you do, so it's an extremely powerful tool. I highly recommend Anki for spaced repetition. I highly recommend books for reading, but anything with words works.
There are other people that talk about the language learning process who are much more detailed and eloquent than I aim to be here. Here's one that I really like:
My collection generally includes both textbooks and books to read in the given language.
- https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search/subs (Any)
- https://jimaku.cc (Japanese)
- https://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=subtitles%2Fjapanese%2F (Japanese)
- My Collection
- https://sites.google.com/site/gtonguedict/home/stardict-dictionaries
- http://download.huzheng.org/
- Language List (A huge list of essentially unsorted language learning resources)
- https://jpdb.io/ (also has vocab lists for each anime/manga)
- https://learnjapaneseanime.com/anime-recommendations/
- https://learnnatively.com/resources/search/
- https://japaneselevelup.com/difficulty-level-guide-everything-japanese/
- https://bookmeter.com/
- spreadsheet for word frequency in anime
- Cure Dolly (Japanese grammar lessons taught from the Japanese perspective, rather than a translate-to-English perspective)
- Transcripts (if you want to read the lessons instead)
- Jo-Mako's Spreadsheet (contains eng + jp transcripts for video games, anime, movies, etc, plus various other Japanese resources)
There are two browser extensions that allow you to use dual subtitles (native + target language simultaneously) and to mouse over unknown words to get definitions.
I've used Language Reactor, but I think both are good. They both have lots of additional features, but I primarily recommend just trying to watch TV at full speed and mousing over words and being comfortable not understanding everything. If you start pausing and trying to understand every line completely, a 30-minute episode will take 3 hours and you're not gonna be enjoying the show anymore.
To watch stuff without Language Reactor, I generally use either dual subs (native + English) or just native subs. To display dual subs, you need a video player that can show two subtitles simultaneously. I use PotPlayer on desktop and mpv on android.
Sometimes, subtitles downloaded from the internet are not in-sync with the video file you have. They're off by 0.2 seconds or so and the lines show up at the wrong time.
If you're comfortable with using the terminal, you can use software I wrote (subbub) to sync, combine, and burn-in subtitles.
Otherwise, you can graphical software like SubtitleEdit to manually sync subtitle files.
The easiest method I've found for having dual-language manga or comics is to just purchase a physical copy of the book in both English and the native language. Then you put the English one behind the native one while you read, and anytime you get stuck, you just slide the native one down a bit and read the English.
A method other people like is to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to read the comic's text and translate it. I haven't done this because it can be annoying to set up and use, and OCR isn't perfect, so actually looking stuff up and getting a reasonable result is probably kinda difficult.
With that said, here's some software to investigate if you're interested:
- https://github.com/cameronkinsella/manga-translator (computer)
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ichigo-manga-translator/lepcfgkehgeiblekejomdmdklmjdmflp (Chrome)
- https://github.com/Rattlehead15/tachiyomiOCR (Android)
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kantan-manga/id1518666365 (iOS)
The above are pretty much all for Japanese. For phonetic writing systems, it's probably easier to just type the words into a digital dictionary. For non-phonetic systems that aren't Japanese (Mandarin Chinese, for example) I don't have good recommendations.
I love my Kindle, it's great. If I'm only looking up one word every few pages, I have no real problem with it. If I'm still learning a lot though, and am looking up one or more words per page, the Kindle dictionary functionality is a nightmare. Loading dictionaries onto the Kindle is finnicky (I haven't found good software to convert from popular dictionary formats to what Kindle expects), and selecting text is difficult at best (like in Italian) and impossible at worst (Kindle actively fights you when selecting Japanese text because it has no spaces, it is often actually impossible to select the exact word you want to look up because Kindle disagrees with you on whether or not it's a word, and is often wrong).
Yomitan is a great pop-up dictionary that works in major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari). It solves all of the above problems with Kindle dictionaries and more.
In order to use it, you'll need to follow the guide on the website, and read your content in your browser. On Android this is a bit harder than on a laptop/computer, but there are guides on using the Kiwi browser to accomplish it.
Yomitan is great, and I recommend it, but I don't personally use it; I use GoldenDict instead as described below. Just fits my workflow better.
I use Moon+ Reader as my reading app, and I use GoldenDict (Android)(Windows) as my dictionary app.
I can highlight text in Moon+ Reader and hit "dictionary" to send the text to GoldenDict, just like in Kindle, but with less fighting the text selection.
I use GoldenDict because it allows you to load your own digital dictionaries rather than just having its own available. That way, I can load both native-to-native dictionaries and native-to-English dictionaries, and if I don't understand a word, I can read several definitions in both languages and compare. (Often the native-to-English definitions suck, even in well-respected dictionaries, they usually try too hard to find an approximate English equivalent word even when one doesn't exist).
See the resources above for my collection of dictionaries.
I love video games. Much more than books, TV, manga, whatever else. But I find it difficult to recommend video games for language learning, just because of the ratio of time spent to actual text/audio/language ingested is lower than books, shows, comics, etc.
That can actually be a benefit when starting out thought, because you might not experience as much fatigue from constantly looking things up.
If you're gonna play games for language learning, I recommend Wisp which lets you translate on-screen text as needed.
In terms of finding games to play, pretty much any game released after 2018 is not region locked, and you can change the language to whatever you want. On Steam, most games require you to right-click the game in your library -> Properties... -> General -> Language.
For game console games you might have to change your console's system language in its settings.
Some games just ask you for a language when you start the game for the first time.
For stuff older than 2018 and not on PC, often the only languages included are the languages in the country of release. With this in mind, if you're finding ROMs to use for emulating older games, make sure you get a version that has the language you're targeting.
I'm an Anki kid. See below for the decks I use.
All of my custom Anki decks can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZG_yYPm2DQAdKGenJQg7FkmoRPwLLjk3?usp=share_link
Descriptions of my custom decks follow below.
I grabbed native-to-English and native-to-native dictionaries and also several word frequency lists and generated decks of ~30,000 vocab words with all the definitions from the dictionaries, with the words sorted from most-common to least-common.
The N1 and N0 kanji decks had no examples for most of their kanji, so I used some dictionaries to backfill more example entries. I've also manually edited some of the readings because some of the rarer kanji didn't include readings that were present in the examples.
I found this deck in cloze form from here, but I changed the format of the deck to just present the example sentences, and you just decide if you sufficiently understand the sentences or not. I thought the cloze form was not helpful at all, but you may disagree.
Essentially the same as above. The original deck is from here but I didn't like its card format, so I changed it.
I think I just changed the display format of the characters from a deck off of AnkiWeb, but I honestly don't remember. Maybe the deck isn't custom at all.
hello, for subtitles i use kitsunekko, [https://github.com/kienkzz/NanakoRaws-Anime-Japanese-subtitles] and as for the player i use potplayer as you mentioned.Though https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/sub is now taken down.You could also use the extension yomichan for katakana,hiragana and kanji(depending on your dictionary).