How I became fluent in Japanese | Kanji

I just wanna post my progress here as I'm continue to learn Japanese. I've always wanted to learn Japanese, but never started since a month and a half ago after watching this video. Your videos really motivated me so I started self-learning Japanese from scratch. I took the first few days looking for resources and learning Hiragana and Katakana (took me about 4 days). After learning Hiragana and Katakana, I decided in the first month, I will study all the first grade kanji, second month-2nd grade,.....while learning grammar using Tea Kim's guide and youtube. Then I found out there was some beginner book clubs on that website called WaniKani, so I started reading Yotsubato! I was kinda struggled at first because of the colloquial language and my reading speed, but thanks to the provided vocabulary sheets, I managed to go through 2 volumes. Reading mangas really helps me remember things as I enjoy them. Up to now, I've learned about 300 kanji and don't intend to stop. My plan from now is to continue what I've been doing so one day I could read light novels in Japanese....

Are we Japanese good at kanji? : HELL NO Do we remember stroke order? : HELL NO Do we BURADDO PITTO? : HELL YEAH

I don’t know why I watched whole video even I am Japanese 😂 but Memorizing kanji is really stressful for even Japanese so don’t worry u guys got this 👍頑張って！

It's actually crazy that your first video has this much quality. Thumbs up!

Let me let y’all on a little tip that improved my Japanese reading, listening and compressions skills SO FREAKING MUCH: Watching American/English show with JAPANESE subs. Now, you may think that does nothing for you, but remember when you put on eng subs your eyes are automatically drawn to the subs even when you perfectly understand what was said just by listening. So when you do this with Japanese, it forces you to put two and two together in terms of what you’re hearing and what you’re reading. You’ll start understanding Japanese grammar a little better and how to form a simple sentence. You’ll start noticing the same character combinations popping up and they’ll start sticking with you, especially when you have the English audio to also remember the meanings. Kanjis will also become more and more familiar. It helped me a TON. I would also pause sometimes take my time to read a sentence and say oh! That’s how you say ‘’I don’t want to eat’’ in a more natural/casual way. For those who can already read Hiragana and Katakana, this will drastically change the game. Trust me, try it and let me know how it goes.

When he said immersion isn’t magic, he’s right. Although, it doesn’t mean it won’t work at all. When you immerse, you have to really pay attention. This is called active immersion. During this type of immersion, you would be paying attention to several things like pronunciation, meaning of a sentence, context, how words are used, sentence patterns, etc. Passive immersion is the opposite where you just have the language in the background not fully paying attention to every moving part and trying to understand each and every one of them. Passive immersion isn’t bad, but it will do very little compared to active immersion. Some immersion is still better than no immersion, so if you don’t always have time to actively immerse, passive immersion is still an option. But be careful though, despite the fact that it still is a helpful supplement, passive immersion will make you almost no real progress. You’re most likely going to need to set apart some time to get some active immersion in. I recommend everyone to get as much active immersion as you can in a day, but set a minimum amount of time you know you can achieve every day. Consistency is very motivating when it comes to learning languages. The more time you spend actively immersing, the faster you’ll understand. Everyone learns at their own pace, so there’s no rush to get active immersion in every moment of the day. Take your time learning the language, but most importantly, have fun.

I learned WAAAAY more Japanese AFTER passing N1 than all of the studying I did to get to N1. N1 is a good start so you can converse with native speakers and read content written for Japnaese people. After that if you continue to be contentious about thinking about the new expressions you encounter and committing them to memory, you can improve a lot. But in my experience, studying the meaning and writing of kanji at the very beginning -- to the point where I knew lots of kanji before really knowing the Japanese they can be used for -- ended up helping in the long run. Maybe not to go from beginner to intermediate, but to go from intermediate to getting an instinctive feel for new compounds. Like knowing the meaning of 糖尿病 when you've never seen the word before.

Learning that one third of the language can be done in just 80 characters was so motivational thank you!

I just started to self study Japanese this year through Duolingo and it really helped me learn Katakana and Hiragana characters by guiding me how to write it. I also tried reviewing it by writing them all on paper. It really helped. Kanji is really intimidating me to continue studying, so unless I devote a consistent amount of time to learn each, I know I won't be able to learn it fully. Now its making me realize how hard is it for kids to study 2,000+ characters while we only need to know 28 alphabets for reading. 😆

To us native Chinese speakers kanji is the easiest ever thing in Japanese 😂 Basically their pronunciation are very similar to Mandarin despite some being written slightly different in terms of strokes. Even if someone has no idea about Japanese they could guess about 80% of the meaning simply through kanjis (or hanzi, as we call them). That’s a huge burden off!!

When I studied traditional Chinese characters ( rlly similar to Japanese kanji), our teacher asked us to write each character (paired with another character to make it a word) for about 6-12 times. I think this rlly help us to learn how to write the traditional Chinese character/Japanese kanji. Remembering them in a word form will help to memorize the meaning of each of them also.

Good video! As someone with 5 years of study I agree with these points. I could manage in broken Japanese for a long time, but It wasn't until I started reading and studying kanji daily did I see marked improvement and started to feel like I "knew" the language. That initial kanji hurdle is hard at first, but once you get there you can focus on mantaining, so just keep up that daily grind!

I am at awe with your talent and the professionalism making this YouTube vid....a job well done.

Of all the Japanese language tutorials I've watched over the last 18 months, you explained things better than anyone else. I couldn't even get to grips with hiragana yet you made learning kanji sound so easy. If only my memory wasn't so bad, I'd give it another go.

This video single-handedly inspired me to start studying Japanese kanji again~ thank you so much!!

I've found that since 99% of my interactions with Japanese these days are over the internet or through the media. This means that the only time I was ever hand writing anything was in my own study. Maybe it's dumb, but I usually just focus most of my efforts being able to type the language more than writing by hand as it's what I do most of the time anyway.

"First video"...wow, you did an amazing job! I am one of those you referenced about "living in Japan for 8(+) years and unable to read Japanese." My wife majored in English and has been my excuse for not learning Japanese. I am finished with making excuses...bring on the Kanji...LOL! Again, awesome job on your video! Hope you are enjoying mainland, but you need to come see the beautiful island of Okinawa when you get a chance!

Been doing rtk for a few weeks now and it really is crazy to see how many Kanji I recognize in writing with only the 450 or so I have memorized now. Those statistics for newspapers comprehension make me feel a lot better about the road ahead. I agree with your point on immersing after you have the basics. By gaining a recognition of most Kanji it will be much easier to pick it up when you see it in natural context (manga, novels, signs etc)

As much as so many people 'hack' learn japanese, there is usually a lot of work involved to master a language. If you know the specific context you're learning the language for, you can fasttrack learning to a certain degree. It is impressive to see an expat pass the N1 test or the N2 test, as there's a LOT of study to get there. I'm working on my HSK 4 chinese after studying japanese years ago, and boy it's a lot of reading, vocabulary practice and character recognition.

Hi! I can't believe this is your first video! It's really helpful as it's really just talking about the hardest part aka 'kanji', the way you delivered the content is soothing and clear, and the way you've learned japanese is actually simple, watching this makes me believe in myself more that i can become fluent in japanese! Right now i'm aiming to get an n5 first! Good luck for your future videos! ありがとう！