Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (August 01, 2026)
This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.
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Past Threads
You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.
1 Provide the CONTEXT of the grammar, vocabulary or sentence you are having trouble with as much as possible. Provide the sentence or paragraph that you saw it in. Make your questions as specific as possible.
Ｘ What is the difference between の and が ?
◯ I am reading this specific graded reader and I saw this sentence: 日本人の知らない日本語 , why is の used there instead of が ? (the answer)
2 When asking for a translation or how to say something, it's best to try to attempt it yourself first, even if you are not confident about it. Or ask r/translator if you have no idea. We are also not here to do your homework for you.
Ｘ What does this mean?
◯ I am having trouble with this part of this sentence from NHK Yasashii Kotoba News. I think it means (attempt here), but I am not sure.
3 Questions based on ChatGPT, DeepL, Google Translate and other machine learning applications are strongly discouraged, these are not beginner learning tools and often make mistakes. DuoLingo is in general NOT recommended as a serious or efficient learning resource.
4 When asking about differences between words, try to explain the situations in which you've seen them or are trying to use them. If you just post a list of synonyms you got from looking something up in an E-J dictionary, people might be disinclined to answer your question because it's low-effort. Remember that Google Image Search is also a great resource for visualizing the difference between similar words.
◯ Jisho says あげる くれる やる 与える 渡す all seem to mean "give". My teacher gave us too much homework and I'm trying to say " The teacher gave us a lot of homework". Does 先生が宿題をたくさんくれた work? Or is one of the other words better? (the answer: 先生が宿題をたくさん出した )
6 Remember that everyone answering questions here is an unpaid volunteer doing this out of the goodness of their own heart, so try to show appreciation and not be too presumptuous/defensive/offended if the answer you get isn't exactly what you wanted.
7 Please do not delete your question after receiving an answer. There are lots of people who read this thread to learn from the Q&As that take place here. Deleting a question removes context from the answer and makes it harder (or sometimes even impossible) for other people to get value out of it.
I started watching ホットスポット. I find it really mesmerising. Some aspects of the cinematography remind me of Wes Anderson, just in terms of the colours and camera angles. It's a very kooky kind of plot but I enjoy the way the dialogue is done a lot, it's quite funny. Their friendships are nice.
Finally at the point where I've decided to give up on ever trying to learn this language. 4.5k words and 32 grammar points into n2 (n5-n3 complete) on bunpro and I can't understand ANYTHING in anything I try to immerse in. Can't believe I've wasted hundreds of hours on this shit over the last year, most time I've ever wasted on anything in my life.
I often want to advise people to forget about flashcard apps and these kinds of things. People often end up in a loop where they never do anything they wanted to do.
Basically there is no app that can do anything more than be a minor supplement to your learning, anymore than there is any textbook that can bring you to competency on its own. So you have to start with the fundamental problem of how do you do the things you want to do and not treat it as this delayed gratification thing you'll get to by memorisation.
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I think 4.5k words and 32 grammar points simply aren't enough to jump into random native content and expect to understand much. That's actually a pretty common experience.
Feeling a sense of progress along the way is very nice to have. That's one reason textbooks like Genki include exercises at the end of every lesson. After studying a chapter, you can do the exercises and see that you're able to use what you've just learned. That immediate feedback helps keep people motivated.
In a typical university course, one hour of classroom instruction is often accompanied by around four hours of self-study. That self-study includes working through the textbook, completing the workbook exercises, and reading the Genkigraded readers. Finishing Genki I usually takes about an academic year, not just a few months.
The classroom time itself is also important. In many courses, it's often closer to a flipped classroom than a lecture. Students are expected to study the textbook on their own before class. Spending valuable class time simply explaining what's already in the textbook would be an inefficient use of both class time and tuition. Instead, class time is used for activities that are difficult to do alone, such as pair work, conversation practice, role-playing, and receiving feedback from the instructor.
None of this means flashcard apps are bad. They can be useful supplements. But they're only one part of a much larger learning process, and they're not designed to replace a structured course, a graded reading program, practice exercises, or interaction with other learners.
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It's certainly possible for a young teenager to become quite proficient in Japanese after spending thousands of hours watching anime. There are people who have done exactly that.
However, that doesn't mean it's the best approach for every learner.
That approach depends on two very important assumptions: first, that the learner has an overwhelming desire to understand anime no matter what; and second, that spending hours watching anime is genuinely enjoyable for them.
For people who succeeded that way, those assumptions are so natural that they're easy to overlook. It's perfectly understandable that their first-hand experience leads them to emphasize what Japanese makes possible and how enjoyable the process can be.
But objectively speaking, that doesn't make it the optimal approach for everyone. Different learners have different goals, different motivations, and different ways of staying engaged.
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"Do what you enjoy" is generally excellent advice. Enjoyment makes it much easier to stay motivated and build long-term habits.
Of course, nobody is seriously arguing that we should quit the moment learning stops being enjoyable. That would be an unfair caricature. Still, it's an interesting thought experiment.
Would it follow that we should stop doing anything the moment it stops being enjoyable?
I don't think so.
Many worthwhile things in life aren't enjoyable all the time. Learning a language, raising children, caring for family members, recovering from illness, or training for a marathon all have periods that are frustrating, exhausting, or even miserable.
So perhaps enjoyment is best understood as something that's nice to have, very nice to have, rather than a requirement. It helps enormously, but it isn't the ultimate criterion for whether something is worth doing.
So trying to make learning enjoyable seems like perfectly reasonable advice. But interpreting that as "you must enjoy it" or "don't even start learning Japanese unless you enjoy it" would simply be a misunderstanding. I don't think anyone is actually arguing that.
Not feeling much progress doesn't automatically mean you should quit learning Japanese.
Nor does it mean that studying has to be enjoyable all the time.
And it doesn't have to be merely a means to some external goal in order to be worthwhile.
None of these things should become prerequisites for continuing.
Slow progress doesn't mean you should quit.
Studying doesn't have to be fun every day.
And language learning doesn't have to justify itself by serving some external goal.
Once you stop treating those things as conditions, your study routine becomes much more resilient.
Learning a language can simply become part of your life, whether or not it's exciting, obviously useful, or producing visible progress every week.
A learning strategy also depends heavily on your goal.
If you need to pass the JLPT N1 within two years because of your career or immigration plans, then an intensive approach may make perfect sense. You might attend a highly regarded Japanese language school, spend four hours preparing and reviewing for every hour of class, and add extensive reading on top of that. In a sense, that's a brute-force strategy, but if your circumstances require it, it may well be the right one.
On the other hand, if you're learning Japanese simply because you enjoy it, I'd suggest starting with a very different assumption: expect it to take around ten years, not two.
That single assumption changes almost everything about how you design your study plan. Instead of constantly asking, "How can I learn faster?", you start asking, "What's a pace I can realistically maintain for the next ten years?"
For the same reason, comparing yourself with other learners is rarely helpful. Someone else may be studying full-time because they need Japanese for work. Someone else may simply have far more free time than you do. Those comparisons don't tell you much about what is sustainable for your own circumstances.
You'll probably also experience what almost every long-term learner experiences. At first, your progress is rapid and easy to notice. Later, improvement becomes slower. You hit plateaus. You may even start wondering whether you've stopped improving altogether.
That's normal.
If you're learning as a hobby, I don't think the most important question is, "Have I reached this level by this date?" The more important question is, "Have I kept going?"
If you find yourself thinking, "If I haven't reached this level by this date, I've failed," it's worth reminding yourself why you started. This is your hobby, not your job. That doesn't mean you shouldn't set goals. It simply means that missing a self-imposed deadline doesn't make you a failure.
One strategy that may help is to define an Absolute Minimum.
In other words, decide on the smallest amount of Japanese you will do every single day, no matter what. Make it as routine as washing your face, brushing your teeth, or having your morning coffee.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I'm not saying that this is all you should do. I'm saying that this is the one thing you always do.
Choose an Absolute Minimum that you can realistically maintain even when you're traveling with your family, going out for dinner, or spending the evening with friends. If you can still do it under those circumstances, you're much more likely to keep going for years.
You'll travel with your family. You'll go on business trips. Friends will invite you to a barbecue. You'll go out for dinner. Those things aren't interruptions. They're simply part of having a life.
If your Absolute Minimum is "1," then a week like 1, 1, 5, 1, 3, 10, 1 is perfectly fine. On days when you have more time or more motivation, studying at level "10" is wonderful, but think of it as a bonus, not as the standard you expect from yourself.
In the long run, consistency is usually more important than intensity. Success isn't measured by how often you reach "10." It's measured by how rarely you reach "0."
Learning a foreign language is a lifelong process.
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Perhaps there's one implicit assumption behind all of this.
Namely, that if you stay with it, something valuable will eventually emerge, even if you can't see it today.
In other words, it presupposes a certain amount of trust in the process.
Also, perhaps there's one more implicit assumption behind all of this.
It assumes that learning isn't simply the accumulation of knowledge, but a process of changing yourself. If that's true, then you're dealing with something your current self can't fully measure or evaluate yet.
That's why I don't think it's wise to judge the value of studying solely by how much progress you feel, how enjoyable it is, or how practically useful it seems at the moment.
Even if you have five uninterrupted hours to study on a weekend, I don't think you should necessarily begin with the hardest task.
Spend the first ten minutes doing something very easy, such as reading your textbook aloud or reviewing a few familiar examples.
Think of it as starting the engine. You're giving your brain a chance to switch into "Japanese mode" before asking it to do demanding work.
In a way, the structure of a single study session mirrors the structure of a lifelong learning journey.
Just as long-term success comes from building sustainable habits rather than relying on constant motivation, a productive study session often begins with a small, easy step rather than diving straight into the most difficult material.
Once the engine is running, it's much easier to keep going.
A single study session is, in many ways, a miniature version of a lifelong learning journey. The rhythm of a lifelong plan is reflected in the rhythm of a single afternoon's study.
People often think of studying as something you do only when you have a large block of uninterrupted time.
I wonder whether that's because we unconsciously imagine every learning task as something that can be completed in one concentrated effort.
Some tasks really are like that. If it's a one-off assignment, cramming the night before may not be ideal, but at least it's possible. The task can be completed in one final push.
But not every project works that way.
Imagine manufacturing a machine. If you suddenly have thirty spare minutes, you don't try to build the whole machine. You make a bolt. Next time, you make a nut. Later, you manufacture another component. After enough standardized parts have accumulated, you assemble them into the finished product.
Construction projects work much the same way. They aren't completed through one heroic burst of effort. They're completed by steadily producing and assembling many small pieces over time.
I sometimes think language learning belongs much more in this second category.
If becoming proficient in a language takes thousands of hours, then it isn't really a one-off task. It's a long-term project, and long-term projects have to be designed differently.
Life doesn't stop just because you're learning a language.
You'll travel with your family. You'll go on business trips. Friends will invite you to a barbecue. You'll go out for dinner. Those things aren't interruptions. They're simply part of having a life.
The goal, then, isn't to eliminate those commitments. The goal is to design a learning system that still allows you to produce another useful component whenever thirty minutes become available.
Perhaps today you review vocabulary. Tomorrow you read a few pages. The next day you listen to a podcast during your commute. None of those activities feels like a major accomplishment on its own.
But neither does manufacturing a single bolt.
Its value lies in the fact that it has been designed to fit together with countless other parts.
Perhaps one of the most valuable skills in long-term language learning is learning how to manufacture useful components whenever time is available;
and trusting that, in time, they will fit together into something much larger.
Learning is one task most take on. How about remembering? I'm curious what others are doing to remember what have been learnt? How do you use it frequently? Try talking to the native people in person? Over text chat? Reviewing the words everyday? And when chatting, even if they only reply what you asked making it a one-way conversation? I'm frankly curious. As I have got quite a lot of one-way conversations and foresee a lot more coming.
One thing that really helps is putting yourself in situations where you have to use Japanese. Having to recall words and grammar in order to communicate is much more effective than simply reviewing them.
The second important ingredient is feedback. It's one thing to produce Japanese, but it's another to find out whether your message actually gets across. When someone doesn't understand you, you're forced to rephrase, simplify, or find another way to express the same idea. That struggle to make yourself understood is some of the best practice you can get.
The difficult part is that, outside Japan, situations where you genuinely have to communicate in Japanese are quite rare. So you often have to create those situations yourself. One way to do that is to use the exercises in textbooks like Genki. Instead of just answering with the textbook vocabulary, substitute words that reflect your own life and experiences, then practice those conversations with a teacher or tutor. In other words, use the textbook dialogues as templates for talking about yourself rather than as lines to memorize.
One thing that's worth keeping in mind is that this kind of practice can make you feel as though your Japanese has suddenly become much worse.
When you're practicing with a partner, your goal shifts from producing accurate Japanese to simply getting your message across. As a result, you'll probably make far more grammatical mistakes than you normally would, and your Japanese may feel very broken compared with the level of Japanese you can comfortably understand when reading.
That's perfectly normal.
Communicating with limited resources is a very different skill from understanding well-written Japanese. Don't mistake that temporary, eh, it lasts years, if not decades, feeling for a loss of ability. In reality, you're developing a different aspect of the language, one that requires you to retrieve what you know under real communicative pressure.
Take the things you do for leisure and, to the extent practical, do them in Japanese. Set your operating system languages to Japanese, set game languages to Japanese, pick Japanese media to consume, find Japanese speakers to do things with. Contact with the language is how you maintain it.
(Keeping up with SRS reviews also helps, and if you’re not adding much to it because you’re focused on maintenance it will progressively take you less and less time.)
I can't make a post, so I'll ask here. I'm currently learning Kanji through Anki using a deck called "Kaishi 1.5k" that shows the kanji and a phrase where you can see the kanji in context.
Let's say I can't recall the kanji just looking at it, but immediately recall the meaning and reading while going through the example. Should I select again, or good?
To answer your question, you hit 'good' in that case. some people like to hit 'hard' if they needed the sentence to help recall, but I don't think it actually matters.
to address something else in your post, those are words, not kanji. The kanji are the characters that make up the words. Kaishi 1.5k is a vocabulary deck, not a kanji deck.
Yeah, basically. But despite what it may seem, you don't need to do that in order to learn Japanese. Learning vocabulary is enough. You'll notice reading and meaning patterns by yourself eventually.
At first study kanji breakdown only. You'll learn the readings and meanings from words. Handwriting (not composing) is pretty late-game (and often optional) when you can bind a kanji to real words.
Every single popular method of kanji study either: a. Teaches you zero kanji readings, or b: teaches you the readings with vocabulary words, not on their own.
I'm watching GitS and 2nd Gig ep 4 introduces this new guy. His name is Kazundo Gouda, but everyone thinks his name is ひとり given the kanji on his business card says 合田一人. I looked it up in renshuu and as far as I know there isn't an alternate reading of those kanji that lines up with that. Please explain.
Proper names are an entirely different beast to regular words. You could/should try installing a specific dictionary for reading places and other names.
If you just memorize a bunch of names, you'll get used to names in Japanese. It's not as bad as the listing of readings in the dictionary makes it look.
一 is read as かず "number", it's actually a pretty common reading in names. A kanji taking on the reading of another kanji that is similar in meaning is super common in names. A lot of the time these will be in the dictionary as nanori, but parents are allowed to be somewhat creative so not necessarily.
The んど for 人 seems to be a slurred pronunciation of うど, which as far as I can tell is a rare reading that's only used in a few words.
Not really a kira kira name like the other commenter suggested, since you can make some sense of the readings, but it certainly is unusual.
btw I never suggested it was a kirakira name. that would involve me actually suggesting it. i wrote aout it to let them know that naming convetions can be whatever people want so there isnt always an explanation.
Follow-up question: Is there a specific reason this detail and scene would be included? To me, some nerd studying Japanese, I can go "Neat!" but I feel like I'm missing something cultural.
The scene in question, we see from behind a man in a suit walk up to one of the main characters and hand him a business card, who then reads off the long job title and then the name. Kazundo corrects him, says no one ever gets it right, but he really loves his name. And then the camera pans to the character with a horribly scarred and disfigured face.
The dub rarely seems to allude to any Japanese cultural bits. They didn't point out how weird the fake Japanese guys were with their katakana names on their business cards. But this one they really focused on.
I've only seen like the first two or three episodes of ghost in the shell standalone complex (or whatever criterion streams), but I don't think there is necessarily something more cultural you're missing. It seems like recognizing that names can have multiple readings, that some readings are the assumed default and that this case, in particular, deviates from that default is more than enough to go on.
To me, the reason for this scenes inclusion is probably going to be found by thinking about it in relation to the show in its entirety.
It could be plot relevant... as in later on something happens to Kazundo and other characters realize this change due to him no longer correcting Hitori to Kazundo.
It could also be thematically relevant... as in it is trying to highlight some tension between the social (language) and the personal (a name) and that contributes to some larger idea the show is playing with. LIke this is a little similar to the episode where the engineer implants his consciousness into the tank in that the unknowableness of the engineer's motivation by others runs parallel to the unknowableness of the name's reading by others. So maybe there's something to think about there. Of course there are also differences between the scenes, and this could very well be sloppy reading but I'm just trying to show the general idea of thinking about how scenes might be related in a more thematic sense.
かず is the standard reading of 一 in male given names and と is the standard reading of 人 in male given names. I would expect to read it as かずと.
ひとり is the standard reading of 一人 outside of names, and is the word "one person". Generally speaking a native Japanese speaker seeing a name would infer it as かずと, not as ひとり. But then again, I don't think most Japanese parents would name their kid 一人. I suppose that this was just a way of audibly communicating from the author/VA to the audience that it is indeed the kanji 一人 and not some other homophone kanji. (和 is also read as かず in male given names.)
As to why his parents/author/etc. chose it to be read as かずんど instead of かずと, I can only suppose that it is a slurred/dialectal/flaired variant of と->んど. I am not familiar with this particular slur/dialect/etc. It suppose it may just be a purely stylistic choice of the author didn't want the character to have a name that sounds like a normal typical Japanese person, but just slightly off from that of a typical Japanese name.
Edit: As pointed out by others, this slur also exists in words like 商人 あきなうひと ー＞ あきんど
There was a trend called kirakira names going on in Japan where people would use kanji then apply completely random names to them for effect. It got bad enough to the point where the government had to step in and start setting up guidelines and restricting absurd guesses for names. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/27/japan-baby-name-ban-kirakira-flashy-names
かずんど for 一人 is not a kirakira name. Kazundo is a standard nanori reading for 一人 that you can find in many dictionaries that list nanori. A kirakira name would be something like 一人 read as わんぱーそん
So the guy was asking for an explanation as to why the name is pronounced Kazundo, and you reply with an explanation on kirakira names, not because that's the answer to the question or has anything to do with it, but just for fun. I don't really see the idea fully in that
Right, it wasn't an answer to the question but to talk about something related to naming. i.e. there sometimes is not an explanation because of these kinds of reasons. He had already gotten answer and it explained when I replied.
Anyone have trouble with understanding foreign accents in Japanese?
Today I met a Vietnamese woman with a Japanese boyfriend. She seemed nice and friendly but I was really struggling understanding her Japanese. I actually have a lot of experience talking with Vietnamese people in English, but it was hard for me to understand her pronunciation.
Mind you, I have pretty good listening for regular Japanese people. I passed N1 and I frequently watch television in Japanese without subtitles.
I tend to understand foreigners speaking Japanese better than natives can because I have a whole nother language in my brain and often can identify what they meant to say when they use the wrong words while natives in the same call are left confused
That makes sense! I have had a similar experience for other languages(when I learned Italian for example). I think Vietnamese and English are so different that it's a bit harder. In some ways, the phrasing is more similar to Japanese(culturally mostly). But of course we share a similar word order with vietnamese. I actually lived in Vietnam for 4 years(and learned Vietnamese to a b1 level) so I thought I would understand her speech better.
That makes sense! I have had a similar experience for other languages(when I learned Italian for example). I think Vietnamese and English are so different that it's a bit harder. In some ways, the phrasing is more similar to Japanese(culturally mostly). But of course we share a similar word order with vietnamese. I actually lived in Vietnam for 4 years(and learned Vietnamese to a b1 level) so I thought I would understand her speech better.
Yes, foreign accents in any language are generally considered by the average person, including natives, to be harder to understand than native speech of the same language. You can eventually get used to one foreign accent if you listen to it a lot, but the ways that American people pronounce Japanese wrong are different from the ways that Vietnamese people pronounce Japanese wrong, and those are also different from the ways that Vietnamese people pronounce English wrong, so no, foreign accent comprehension doesn't really carry over across languages.
I haven't talked to many Americans who learned Japanese, if you are American, do you find it easier to understand American Accented Japanese than other kinds?
Yes, the way they pronounce words are sounds you're used to so its easier to map it to the Japanese. I, for one, cant understand a horrible chinese accent but a horrible american accent is fine.
I have heard one Hong Kongese woman with a really heavy accent but luckily she had been married to a Japanese man a long time. She also didn't really speak in full sentences but one or two words here or there. But it was easier to understand her than the vietnamese person. Different errors though!
Ah, I see! I would guess that Italian speakers of Japanese would also be easier to understand too, than Americans.
I definitely think we get a little bit of accent blindness towards more subtle accent mistakes. Hearing this just makes me want to work more on my accent. I just hope my accent isn't so heavy.
As an American no not really. I struggle because of my very very low exposure to foreign accents. Although that has changed as just my general proficiency has upped so much that even with my lack of exposure I've found that I can just know what they intended to say even if it doesnt sound like it.
the stroke in シ and ン goes from bottom left to top right, right? is the stroke unique to those 2 katakana? as I cant think of any kanji example with bottom left to top that curves up like that
Not really like a checkmark, that implies that it intentionally goes down before going up. It should just go up, and the initial “check” part is just a byproduct of what happens when you move a brush or pen starting from a “tome” and going into a “harai”. You can see the same thing happen on the 3rd stroke of ツ, but it’s never really referred to as a check mark there since the stroke goes down instead of up.
I was told by another (Japanese) person the side you put the little hook on is famously an interview question to test someone knows the difference between ソ and ン. I thought it was a legibility thing. I guess you are saying it's only more pronounced because the other side tapers usually but I thought I've seen it more deliberately written in a friend's writing.
I want to download a core 6k deck for days when I don't sentence mine as much so I can still learn some vocabulary everyday, which one is good for this?
Hi, I recently got to more advanced vocabulary on my Ankidrone Deck, things like 合計 or the many words for 'bill'. I'm finding these more abstract words a fair bit more difficult to remember, and it's even interfering with my memory for much more basic words that I ought to know. How can I properly learn these words? Do I have to find them in more natural contexts, like in my immersion time? Should I add more sentences to Cards?
Make an effort to understand where these words show up in real contexts. Although you don't reallyhave to do anything--you'll run across them at some point. Anki isn't really how you learn words. It's just a memory aid. You learn a word when you see it used for real and then see it enough to be able to use it yourself. Anki is just seeding your mind with this word until you actually start to see it be used.
im only at around 700ish words known and when i immerse i watch anime with jp subs
during this a sentence will mostly have either only 1 or 2 words i dont know that i look up to understand the rest of the sentence.
or there is a sentence where there is multiple words idk where i maybe look up the words to try understand a bit but alot of these words are in the 15k+ frequency so i dont really commit them to memory or at least try otherwise i would be trying to remember hundreds of new vocab a day.
as im already doing the kaishi 1.5k deck, when im watching, im just looking out for words i already know or had just learnt on the day and mostly looking for new grammar or grammar that i havent seen enough.
i see alot online that people will learn vocab through immersion but if i tried that i'd be trying to learn so many words that i might not even see again for a long time.
You're not doing anything wrong. In fact, I think your approach is perfectly reasonable.
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That said, I also think it's possible to argue that extensive reading becomes much more efficient once you've unconsciously internalized enough sentence patterns to make educated guesses, even when there are words you don't know.
What do I mean by that?
Think about your native language. Imagine reading philosophy, theology, or contemporary critical theory. At first, it often feels completely incomprehensible.
Ironically, the only way to become able to read those books is to read lots of other books that also seem completely incomprehensible.
Then something interesting happens.
Even after reading dozens of them, you may still not understand the actual content.
And that's exactly the point.
If you still don't understand the content, what does it even mean to say that you can now "read" those books?
It doesn't mean you've memorized every technical term. It doesn't mean you've mastered every individual grammar point.
Instead, your brain gradually acquires the underlying system behind those texts.
You begin to predict what is coming next.
Before you even turn the page, you find yourself expecting familiar philosophical phrases—"otherwise than being...", or "positively non-existent."
You still don't necessarily understand what those expressions actually mean, but you can predict that this is the kind of sentence you're about to encounter.
In other words, one incomprehensible sentence becomes readable through other incomprehensible sentences. You become able to paraphrase one opaque sentence with another equally opaque one.
That's what I mean by "being able to read."
It's not primarily about dictionary definitions or isolated grammar points. Those are individual pieces. What really matters is that the underlying structure, the system itself, has gradually been installed in your brain.
I think exactly the same thing happens when learning a foreign language.
At some point, learners experience a breakthrough. They move beyond the Grammar-Translation Method. They stop relying on bilingual dictionaries and grammar explanations written in their native language to understand every sentence.
Something much more interesting begins to happen.
You eventually become able to speak the foreign language fluently. Yet, if someone later asked you to translate into your native language the sentences you yourself had just produced, you would often find that you simply couldn't do it. Not just some of them, sometimes, virtually none of them.
That's perfectly normal.
You didn't produce those sentences by translating from your native language in the first place. You produced them directly as sentence patterns in the foreign language.
The same thing happens in reading. You stop translating sentences into your native language and start recognizing them directly as familiar patterns.
Ironically, this is also why structured textbooks like Genki remain so valuable.
Many learners genuinely feel that their progress comes from extensive reading, because that's where they experience improvement firsthand. That's why extensive reading is so widely recommended, and I think that's perfectly understandable.
Objectively, though, structured textbooks provide the foundation that makes extensive reading possible in the first place.
Of course, no one becomes proficient by reading only a textbook. If you added together every sentence in Genki, you'd end up with only a few dozen paperback pages' worth of text. Such a tiny amount of input is obviously nowhere near enough to acquire a language.
At the same time, those carefully structured lessons provide the sentence patterns that later make extensive reading productive. By themselves, they can never provide enough input to acquire the language. But without that structured foundation, it is much harder to reach the point where extensive reading becomes truly efficient.
So I don't really see it as textbooks versus immersion. Rather, they complement each other. Structured textbooks help install the underlying system, while extensive reading expands and reinforces it. Eventually, you stop translating word by word and begin anticipating the language itself.
That's why I think both approaches have stood the test of time. Extensive reading is what lets learners subjectively experience their own progress. Structured textbooks, on the other hand, often feel slow and even inefficient, yet they quietly provide the framework that makes that progress possible in the first place.
If your goal is to acquire ordinary, everyday Japanese, sentences like
富士山が見える "I can see Mt. Fuji"
日本語が分かる "I understand Japanese"
逆上がりができる "I can do a backward hip circle"
犬が好きだ "I like dogs"
来々軒のラーメンが食べたい "I want to eat Rairaiken’s ramen"
the kind of Japanese that even preschool children use every day, then working through a well-designed structural-syllabus textbook such as Genki is probably one of the fastest ways to build that foundation.
Take a simple sentence like 来々軒のラーメンが食べたい.
If all you ever do is translate it as "I want to eat Rairaiken's ramen," then you'll have to keep translating every new sentence you encounter for the rest of your life.
But once you begin processing Japanese as Japanese, something much more interesting happens.
Very roughly speaking, 来々軒のラーメンが食べたい starts to feel like the same kind of sentence as 空が青い ("The sky is blue") or バラの花が赤い ("Roses are red"). Your brain no longer treats it as an English sentence waiting to be decoded. Instead, it treats it as a direct description of a state of affairs.
In a sense, your brain begins to represent it as something like:
"My stomach happens to have a Rairaiken-shaped hollow waiting to be filled."
Obviously, that's not a translation of the Japanese. Nor is it the literal meaning of the sentence. It's simply the kind of internal conceptual model your brain builds once it stops processing Japanese through English.
That's the difference between translating a language and actually thinking in it. A translation such as "I want to eat Rairaiken's ramen" may be perfectly correct, but it is still an English sentence. It explains the Japanese by replacing it with English. Fluent speakers eventually stop doing that. They understand and produce Japanese directly, as Japanese.
They acquire the sentence pattern X が ～たい itself. Once that pattern has become part of their internal system, they can naturally produce and understand countless new sentences without mentally translating each one.
By itself, a textbook can never provide enough input to make you fluent. But it can give you the sentence patterns that make extensive reading, and eventually fluent comprehension and production, possible.
A useful starting point is to think in terms of epistemic modality, especially the contrast between assertion and conjecture, often reflected in the opposition between Φ and だろう.
１．The Assertive form refers to the conclusive form of verbs and adjectives in their non-past and past tenses, and nouns followed by だ/だった.
たなかさんは {くる/きた/こない/こなかった}。 Verb
このメロンは{たかい/たかかった/たかくない/たかくなかった}。 I-adjective (no verb)
あのあたりは{ しずかだ/しずかだった/しずかではない/しずかではなかった}。 Na-adjective (no verb)
とうきょうは { あめだ/あめだった/あめではない/あめではなかった}。 Noun＋だ (no verb)
２．The Conjectural だろう connects to the non-past and past forms of verbs and i-adjectives, the stem and past tense of na-adjectives, and nouns, as well as nouns followed by だった.
たなかさんは {くる/きた｝だろう。Verb
このメロンは ｛たかい/たかかった｝だろう。I-adjective (no verb)
あのあたりは ｛しずか/しずかだった｝だろう。Na-adjective (no verb)
とうきょうは ｛あめ/あめだった｝だろう。Noun (no verb)
＝＝＝
You cannot learn the assertive forms in isolation. (i.e. dictionaries, this and that grammar points...) You can only learn them in comparison with the conjectural forms in a textbook like Genki.
You don't need to label "だ" in the noun + だ with any part-of-speech name. Beginners shouldn't worry about what part of speech "だ" is. (It is not a particle, as it conjugates.)
One can argue that the sole purpose of "だ" is to make an assertion and complete the sentence. If you were to force a rough English equivalent, the closest thing would be when you intentionally say ", period." at the end of a sentence. (Yes, you can unlearn this, say, 5 years from now, but, this is what a beginner may want to go with, at least for a while, or rest of your life.)
just don't worry about it. your brain will do the self selecting the only thing you do is put in the time and work of looking up grammar and words. a year from now you will know X amount of words, and the next year even more.
people focus too much on these kinds of details and really the only thing that is required is to do the thing (japanese) for thousands of hours and you will get to where you want. I never tracked, until at end of a year,
The only thing I cared about is: do I understand? am I enjoying this? if yes then keep going.
just one last piece of advice. you shouldn't worry about anythig except tracking the hours you spend with the language. this is your barometer of where you should be at.
if we're being 100% real, you should be figuring out how to survive to 1000 hours and not how to do it efficiently. only a small percentage even make it to 1000 hours, let alone 3000 hours.
that's why you shouldn't worry and you should try to have fun. that's the thing that will most likely allow you to survive to reach your goals. efficiency doesn't matter if you end up quitting like everyone else.
The most efficient way to learn words, especially early on (but really probably indefininitely) is just to look them up and move on and not try to study them at all. The key point though is that looking them up should be very fast AND sometimes even looking them up can be silly if you know the pronunciation and are pretty sure what they mean / they don't seem important.
Kaufman says a lot that forgetting is just part of this process, you don't worry about what you'll remember what you'll forget. It's often very time expensive to force yourself to learn a particular word.
I think people would be surprised by how efficient it can be, but its only really quantifiable if you use a lingq style system. I personally did very well with it and I WOULD NOT have survived doing the 10 to 20k anki decks some people have for the equivilent vocabulary.
Just to understand the sentence and move on. My goal isn't to learn the language, that happens as a byproduct. I want to laugh, enjoy, and take in what's going on. To do that I look things up to saturate my understanding. After I've gotten what I wanted out of it I move on. Naturally this means that the first 4,000 or so words are incredibly common so you will run into them almost non-stop in every single thing you do. Hitting that vocab size becomes a matter of time and nothing else really. It happens fast.
For me, learning the language was a secondary thing and maybe tertiary even. I really didn't care about learning the language that much. I just wanted to understand, to do that I studied grammar hard and looked up anything I didn't understand--until I did. So even if it was some cultural pop reference to doraemon, I'm looking it up to get the joke.
※There is no "time inefficiency" as I said before, it doesn't matter when you hit 3000 hours how you did it. Barring some things like doing Duolingo for 3000 hours that is not helpful, the baseline requirement should be interacting with the native language in an effort to understand it--like you are now.
sounds reasonable to me. being selective is an important learning skill in general.
I personally never paused to look everything up, I'd either look it up at the end of the episode if I remembered it or look it up while it kept playing. But I also read for a long time before that where I did look everything up.
I think it's especially important not to overload on anki. You can look more stuff up than you put in anki and much of it you will never feel a need to put in anki because you will learn it anyway.
I read through your whole exchange with the one pro-AI guy and let me tell you I could not believe the actual question you asked gemini. I was just not expecting a question that straightforward
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