Hello Japanese language learning friends and media enthusiasts! It's time to dive into my favorite guides, resources, and tools to get the perfect Japanese language immersion learning setup. All for free!
It is never too early and never too late for you to start consuming native Japanese media. Whether you're a complete beginner, stuck in the intermediate plateau, or an advanced Japanese language learner looking to improve, you are bound to find something useful in this list. These are guides and tools that I have tried and tested, and I plan to add on to this list when I encounter something new and good.
ANKI: The Ultimate Spaced Repetition System
Let's just say that if I had never discovered Anki, I would still be having the worst time of my life trying to memorize vocabulary using paper flashcards, writing them repeatedly, and eventually just forgetting them anyway. With Anki, I have thousands of vocabulary and grammar flashcards from the media I've consumed - also known as sentence mining - with native audio, context sentence, and images.
Even if I complain about Anki sometimes, it has fast tracked my learning so much that I will never go back to whatever I was doing before. I would highly recommend starting Anki at twenty new cards a day (never more!), and be familiar with 600 new vocabulary in a month. That's 7,300 words a year all on one application.
If you're a complete beginner and don't know how to sentence mine yet, there are vocabulary decks (Tango N5 and N4 and Core 2.3k VN Deck) from TheMoeWay that you can use to start.
ANKI SETUP GUIDE: Animecards/Vocabulary Cards
Speaking of adding words to Anki, I recently switched to vocabulary cards or anime cards and it has been better for my recognition in the wild, and my time in Anki has been reduced to less than half the time I used to spend using sentence cards even when I have 300 reviews for the day. Check this Anki setup for animecards to start your sentence mining journey.
YOMICHAN: The Best Dictionary Browser Extension
Read anything Japanese on your browser with Yomichan as your dictionary extension and instantly add words you don't know to Anki with a few clicks. Check this guide to setup Ankiconnect and Yomichan. I also recommend setting up Yomichan on KiwiBrowser on your mobile so you can read and lookup words on your html or epub on the go with Ttu's Reader.
MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARIES: TheMoeWay's Monolingual Transition and the Best Dictionaries for Yomichan
Of course, you can't use Yomichan without a good set of dictionaries. Boost your Japanese comprehension in both vocabulary and grammar with monolingual dictionaries. All of my Anki cards have monolingual definitions on them, and my lookups while reading (save for common nouns, technical terms, etc.) are monolingual.
TheMoeWay has the best compilation of resources and dictionaries out there and it is constantly updated. My most used dictionaries are 大辞林 第三版, 新明解国語辞典 第五版, and 旺文社国語辞典 第十一版 since I found that they are the most comprehensive and easiest to understand.
ViSUAL NOVEL GUIDES: Easy Setup Guides to Reading Japanese Visual Novels
I learned how to setup Visual Novels through theMoeWay while the animecards site walks you through how to sentence mine from them for Anki, which makes use of programs like Textractor and ShareX. These guides are extensive and may seem complicated at first glance, but since it helps you read raw text and make cards that come with the target word, context sentence, image, and audio if available, they are not only high quality, but also makes reading easy and fun even for beginners!
Tae Kim's Grammar Guide - Read through this and get a decent grasp of grammar from basic to advanced
Cure Dolly - I haven't watched every video robotic voice rip but I did learn a lot from the few that I have
Dictionary of Japanese Grammar Series - Not free unless you read TheMoeWay then it totally is and comes with an Anki deck too but a very good textbook reference to most if not all grammar points that exist.
Yomichan with Monolingual Dictionaries - probably the best way to learn grammar but may be intimidating for a lot of people
TheMoeWay has a language learning Discord that I spend too much time in that has a ton of resources shared daily, monthly reading challenges, anime and movie streams, and pretty sweet immersion leaderboards to help gamify the process of language learning.
I highly recommend reading the site thoroughly before joining the Discord especially the resources page, since it provides you with a lot of information on how to learn Japanese at all levels, and it overall offers good advice on language learning through immersion.
I go by meimae there as well. Come say hi!
Thanks for reading, and I hope these resources make your immersion journey easier and fun as it did for me!
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