Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI and people are more willing to make the jump here are just some alternative apps and what languages they have:
Language Transfer (Languages: French, Swahili, Italian, Greek, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, English for Spanish Speakers)
"I want a good audio-based app and money's no object"
Pimsleur (Literally so many languages)
Glossika (Also a lot of languages, but minority languages are free)
*anecdote: I borrowed my brother's Japanese Pimsleur CD as a kid and I still remember how to say the weather is nice over a decade later. You can find the CDs at libraries and "other" places I'm sure.
"I have a pretty neat library card"
Mango (Languages: So many and all endangered/Indigenous courses are free even if you don't have a library that has a partnership with Mango)
"I want SRS flashcards and have an android"
AnkiDroid: (Theoretically all languages, pre-made decks can be found easily)
"I want SRS flashcards and I have an iphone"
AnkiApp: It's almost as good as AnkiDroid and free compared to the official Anki app for iphone
"I don't mind ads and just want to learn Korean"
lingory
"I want an app made for Mandarin that's BETTER than DL and has multiple languages to learn Mandarin in"
ChineseSkill (You can use their older version of the course for free)
"I don't like any of these apps you mentioned already, give me one more"
Bunpo: (Languages: Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Mandarin)
Anya is such a funky little gremlin child I love her so much lol
But also bc she is a literal child and talks like one in this show it was easier to follow what she’s saying. So I wanted to make a list of some of the phrases she says
おでけけ：Ooting
お出かけ 「おでかけ」：Outing
お手伝い 「おてつだい」：Help/Helping
ワクワク：onomatopoeia for excitement
父！スッポンポン！スッポンポン！：Papa! I can see her boobies!
父 「ちち」：father (what you would call your own father when talking about him in a conversation)
スッポンポン：onomatopoeia for being completely naked
人がゴミのようだ：Subs TL: People look like bits of trash from up here
Literal TL: People look like trash
人 「ひと」：Person/people
ゴミ：garbage
アニャ母いなくて寂しい〜：I’m so lonely because I don’t have a mama~
母 「はは」：mother (what you would call your own mother when talking about her in a conversation)
寂しい 「さびしい」：lonely
I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but your progress is not ruined after 1 bad day, 2 bad days, maybe even a month or more of bad days. Everything you experienced and learned during that time is valuable and essential for your growth. Forgive yourself, and try again.
十五夜 じゅうごや harvest moon night (15th night of the 8th lunar month)
銀杏 ぎんなん ginkgo nuts
秋刀魚 さんま Pacific saury (a seasonal fish)
彼岸花 ひがんばな red spider lily
菊 きく chrysanthemum
落ち葉 おちば fallen leaves
焼き芋 やきいも roasted sweet potato
秋茄子 あきなす Autumn eggplant
(Note: there’s a saying: “秋茄子は嫁に食わすな / Don’t let your daughter-in-law eat autumn eggplants” which implies that you shouldn't let your daughter-in-law eat them because either they are delicious, or they might affect her health and her childbearing ability, although now it's more of the first meaning)
This pile of graded readers was what I would usually bring to my university's weekly in person book club meetings. The book club was open to anyone who could read at least hiragana and thus had participants from all levels of Japanese reading abilities.
This meant during our reading time everyone would read different Japanese books on their own level and I always made sure to have a graded reader on hand for everyone's reading abilities.
The graded readers you can see in this picture start from level 0 with mostly pictures and set phrases in Japanese and go up to a solid intermediate level, that were already little story books or rewritten classic literature. I can recommend all these series you can see in this picture. If you are interested in reading more in Japanese at your current level, please have a look:
Tadoku Free Graded Readers by the NPO Tagengo Tadoku
レベル別日本語多読ライブラリー (reberubetsu nihongo tadoku raiburarī) by the NPO Tagengo Tadoku and ASK
日本語多読ブックス (nihongo tadoku bukkusu) by the NPO Tagengo Tadoku and Taishukan
Yomimono Ippai (the book in the picture is バナナは日本一)
Prioritize radicals and the kanji they unlock. Use the Lesson Filter userscript.
Do at least 5 but no more than 10 new items per day, especially with new kanji.
5 to 10 vocabulary (easy to digest because it’s based off previous or new kanji)
5 radicals – Look them up to see if the radical directly corresponds to a kanji or vocabulary word, or use its meaning from the list of 214 radicals (see below).
5 kanji – All kanji will be reviewable within a week (30-35 kanji per level).
Look up radical meanings. After each lesson that contains a radical, first see if the radical directly corresponds to a kanji. If so, use the meaning of the kanji and/or vocabulary. If it doesn’t have a kanji, then try to look the radical up online: here, here and/or here. Those meanings are generally much more closely related to how they will later be used in kanji and vocabulary. If you still haven’t found it, see if it corresponds to a hiragana or katakana character. Spending some time verifying the meanings of the radicals will help you remember them down the road. Some of the quasi-radicals and names for them that WaniKani uses can cause a good bit of confusion later (e.g. this 黽 is the radical for ‘frog’, not this 支, which is actually ‘support’ or ‘branch’).
Spread out lessons over the course of a week if needed; no need to do them all immediately.
Spend more time up front on lessons. When you go through each group of 5 items, don’t go straight to the quiz. Click the ‘I need more time’ button, and just cycle through those five items until you can recite them all without hesitation.
Don’t do new lessons until all reviews are done, or else it'll be easy to get overwhelmed.
Keep Apprentice items below 100 to reduce the amount of daily reviews (e.g. if you’ve got 90 apprentice items, cap that day’s lessons at 10). Smaller review stacks mean you can focus on learning from mistakes.
Go at whatever pace is comfortable while still trying to maintain a decent level up time (8 to 15 days). It’s much better to go at a slower pace than to rush and burn out.
Right after lessons:
Use the Self-Study feature to quiz yourself on the items you just learned. This will help things stick better for the next 4 hours before the first review.
Reviews:
Work on reviews at least once a day. Consistency is good, but you don’t need to set the fastest pace possible.
Make sure to get the reviews down to zero by the end of every day. If this becomes difficult, reduce the number of lessons you do per day.
During study and reviews, recite the kanji out loud, reading-then-meaning, no matter which one the question is asking for. The brain has a powerful instinct for memorizing things that occur (a) together, and (b) in a consistent sequence.
Identify critical items (“leeches”) early and put extra study time into them outside of the SRS system. These are items that you continually get wrong: you push them up to guru or master and they tumble back down to apprentice. One or two is fine, but if you let them accumulate, they will hinder your higher-level progress and overwhelm you.
Don’t be afraid to get the kanji wrong early on. It is better to make sure you have a good mnemonic and understanding of the kanji early on than to find out you have to refine it later. A wrong answer at Guru will set you back a few days. A wrong answer at Master will set you back a couple of weeks. A wrong answer at Enlightened will set you backabout 5 months.
Using Radicals
Break down the kanji into at least 2 but no more than 3 chunks using radicals. The fewer radicals we can chunk a kanji into, the more efficient the memorization.
Combine two or more radicals into a single new one, especially if those radicals appear together often. Instead of using them separately to form a mnemonic, combine them into a new radical with a good name that you can clearly tie to the meanings of the individual radicals.
Example: 土 (“dirt” radical) and 戈 (“drunkard” radical) appear together in 裁, 載, 戴, 栽 and 哉
Combine learnt kanji into radicals instead of trying to come up with a mnemonic for a kanji containing 5 different radicals.
Example: In level 59, the kanji 擬 means “Imitate”. Wanikani presents this as consisting of 5 different radicals. 擬 also has the same reading (ぎ) as 疑 from level 13, so it's even easier to remember.
Most of the time, radicals don’t have direct meaning and are just a visual tool. However, because Japanese kanji are derived from Chinese hanzi whose parts do have a meaning, you can use hanzi to make a given kanji easier to understand.
Example: 掃
Instead of breaking this kanji down into four different radicals, use hanzi instead to break it down into: 扌and 帚.
The kanji radical on the left means hand, and the Chinese hanzi on the right means broom. Together, hand + broom = sweep. A lot easier to understand!
Making Mnemonics
Look up the kanji on Jisho.org. Learning just something extra about the kanji fleshes out its character and makes it more memorable. You might find that WaniKani has omitted a crucial synonym that makes the kanji click in your head. Add that word to the synonyms tab. Or the kanji may be related to another kanji with a similar reading.
If you encounter a new kanji that reminds you of some other kanji you learned, chances are there’s a connection that will mutually reinforce the two and help you remember both better. Look it up on Jisho.org.
For example:
(If you went by the WaniKani mnemonic, you get some nonsense about a guy who says “I’m a cutter, yo”. It’s needlessly convoluted.)
Use the Kodansha Kanji Learners Dictionary to preview the kanji you’ll learn that day. On a sticky note, write down the kanji and their index numbers (on Jisho.org, under dictionary indices). It’s fun to try to guess the readings and meanings of kanji and/or words you haven’t learnt yet before you review them. (Getting it right is encouraging, getting it a bit wrong is disappointing in an interesting way, and being completely off base is strangely entertaining!)
Do kanji math. If you break the bigger vocab into its semantic and reading chunks, you get a better understanding of how Japanese works. For example:
労働者 = labor + work + someone = laborer
鼻歌 = nose + singing = humming
走り回る = 走り (run) + 回る (to turn/revolve) = to run around
左手 = ひだり + て
hand (手) + sack (袋) = glove (手袋)
Use Google image search to distinguish between very similar vocabulary words that would be better understood through a picture (e.g. 跳ぶ and 跳ねる both mean “to jump,” but actually mean different kinds of “jumping”).
When you encounter a reading with very few English phonetic or spelling equivalents, be creative with mnemonics that may use people’s names, have more than one word in it (e.g. “toe cheese” for とち) or allude to previous kanji you already learned.
Choose one thing to associate to a given Japanese sound to make more efficient, less confusing mnemonics (e.g. On level 13, WaniKani uses “guitar” to remember ぎ but level 59 uses “guillotine”). Whichever one you choose is not really that important, as long as it is a thing you can imagine clearly.
Look for a natural mnemonic in English that mimics the Japanese phonetics.
Example: The kanji 殻 means ‘shell/husk’ and has the kun-yomi から. This sounds like the English word “carapace” (which means the shell of a turtle or crab).
If you can’t find one, use similarities in romaji spelling with English words. To make this easier, use The Free Dictionary, which will generate a bunch of words based on spelling.
Use English words that have either soft or long ‘o’ and ‘u’ vowels in them, or distinct spellings to create mnemonics.
Example: The kanji 相 means “mutual” and has the on-yomi reading そう. Tie this to a related English word with sou in it, like “soulmates” (e.g. ‘mutual souls’).
Example: The kanji 組 means “group” and has the on-yomi reading そ. Tie this to a related English word with so in it, like “sorority” (a group of people).
Use English words that have identical spelling to the romaji pronunciation (“couch” for こう). This spelling reminds you that you need a ‘u’ to follow the ‘o.’
Make your own rules to get consistent English mnemonics. For example:
Before leveling up:
Look up the next level’s kanji to make the upcoming lessons easier. Read the meanings, readings and mnemonics now so that when lesson time comes around, you’ll have more familiarity.
As I said yesterday, I bought the first two parts of the Death Note manga series in Japanese and so far I only read through the first 13 pages and wrote down the (heaps of) new vocab.
The list is extremely long so yeah, deal with it :D
死神・しにがみ・Shinigami (Death God)
死神界・しにがみかい・Shinigami realm
同じ・おなじ・same
毎日、同じ事の・まいにち、おなじことの・a phrase like “Everyday is the same”
世・よ・world/society
人間・にんげん・human
人間界・にんげんかい・human world
腐ってる・くさってる・Godan verb: to rot
(btw 腐女子 is the kanji version of fujoshi (yaoi lover) and 腐男子 （fudanshi) is the male counterpart)
繰り返し・くりかえし・repetition/repeatedly/cycle
僕・ぼく・male first person pronoun
勝ち・かち・victory (ex. 僕の勝ちだ・I win (lit. it is my victory))
五日・いつか・fifth day (of the month)
不毛・ふもう・unproductive/sour
ぜ・sentence ending to add force or command
ちまう・Godan verb: do something completely, ex. follows
落とし・おとし・loss/drop (デスノート落としちまった・I completely lost (dropped the Death Note (this sentence is weird to directly translate))
落とす・おとす・to drop (godan verb)
冊・さつ・counter for books (ex: 一冊・いつさつ・one book)
今度・こんど・this time
者・もの・person
夜神・やがみ・Night God (Light´s last name)
戦い・たたかい・struggle/conflict
直訳・ちょくやく・literal translation
面倒・めんどう・trouble/difficulty (or a pain in the ass)
病む・やむ・Godan verb: get ill
不幸・ふこう・unhappiness/sorrow/disaster
手紙・てがみ・letter
人物・じんぶつ・character/personality (in the context it was used like person)
効果・こうか・effect (ex: 効果はない・it does not work/take effect)
ゆえに・therefore
同姓同名・どうせいどうめい・having the same name (同姓同名の物- people with the same name)
得る・える・learn/acquire
遍・ぺん・number of times
秒・びょう・second
以内・いたい・within/inside of/less than
死因・しいん・cause of death
通り・とおり・street/way (used as その通りにたる・it will happen this way)
全て・すべて・all
心臓麻痺・しんそうまひ・heart attack
詳しい・くわしい・detailed/accurate
記載(する）・きさい（する）・description/record/entry/statement (if you add suru, you make these nouns a verb)
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
germansingergirl
titsay
theartofmadeline
2087
andulkaphoto
izzy806
vaporwave
