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There is something I don't like about how memrise tries to teaches you, it puts every word in rōmaji by default at least it does for beginners and that kinda sucks, this of course depends on the course you are taking but the most important one is the timer...sometimes is just not enough to type the answer and not being able to change it kinda sucks

 

 

this script was very helpful :)

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There is something I don't like about how memrise tries to teaches you, it puts every word in rōmaji by default at least it does for beginners and that kinda sucks, this of course depends on the course you are taking but the most important one is the timer...sometimes is just not enough to type the answer and not being able to change it kinda sucks

 

 

this script was very helpful :)

 

99% of courses are made by other users. There is no official Memrise learning schedule. Just take whatever course you like.. or make your own and adjust it to your needs. For example I´m reading VNs in Japanese and copy unknown words into my own course. Works fantastic!

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99% of courses are made by other users. There is no official Memrise learning schedule. Just take whatever course you like.. or make your own and adjust it to your needs. For example I´m reading VNs in Japanese and copy unknown words into my own course. Works fantastic!

Yep you are right, well I'm very new to the site, it's fantastic to be honest and with the timer script it's much better now, writing in kana is not easy, having to switch from katakana to hiragana or choosing the right kanji it's a pain! and you don't have enough time to do it but again that script solved everything.

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  • 2 weeks later...

In case of anki vs memrise.

In my case i'm using anki droid with whtieboard, might be good if you also plan to remember stroke order etc.

Though i'll be switching to memrise soon, i just finished heisigs rtk, i'll stick with anki to reinforce those while slowly moving towards memrise, i've been playing with it and it felt nice but a bit chaotic and to be honest all i went through was stuff i already remembered so it was hard to judge wether it's useful.

After all while i feel drawing kanji while i remember it helps while learning atm it seems to take too much time. Once i feel comfortable with drawing all characters (prolly in a week or so i'll prolly stop that, after all i'm learning to read not write ;))

Just to be clear i'm not saying writing is a valid method of learning.. learned it quite fast, i originally kept writing each character a lot of times untill i realized it doesn't really make much difference aside from getting the feel for writing order.

edit: after trying it out.. well there's way too much useless courses..

Anyone knows any good ones ? I can see how it's useful for example when it comes to kana or some simpler languages but i dunno about japanese... besides i ain't sure how it sorts out stuff you don't know does it track time or only mistakes ? Cause i always try to answer correctly, thing is some things i can answer near instant cause i know it, some other things require quite a bit of thinking and i feel i havent learned those yet.

There's also a matter of answers, rather than thinking whole thing quite often you end up picking on from ready answers which is much easier and might affect learning...

For now i still feel like i'm more likely to learn something through anki method than memrise, but might be i didn't have enough experience with it.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hey, guys. I actually never got around to reading most of this thread, but I thought I'd throw in a few things since I just started studying recently.

 

Huge wall of text.

I haven't tried using Anki yet, but I have a hunch it wouldn't work out for me. Even though some people are able to learn more on their own than they are without assistance, I always found it easier to learn things by following a teacher's lecture. The upside to independent learning is that is that you don't need to have anyone to guide you and can make adjustments to your study as you see fit. A teacher would need to create a sort of format that would be most effective in teaching you information effectively, and that can cut down productivity if it doesn't meet your needs precisely. As someone who has a minor learning disability and unable to come up with a working format for myself, I find Memrise to be a perfect fit for me. It's laid out in a way that I can remember words more effectively and it actually feels kinda fun to me. I don't particularly care about the scoreboards since I tend to get into them a lot in video games, but I love getting the chance to type out a few phrases that I sometimes hear in anime within a short period of time. It has a charm to it. :)
 
As for motivation, I've been having some conversations with Zealty (aka Ayana) to help keep me motivated. There's a few beginner level VNs that I'm really interested in reading (Subahibi, Kuru kuru, Baldr Sky), and having someone to talk about it with helps tremendously. On top of that, I receive emails from Memrise motivate me to go back and learn more for some reason. Because I always read my emails as they come up, I almost always feel inclined to click the button that takes me right into my lessons.
 
If there's anyone who's interested in learning, but has motivation problems, send me a PM. I'd like to get a private group going so we can talk about stuff to help encourage each other. Something along the lines of VNs, LNs, and whatever other untranslated works we'd get into after learning Japanese. It'd be a way for me to help you to help me, ya know.
 
 

edit: after trying it out.. well there's way too much useless courses..
Anyone knows any good ones ? I can see how it's useful for example when it comes to kana or some simpler languages but i dunno about japanese... besides i ain't sure how it sorts out stuff you don't know does it track time or only mistakes ? Cause i always try to answer correctly, thing is some things i can answer near instant cause i know it, some other things require quite a bit of thinking and i feel i havent learned those yet.

There's also a matter of answers, rather than thinking whole thing quite often you end up picking on from ready answers which is much easier and might affect learning...

For now i still feel like i'm more likely to learn something through anki method than memrise, but might be i didn't have enough experience with it.

I know I'm a little late here, but do you still need any clarification on how the process works in Memrise? Introduction to Japanese works just fine for me, and I don't think it'd be pointless to take their world heritage course. I'm not sure if you have to finish the basic course before moving on to the more advanced ones though, but if that's the case, just run through the basic course (it could help with reinforcement). It probably doesn't provide the most ideal way to learn the language unless you upgrade to premium, but I've still found it efficient to learn for free. I think it works because it has you memorize words at various angles (converting English words to kana and vice-versa) and also requires you to type some of your answers out. I think it's useful to alternate between learning new words and reviewing what you've learned. The more you drill something into your head, the more it'll stick with you in the long run. It's true that just learning things as they're presented in choices won't help you attain mastery, but it'll at least allow the words to start sinking in so that you can practice them in some other way. I don't think it's a good idea to rely solely on Memrise if you want to attain better mastery of Japanese, but it should work fine as an introductory tool. Like for someone starting out, I think it'd be better to use Memrise for learning hiragana and then switch to Realkana to improve your mastery over it. One thing I do know is that I have a much easier time familiarizing myself with new hiragana from Memrise than I do from RK.

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I've started learning Japanese about 2-3 weeks ago with ofcourse the main goal being able to read visual novels in Japanese.

 

I'm actually having a pretty good time learning Japanese.

Started out with the Kana Alphabet (hiragana and Katakana) once i had that under control i started reading a bit of random Japanese stuff. It was very satisfying being able to read and understand certain words and " easy"  sentences.

 

Now im both using Memrise and Anki to learn more words and kanji. I must say i was afraid of kanji because of the different symbols etc but with Anki i'm learning about 22 new kanji a day. I might increase the number later not to sure yet. i know about a 100 now so we will see how things will go later on.

 

I also read the guidetojapanese.org guides just as a little extra.

 

I'm also thinking about using free accounts on Japanesepod101, i checked it out and seems to be decent.

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Yeah i'll agree that memrise might be good for starting, what i'm concerned about is mostly kanji, after all sign has a meaning, on readings, kun readings etc... i think it might be not enough for that..

On the other hand, been done with heisig for a while, went for tae kim's book.. Good next step after reading it i can see why next recommended step is to translate.

 

increasing vocabulary and enforcing the grammar understanding will be needed.

 

I'm only concerned about learning various readings for kanji now.

 

That is i still tend to forget mistake etc kanji. Keep doing anki cards and it takes a while most often with characters that have similiar meaning or word so obscure in english i keep forgetting it (not my native language).

Also learning different readings should help in the long run so i'm wondering about relearning kanji using proper way now, after all i have a base and i keep doing flashcards every day, might as well start going for the new stuff... but i'm worried it is gonna confuse me or something.

 

 

On the good side after watching ~700 anime series pretty much have a lot vocab somewhere in my brain that gets sorted out or starts making way more sense when i learn the grammar :)

I thought conjugations are gonna be hard but it seems like i pretty much have a lot of examples burried somewhere in my head that only needs sorted out and a bit of practice to enforce the rule understanding for more difficult cases.

 

Oh well i'm taking easy atm since i decided to keep this time for rest (witcher 3 release) but hell once i beat the game i guess im gonna start going all out on trying to read novels. Maybe by then my kanji memory will get better and i'll be able to start learning on/kun readings.... if not i'm sure it'll get reinforced during novels.

 

I still didn't get hooked on memrise though, oh well mabe once i start putting more effort again.

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I'm only concerned about learning various readings for kanji now.

 

Do not learn readings separately from vocabs. It´s pretty much useless because first, you don´t know which readings are frequent and which are not, second, you can never be sure when to use which reading in a word. Just learn the radicals and the general meaning of a Kanji so you can associate those bunches of strokes with something, making it easier to learn vocabulary.

 

In terms of grammar, Tae kim is good, but try out imabi.net.

 

For vocabulary, try out the JLPT courses on Memrise (English to Kanji for the meaning and Kanji to Kana for the reading).

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Yeah, I started watching the videos of this channel and they're pretty cool. It's much better than a dry textbook to learn some new japanese, although stuff like imabi is obviously better if you wanna look up something specific while reading & is a bit more detailed I guess.

 

I need to update the OP this summer at some point.

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After months and months of doing absolutely nothing I finally decided to start studying Japanese again. 

 

I hate my laziness sometimes. If I just continued studying now I could have been doing something more than starting with Kanjis and grammar all over again -.-

 

I don't know if I should have a serious schedule for grammar. When I began studying Tae Kim's guide months ago I read it without much of a tought and just  because I was curious about the languague and was not really trying to study each topic trough. Some concepts stayed with me as I understood them and others had a rough time and needed some more reading.

 

What do you guys suggest? 

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Yeah I forgot to mention I already started studying the Kanji and the Kana just stayed in my head since I studied them months ago ^_^

 

The only problem that I have is how much time should I invest in each topic for grammar. As I stated in my post when I began I didn't actually study and just read it like a text with some things staying with me and others just not understanding them at all. Now I want to fully study grammar and vocabulary thoroughly.

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This might sound obvious but I think you need to study until the point where you see something in a sentence and you can identify it, for example seeing a particle and know why is there, same with an adverb or adjectives, is the verb in a て form, what does it mean?why is a だから/から there and so on.

The thing is when you are learning grammar if you don't know at least some vocab you will get very frustrated, for example if you are learning the も particle and you see this:

peterは遊ぶ彼女もする, it looks very pretty and all but if you dont know what hell 遊ぶ or 彼女 then you are learning nothing...so you need some basic vocab to learn the grammar, so you should at least learn the vocab from jlpt5 to use the tae kim's guide (I think he uses the vocab from jlpt5 and nothing more, leaving aside the verbs)

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Funny thing I had in my other computer a whole .doc file with a lot of vocab that I put together after I did some dictionary research. I began studying a little of it and left it alone after a while and now that my HDD broke I lost all that compilation I made :'c

 

Well I think that's all I had to say about my inquiry. So I'll see what I can do with what I got. Thanks for the answer. ^_^

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Uhm..guys..im going through Heisig's Remembering the Kanji and its not that hard to remember the basic meanings of each kanji, but there are no transcriptions for them in the book...so my question...is it okay to learn meanings first? Or i should start with..i dunno writing down those 2k words and learn how to read them in hiragana instead?

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learning remembering the kanji helps you when you actually need to study the kanji itself later on or with vocabulary, my advice is dont study each kanji onyomi and kunyomi reading or you will be insane after learning 300 xD (if you even can remember them all), learn vocabulary instead and by doing that you will be learning onyomi and kunyomi reading at the same time, for example

 

大好き <---- だいすき onyomi reading

大きい <--- おおきい kun reading ,

大切 <--たいせつ, another on reading,

 

and so by learning vocabulary (all this words are from N5 level) you already know almost the whole kanji on and kun reading (the onyomi should be in katakana but dont mind that)

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Wow menrise is so fun to use. I don't know if switch my kanji study from aniki to menrise  :P

Memrise recently made some ridiculous changes to the interface, making it oversized and uncomfortable to use. They claim it reduced the load off the servers by 75% but I guess that comes at the expense of it loading 750% longer on the user side of things. I wish all my courses weren't on Memrise, otherwise I would have already switched to Anki which must be more reliable since it's a program and not a website (never used it, could be some glaring faults with it too).

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Memrise recently made some ridiculous changes to the interface, making it oversized and uncomfortable to use. They claim it reduced the load off the servers by 75% but I guess that comes at the expense of it loading 750% longer on the user side of things. I wish all my courses weren't on Memrise, otherwise I would have already switched to Anki which must be more reliable since it's a program and not a website (never used it, could be some glaring faults with it too).

 

Really? I never saw the previous interface so I don't really have much to say. I find it confortable enough. Maybe if I started using it before I could notice the obvious changes.

 

Well on my previous topic I decided I will stay with Anki for my kanji study. I feel better with it.

 

So my current kanji number is 243/1764. I started with JLPT5 Vocab on Memrise. I'll start with grammar when I'm up to it.  :P

 

I hope I can go trough the study now. The sudden urge to procrastinate isn't here yet.  :makina:

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  • 2 months later...

Hi Down!

 

I cross-post this post of yours from another thread...

 

 

What I do to learn kanji is simply use an Anki flashcard deck with all 2000+ jouyou kanji in order with compounds cards. Basically, when a new kanji is introduced, the following cards are compounds of that new kanji + older kanjis. It works really great for me so far, I'm close to completing it after some 6 months using it (there are 16000+ cards in it).

This way I absorb new vocab, provided there are enough compounds remembering the ON reading is a cinch (whereas it's much harder, from experience, with a deck containing only single kanji entries), and the KUN readings are also included. It's also much easier to start grasping the nuances of the kanji by seeing its compounds.

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Hi Down!

 

I cross-post this post of yours from another thread...

 

 

Do you mind if I ask you which Anki Flashcard Deck you're using?

Is it a shared deck or your own customized deck? Would you mind sharing the link if it's a shared deck or uploading them somewhere if it's your own personal deck?

 

Thank you in advance!

you can use this one https://ankiweb.net/.../info/523650169 and this one https://ankiweb.net/...o/1668783345 to start, N5 and 4

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