掲示板 Forums - Where do I start?

The beauty (and sometimes bane) of renshuu is that you are in full control what you want to learn/study - I no longer was a beginner when I found and joined renshuu, but I would imagine that a good place for you to start would be to create Kanji and Vocab schedules for JLPT N5 and/or the textbook you are working through in parallel (JFBP, Genki, Minna no Nihongo, etc.).

I highly recommend using a textbook in parallel to supplement your learning [I started with JFBP, but I often hear that Genki is better?], as these textbooks are set-up to quickly introduce you to everyday vocab and grammar right away and have texts and exercises that are built upon the vocab and grammar they introduced to you until that point.

JFBP is showing you Kanjis early on already, but is not really teaching them to you until the end of book 1. I don't know how Genki/Minna are on this end, but if they are similar I would suggest to fall back to renshuu and/or WaniKani to learn and review Kanjis. I thus far primarily learnt my Kanjis via WaniKani, but plan to continue my Kanji studies via renshuu as soon as I finished all that WaniKani has to offer [WaniKani covers ~2000 Kanjis, while renshuu covers - well - all Kanjis ].

As soon as you have the first few hundred Kanjis and Vocabs under the belt you can start looking at articles on NHK News Web Easy, which is a Japanese news site for kids (including furigana and audio for all articles).

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As I presume that you are new to renshuu (welcome! ), below a mini-tutorial/example on how to create and maintain a schedule for studying and reviewing JLPT N5 Kanjis:

First, navigate to the study library page; i.e. either click on "Study Library" on your dashboard or go there via Learn -> Study Library using the top navigation

Here, go to the item "Scheds" in the bottom left and click on "Make a schedule", then "Kanji", and finally enter a name for the new schedule and click "Make Schedule" [let's say we call it "JLPT N5"]

In the new page, click "add study materials", then click on "JLPT" [or enter "JLPT" in the search bar]. In the search results, scroll to "JLPT - N5" by renshuu.org, click on "view lessons" and then "schedule this" to the first lesson. Scroll to the top and click "Save changes".

You are now set-up to start studying your first batch of Kanjis. There are a couple of options and settings you can play around with:

- under Settings in the schedule overview (specifically "Advanced Settings") you can control which study vectors the current schedule should cover. For example, maybe you do not want to test your knowledge of the radical associated with a Kanji yet, and rather focus on readings and meaning only.

- Further, in the schedule overview, you have a cog symbol besides the "Study now" button that allows you to modify what is quizzed how [e.g. multiple choise vs. fill the blank, among a lot of other things].

When you learned the 10 Kanji contained within JLPT N5 Lesson 1 and want to add more from JLPT N5 or other sources you can now click on "adjust +/-". If you just want to add more lessons for a topic you already have included in a schedule you can directly go to "in schedule" to have a faster access to all JLPT N5 lessons (i.e. do not need to search them anymore). If you want to add items from another topic just search for and then add it to your heart's content

The same steps written above also apply to Vocab.

Grammar is similar, albeit more controlled when it comes to the selection of lessons - you will see what I mean the moment you create a schedule for this

Thanks SirEdgar and マイコー for the quick response!

So basically I need to start a textbook to start my fundation on grammar then use Renshuu + other stuff to help the process basically, right?

Yes indeed I'm totally new on renshuu. I saw the recommendation on reddit /learnjapanase after researching ways to study Kanji after learning Kana. I didn't see the ''Getting Started'' link in the menu, sorry about that. I was just eager to get ready to use and just got lost haha.

One more thing: Creating your own decks about sentences you see on textbook or some news site and study later on anki is actually a good method? Or maybe just after learning N5 Kanji?

Short Answer: Yes.

Personally I would say the textbook should be your primary focus and you should use your SRS (Renshuu/Anki) for memorizing stuff (kanji, vocab).

Using an SRS to get a handle on the *vocab* for the lesson you are working on prior to going through the lesson (or even during) is a very good idea. If you do that, then the lesson will go more smoothly. They are words that you need to learn for the lesson anyways, and usually the textbooks try to give you the words that are most commonly used in real life, or that will be most useful to you in real life, at the very beginning, so it is a good idea to learn those words anyways.

About adding *sentences* from your text or NHK or somewhere to your SRS: I think this is one of those "everyone's learning style is different" sort of things. There was a long post on Tofugu about putting sentences into your SRS, but I don't really get the appeal of it. If you have sentences in your SRS, you have to spend a much longer time on one card, whereas what SRS excels at is allowing you to practice a lot of terms, where you are trying to remember just one thing per card, in a short amount of time. I also feel that to learn sentence patterns it's good to use a textbook so that you are thinking about, understanding, and producing those sentence patterns ONLY in Japanese, not trying to translate back and forth between Japanese and English. (see my comments about Minna no Nihongo below). If you want to really be fluent in any language, you need to understand what is being said and produce sentences only in the target language, without having to internally translate everything back into your native language, so I'm a bit skeptical about whether flashcards where you see a Japanese sentence and try to translate it into English is a good way to do that. I'm a professional interpreter/translator, and I only put an entire sentence on a flashcard if I really want to memorize that whole sentence: e.g. it's a set phrase that is always said in a certain way, or it's an idiom or proverb, or something. So it's quite possible to reach a high level of Japanese without doing that. But on the other hand, there are some people out there who really like putting sentences into their SRS and successfully study that way. Also, if you study vocabulary but don't have a good idea of how that word is really used in context, then you're opening yourself up to the danger of using that word in a way that is not natural-sounding, so some people like to add example sentences (from authentic Japanese materials) to their vocabulary cards, which is a bit of a different thing from making a sentence itself the main focus of the card. TL;DR, if you find a way to study with sentences in your SRS that works for you and that you like, then that's great and you should do whatever fits your learning style best.

Back to textbooks:

Minna and Genki are both great choices.

I personally am a huge fan of Minna because the main workbook is entirely in Japanese, so it gives you an immersion experience (you have to already know hiragana and katakana to get started, but you've already memorized those and should be fine), and also I found the way that they presented the sentence patterns (dividing them up into blocks, looking at sample conversations and at the sentence examples first so that you are looking at them and trying to use deductive reasoning to understand them rather than just having an explanation handed to your right away).

Either of those textbook series, Minna or Genki, will also teach you things about Japanese culture, and they have the benefit of being written by Japanese people, so even the example sentences and so on are written from a Japanese cultural perspective and will tend to be things that Japanese people would tend to say, phrased in ways that Japanese people would tend to say them.

Anyways, you may have heard this already, but although it might get you further with some language pairs (in a case where the word order of the target language is mostly the same as your native language), just learning a bunch of words and kanji will not allow you to speak or understand Japanese because the word order and grammar are completely different from English. But even with one very simple sentence pattern there are a lot of things you can say. For example:

これ は ほん です。
this (topic marker) book =

This is a book.

（これ は） おもい です。

This is heavy. (You can leave out the これは part if the other person knows what the thing is that you are talking about.)

わたし は アンバー です。
I (topic marker) Amber =

I'm Amber.
(It is better to say 私の名前は＿＿＿＿＿です, but the above is understandable.)

わたし は つうやくしゃ です。

I am an interpreter.

きょう は　 はれ です。

Today is sunny.

きょう は にちようび です。

Today is Sunday.

（わたし は） うれしい です。
（わたし は） さびしい です。

I'm happy.
I'm lonely.
etc.


With just this one sentence pattern you can state what the things around you are, describe the things around you, introduce yourself in a basic way, state your occupation, describe the weather, describe your feelings, etc.

On the other hand, if you try just memorizing words and putting together a sentence in the same way you would in English, it's not just going to sound a little weird, it's going to be unintelligible.

. . .

Now, this is a different subject, and it might have been good to put it more at the beginning of this post. （笑） But if you haven't considered it already, you might want to think about and get a clear idea of what your purpose is for studying Japanese.

For example, do you want to be able to talk to Japanese people? Do you want to prepare to travel in Japan sometime in the future? Do you want to be able to read manga in Japanese? Play video games in Japanese?

In any living language there are four basic skills: reading, writing, listening, speaking.

Naturally, if you only practice reading and writing, you will learn how to read and write, but you won't be able to listen or speak. If you practice listening but don't practice speaking, you'll be able to understand spoken Japanese but probably won't be able to speak very much (if any).

I really believe that everyone's learning style is different, and what motivates you to study, or what is the best method to study, is going to vary from person to person. For example, there are some people who adamantly believe that having conversations with real native speakers from Day 1 is the best way to learn a language (e.g. the polyglot Benny Lewis). But there are some learners who when they first start out learning a foreign language like to listen for a little while first and then they get to a point where they feel comfortable trying to speak.

So if you want to learn listening and speaking, how you want to do it is going to depend on you and what you feel comfortable with.

Personally, I think that conversation is really great. (It tends to have an approximately 50-50 balance of listening and speaking, which is good because a lot of people learning Japanese listen way more than they speak, which leads to an imbalance in their listening vs. speaking abilities. Also the fact that you are using the language "in real life" is extremely helpful in making it feel relevant, which makes it stick in your memory a lot better.)

But even if you don't want to jump into conversation right away, or don't have that as a main goal (e.g. your main goal for learning Japanese is to read manga in Japanese), like SirEdgar, I would also recommend doing some listening and/or using resources that have audio pronounced by native speakers included in them (like Memrize or Anki decks with audio included) so that you don't internalize some wrong pronunciations when you subvocalize while studying. This will be less of a problem for you if you have already gotten exposed to a lot of Japanese speaking (e.g. watching subbed anime) and have a good idea of how words are pronounced already, but extra listening reinforcement doesn't hurt either.

To make a long story short, to get a well-rounded approach what you need is:
①A textbook
②An SRS (for memorizing words and kanji; it is fine to go light with this and mostly stick with the words in your textbook)
③Some method of practicing listening/speaking if you want to be able to listen/speak. (Or even if you don't have speaking as an immediate goal, it would be a good idea to make sure to get in some listening so that you don't memorize mispronunciations.)

I guess some textbooks come with audio CDs, so if you get one that has an audio CD, for ③ you can use that, and you can practice reading the sentences in your textbook out loud, or doing shadowing with the CD, for speaking practice.

Anyways, if you reply and let me know what your goals are for how you want to use Japanese, I might be able to give you some more specific advice (if this wasn't too much information already).

Brazil has a large Japanese expat and Japanese-descended population, right? Are there any Japanese language schools aimed at the children of Japanese natives living in Brazil to teach them Japanese? My city (in the US) has one, but I never knew about it until recently because they don’t advertise to non-Japanese people (though they will teach non-Japanese people who want to learn) since that’s not their target market. It might be worth asking a Japanese person about if your area has any Japanese population at all.

About getting books: Sounds like you’re all set for now, but for the next time you need to buy a textbook or something, these websites do international shipping (though I don’t know how smartphone-friendly they are):

https://www.amazon.co.jp/

https://shop.whiterabbitjapan.com/

For Amazon Japan, you can change the menu/interface language to make it easier to navigate.

White Rabbit Press is a website designed specifically for shipping Japanese stuff from Japan to other countries, and they have a large selection of Japanese textbooks and learning resources. The interface is all in English.

For the record, I checked and found out that みんな does have both Spanish and Portuguese language versions of the grammar explanations book that accompanies the main workbook, but げんき is a good textbook series and even if your book is in English, with your English level it seems like you should be fine.

If you want to make sure to learn words with context, then maybe you could try putting in sentences just as example sentences (have the word on the front with some example sentences below, or highlight the target word in the sentence in a different color on the front of the card, and make the output just the definition of the target word, not a translation of the whole sentence)? Or cloze deletion can also be effective (on the front of the card leave a blank in the sentence where the target word goes, and your goal is to figure out what word goes in the blank). I am mainly skeptical about making “translate this sentence into your native language” as a study method.

Kanji: If it is the case that you are feeling a lot of frustration right now about not being able to read things because there are too many unknown kanji, then unlike what I said earlier, it probably would be good for you to start tackling those right away (you can turn that frustration into energy to study). You could start with N5 on Renshuu and work your way up.

Listening: It’s good that you have already spent a lot of time listening to Japanese, because that should give you a sense of the overall rhythm and intonation as well as pronunciation. As actual focused listening practice, though, if you try to listen to something (e.g. a game) that is just natural Japanese made by and for native speakers, you might run into a similar frustration as your current frustration with kanji. It will be too fast, there will be too much slang or difficult vocabulary, or too many words will not be pronounced clearly, so there will be a lot that you won’t be able to understand right away. But げんき does have CDs, right? So you can use those in order to practice listening for comprehension, listening and trying to understand rather than just passive listening. If you want more resources in addition to that to practice listening for comprehension, then I think there are some books with CDs for JLPT listening comprehension, so you could get a N5 listening book from White Rabbit or somewhere.


Writing on paper: Do you want to be able to write on paper? If so, then you can devote some time to it, but if not, so much is done on computers these days that it’s not really a very high-priority or highly-useful skill compared to other things you could spend your time on. However, you should probably at least know the proper stroke order for kana so that you can write Japanese on paper when necessary, for example, you probably need to write out some Japanese answers in your げんき text, so you should do that in kana at least, even if you don’t want to prioritize being able to write kanji by hand. (Maybe you already learned kana stroke order from the apps you used?)

For both the frustrations of trying to read and trying to understand spoken Japanese, your text will help with that because textbooks or other structured courses are designed in such a way that they teach you whatever words or kanji you need to know for that lesson, and then they don’t use anything other than those words and kanji, so it’s at a level that you will be able to understand. And then the more you do what you are doing, going slowly and steadily with your textbook (and kanji on Renshuu) and laying the foundations for understanding, the more you will be able to enjoy authentic materials (games and so on) without having a huge wall keeping you from understanding what’s being said. For example, once you get through the two elementary level textbooks (初級) you will have a good understanding of the most commonly used sentence structures, and although you will still have to look up words, it won’t be every word or every kanji in the sentence anymore.


By the way, by learning kana right away you've done one of the best things you can do starting out. You seem like you are off to a great start; がんばって！