Welcome!! I hope this time goes better for you!

I found it helped to follow the jvlogging community on Youtube. Lots of super awesome people there (I can make some recommendations if you want). All Japanese All The Time (http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog) is also a pretty good place to go for some additional learning material/suggestions.

There are SO many resources available on the internet – I highly advise using more than just one. It makes it easier to make sure you’re doing SOMETHING related to learning Japanese. Some times I just don’t feel like doing TF, but if I skip a day of learning it actually ruins my motivation and I end up feeling pretty down. By having other stuff there to support me, it really helps to get some serious learning done.

Just a thought! Best of luck on round three! :D

クリーム =P

Well… that… yeah. Lol. That makes an awful lot of sense. Thanks! :P

Hello and welcome!

I originally started learning Japanese cause I thought it sounded cool, and I never thought I’d still be doing it many months down the road. So I can only hope you too find yourself hopelessly addicted to its charms. Seriously it’s a brilliantly good time and you’re going to have a blast with it.

Just wait until people have started to figure out that you’ve been learning, and then someone inevitably hands you something in Japanese saying “hey can you read this?” and you get to confidently look them in the eye and say “Nope!”

Wait. That one kind of got away from me…

Anyways, welcome to the madness – you’ll find a lot of support and some pretty great people here. It’s one of the nicer parts of the internet. If you get stuck on anything, fire questions at us. While a bunch of us (myself included) will just stare uncomfortably at our feet, there are enough people who can help you out.

Yeah I agree, listening is really good for picking up speech patterns. And especially when you’re just starting out, it gets you used to the actual sounds within the language. It’s also fun when you learn new words, and then you’re able to pick them out of an otherwise unintelligible conversation. It’s become part of my studying ‘ritual’ actually – after I do some work in TF or some heavy vocabery in Anki (I’ve invented a word just now) I like to watch a little bit of anime just to see if any of the words I’ve learned pop up. It’s a very different scenario hearing the word out of context than it is being able to identify it in a conversation. It’s a reasonably ok learning substitute for having an actual conversation. At least for me.

In terms of watching things with subtitles, this is of course highly individual, but I don’t find it distracting or anything. That’s largely a result of musical training though – reading and listening at the same time isn’t hard for me, but that’s because of a LOT of practice, which anybody can do if they’ve got the time. It’s also interesting to note the way some fan subs translate things – as the most basic example I can think of, you’ll see things like a character saying “はい!” but then it’s translated as “you got it!” or something that generally conveys agreement but isn’t the word “yes”. And the more you learn in TF (or anywhere else) the more you can have fun exploring the differences between the direct translation of the spoken words and the fan sub translation which is meant to include contextual stuff.

Ok I was about to hit submit but then I had another thought. Depending on the specific thing you’re watching (I feel drama would be really good for this) I find it gives you a pretty solid working example of honorifics in action. It helps to reinforce when you should use what. Again, good for newbs such as myself.

So with Anki Adder you can load up the decks, and then run through them using Anki Web. Kinda sucks having to use two utilities, but it seems to be the least work to set up.

I can take a look at the Anki source code and see if it’s possible to make a Chrome extension out of that, since there’s clearly a lack of proper online usage. That’s quite a bit more development than I really have experience with, but depending on what language they’ve written Anki in, it could be very easy. What would be REALLY cool is if you could use Google Drive to store Anki decks in. I’ll try to look into that too. If anyone else out there has some dev experience, input on that would be appreciated! Let’s pimp Anki right the hell out ;)

In the meantime, I think Anki Adder + Anki Web is your best bet. But that’s just my opinion.

Glad to be of service! :D

Good luck!!

My understanding was that you could do it only once for that country. So after doing a year in Japan you could then go do a year in like… I don’t know… Somewhere else. I could be wrong about that though. I would certainly not be surprised if I were incorrect, and I am happy to be corrected!

Aw, I didn’t realise it was under 30. Canada is under 35.

Sync.

Basically, you sign into Ankiweb through the Anki program on the computer, get all your decks loaded, and then click the sync button (two little circular arrows). If you’re a PC user I can take some screenshots for you and show you how to do it if you can’t figure it out. If you’re a Mac person, I can’t help :P

It’s actually the most helpful feature. Every time you open and close Anki on the computer, it syncs (as long as you’ve got internet connected). The Android app requires you to click the little sync button I believe but it’s one click and you’re good.