Japanese learning blog
Practical guides on speaking, grammar, pronunciation, listening, and study planning, written for learners who want to use Japanese in real life.
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How to Learn Japanese from Manga Without Bad Habits
Manga lets you read Japanese above your grammar level because the pictures carry half the meaning and many titles print furigana over the kanji. The risk is copying speech that no one would use with a stranger.
11 min readLearning Japanese with Japanese Drama and Film
Live-action drama is the closest thing to a recording of the conversations you are training for. The trick is to study two minutes of it properly rather than watching ten hours of it hopefully.
11 min readHow to Learn Japanese with Music and Song Lyrics
A song can give you hours of willing listening practice and a chorus you will never forget. It can also teach you sentence habits that sound strange the moment you speak them.
14 min readLearning Japanese by Playing Video Games in Japanese
A game will keep you reading Japanese for hours that a textbook could never buy. The danger is finishing a hundred-hour story with a large vocabulary and no ability to say anything.
14 min readHow to Use Japanese Podcasts to Train Your Ears
A podcast can be the most convenient Japanese input you own, or forty minutes of pleasant noise. The difference is not the show you pick but what you do during and after it.
15 min readJapanese Subtitles: How to Use Them Without Cheating
Subtitles are not the enemy of listening practice. Reading them at the same moment you are supposed to be listening is. The fix is a sequence, not a ban.
14 min readHow to Start Reading Japanese News as a Learner
Japanese news looks like the hardest reading available, and it is in fact the most learnable, because the same structures and the same few hundred words come back every single day.
14 min readHow to Read Your First Book in Japanese
Finishing a whole book in Japanese is less about your level than about choosing the right book and agreeing with yourself in advance how much you are allowed not to understand.
15 min readLearning Japanese from YouTube and Vlogs
A video you enjoy and a video you learn from are rarely the same video. The difference is not the topic; it is whether one person is speaking clearly enough for you to take a sentence away with you.
13 min readJapanese Internet Slang and Social Media Language
Japanese online is a register of its own, not a corrupted version of the language you are studying. Learning to read it is useful; learning where it is safe to speak it is what keeps you out of trouble.
12 min readJapanese Conditionals: Ba, Tara, Nara, and To
Japanese has four everyday words for if, and they are not interchangeable. Choose by the job the sentence is doing, then the forms take care of themselves.
12 min readThe Japanese Passive Form and How to Use It
The Japanese passive is easy to build and surprisingly easy to overuse. This guide shows when a Japanese speaker actually reaches for it, how to form it from any verb, and which everyday alternatives sound more natural in conversation.
16 min readPractical guides
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