Firstly I would like to apologise for not updating the past week, I've been in a writing funk where I didn't want to write a book review, I was considering writing a movie review for Independence Day: Resurgence which I might still do anyway and then decided on telling you how I'm currently learning Japanese.
Learning a new language is difficult, especially when you have to learn a new writing system but I still decided to learn Japanese. I'm still a beginner so this is more a "How to get started" guide. I started off by downloading a few apps, I wont mention those apps because they weren't that helpful. I use an app called SpeakEasy on my iPhone which just has basic phrases and I mainly use it for pronunciation, I also use an app called HIRAGANA which lets you trace out the hiragana in correct stroke order but it's completely different than actually writing the hiragana on paper.
I would mainly suggest going to a Japanese class if you can because self teaching is really, really hard. I haven't made much progress, mainly because I'm not practising everyday which I will start to do because it's really important if you want to improve. Unfortunately for me my college (sixth form) doesn't offer Japanese classes and the language centre near me won't kick classes back up till September which I am seriously thinking about going to.
Buy books! Books are great for learning, if you have a small budget them Amazon sells used books for cheap and you could find them in clearance as well, I have two books that I've bought, one I completely regret wasting my money and the other is just the best for learning Hiragana and Katakana.
So these are the two books I bought. I'm going to talk about the first one that you see, Japanese in 30 days, before anyone asks I didn't think I would learn the full language in 30 days I just thought it would help me with the alphabets and pronunciation as it came with two CDs. Did it teach me anything I hadn't already learned off an app? No, it didn't. You write in Romaji for the first 27 days! You don't even look at Hiragana until Day 28! It was ridiculous, you have no idea how upset I was that I wasted £15 on this book. Although I can say if you are going to Japan for a while and you just want to know enough to have conversation and you don't really care about reading or writing then I'm sure this book would be perfect for you. However if you want to learn the language, avoid this book, especially because of the amount of Romaji they use. I'm constantly told to keep away from Romaji and because I actually have a grasp on Hiragana now I completely understand why I'm told that.
The second book now, Hiragana and Katakana is amazing, I'm still working my way through the hiragana and from one day of using this book I was able to write the first ten characters of Hiragana without referencing to the book. It's honestly such a good book, I picked it up from waterstones for £10 and it was by far the best decision I've made. It doesn't just teach you how to write the alphabet it also teaches you some words and how to write them in Hiragana and Katakana, it also gives you a little history on the language at the beginning so if you are just a beginner I really suggest this book.
Next, lets talk about this app. HiNative! This app lets you speak to native speakers of a language and ask them questions, you can record your voice speaking that language and ask if your pronunciation is correct. Or write in that language and ask if your sentence is grammatically correct. You can just ask anything as well. I use the app mainly for asking questions about my speaking and writing capabilities and I like to help out people who are learning English as well by answering their questions. It's not just for Japanese and English, its for a lot of different languages, I know Spanish is one and I think Korean is too, so if you're not learning Japanese and are learning another language I'd suggest going on the app and seeing if they do your language because it really is so helpful. Everyone on there is really nice and they tell you where you're going wrong or if you sound great or if your writing is perfect. I'm going to insert a picture below of what the layout is.
Another thing I'd suggest for learning Japanese is listening to Japanese music and watching Japanese shows or movies. Also there are Japanese youtubers or youtubers who live in Japan and although they don't really "teach" Japanese they do speak it so you can pick up words from them that you might not get from reading a textbook. I particularly like watching on youtube "Texan in Tokyo" they're a married couple and they live in the Japanese countryside and whenever they speak Japanese in a video they always have subtitles, I was watching one of their videos and learnt that もも (momo) means thigh and peaches, which I would not have learned in a book. So don't underestimate what you can learn from watching someone speak Japanese because you don't need to just stick to a textbook.
So this is just what I use and are just suggestions and my opinions, none of this is sponsored, so what I'm saying is just genuinely what I think of these "products". These are what have helped me and what haven't helped me. All of the apps on here are free to download, so if you are learning Japanese I really would suggest giving them a go, like I said they have helped me at the very least a tiny amount. If any of you have suggestions for me for learning Japanese, please tell me in the comments section and I'll have a look because I am still a beginner so it's nice to look at new approaches and ways that might accelerate my learning. Thanks for reading :)
