How to Learn Japanese (with LingQ) - Blog Post

Hey Everyone,

I recently wrote this blog post to help new and experienced Japanese learners who are using LingQ.

I go over some of LingQ’s best features, how to start, and introduce free resources (anime, podcasts, books) that can be imported into LingQ to help you improve your Japanese.

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Learning with lingq is a plus. I think it is a great way to boost your confidence since that practicing alone is not easy compared to learning with a tutor. That is why this site is very important and helpful to many people in the long run. Try to at least understand how it works as well so you won’t have any more problems when it comes to taking on the deciding factor on how well you get the language as well. There are also exercises and that is a great help to all of us in the long run.

I feel that learning Japanese on LingQ is difficult. The AI sometimes pronounces wrong, and I do not know how to correct that.

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Mari, I recommend importing content from YouTube or other resources recommended in the LingQ resources forum post. That way, when you play the audio, it will be native Japanese speakers, not AI. I talk more about this here: - YouTube

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Hey, mari5443!

I feel your “LingQ pain” - not in Portuguese, but in Japanese :slight_smile:
For languages like Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc., it might be a good idea, at least for learners who know only Indo-European languages, to start with some “warm-up approaches” and later switch to content-flexible audio readers à la LingQ .

My personal warmup approaches for Japanese are:

  • The Michel Thomas approach: The variation of morphosyntactic patterns in the basic and advanced courses is helpful to get a feel for the Japanese language.
  • JapanesePod101, especially the lesson tree regarding frequent morphosyntactic patterns, which deepens the Michel Thomas courses, and the many mini-dialogs by humans, not AI!
  • Obenkyo for hiragana, katakana, and kanji: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Obenkyo&hl=en_US&gl=US

After that, as Eric suggests, learners could directly import authentic content from native Japanese speakers into LingQ. For example: “Learn Japanese with Noriko”. See: Learn Japanese with Noriko - YouTube or
Entrar - LingQ

Hope that helps - of course, not for you, Mari, but maybe for some of your students :slight_smile:
Peter

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Is there something like TheChairMansBao for Japanese (graded news articles with audio and text)?

Good question, Jan. Not that I know of, but there are websites that offer simplified news in Japanese, e.g.:

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Thank you Eric and Peter,
I can introduce these excellent sites to my students.
Speaking of the problem, I sometimes find mistakes in ふりがな, which is above ひらがな of each kanji, and I wonder how learners deal with this problem. The problem is that Japanese kanji has a variety of ways of reading, so sometimes even Japanese do not know how to read. I see many Japanese children have this problem. I want to make them read each kanji correctly and want them know the meaning of each words. I believe that LingQ absolutely is an excellent app and will help solve the problem, but at the same time I am disappointed when I see mistakes. If you know how to correct please let me know.

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Hopefully, the new LingQ version will address this editing issue:
"Our new reader, in LingQ 5.0 version we are working on should bring huge improvement regarding spacing in Asian languages, so hopefully issues you noticed will be gone in new update. Also, lesson editing for Premium users will be much easier to do in this new update and you will be able to make changes directly in the reader, not on the Edit Lesson screen.
Regards,
Zoran " (from ChiefStrudel’s comment here: https://www.lingq.com/pt/community/forum/support-feedback-forum/master-list-of-grievances-from).

In the meantime, you could edit the lesson and add the furigana in parentheses after the respective kanji.

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Thank you Peter,
I am looking forward to using new LingQ. In the meantime, I will add furigana in parentheses as you suggested me. Thank you for your good work.

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