Hi everyone! Newcomer to LinQ!

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Hi everyone! 皆さん、こんにちは！

So I have been thinking about posting for a while now, so here we go. I’m a self-learner of Japanese, and I started using LinQ this month, I have watched a lot of Steve’s videos before but I have never checked out the site until now (Which I really regret, this is an amazing site!). I signed up for premium pretty early after the free trial, and I have been having a great time with the site!

I just need some directions for the site, and language learning in general, and since there are lots of similar students on here I thought I could give it a try. I have been studying Japanese for a little over a year now and I think my progress is kind of slow. I usually listen on the LinQ playlist at work for several hours, and I listen to my recent lessons pretty much over and over again. Then when I get home I tend to read them again, I think it works pretty well for me. I’m a bit unsure about my reading ability though since I just know around 800 kanj characters, and my vocabulary is still not that good. I get a bit demotivared when I hear and read that many other people progress a lot faster than me.

I have a strong passion for Japan, and the Japanese language and I always enjoy my studies and I hope that LinQ will make it a lot easier for me to progress with the language! Japanese is the first language I’m trying to learn from scratch, and by myself.I have tried many, many apps and some of them I’m still using such as memrise, and Tae Kim both for grammar reminders.

I just wanted to share a little bit of my journey and struggle to learn the Japanese language, and I hope that I will see more and more progress with LinQ. I hope I can get some insight into language learning from more experienced people as well :slight_smile:

Now for some pointers about the site that I’m wondering about. Feel free to reply to any of them.
First, I’m wondering how you usually tend to find material that you are interested in? Do you search for keywords mostly, or import from other sources?

Which leads me to my second question, I’m planning to input some of my own materials into LinQ but is it possible to not share the lessons with everyone else? I do know that you can do that for e-books and such, but does it work to have lessons private too?

Lastly I’m wondering if It’s a good idea to keep progressing with reading lessons, even if you don’t understand all the grammar and structures in the text? I tend to go trough several lessons/articles at once and then listen to all of them in the playlist. Is it maybe better to go with fewer and listen to them more intensely. I’m a bit lost on how to go about it :slight_smile:

I have probably missed something that I was thinking about… but thank you so much for reading through my first (and a bit lenghty) post!
I look forward to use LinQ for my Japanese studies!

じゃ、またね！

Best regards!

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Welcome to LingQ! It sounds like you are progressing just fine at 800 words. It can take more time in languages for which you don’t get any free vocabulary to start making more substantial progress. Steve often compares it to a snowball rolling downhill and gradually getting bigger and bigger. You will start to see faster vocab growth as you stay with it. It’s a function of seeing the same vocabulary and components in multiple contexts that just starts to implant that vocab in your brain.

To that end, I recommend not staying with content until you “nail” it. Study a few lessons for a while and then move on to fresh lessons. You will see a lot of the vocabulary, especially the important vocabulary, again and again in multiple lessons. Seeing the vocab in multiple contexts helps cement it in your brain better than almost anything else. Plus your brain craves novelty.

Regarding importing, everything you import is private. It is only shared if you specifically choose to share it. That goes for ebooks, news articles from the Feed or lessons imported directly or using the browser extensions. I recommend using the Feed to find popular articles from our Library at your level, as well as searching the library for terms of interest and also importing when you feel ready. A little of everything is best although in the early stages you should try to stick with content that also has audio so you get that additional input and reinforcement.

がんばってね！

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As for content for import, I don’t know anything about Japanese, but generally I let people know that you can import the Bible in any language with Audio and go by chapter. If you are interested in a long non-biblical book, the the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit by Tolken is generally available in many languages with audio, although once again, I am not sure about Japanese.

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"First, I’m wondering how you usually tend to find material that you are interested in? "

I read articles from http://lifehacker.jp/, you’ll usually find the English version of it if you scroll to the bottom, for example:
人生の役に立つ言葉：どんな環境でも自己を高めることはできる | ライフハッカー・ジャパン

At the end it says : Patrick Allan - Lifehacker US［原文］ which links you to The Only Thing Keeping You From Improving Is You

Not all articles have translations.

Then there is this other page nippon.com | 日本情報多言語発信サイト that have articles in English, French and Japanese.

As for vocabulary, I used a frequency list, which I memorized, that helped me tremendously when I began reading my first lessons here at lingq.

For grammar, I also used Tae Kim and A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate Japanese Grammar (I memorized the sentences Japanese → English from the first two books).

Nowadays I import some texts and audio from another paid service (don’t know if I’m allowed to write it’s name) and try to use Japanese - Japanese dictionaries, and for grammar, I watch Nihongo no Mori 日本語の森 - YouTube

bottom line: - YouTube

Edit: Looking back, I must admit that I’ve forgot most of what I memorized, but it was important to get me trough the firsts steps.

Edit 2: Netflix and animelon are excelent sources for shows with Japanese/English subtitles

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こんにちは、Metamorphosisさん。
あなたは、もしかしたらカフカの小説のファンですか。
(Do you happen to be a fan of Franz Kafka’s novels?)

あなたのユーザーネームに相当する日本語は、「変身(へんしん)」です。これは、カフカの小説のタイトルですね。
(The Japanese equivalent of your username is “変身（へんしん）”, which is the title of a novel written by Franz Kafka.)

“『変身』（へんしん、Die Verwandlung）は、フランツ・カフカの中編小説。”—Wikipedia

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I’m a newcomer to LingQ, too.

I right away imported a Spanish book I was reading into LingQ, and because LingQ helps me to read faster. I hope to finish it in early July. When I was reading my first book in Spanish, I at first tried to read chapters over and over. My goal was to understand basically everything before I moved onto the next chapter. However, in time, I realized that mentality is counterproductive in language learning. I now believe I need to have a high tolerance for being comfortable with not knowing everything in Spanish so that I can progress faster in the language. For example, I watch videos on YouTube with Spanish subtitles, and I listen to things in Spanish while I drive and etc. I even recently went to a Spanish church 2 times. I don’t know everything, but I figure the more I do things like that, the more I’m going to learn. I figure that if I’m spending 1-2 hours a day with Spanish, and I’ve learned something more than I knew the day before, I’m making good progress.

Specifically, when I read new material, it challenges my mind more to learn how the language works. I get to figure out if the grammatical patterns I’ve been noticing while I’m reading apply in the new sentence I’m reading. Because I’m reading extensively (and intensely), I don’t worry about reviewing my vocabulary. I figure the vocabulary I most need will come back again. Going over the same material, to the exclusion of covering new material, ceases to be a challenge to me, and I don’t believe I will learn as much. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing to review material, but for me, I want most of my time with Spanish to be covering new material, with an occasional review of old material. My “review” honestly wouldn’t be for review’s sake. I’m using Spanish as part of my daily life, so the real reason I would look at old material is because I really liked reading it.

Please check out this blog post: Input Hypothesis: The Basics – the book-bound polyglot. It highlighted someone that got to a very high level in Japanese primarily through reading and listening. You might really enjoy 3 videos he did where he talked about his language learning philosophy. I found them them to be very valuable to me, even though I’m learning Spanish:

  1. All Japanese All the Time part 1
    All Japanese All the Time pt. 1 - YouTube

  2. All Japanese All the Time part 2
    All Japanese All the Time pt. 2 - YouTube

  3. All Japanese All the Time part 3
    All Japanese All the Time pt. 3 - YouTube

In addition, I have a language learning partner that’s learning a different language than me, however we talk constantly about language learning strategies, and we encourage each other. That has been very helpful in this language learning journey, and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve made more progress this year in Spanish that I did last year.

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Thanks a lot for giving me a much better insight on the process of using the site! I’m also very thankful for your input on the importing! I’m really happy to hear that the imported lessons are private as default, that means I can import from sources that I can’t share to others, but use for my own study through LinQ, that will be very helpful for me!
I also think that reading along texts with sounds the very first time has helped me a lot too, so I will continue to do so. I’m very grateful for your input on the subject, thanks!

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I see you have come a long way in your Japanese studies, and I just have to ask if you have used any other strategies than input methods like listening and reading? I’m also using a site called Memrise where I mostly try to learn grammar in contexts and review my hiragana, katakana as much as possible (I have Tae Kim lessons there, along with other useful once like the Core 2k /6k decks and such). I also use a site to learn more kanji, but it hasn’t been as helpful as I first thought it would be. I have also tried several beginner books and series, and I’m currently going through Japanese from Zero Book 2 and reviewing basic grammar in an app called Deerlingo. I just think that I might focusing on too many resources at the same time, it takes a lot of time for me to keep all of the resources I’m using up to par so to say, and I feel like I should maybe tone it down a bit, I don’t know.

Thanks a lot for sharing so many useful resources that I can use and maybe even combine with LinQ, they will surely be very helpful to me! I will do my best and fight on and maybe I will reach your level some day :smiley:

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こんにちは、Yutakaさん！そうですか！
いいえ、わたしはカフカの小説のファンではありません。しかしその小説に興味があります! ありがとうございました。
このユーザー名は、Castlevania:Symphony of the Nightのゲームのものです。Thank you for letting me know the Japanese word for my username! I’m sorry if I disappointed you in where I took my username from haha, ごめんなさい！
Yutakaさんの返事をどうもありがとう！

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Thanks a lot for your valuable information, and I will make sure to watch those youtube videos! Thanks a lot! :slight_smile:

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You’re welcome. I think you might really find those videos very valuable for learning Japanese.