What are /r/Team_Japanese's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I highly suggest Anki. It's a flash card program that uses an SRS algorithm that aids in retention of new information. There are many pre-configured "decks" that you can download, and many, many available are specifically for Japanese learners. This program works excellent for kanji and vocab practice. YesJapan.com is also okay and has very nice practice games, and you can try their full site out free for one month by using the promo code "reddit".

You can find the program here: http://ankisrs.net/

As for online dictionaries, Jisho is one of the best online Japanese dictionaries I've come across and allows many different convenient searching options. You can find that here: http://jisho.org/

And last, for listening practice I listen to そこあに(sokoani). They talk about anime and whatnot and a lot of their speech isn't too difficult, even for me as a noobie. www.sokoani.com

Week 1:

Since I started on Christmas eve, I managed to learn hiragana and katakana. Also I reached level 2 in WaniKani. Yay me! It is so very addictive, I can already see I will have a lot of fun.

Week 2:

Will be continuing on my WaniKani lessons.
Also I decided on Japanese the Manga Way as my textbook for grammar. I just find it easier and more entertaining to learn through actual manga examples. Though it will probable arrive on week 3 or later.

I haven't posted in a while since I don't really have anything new to say. I just keep doing the same things as always:

• Anki reviews
• WaniKani reviews
• Playing yokai watch punipuni on my phone
• Watching some kids tv, recently doreamon and crayon shin-chan
• Reading Japanese books to my daughter for 5-20 minutes every second day.

Lately most of my free time has been spent on programming and I recently published my first app on Google Play. It's an app for parking cars att the office parking so you can see if there are any free spots left before you drive into the garage. Since it's only useful for people working at my office that maximum amount of users I can ever hope to get for this app is around 10-20 in the best case.

今週はとても忙しいでしたよ。僕は家を買うのを探すんです。

I've been really busy this week, because I'm starting to buy a house, working on pre-approval stuff, should start looking soon.

Also, my PSU died on my main desktop over last weekend, I had to order a new one and couldn't really use my computer until Wednesday.

This week:

• Kept up on WaniKani, despite being really busy this week I was able to do ~30 lessons.
• Still need to catch up on Anki, hoping to do that today
• Haven't had time to do any grammar study
• I only wrote one entry on Lang-8

Next week:

• Keep doing WK as usual
• Catch up on Anki and keep making progress
• Do at least one grammar lesson
• I'm going to be skyping with a Japanese friend tomorrow again. I should think of some topics to discuss before that, any suggestions?

I posted it on the WK forums too, but I fixed the WaniKani Override script to work with Greasemonkey since it's no longer supported and I just switched from Chrome.

I'm looking forward to when I find a house and get all moved in so I can spend more time on studying, it's going to be slow progress until then I suspect.

You can always import a RTK deck and edit it to your likings. Some time ago I found this deck, maybe you can take words from there, I don't know, never looked inside.

> and it's amazing how much I can do with just the 700-800 I know so far

It's crazy how many places lots of kanji are used, even something like 丸太 use surprisingly basic kanji. It makes it a lot easier learning new words, that's for sure!

> Any one have any other recommendations for good music to listen to while studying (it must be instrumental, otherwise I just listen to the lyrics instead of doing what I'm supposed to do)?

I really like listening to the Mass Effect 3 soundtrack which is an excellent soundtrack (also my favorite game series of all time). Be careful though, if you plan on playing those games and haven't yet, don't watch the pictures in the video- they may be a bit spoiler-y. (Also if you find yourself with ~70-100 hours to burn and like sci-fi, I can't recommend those games enough :P).

I also have a Mass Effect 3 soundtrack Pandora station which has a lot of good music on it from Two Steps From Hell and AudioMachine, as well as a bunch of other games (Skyrim, Assassins Creed 2, The Last of Us, etc.)

コーナー is one I got reminded about when visiting Japan last month. Early on I got annoyed by how the Japanese were calling all kinds of places that are obviously not corners for "corner".

Some examples of Japanese "corners".

• A section for something special in a store can be called "corner" even though it's just shelf in the middle of the store.
• In the end of a book I've read there were a couple of pages in the end where another author were writing about the book I just read who referred to those pages as a "corner"
• Similarely a column in a newspaper or a magazine can be called a "corner".
• A part of a TV show can be called a "corner"

Once I realized that コーナー is much more than just a corner it got easier for me to accept the word, but I still find it interesting that there are so many things that are obviously not corners that are called "corners".

Didn't do any reading last week! I've been kind of off and on :P. Not that I'm not being productive though, I'll just go down a rabbit hole of productivity on a programming project or something so I just spent a shit ton of time working on my website instead of studying.

That's leading me to realize I need to be better at timeboxing or something to balance my time. I've been using Habitica with a few friends again lately and I just today added a "balanced focus" habit to prevent myself from tunnel visioning completely on one thing and ignoring my other commitments, otherwise I have weeks like this week where I completely neglect other things I want to do in favor of only doing one.

Speaking of which, I'd recommend people check out Habitica (formerly HabitRPG as of years ago, but I know this sub used it back then). I think it's a pretty cool site/app. I used it off and on for a few years after I saw an old official guild for this subreddit that's now long gone. Nowadays I'm trying to be much more strict about what I'm adding and only adding things that I think are somewhat difficult because otherwise it feels fairly pointless. Anyways, the website for Habitica does a much better job explaining things, but in essence it's a gamified habit/todo tracker app where you get xp/gold in game for doing things you want to improve on, and it's up to you to choose what you want to be habits/dailies/todos/rewards etc. I have several health/diet related habits and some productivity ones. You can spend gold on weapons/armor but I haven't really bothered this time around, otherwise you can make custom rewards with your own price on them so I put one on there today for like 400 gold to just spend a day getting drunk on mead and playing Skyrim lol. If people were interested I could make another official r/Team_Japanese guild but we'll see if anyone's interested.

It hasn't really changed much since last time. I just listen to a 10 hour video of Skyrim dungeon music and a rain noise generator. The combination gives me music that's fairly ambient so it doesn't grab my attention from what I'm doing but also is just enough to keep random songs from popping into my head. The noise generator helps to drown out other noises in my environment in between lulls in the music.

I read on a separate computer from all my other computer stuff so I don't have more than a few tabs open in a browser and my ebook reader. I recently started hiding my bookmark bar on that computer too so I don't see an icon for a site and impulsively go surf that site instead of reading.

I try and read as soon as I get up, and I wake up early so I can hopefully get most or all of my daily reading goal done before work. If I'm still stuck doing my studying later in the day it's frustrating to me, so my goal is to get faster at reading so it takes me less time! Occasionally I'll do other things I need/want to do first and it pushes back my studying which frustrates me so I'm trying to get away from doing that.

Just remembered (because it just came up again) that that happens with くやしい. They don't accept 悔しい but I always forget. That's probably one of the words I've memorized but still answered wrong the most times. Kind of funny that it happens with that word in particular.

that looks cool! One of the things that puts me off of ergonomic keyboards, actually, is the fixed layout, so I like how they solved that.

If you want ideas for stretching the classic book is... Stretching, lol

I have the 30th anniversary edition, here's the link to the 40th

https://www.amazon.com/Stretching-Pocket-Book-40th-Anniversary/dp/0936070889

WaniKani is a (paid) webapp for studying Kanji. It's in beta and you have to sign up on a waiting list to be let in, but you're usually let in within a day or two if I'm not mistaken.

I really like it, but it's not really suitable for everyone. Especially not if you've studied a lot of kanji before as there is no placement tests or ways of skipping ahead. You have to do everything in the order WaniKani wants you to do it. The first couple of levels are pretty slow which frustrates many new users, but the pace picks up after you've been using it for a month or two.

If you're interested you can find it at https://www.wanikani.com/

こんにちは with the extra ん thrown in there. Plus it is は (pronounced わ) since it's a particle (Denshi Jisho has the わ variant listed as colloquial as well though.)

Here I found an interesting blog post on it.

Good luck to you though.

Good luck! Interesting, I've never heard of that app! I use Habitica for habit tracking for that sort of stuff, they seem pretty similar but with really different presentation styles lol.

I started using Habitica again recently so I'll probably start talking about my habits/dailies I have on there from now on with these sort of reports. It's pretty sweet and allows you to gamify life.

Right now I've got 3 dailies (required daily tasks)

• Read an article - this has been going well. I usually just pick something interesting from /r/newsokur
• Memrise reviews - I have a 56 day streak currently on my main corse after accidentally letting a ~73 day streak lapse.
• New words on Memrise - I don't have any specific number, but just that I learn something. It usually varies between 5-50 words on any given day.

And my habits (stuff that's not required daily but I get points for doing them)

• Read はたらくまおうさま - only read a few pages since I don't understand a lot of the words. I'll probably just check it out every once in a while until it's a bit more manageable (hard to read something like this without rikaikun). I might get Detective Conan or check out some of the stuff on Comico and make this a bit more general
• Read random stuff in Japanese - usually this means just Googling stuff I would otherwise search for in English but just searching in Japanese. I also will count reading extra articles/pages over my daily "read an article" goal as this too
• Watch a video - any normal JP video, はじめしゃちょー, Seikin, let's plays
• Play a game in Japanese - haven't done this one all that much lately
• Skype people
• Watch an educational video - I count this as usually any 日本語の森 or バイリンガール Chika video (even though hers are for Japanese people learning English I still count it, I just kind of use the information backwards)

I don't know about online, but I recommend this physical book. It's the book I'm using at the moment it's pretty good. I would also recommend getting some ５ｍｍ方眼罫 paper for practicing in (although any graph paper would work if you are outside of Japan).

Is this what you're talking about? It looks pretty helpful!

I can understand your thoughts on WK. For me it's helpful because it's an easy (and addictive, like you said) way for me to learn kanji, especially if it overlaps with another learning source. I skipped learning vocab for lessons 8+ in Genki 1 and I'm learning it all now with Anki and I'm finding I already know most of the words.

I should try looking for a game again. I tried playing Borderlands 2 in Japanese but it was pretty hard even with subtitles since everyone talks way too fast for me. I was thinking about getting a visual novel on Steam so the dialog would go at a slower pace.

Thanks for the help. I'll look into the resource list more and see what I can find.

I have been using the app called Kanji by TenguGo, it has been very helpful so far!

It includes very detailed explanations of the origin of the kanji, and comes with 2000+ kanji to learn, separated into different levels of learning so that the app can fit with any knowledge level. It does have a cost of $1.25, however.