Hi, I’ve recently started a paid subscription, and am looking for a good beginner / advanced beginner Japanese content here on LingQ.
As background, I’ve been living in Tokyo since 2011, but am embarrassed to say I’m only now finally getting my **** together to start learning the language. I don’t know all the jouyuu kanji, but know enough to start on (slowly) reading the NHK easy web pages.
However, I’d like some extra content – perhaps with dialog – and the audio voice seems to be computerized – or so my wife tells me.
Can anyone recommend a good advanced beginners course? I’ve got about an hour or two a day to spare.
P.S. I’ve done the Lingq101 Japanese lessons. Very good, but boy she speaks fast.
If I were in TOkyo, I would use my phone’s voice recorder to record myself repeating unfamiliar but important sounding words that I hear daily. There are probably a good 400 - 500 of those that you can just grab by being in a public place. Then I would just sit down at night and look them up.
@tkalee - Have you tried looking at Recommended Courses on the Learn page? Just make sure you have Beginner2 selected or Beginner 2 and even Intermediate 1 if you want to spread your net a little wider.
The great thing about our community is that you can get many conflicting recommendations about language learning, and you have to choose what works for you.
I must say that I would never do what dooo recommends. Simply too much work. I would focus on lots of listening and reading, using the simpler lessons at LingQ, to become more familiar with the sounds and flow of the language. It may seem as if people are speaking too quickly and it is difficult to understand. Even after reading the lesson, and looking up the words, it will still be difficult to understand when you listen. However, you just need to keep going.
You may need to listen several times to the same lesson. Don’t wait until you understand everything before moving on. Move on when you are bored. You can always go back to the first lesson again. As your listening comprehension and reading comprehension improve, you will start to feel confident enough to speak more. You are in the lucky position of being surrounded by the language. Good luck.
I don’t have specific beginner lessons to recommend, it has been a while since I’ve gone through any of them. That said, I seem to remember some beginner level lesson that pertained to specific subjects such as going to a restaurant. I would recommend trying to find some lessons that involve vocabulary you want to learn.
If there are many words in a lesson that you don’t know well (ability to read without the aid of LingQ), you will have trouble reading along with the audio - it will sound too fast. In that situation, I would recommend just trying to pick out as many words as you can while listening and worrying about little else.
As Steve pointed out, I would also recommend moving on to another lesson before you understand everything. If a word is important, you will definitely see it again. Also, seeing or hearing a word in different contexts helps strengthen your memory and understanding of that word.
Thanks for the replies, everyone. To answer dooo, I kind of do this a bit – I surreptitiously record my daily encounters (restaurants, doctor’s office, etc) and then play them bank. Hopefully, I’ll be able to transcribe them into LingQ once I get the time.
As for prepared content, I’m liking the stuff that emma00 added a few years back. I have a technical question, but I’ll post that separately.
@tkalee - I agree, she does speak very fast! However, I’m really enjoying the Lingq series as well as Emma and others. University dumbs down the speed and pronunciation for us students to make it easier (and it has its place). The lecturer usually makes sure they articulate or emphasise key words in such a way that we understand, but that’s not always helpful. We end up thinking we’re better than we actually are, and mostly can’t understand much at normal spoken speed. So I welcome some of those fast spoken beginner lessons.
tkalee - I think what you do is a quite different. I would find it hard to secretly record people
I just use the voice recorder as a memopad and I dictate single words/expressions. I could just as easily write the word down but voice recorder is more convenient. For me this is just as much listening exercise as vocabulary study. It will train you to hear the language more accurately and also drill a little the most common expressions you will actually hear from day to day. ALso looking up words is easy with a lot of free apps available.
