I have begun learning Japanese and I know all of the Hiragana and no Katakana. Is lingq right for me currently OR should I learn Katakana and begin lingq? Also I was wondering how is learning kanji here? I’ve been using WaniKani for kanji but if I’m going to be using lingq I wont have as much time for WaniKani.
Thank You in advanced!
It’s not difficult to learn the Katakana (though I admit I don’t like them and also I don’t see their purpose considering that Hiragana is more than enough). And about the kanji , it’s good to learn them here at Lingq because you can see them in lots of examples ( though you should also practice writing them ).
It would be useful to know Katakana first but probably isn’t necessary. You won’t run into Katakana words as much as Hiragana and you could type the Hiragana equivalent into the hint for Katakana words you run across. Chances are you would want to do the same thing for any words that use Kanji.
I haven’t used WaniKani, is it a SRS program of some sort? I found SRS programs such as Anki rather useful early on in my Japanese studies but I find them much less useful now. It’s just that they can only take you so far and eventually you will need the context that reading and listening gives you.
That kind of leads into your second question about learning Kanji. You don’t really learn Kanji at LingQ, you learn words and phrases. You will run into words that are composed of just a lone Kanji but most words with Kanji will include either multiple Kanji or a combination of Kanji+Hiragana. So instead of learning 「書 = to write」 you will learn that 「書く = to write, and is pronounced as かく」 or that 「書店 = bookstore, and is pronounced as しょてん」. Eventually you might even learn that 「書」 can mean “penmanship” and is pronounced as しょ but that it isn’t a very common word.
Hopefully that answers your questions. I can only speak from my experiences, maybe some more users studying Japanese can chime in?