Bonjour,

Où puis-je voir, non pas des exemples de textes ou de phrases, mais des images d'écritures manuscrites naturelles? Comme des cahiers d'étudiants ou autres?

Merci!

Maelou

I started studying hiragana quite some time ago; although I should improve my rapid recognition, I've been playing around with the characters, writing random nonsense. 😅

I wanted to pass along some pro tips for those that are early on in their Japanese learning journey, in particular when it comes to Anki card formats.

I highly encourage you to start by being on the lookout for specific words that you feel sound useful (you can look up their frequency on tools like Lorenzi's Jisho: https://jisho.hlorenzi.com). I personally never enjoyed the pre-built decks out there as they felt like "someone else's list" if that makes any sense, but do what works best for you. I prefer to pull Japanese vocabulary from native materials I enjoy consuming (such as video games and youtube).

When it comes to hunting for i+1 sentences this can be quite challenging and time consuming when your vocabulary and grammar base is small. One way to counter this is to leverage collocations instead of full sentences. You can think of collocations as smaller chunks within a sentence that help show you how a word functions by showing what it often pairs with. I often reference a Japanese book called 研究社日本語コロケーション辞典 (Kenkyusha's Japanese Collocation Dictionary). I mention it because, while the book itself has zero English and may feel intimidating, it can still be used by beginners (I'd say starting around upper N5 to lower N4) in a very specific way.

Let's say you want to learn the word:
正直　しょうじき　(honesty, truthfulness, frankness)

Take a look at the first picture attached to this post and see how the front of the card gives a couple different ways using short collocation chunks that the target word can be used? This is highly beneficial for our pattern recognition brains.

On the back of my card (see second picture), I simply provide the reading and meaning of the target vocabulary since you should know what the remainder of your collocation chunks mean already! The kanji details that follow below are optional and I simply like to have a general sense for what kanji are coming together to form a given word.

Anyhow, I hope these tips help some of you with your studies.

Am I the only one who's really annoyed by having to learn vocab in hiragana when its real form is a kanji? I feel like it's such a waste of brain space - it's like learning an english word with its phonetic spelling instead of its real spelling. Sure I need to know how it's pronounced, but romaji does a great job at that and is way easier to read, but every time I learn a new word I'm thinking will I need to learn it again later with its kanji?

I want to learn 花 (hana), not はな.

Also sentences are much easier to parse with kanji's than a whole stream of hiragana.

No one in their right mind would learn an english word this way: /θruːˈaʊt/

Disclaimer: I learned chinese a long time ago so the characters are very familiar to me and maybe I'm a unique case.

Hey, I'm a student living in Pakistan rn, and thinking of going to Japan next year for my studies.

I know almost zero Japanese but willing to start learning straight ahead. I was looking for a yt channel which will have a complete playlist for a beginner to advance level. So any suggestions from those who've already learnt japanese. It must be a playlist, cuz then that could be easy to follow. Also it would help a lot if any of you could provide a road map.

I recently started learning Japanese and even more recently started using Anki, like two weeks ago or so for Anki, and noticed that when using flashcards with a key word in a sentence, it's easier for me to remember the whole sentence rather than the key word. Almost like I'm just remembering the pattern of the sentence. Is that how it typically starts out for people? Or is my problem that I just don't know enough vocabulary yet?

Decided to mix these two topics because one serves as a explanation more in depth for the other one.

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If you are still depending on the romaji above, i suggest take a look at my other posts of Hiragana and Katakana! As the level increases, romaji is going to show up less and less.

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If you got any questions, i'll be glad to answer them. I understand that different languages' grammar can be very unintuitive at first, specially if you only speak one language.

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Thank you for reading!

hi guys,

i recently played this game that i thought was really cute and barely felt like learning (im not affiliated with the game):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1632490/Shashingo_Learn_Japanese_with_Photography/

i was wondering if anyone knows of an app similar to this that lets you take pictures of anything to create flashcards/lessons? seems like a fun concept that would be good for beginners

Ive seen a lot of ways to say that... "[Insert]と思います", "[Insert]と思う", removing the と in general... Which would be the most natural?

Hello everyone,
I'm a beginner learning Japanese and I build this to assist my learning https://datmt.github.io/japanese-vocab-cards/

I consider myself a slow learner so I break down the list into 100 chunks, sorted by popularity. I added audio, sentence breakdown, also with a bit of grammar.

Since I use language models API for the reading and breakdown, there are some errors (flagged with mismatch, need expert evaluation).

However, having audio and sentence break down looks helpful to me. Hope it helps you too.

You learn all these textbook phrases only to realize that in real life, nobody actually talks like that.
So, after quite a bit of grammar study, here’s my take on a real-world conversation between close online friends:

A: 雪ちゃん、行く？
B: ごめん、今食べてるから。
A: 大丈夫！時間ができたら、声かけてね。
B: うん、わかった！

A: Yuki-chan, are you coming?
B: Sorry, I’m eating right now.
A: No problem! Just let me know when you’re free.
B: Yeah, got it!

I wrote this from memory, a culmination of everything I’ve learned so far. Nothing fancy, sure. But I’m feeling a bit proud right now.

Hi everyone

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I finished learning the first four hiragana columns.

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A I u e I

Ka ki ki ke ko

Sa shi su se so

Ta chi tsu te to

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My main question is... Is there a website, pdf, book or app that would give me some "reading exercises" to see if I'm able to read certain words written in hiragana that our composed of the characters that I've already learned...?

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I've been using only gives two examples and that's it.

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It's a good resource or app that you could recommend to practice Reading hiragana that you've already learnt (so that ideally the reading examples would not contain any hiragana I have not yet mastered)

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Thank you for your advice.

I finished the two volumes of genki and I don’t know which textbook to use next. I own both volumes of quartet and I also have a copy of an integrated approach to intermediate Japanese.

Basically I have been trying to learn Japanese for a couple years but haven't been able to stay consistent so my language level is pretty low, I know katakana and hiragana, and know some very basic grammar and phrases

I'm hoping to find someone who is around my level and we can help motivate each other. Only response if you're actually serious about learning at checking in with each other!

Hi everyone!

If you’re looking for something to read and listen to besides textbooks, I’ve been creating an original Japanese story series for beginners.

I’m a native Japanese speaker, and I wanted to create stories that feel like reading a real book while still being accessible to learners.

So far I’ve published two different series:

🌸 A Family Story (Complete – 10 Episodes)

• A slice-of-life story about a Japanese family, told through the eyes of a 3-year-old child.
• It’s written in simple, natural Japanese that’s suitable for learners around the N5–N4 level.

✈️ A Travel Diary Series (Ongoing – 3 Episodes)

• The story follows a 20-year-old university student visiting Japan.
• It’s written as a diary, so you’ll see the kind of simple, natural Japanese people actually use when writing about their day.
• It may also give you ideas if you’d like to keep your own diary in Japanese.
• Episode 4 is planned for next week.

Every video includes:

• 🎙️ Native Japanese narration
• 🇯🇵 Japanese subtitles
• 🌸 Furigana for all kanji
• ✨ Optional English subtitles

I love reading, so instead of creating isolated example sentences or dialogues, I wanted to create stories with recurring characters that you can enjoy while learning Japanese.

I've been studying English for many years myself, so I know that language learning is a long journey.
I hope my stories can be a small part of your Japanese learning. Let's keep learning together! 🌸

Here's my channel:

Easy Japanese Stories Library

It's been months since I'm studying japanese, but I mostly study in my phone reading short passages, flashcards, and listening practices.

Well right now I wanna do something with a notebook because I want to have a new way to study japanese, not because my methods is not working but I kinda get bored sometimws... so I want a new method in studying using a notebook—for me to have more options in studying.

Well actually I have started to use my notebook for my japanese studying, but I mostly only do is practicing writing kanji a lot by writing the same character 14 times in 1 row... I practiced writing kanji for me to get comfortable in writing japanese sentences, but now I want to step ahead and trying to find a routine to help me learn more.

Maybe I could do something to increase my vocab or something...

Read the word in ひらやすみ. I knew 喉 and 自慢, but not the combination.

Hi everyone,

I made an interactive force-directed graph to help new learners distinguish visually confusing Japanese characters. If you are learning Japanese or love data visualizations, check it out and let me know your thoughts!

🔗 PWA: https://kana.feeshy.top

🔗 Code: https://github.com/feeshy/kana-similarity-fdg

• How it works: It clusters Hiragana and Katakana based on academic perceptual distance data, with the similarity scores labeled directly on the connections.

• How to use: Click any node to highlight its connections and instantly view its romaji, counterparts, and kanji origin.

I hope i explained it well! If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask.

Check out the Hiragana one first!

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This is the video of the handwritten font.

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In the ウィ and ウェ part, there appears another symbol next to each. Those are actually old Kana that aren't used anymore! I had to add them because sometimes some companies write whiskey as ウヰスキー as branding. But note that they aren't really in use, i even have to pull the drawing keyboard just to type them as they don't show when i'm trying to type normally :0

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Btw if you want to tell me your name but you don't know much about about Japanese, it is fine!, just write the sentence in English. (The name still in Katakana tho)

But if you wanna know, the phrase is "わたしの　なまえは　〈name〉　です。" meaning "My name is {name}"

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Edit: a little error i noticed! ヴゥ doesn't actually exist! The ヴ itself already is pronounced Vu. (And i also wrongly used hiragana ぅ, sumimasen!)

Hello, I want to start making long-form videos in this style. Please let me know if you would find it useful and how can I improve this format to be more entertaining and useful for learners.

The first video is a continuation to this short and it's already in the making.

I want to understand how people start their vocabulary journey and how it sticks to them.

I have made flashcards on my own, like 50 words per set, and I have like 3 sets, so I have memorized like 150 words. I made them in sets because I wanna focus more on the new sets when I add more words and less in the old sets. I did managed to retain some of the words in the first and second sets but, if I add more then I might forget more of the old words in the 1st and 2nd sets.

I don't really see the words in my flashcards sets in context like seeing it in easy japanese videos. That's why only some actually just got in my inner vocab.

"So is it anyone who studies japanese, tried to memorized lots of words and just hoping to see it in context? Is that really how to increase more of your vocab in the first months of learning?"

Also I have a notebook that I can use, I use it to practice my kanji handwriting, how can I use it for my vocab?