sotolf

I did learn Japanese in university, and I have a bachelors degree in it, I even lived in Japan for 1,5 years. But right after I completed my degree I moved to Austria, and had to learn German to be able to get work and be more comfortable here, so I've spent some years getting comfortable and fluent in German, and now when spring is here, I'm feeling motivated to learn and refresh my knowledge, so I thought, I'd share some tools and things that will be good for language learning.

First of all, I have a base in the language, and it's something that I think is important, so when I'm learning a new language, I will always go through a couple of itroductory books before I start using these tools, because without having an at least basic understanding of a language before I'm bound to make wrong assumptions and creating a warped intuition of a language which is going to haunt me for a long time.

So on to the tools

Anki

Anki is an awesome spaced repetition (SRS) program, probably the best there is, I've been testing out around 30 or so different SRSs and none of them are as effective and/or comfortable as anki is.

The basic thought behind an SRS is that you learn a word and make flashcards for it, then the SRS lets you see it in longer and longer intervals as you repeat them, and it's a very efficient way of memorizing things.

One thing that is important to keep in mind is to not get overzealous with the amount of cards that you let it show you in a day, yeah in the beginning it's nice to do 20-50 cards a day, but as the reviews start creeping in it will be a chore, so I like to set mine on 8-10 words a day, and I've found that to be a sweet spot for me. Also for for the word lists I've found that making my own lists instead of downloading a finished one from the net has been way more effective, as the process of making the cards themselves have been an important step for being primed on the meaning of the words.

Clozemaster

Clozemaster is an interesting tool to get a feel for the language, it uses cloze deletion problems, basically it shows you a sentence with one word removed, and you'll have to choose the right word to put into the blank, I like to put on the option of only showing the translation after I've commited to the answer, it still lets me peek at the translations as for some langauges like japanese that are highly context sensitive even removing one word might make it impossible to figure it out if one word is missing.

Clozemaster also has a rudimetary SRS built in, nothing as advanced or good as anki, but it still is nice as you'll see sentences you have problems with more often than ones that you get easily.

Kindle

I love reading books, and the kindle has some functionality that can be really helpful when learning a foreign language, you can download a dictionary of the langauge, and I've been using this functionality quite a bit to look up words that I have problems with without having to bring along my electronic dictionary or anything like it, I tend to read a couple of pages of a book a day, and if I see a word come up again and again I'll be adding it to my anki vocabulary list to commit it into memory.

I'm using calibre to convert and add foreign language books onto my device, and being able to spend a little time reading when you have some time off is a great way of squeezing in some learning through the day.

Japanese specific tools

The tools I've been mentioning until now have been tools that are great for many languages, since I'm currently working on rebuilding my Japanese skills I thought I'd add some japanese specific tools as well

Easy Japanese News

Easy Japanese News is a pretty nice application that has news stories with lookup for words, and also a more difficult version of most of the articles as well, that way is great for getting some reading comprehension and also listening skills in. It also has furigana on all of the kanji so that it's nice to sement the reading of things that you don't see that often.

Electronic dictionary (電池辞書)

When I was living in japan back in the early 2010s I got an electronic dictionary and it has been a really nice tool to quickly do lookups, it doesn't need an internet connection, it has hand writing recognition and many dictionaries built in, with Japanese-English and Japanese-Japanese ones as well.

And I think that's it for today, I'm sure I've forgotten a ton of other great language learning tools as well, but these are the ones that I've been using the most through the year, and it might be helpful for someone else as well to have some tools to efficiently learn a new (or old) language.