Hello everyone, I realised we don’t really have an introductory or meta thread for this community, and I thought it might be wise to create one.

So first of all, you might be wondering what japaneselanguage’s particular scope is and how it might be different from other Japanese communities in other instances.

Generally, I don’t like to think that we will be competing with other instances, but rather that we will be filling a niche for people that might be interested in discussing the language itself rather than it’s study methods. This community isn’t going to be a place to discuss the speedrunning or the efficiency of learning Japanese as there are other communities dedicated to those subjects.

Instead, this will be a place where we can discuss how the Japanese language works, it’s phonetics, it’s writing system, calligraphy and other related topics, our handwriting, as well as all other sorts of topics.

Learning materials, media, and literary discussion are very much welcome and encouraged! The only subject that will be discouraged (though not downright banned) is discussion of study methods exclusively without also including discussion about the language itself. So threads in the style of “how I learned 1,000 Japanese sentences over a three-week period” and similar threads focusing more on the methods than the language will probably belong in more specific communities.

Thank you very much for browsing this community and I hope we will be able to build a fun space for all of us who love Japanese.

  • calculuschild@vlemmy.net
    7·
    1 year ago

    Hi there! I’m looking for a place to get advice for studying Japanese, and this is the only community that comes up for me. I understand that’s not the point of this place, but you seem to know about “other communities dedicated to those subjects”. Would you be willing to point me toward those?

    • DigitalAudio@sopuli.xyzOPM
      4·
      1 year ago

      Learnjapanese will probably be geared towards that specific niche as it becomes more active. Right now, most of that content is found on Reddit or other independent forums, unfortunately

      Personally, I’m thinking since this is the most active Japanese community on Lemmy, we might open a pinned thread or FAQ where we gather several study materials, methods and documentation.

      I don’t want to keep that content completely away from here, because we’ve all been (or are currently) studying Japanese, and documentation is a natural part of that.

      But it’s tricky because the more you allow that content on here, the easier it is for it to completely take over the community, leading to never ending threads about which method is quicker or slower, min-maxing the learning process, countless threads about “anki”, “immersion” and other topics that end up obscuring discussion about the Japanese language.

      • calculuschild@vlemmy.net
        3·
        1 year ago

        I’m mostly looking for advice working with Anki. The LearnJapanese subreddit seemed to have quite a bit of expertise setting up unique Anki stuff but that’s kind of a niche within a niche.

        I’ll see if those other communities have any input first. Thanks!

      • Iapar@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        Would it be an option to make a community for the purpose of studio technics and link to it in the sidebar? And in the study you link to here. With a small description explaining the focus of each?

    • Galaxyor@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      I have some resources to share if that’s what you’re looking for. But given that I am still a beginner, I don’t know how much of my advice is going to be useful. I can still point you to some resources that have helped me.

      I know two other communities that might interest you; here they are:

      https://lemmy.ml/c/learnjapanese https://lemmy.ml/c/japanese247

      That being said, they don’t seem to be very active to me yet.

      If you’re looking for a guide to learning Japanese, I would personally recommend http://learnjapanese.moe/resources/.

      It has a lot of great resources listed. The author of this website strongly encourages learning through immersion and not using “traditional learning material,” such as the Genki books. I personally still find value in these books. But even if you don’t agree with the author on his techniques, I still think you can find some great advice through the posts on his blog, especially on the “resources” page. They also have a Discord server, if that’s what you’re looking for.

      The r/learnJapanese wiki on Reddit also has some helpful information. Here is a link to the archived version of it: http://web.archive.org/web/20230611093411/https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/wiki/index/.

      I am not sure if I’ve answered your question, but I still hope this can be helpful to someone.

      I might make a post here with a list of tools and resources that have helped me get started. My understanding is that a post like that would be allowed here, is that right?