LLearn Japanese

Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (April 06, 2026)

  • April 6, 2026

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

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11 comments

  2. Is all of Yotsuba& at about the same difficulty or is volume ~1 as difficult as ~10?

  3. Just wanted to say avoid please avoid Preply at all costs. Their subscription based model is a scam, and if you cancel part-way through, you cannot get a partial refund.

  4. Howdy community. I’m brand new here but have a bit of a keen interest in learning and teaching Japanese. Let me explain.

    Last summer I gave my 11-year-old daughter a challenge during the school holidays. Like most 11 year old kids, she lovees dabbling with new things but then rarely sticks at them. I wnated her to know what happens if you stick at something, so I said “pick anything you want to learn and we’ll both commit to doing it for 20 minutes every day”. The goal was mostly to show what it feels like to actually stick with something instead of dropping it after a couple of weeks.

    She chose Japanese!

    I already knew a teaching approach for all languages that works really well for beginners, but while we were doing it I kept thinking it could work much better if it were built into something interactive and voice-based rather than just following the method manually.

    That slowly turned into me building an app around the idea.

    The premise is pretty simple and very different form other language apps

    1. No subscriptions

    2. No gamification

    3. Spoken Japanese only (no reading or writing) – so you can learn while walking, cooking, cleaning etc

    4. JUST the basics, enough for you to get by on a 2 week trip

    Since I started playing with the idea last August, it’s been a bit of a labour of love 🙂

    I’m now looking for about 5 people who are basically starting from close to zero in Japanese who’d be willing to try it and give some honest feedback.

    The focus is on speaking and listening from the start, and it’s designed so you can do it totally hands-free.

    If anyone here would be interested in trying it, let me know and I can send the link.

    Hpe I’m not breaking any rules with this post. I don’t want it to be totally self-promotional. If I’ve infringed anything, just let me know and I’ll tweak acordingly (I didn’t add a link as I thought that might not be allowed)

    I’m Mark BTW 🙂

  5. I’m a super beginner for japanese, I’ve learned hiragana and katakana, and I’m going through kaishi 1.5k and yokubi right now, I want to start immersing in manga/anime/visual novels/books as soon as possible after learning basic grammar and vocabulary, but I wanted to know if I should study kanji as well alongside just learning vocab? And if so, which ones, can I just go through the JLPT levels for them? Thank you in advance!!

  6. Sometimes I noticed in those street interviews, they call the interviewee おねえさん/おにいさん even though the other party is clearly younger. Is that a thing? Is it because you take the other perspective, like when your mum would call your father お父さん?

  8. I don’t know any Japanese. My goal is just to be able to read and write, if I want to learn how to listen and speak that will come later, but it’s less important to me. I want to be able to read books in Japanese. I see a lot of things telling people to read to learn, but what if you want to learn TO read? Where do I start, just learning the alphabets with the Starter Guide?

  9. 毒を混ぜっているだなんて

    とんだ言いがかりだわ

    Does だ in だなんて add extra emphasis over just なんて? Every now and then I see a post in here about Japanese’s predicate centred nature and how a series of things may attach. I am wondering what it means to attach だ to a verb. It feels like maybe fightin’ words, at least in this context.

  10. Hi! So I did Kaishi 1.5k up until about a week ago, but even at a rate of 15-20 words per day, it felt much too slow and boring. Past the super super basics like 嬉しい, 食べる, 彼女, etc etc, it honestly felt like I was banging my head against a wall learning random vocabulary in isolation.

    I stopped at exactly 500 vocab learnt on the 1.5k and have been immersing (mostly from slice of life anime) and mining to my own deck for about a week now. I have to do a lot of lookups, and many sentences I just have to brute force with a dictionary, but I’ve been having a lot more fun doing it.

    My issue is that almost every resource I‘ve seen recommends that you complete some sort of base, 1.5k, 2k, whatever deck before you start mining on your own. Or at least get through around 1k of it. If I’m being honest, even though I’m enjoying the process, it makes me a little anxious to think maybe I’m hurting myself in the long run by doing this. I consciously mine the highest frequency words possible, but I wonder if it would be “better” to just power through a hyper-optimised deck like the Kaishi.

    I guess my question is, is a 500 vocab base sufficient to begin immersing with easy native content and mining? Without sort of gimping yourself and leaving holes in your knowledge. Has anyone had any similar experience?

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