A great channel to test your Japanese skills on is QuizKnock. Their YouTube description is the following: 東大クイズ王・伊沢拓司を中心としたメンバーが、ガチンコクイズや盛り上がるゲーム、激ムズ入試問題など様々な無理難題に対し、頭脳と根性で挑戦していくチャンネルです。勉強動画もあるよ！ ガチンコ means to do something seriously. It comes from Sumo, originally being ガチン which is the onomatopoeia for the sound of two wrestlers slamming together when they go from the 蹲踞 crouch…
You want to get as much input as possible when learning a language. One video that really opened my eyes to how important input is to language learning was this great channel What I’ve Learned: If you don’t spend a lot of time hearing what ACTUAL Japanese sounds like, no…
Te forms are super important in Japanese and I’ve done several videos and blog posts on them. At least a basic understanding of the te form is needed to get any meaningful progress in understanding let alone speaking Japanese well. However much of the focus always seems to be on…
The JLPT is opening up for registrations soon for the December 2021 sitting. You can read about what the JLPT is on their website. The reason I’m talking about it is because it’s a great opportunity to test your Japanese level. Now, the JLPT is not a perfect test. Indeed,…
One thing I wish I had realised earlier is that school and exams are not really that great a measure of your ability in a subject. In the end, tests and exams are an imperfect way to test people. You can be amazing at a subject or area but do…
One of the most common questions that you’ll see about learning Japanese is about what scripts to learn. Do you learn all three at the same time? Should you ignore kanji because we have smartphones? Why bother learning katakana if you can already speak English? As with most questions about…
About half of the students I tutor are doing Japanese in school, generally high school. Despite them learning Japanese for many years, due to how Japanese language programs are structured they have not learnt the basics and therefore struggle with everything to do with Japanese. If they better understood the…
If you are not doing some type of spaced repetition system (SRS) flashcard system to help you memorise words and kanji, you probably should. Language learning does involve learning many words and unless you have some kind of amazing memory, you will need to go over the same words many…
都道府県, read as とどうふけん is a word used to represent the various top level administrative areas of Japan. The Wikipedia article has some great maps, diagrams and more than enough information you’ll ever need to know about this topic. In Japanese the breakdown is as follows: 都：東京都の1、道：北海道の1、府：京都府および大阪府の2、県：それら以外の43. So we see…
Music is an excellent way to learn Japanese. If you find a song you like, you can listen to it endlessly and the constant rehearing of the same words and grammar structures will help you learn them very effectively. In my personal experience, people who are better than your average…