How to practice Japanese with native content

From my experience a lot of Japanese learners always struggle with actually practicing the language. For most this means either solving quizzes in textbooks or they instantly want to make the jump to speaking. But practicing Japanese starts with something very easy - and extremely fun! Understanding the language.

That's why in this article I want to show you where you can easily find sources for interesting Japanese stories and how you use them to improve your language skills!

You should already know:

• Hiragana and Katakana
• It can be preferable to know some basic grammar

Next you need an app for lookups! There are a lot of options out there which I introduced in my overview article. The most convenient way for the majority will be Migaku though, as it works on all systems and doesn't require any setup. You can get it by clicking on the following green button:

Now you need native material! There are of course tons of options around. But assuming you are a beginner, I would recommend audio books first. Reason being: They combine reading with listening. You don't need to go out and buy them though. You can find a lot of easy stuff on Youtube! My recommendations are:

• Tadoku: The Tadoku Channel has some conveniently sorted playlists for all levels. The easiest here is "Level Start" and then it gets harder from Level 0 to Level 5.
• Anpanman: Childrens stories are always a good way to learn a language. And the most famous ones is probably Anpanman - which One Punch Man is a parody of btw. Some channels uploaded videos where they read these books.

Looking for more advanced content? Some Japanese publishers actually upload episodes of their old anime to Youtube where you can watch them for free. I made a list of such channels in my article about how to watch Japanese channels with English subtitles. You can easily skip the English subtitle part there and use the sources with the method described here to learn the language!

And now the fun part: You can just visit these channels with Migakus* Youtube-Function. If they already have their own subtitles, you can start instantly. If not, Migaku can create some for you. I'll guide the through the entire process in the following gallery:

If you are playing on PC the most convenient method is to use meikipop. It's a very lightweight app really only focused on providing you a popup-dictionary. That means you can't create flashcards while playing. But due to it, it is extremely easy to use: You start it and it works, without having to do anything else.

On Smartphones Migaku lets you easily look everything up on Youtube, Websites and even eBooks. But what if you want to quickly search a word while playing a game or using the Netflix-App? For this you can use Dokuen!

The App uses character recognition and even allows you to create flashcards with the help of Anki. At the moment of writing you can't automatically add pictures to these, but this feature is planned for a later version. Before using it, I would recommend using the following settings:

Afterwards it is very straight forward:

Be aware though that due to DRM it is not possible to take pictures from a Netflix-Stream. No matter what, it will always turn up black. But you can still look up the subtitles and export them to Anki.

When it comes to understanding a language alone that in general is the entire learning progress: Read and listen native material and make sure you grasp the meaning of all words and the entire sentence. If you are doing this long enough, the language will just start to stick automatically.

Of course speaking requires its own training. But to be able to speak you first need to understand anyways. Because after all you obviously want to know what you are saying and also need to be able to understand the answer you will get. And with this method you basically have a safe space to practice understanding for hours without any pressure!