November 17, 2025 — Tatsumoto Ren
What if a person's motivation for learning Japanese
is only to play niche proprietary games/software
that will never be localized into their native language.
How could they follow the AJATT method?
If someone's only motivation
is playing a specific set of games,
that's a recipe for quitting once they've finished those games.
Try to broaden your content choices so you always have something to do in Japanese.
If you spend too long searching for content,
your immersion is paused and you don't progress.
To succeed with Japanese
you need both active and passive immersion,
and games alone won't cover everything.
This situation where you have only proprietary
options and no free alternatives
isn't unique to language learning.
I think Richard Stallman would say that if there's no libre alternative,
he'd still refuse to run the proprietary version.
From a software-freedom perspective,
not running proprietary software preserves your freedom just as much as running free software.
Tags: faq
October 30, 2025 — Tatsumoto Ren
This site contains AJATT's language learning guide and related information.
Here you'll find everything you need to know about learning foreign languages.
Read more...
October 27, 2025 — Tatsumoto Ren
Hi! In the past I have heard other Japanese learners say that women speak
Japanese very differently from men and that learning Japanese purely from
copying slice of life/CGDCT material will make you sound obviously effete and
feminine if you are a male. Is it something to worry about?
Yes, there are sizable gender differences in Japanese.
Men and women speak and act differently,
use different expressions, pronouns and sentence endings.
People also change how they speak as they age.
A 75-year-old man doesn't sound the same as a 15-year-old girl.
This is true for many other languages as well.
Read more...
May 25, 2025 — Tatsumoto Ren
What's actually the best way to find easy anime?
You would think just analyzing the subs for speed,
frequency and words you know, maybe even grammar,
would make it possible to rate how easy it will be for you.
When I learned Japanese,
I didn't worry about categorizing anime into easy VS hard.
The first anime I mined after making my mining deck was Steins;Gate.
Although it isn't the simplest anime if you count the difficulty of every word,
it wasn't hard to mine from it.
I simply went through it line by line,
adding every sentence with unknown words to Anki.
For beginners,
it's fine to start with
any slice of life anime
without stressing over the difficulty.
Don't try to mine sentences right from day one.
I only began sentence mining after I had learned more than 1,000 words
from a premade deck.
There are many resources that claim to organize anime by difficulty for Japanese learners.
I think it's best to avoid them.
They often miss the mark,
potentially leading you to anime that isn't interesting or suitable for your level.
Plus,
many of these resources require you to create an account
and come with questionable money-grab schemes.
If you find an anime that looks fun, it's probably the best one for you personally.
Tags: faq
April 30, 2025 — Tatsumoto Ren
I printed out some handwriting practice templates.
However,
I haven't found any recommendations on
how many times to write each word when reviewing in Anki.
My question is,
should I write each word only once, or should I practice in batches?
If the latter, how many repetitions should I do per batch?
Write each word once.
You just need to write a word correctly with the correct stroke order.
The goal is to test whether you can recall how to write something from memory.
For example,
if you were to go to Japan and needed to write by hand, you'd want to be prepared.
Although writing a word multiple times in a row might help a little,
the real benefits come from spaced repetition.
Waiting before trying to recall a word again is more effective,
which is why Anki has learning steps.
Anki takes care of the intervals for you,
and if you forget how to write a word,
the program will show you the corresponding flashcard more often.
For learning handwriting, see Writing TSCs.
Tags: faq
March 02, 2025 — Tatsumoto Ren
Is it worth learning words not just by associating a word with its translation,
but also in reverse — from translation to word?
For example,
if I look at a list of translations and try to recall the corresponding Japanese word.
It feels much harder than simply memorizing the translation.
However, this method seems to strengthens my memory.
Read more...
January 18, 2025 — Tatsumoto Ren
Absolutely!
Immersion is crucial for mastering a foreign language.
Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine,
optimized for language learning
and designed to learn languages naturally.
By surrounding yourself with content in the target language (TL),
you begin to internalize vocabulary and grammar intuitively,
even if you don't notice it.
Read more...
January 08, 2025 — Tatsumoto Ren
Traditional language classes suck.
They cost money.
They are boring.
And they are not effective.
If you're enrolling in a typical textbook-based Japanese class,
hoping that teachers will magically transfer
textbook material into your brain
during short daily lessons,
you might want to rethink your strategy.
Read more...
November 30, 2024 — Tatsumoto Ren
I have some exciting news, folks!
You've been asking me to do this for a long time,
and now the moment has finally arrived.
I've decided to discontinue our Matrix community
in favor of a different platform.
Read more...
November 11, 2024 — Tatsumoto Ren
It's up to you,
but we recommend spending around 15 to 30 minutes each day on grammar.
We all know that reading about grammar isn't exactly the most exciting thing in the world.
Thus,
we think that consuming grammar theory incrementally over time
will make it easier to consolidate and integrate what you've learned.
If you choose to spend about 30 minutes a day studying grammar,
it's perfectly fine to study basic grammar alongside
Ankidrone Foundation
and/or
Ankidrone Essentials.
Tags: faq
