Hello everybody!
(You are very welcome to reply, whether you're a native English speaker or not)

Spanish is my native language, and my English, as you can see, is, at best, rudimentary/decorative. Yeah, I'm from Spexico, I eat tacos and "pastel de papas", dance flamenco, samba, cueca, and tango, play zampoña (see? I write eñes) and charango, I like lucha libre and corridas de toros etc.

Okay. That was just to start off with some humor; now, back to the original topic.

I've opened this thread to ask non-native English speakers some questions about any English resources they use to study:

"Are you having a hard time using it? Are you making it work? Do you think you get the gist of it? And how do you pull it off?"

For all the English I've learned, I've learned to read (through reading) — and that's why my writing style is so awkward, with me using commas the Spanish way, and messing up with "it's" or "is". So, my English isn't that great, and I'm sure I'm not special: I think plenty of people on this forum must be in the same spot.

As I said before, my native language is Spanish, and Spanish resources for learning are all old, incomplete, or just plain bad, which forces me and others who are interested in learning Japanese to rely on resources in English — this forum included.

There are things like Nukemarine's Suggested Guide for Beginners, I think that is really well explained and all, but even so I overcharged just reading the 15 pages of the thead's posts 15 pages has made me question whether I can really learn Japanese through a language I'm not even that good in. I have the Spanish RtK translation (I'm on kanji 870, yay!), but it's an old revision translation, and that's the only good resource I've found in my native language. Series like Minna no Nihongo are old and expensive here.

But in spite of all this, I think I can see the glass as half-full: maybe I can learn English while learning Japanese.
What do you think? Hope that you guys can give me some (lovely) feedback or suggestions!

Edit: Improved this post thanks to Strangers, you can see the original here with all my English mistakes.

First of all, your English is awesome. In fact, seeing how so many 'foreigners' have such natural English is one of the things that inspired me to learn Japanese in the first place so I guess I owe you a thank you, haha

Anyway, as you might have guessed English is my native language, but I can kinda relate to your situation because I'm studying some Korean (my L3) through mostly Japanese resources (my L2). Generally it's fine, though that might be helped by the fact that Japanese and Korean are so similar. Sometimes I don't grasp explanations 100% but that is an opportunity to learn some Japanese at least. Thanks to this I would guess that there's a lot of linguistic terms that I know in Japanese now which I don't know in English which is kinda cool.

I suppose I can be quite laid back about it though because I'm a great believer in immersion/input-based learning, so I think that even if I don't understand the explanations 100%, the vast majority of my improvement will come from native Korean materials.

[Zgarbas]

Well, there's little you can do but try

If I run across a word I don't know in English I just look it up... but I usually dismiss the word since if I don't know it in English it's unlikely that I'll ever encounter it.

Thanks for the compliment Ash_S, I'm blushing now :$. What was your Japanese level when you began?(just to compare with my TOEIC level)

Zgarbas: if the country under your nick doesn't lie, we both speak romances languages weee. With just I glance, I think that your English is better than mine, you improved your English skills while learning Japanese or was already at that level when you started?

I think I'll just keep going on.

It doesn't matter which language is your studying vehicle as long as you can freely think in that language.

[Zgarbas]

Omar_Zupial Wrote:Zgarbas: if the country under your nick doesn't lie, we both speak romances languages weee. With just I glance, I think that your English is better than mine, you improved your English skills while learning Japanese or was already at that level when you started?

My English was already pretty good. I did get to learn some things that I never bothered with (mainly bird and tree names, which I never bothered associating with actual birds and trees) though .

Most language resources seems to be in either English or French, and I can't be bothered to learn French.

My biggest issue was RtK with its strange keywords. :p

(I'm also an ESL speaker; my native language is Norwegian. I score 7.5 when I took the IELTS in 2011, so my English should be good enough to be used in learning Japanese. :p)

EDIT: Your English seems to be more than good enough, btw.

While it depends on what studying habits you go with, I wouldn't say you're gonna need English to take you all the way through to Japanese fluency, or at least not master level English. I'd like to go as far as to say you can't rely on one language all the way through to master another, but I don't have anything on my mind to support that opinion at the moment.

Your Japanese understanding will eventually be at a point where it can entertain further learning of the language by itself. As you get further down the road, if you indulge in content you can understand the vast majority of, you'll probably find that you can't be bothered referring to resources to keep learning.

Omar_Zupial Wrote:There are things like Nukemarine's Suggested Guide for Beginners, I think that is really well explained and all, but even so I overcharged just reading the 15 pages of the thead's posts 15 pages has made me question whether I can really learn Japanese through a language I'm not even that good in. I have the Spanish RtK translation (I'm on kanji 870, yay!), but it's an old revision translation, and that's the only good resource I've found in my native language. Series like Minna no Nihongo are old and expensive here.

Ugh, reading 15 pages of a forum thread? If I had been introduced to that thread now I'd read the first post, probably the rest of the first page, then skip to the most recent one to see if there'd be anything new and updated. The rest is just pretty boring, and the more boring it is the quicker you grow tired of it. How do you do on reading English novels that you enjoy?

About RTK, I had a small field on my Anki cards for definitions of the keywords here and there I didn't know, and sometimes pictures. I copy-pasted over definitions from thefreedictionary.com, I found that quick monolingual English explanations felt more in place, at helped visualize the keywords better than Swedish translations did.

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:Ugh, reading 15 pages of a forum thread?

I was having problems with Core and how to start it — the Nukemarine's Core deck has so many fields that I don't know what do to if I just want simple sentences or vocabulary, and because I don't like asking question already answered I began reading. But I still don't know what to do xd.

It's true that English isn't needed to achieve fluency, but it is for basic explanations an get a intermediate level.

I did the TOEIC some time ago and scored 440 points in reading, I've never did so much writing until this post.

Thanks for the comments, folks!

Hi there.

I'm from México, my native language is mexicano and I love tacos de carnitas.

I personally use KanjiDamage (finished and 86% mature),a customized version of Core 10k deck, Taekim's japanese grammar guide and jgram.org.

Almost a year ago I decided I would use only english resources to learn japanese, even though I'm far from good in english. I'm confident in my reading and listening skills (I can understand Chris Rock stand ups) but you would rip your ears if you heard me speaking, so at least, I hope your eyes won't bleed when you read this. I use punctuation marks the spanish way too, I think.

I chose english as a bridge to japanese land, mainly for convenience. There is only one set of books in spanish written by spanish speakers I know of[1] and everything else is either in english or it's a translation from english. The other reason is that I'm interested in the laddering method and although my japanese still in it's infancy, as I learn new concepts, sometimes I learn new english words and concepts too, so I go both ways on that ladder.

My head hurts!, this is my first attempt to write in english... excluding the exercises in the english workbooks. I'm inspired by your post, I'll make an effort to refine my english skills while crawling to the japanese promised land.

[1] Japonés para Hispanohablantes

¡Hola, lalo5! Tú hablas inglés muy bien. The only mistakes I noticed were when you didn't capitalize the names of languages. It sounded very natural! I hope you continue to write in English and challenge yourself. Keep up the good work!

I'm also studying Japanese through Enligsh resources and, to be honest, I'm not having too much of a hard time with it. Of course, I'm not perfect at English and I do end up carrying certain things from my L1 (Brazilian Portuguese) and doing some grammatical mistakes while doing production in English just like you do.

From my experience, as long as you can comprehend most of what's in your studying resources, you shouldn't have too much of a problem. What may happen is that you might end up not understanding certain nuances due to your L1. For example, while I did RTK in English, I had some problem setting the 税 ("tax" kanji) appart from 料 ("fee" kanji), since when translated to my L1, they both mean the same thing. Still, I don't have too much of a problem setting them apart while doing written production or reading practice in Japanese since I've learned their uses in words and I don't rely in English to actually make use of the Japanese language, just to learn it. For example, I know that 料理　is written with 料　and not 税, and chances are that I'll never mistake one for the other since they are used in a lot of different ways from each other.

As for learning English while learning Japanese, chances are you can do it at your current level. Even I learned certain things I didn't know while studying Japanese (certain RTK keywords and terms such as "commuter's pass" that I had never heard about before are now part of my vocabulary), and your level doesn't seem that far from mine (in fact, it might be even better). Still, you can't be certain of anything until you try, so you should simply go and try learning it. If you ever feel like it's being too difficult, you can always stop for some time to better your English knowledge and then come back. But remember: always stay motivated while studying. That's the most important point of all, since lack of motivation seems to be the main reason why people quit learning any language.

では、頑張ってください。

Rtk has some really strange keywords imho.
As for me, my mother tongue is russian. My second language is German and my third is English (still in progress ;)).
Most Rtk keywords can't be translated into Russian all too well (or so I think), but the german analogies/translations help a lot. Since German and English are pretty similar.
I plan to learn Chinese based on Japanese later on... so in 20-30 years at best :D

P.S.
your English is awesome. :)

At your level of English, you shouldn't have too much trouble using it to study Japanese.

You will have a little googling to do. My English is pretty near perfect at this point, but I still encounter terms I'm not familiar with, and have to look up (just a couple of days ago, I had to look up "graduate school" - I assumed that's what comes after college, but I wasn't entirely sure). Other common examples are the names of birds and plants, like Zgarbas mentioned. Oh, and fish. Those are the worst, and you're gonna come across a lot of them learning Japanese.

But, really, it's not a significant problem. If you look it up once, it's usually enough.

I use all-English resources to learn Japanese, because they're much better than the resources in my own native language. (Which is kinda odd, because there are so many ethnic Japanese people in my country. I guess most of them aren't interested in learning the language of their grandparents... but I digress.).

I'm so used to English resources that my flash cards are Japanese/English, even though my English sucks.