I'm not an expert on language learning. I barely speak my native English, and sometimes I don't do the good speak the English. But I did spend a bunch of time doing internet searches and making Anki decks instead of actually studying, so hopefully some of that is helpful.
My collection generally includes both textbooks and books to read in the given language.
- https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search/subs (Any)
- https://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=subtitles%2Fjapanese%2F (Japanese)
- https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/sub (Japanese)
All of my custom Anki decks can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZG_yYPm2DQAdKGenJQg7FkmoRPwLLjk3?usp=share_link
Descriptions of my custom decks follow below.
I grabbed native-to-English and native-to-native dictionaries and also several word frequency lists and generated decks of ~30,000 vocab words with all the definitions from the dictionaries, with the words sorted from most-common to least-common.
The N1 and N0 kanji decks had no examples for most of their kanji, so I used some dictionaries to backfill more example entries. I've also manually edited some of the readings because some of the rarer kanji didn't include readings that were present in the examples.
I found this deck in cloze form from here, but I changed the format of the deck to just present the example sentences, and you just decide if you sufficiently understand the sentences or not. I thought the cloze form was not helpful at all, but you may disagree.
Essentially the same as above. The original deck is from here but I didn't like its card format, so I changed it.
I think I just changed the display format of the characters from a deck off of AnkiWeb, but I honestly don't remember. Maybe the deck isn't custom at all.
- My Collection
- https://sites.google.com/site/gtonguedict/home/stardict-dictionaries
- http://download.huzheng.org/
- https://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=subtitles%2Fjapanese%2F
- https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/sub
Light Novels
- https://jpdb.io/ (also has vocab lists for each anime/manga)
- https://learnjapaneseanime.com/anime-recommendations/
- https://learnnatively.com/resources/search/
- https://japaneselevelup.com/difficulty-level-guide-everything-japanese/
- https://bookmeter.com/
- spreadsheet for word frequency in anime
- Cure Dolly (Japanese grammar lessons taught from the Japanese perspective, rather than a translate-to-English perspective)
- Transcripts (if you want to read the lessons instead)
There's a Chrome extension called Language Reactor which allows you to display dual subs on Netflix and YouTube videos. It also has a bunch of other features you can enable or disable; like translating words when you mouse over them, automatically stopping after every subtitle so you have time to process it, and enabling pronunciation guides like pinyin and furigana.
To watch stuff without Language Reactor, I generally use either dual subs (native + English) or just native subs. To display dual subs, you need a video player that can show two subtitles simultaneously. I use PotPlayer on desktop and mpv on android
The easiest method I've found for having dual-language manga or comics is to just purchase a physical copy of the book in both English and the native language. Then you put the English one behind the native one while you read, and anytime you get stuck, you just slide the native one down a bit and read the English.
A method other people like is to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to read the comic's text and translate it. I haven't done this because it can be annoying to set up and use, and OCR isn't perfect, so actually looking stuff up and getting a reasonable result is probably kinda difficult.
With that said, here's some software to investigate if you're interested:
- https://github.com/cameronkinsella/manga-translator (computer)
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ichigo-manga-translator/lepcfgkehgeiblekejomdmdklmjdmflp (Chrome)
- https://github.com/Rattlehead15/tachiyomiOCR (Android)
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kantan-manga/id1518666365 (iOS)
The above are pretty much all for Japanese. For phonetic writing systems, it's probably easier to just type the words into a digital dictionary. For non-phonetic systems that aren't Japanese (Mandarin Chinese, for example) I don't have good recommendations.
I love my Kindle, it's great. If I'm only looking up one word every few pages, I have no real problem with it. If I'm still learning a lot though, and am looking up one or more words per page, the Kindle dictionary functionality is a nightmare. Loading dictionaries onto the Kindle is finnicky (I haven't found good software to convert from popular dictionary formats to what Kindle expects), and selecting text is difficult at best (like in Italian) and impossible at worst (Kindle actively fights you when selecting Japanese text because it has no spaces, it is often actually impossible to select the exact word you want to look up because Kindle disagrees with you on whether or not it's a word, and is often wrong).
I use Moon+ Reader as my reading app, and I use GoldenDict (Android)(Windows) as my dictionary app.
I can highlight text in Moon+ Reader and hit "dictionary" to send the text to GoldenDict, just like in Kindle, but with less fighting the text selection.
I use GoldenDict because it allows you to load your own digital dictionaries rather than just having its own available. That way, I can load both native-to-native dictionaries and native-to-English dictionaries, and if I don't understand a word, I can read several definitions in both languages and compare. (Often the native-to-English definitions suck, even in well-respected dictionaries, they usually try too hard to find an approximate English equivalent word even when one doesn't exist).
See the resources above for my collection of dictionaries.
I'm an Anki kid. See the resources for the decks I use.
hello, for subtitles i use kitsunekko, [https://github.com/kienkzz/NanakoRaws-Anime-Japanese-subtitles] and as for the player i use potplayer as you mentioned.Though https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/sub is now taken down.You could also use the extension yomichan for katakana,hiragana and kanji(depending on your dictionary).