Welcome to the Mass Immersion Approach (MIA) resources sheet! This page is the resource hub for the MIA discord server. For that reason, please don't distribute the link to this github gist to people outside of the server.
- Important Links
- Anime
- Subtitles
- Manga
- Drama
- TV Shows
- Movies
- Audio
- Books
- Visual Novels
- Dictionaries
- Sentences
- Pitch Accent
- Tools
- Miscellaneous Links
These are the most important links for starting your MIA journey. You should familiarize yourself with the theories and methods and programs they describe before asking any questions in the discord as the answer to your question will most likely be in one of these links.
All Japanese All The Time (AJATT) is the original method created by Khaztumoto that he used to become fluent in Japan. The website can be hard to navigate, so it's best to read the ENTIRE table of contents in order.
Note: Originally, I had a sentence saying to skip over the Lazy Kanji Cards articles on the AJATT table of contents and to only read the original How To Learn And Review Kanji Using an SRS because lazy kanji is bad and you shouldn't do it, but this was before Matt released his HUGE UPDATE | MIA & New Ideas About Kanji and Grammar video detailing why it might make more sense to do lazy kanji initially (not even necessarily all the kanji in RTK 1 + 3), and then traditional RTK when you are closer to fluency. You might as well read both sets of articles and watch the video so you have an idea of what the differences between lazy kanji and traditional RTK are. If you are still unsure about how to approach RTK, feel free to ask for advice in the discord channel.
This should give you a foundational understanding of how the AJATT and MIA methods work, as well as how to get started learning Japanese, however there are differences between AJATT and MIA, so it shouldn't be taken as gospel.
Matt VS Japan has been making videos about AJATT/MIA for many years. The goal of his videos are to fill in the gaps left by the things the AJATT TOC doesn't explain well (or at all), inform people about how to go about learning kanji, immersing, mining sentences and actually doing AJATT/MIA, as well as to iterate further on language acquisition theory and practice.
Once again, you should watch all of his videos. The order in which you watch them doesn't really matter, but I would suggest going from oldest to newest as he references older videos sometimes.
Some videos to pay special attention to are:
- How to Learn Japanese | AJATT Overview/Timeline
- Q&A Part 1: Kanji | AJATT
- GIANT AJATT Q&A
- Why "Remembering The Kanji" is The Best Way to Learn Kanji
- How to Make RTK Anki Cards
- AJATT | How to Immerse: Listening
- The Dilemma of Theory vs Practice
- I Stopped Using Anki | The SRS Endgame
- HUGE UPDATE | MIA & New Ideas About Kanji and Grammar
- Does Input Have to Be "Comprehensible"?
- How Often Should You Look Things Up?
Matt is slowly adding to this website, it is very much in an unfinished state, but the end goal is to have a website that details each step of MIA as well as guide the user on the MIA journey.
Going through the Table of Contents will help deepen your understanding of MIA.
Anki is an incredibly powerful spaced repetition tool that you will use to aid your language learning journey. It is (in my opinion), the best flashcard program available. The customizability is unparalleled, there are heaps of addons that extend the capabilities of anki immensely, it's supported on Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as both Android and iOS (the iOS official app costs money though, unfortunately). You can also sync between different devices so you can do your reps anywhere.
Don't even bother with Memrise.
I would recommend reading the Anki Manual and familiarizing yourself with a bit of HTML so you can start customizing your own cards to your liking. I would also encourage you to download community decks and learn from the HTML used in them, but don't actually used pre-made decks, always make your own cards.
Here are some subs2srs decks made by people in the discord channel. You can upload your own subs2srs decks here (please ensure the audio is at least 128kb/s, with about 150ms of padding, and that the images aren't too big).
James W. Heisig's Remembering The Kanji (RTK) is the best way to learn kanji. RTK1, commonly referred to as just RTK, teaches you 2200 kanji by getting you to associate single keywords with imaginative stories that you create. These stories contain references to primitive graphical elements which you then use to draw kanji characters. This forms a relationship between a single, unique keyword and a kanji character. RTK3 contains a further 800 kanji, taking the total to 3000.
Note: the number of kanji you learn may vary depending on the editions of RTK1 and RTK3 you use, but overall this isn't that important as the difference is <200 kanji.
As of the 18th of July 2018, the latest editions of RTK are as follows:
- RTK1: 6th Edition - 2200 kanji
- RTK3: 3rd Edition - 800 kanji
RTK1 and RTK3 are essential to learning kanji, so buying a copy is a good idea, however if you ask nicely on the discord you may be able to get some nice PDF versions.
Download and install Google's Japanese IME. This is really only useful for Windows users because it's better than the Microsoft Japanese IME, and the Mac Japanese IME is pretty good already. This is the tool you will use to type Japanese on your computer. Some quick googling for IME tips or IME hotkeys should get you pretty familiar with it.
For some Tae Kim's Grammar Guide was seen as one of the best introductory resources for Japanese grammar, however recently many members of the community have begun to advocate the JLPT 単語 series as being of superior quality due to its i+1 structure.
The N5 (sometimes sold as はじめまして日本語能力試験 N5 単語 １０００) and to an extent the N4 books are recommended initially, however the N3 to N1 books should be avoided in favour or sentence mining.
Messaging a moderator on the discord channel with proof of purchase of the books will entitle you to receive an anki deck made from the book with native audio recordings.
Although it has gone out of favour a bit with the advent of the above mentioned JLPT 単語 books, this book will still teach you the fundamentals of Japanese grammar in a detailed yet easy to understand manner, without bogging you down with exercises and dialogues like Genki and other textbooks. There is also an online version but I find it harder to navigate than the PDF.
Your goal with this book is to gain a solid understanding of grammar. You should make sentence cards for pretty much every sentence in the book. They often won't be in i+1 order, so you might have to do some shuffling around or laddering in order to make them so.
Note: Copying and pasting from the PDF can be weird. I've encountered situations where copy and pasting kanji into a search box in notepad++ won't work, but then typing out that same kanji will work. I would recommend typing out the sentences from Tae Kim's into Anki to avoid this problem, and also to learn how to use your IME.
Here's a spreadsheet with all the sentences from Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, however it's from an older version so some sentences may be missing/different, but you can still easily copy and paste them.
Alternatively there is Tae Kim Optimized. This is part 1 of Tae Kim's grammar guide as an Anki deck. It includes vocabulary cards as well as sentence cards. Vocabulary cards also include the sentence the vocabulary first appears in for further context. In addition, native audio is provided for all cards, both vocabulary and sentences. While I would be weary of using pre-made decks, the audio is very helpful. There is also a spreadsheet with all the sentences in it. Credit goes to Nukemarine for this.
Anime is a great source of immersion material as well as sentences for mining. Slice of life anime are especially good for beginners as they often use simple vocabulary and typically have fun, light-hearted stories that are easy to follow. That being said, the thing that makes anime so great is that there are so many different shows about so many different things that there's something for nearly everyone.
Download anime:
- Nyaa: a torrent site that has many copies of a lot of anime, although the older and more obscure ones might not have any seeders. You can find anything from low quality to incredibly high quality rips on here, so it's worth looking around.
- HorribleSubs: a fansub group that releases high quality rips quite soon after the episodes air (obviously turn off the subtitles). They have both torrent and direct download options. You can usually find most of their torrents on Nyaa as well, including batch downloads for entire seasons of shows.
- anisource: an aggregate site for high quality raws from Raws-4U, スカー Raws and Leopard-Raws
- AnimeOut: free downloads of lots of anime, with batch links as well, although some old encodings may have hardcoded English subs
- B9GOOD: stream recently aired anime, also had download links
- fluentcards: useful once you've downloaded your media. If you have subtitles to go with the video then this website is a great way to watch it. More info here.
Stream anime:
- Netflix: a subscription-based, on-demand streaming service that has a good selection of anime to watch, depending on where you live. If you want to get access to A LOT more anime on netflix than you normally can, you can use a VPN to trick Netflix into thinking you're in Japan.
- Animelon: a free streaming site that has a good selection of anime with the added bonus of having japanese subtitles, however the subtitles can be buggy sometimes.
- anjsub: A free streaming site that has decent list of anime with japanese subtitles. There is also an interactive transcript next to the videos so you can skip around to certain lines whenever you want.
- AnimeJpnSub: same as anjsub with a similar interactive transcipt while also being ad-free
- B9GOOD: stream recently aired anime, also had download links
- Xavier's Retimed JP Sub Pack v01 (425 Tiles): 1.4GB of subtitles, re-timed to specific releases, so you know they're accurate as long as you download the correct release
- kitsunekko: The most comprehensive source of Japanese subtitles that I know of. You won't find every anime here, but a lot of popular stuff is here, albeit you may need to re-time the subs depending on which release you downloaded. WARNING: Don't use the link on the homepage to download all japanese subs, as there may be malicious files in some of the directories, for example "Ore no imouto ga konnani kawaii" contains a virus. I think this is because the uploads are not strictly moderated by anyone.
- Subadub - Chrome
- Subadub - Firefox: A browser addon that allows downloading of subtitles straight from Netflix as well as enhances netflix subtitles (allows copying and pasting, among other things). Made by symstym from the discord server.
- Aegisub: very powerful and free subtitle editor
- D-Addicts - Subtitle Forum: Drama subtitles. Requires you to make a free forum account.
- jpsubbers drama subtitles: Index of a decent amount of drama subtitles. Click the directories that start with an
@symbol and you can find folders sorted by year and season. - Dramanote: not subtitles, but drama scripts, which you could still use for sentence mining
- JRPG scripts: scripts from a bunch of JRPGs, mainly Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest
- Nyaa: a torrent tracker that is primarily used for anime but has a decent amount of manga scans as well
- raw-cans: this website has scans of a lot of manga, as well as shounen jump, young jump and other manga magazines
- lhscan: frequently updated with scans of the latest manga, although you can't find everything there, and you can also download the scans of each chapter
- zip-all: another scan website that also has magazines and light novels
- SenManga: Manga that you can read online. Not updated very often and won't have the latest popular manga or anything but the site is well made and there's still a decent selection.
- shinmoemanga: Manga scans, decent selection but some series might not be up to date
- BookLive: Buy manga and books, there's some free manga on it too
- sokuyomi: I think this site might have some free manga on it, not sure though
- Puboo: some free books and manga in ebook formats
- AvistaZ: Private torrent tracker with a wide selection of asian media. Lots of hard to find movies and tv shows in good quality most of the time. Sometimes they have open registrations but it's normally invite only. Some people on the discord server might have invites if you ask nicely.
- Google drive: Google drive folder full of drama. I think these are recorded straight from TV, so the file sizes are quite large relative to their length. Some of the files are password protected, ask in the Discord server if you want the password.
- Nyaa: Not as good for dramas as it is for anime and manga, but you can still find some dramas on there
- mhometheater: lots of dubbed western drama
- VIKI: A small selection of drama. To turn off English subtitles and if you want Japanese subtitles, turn off learn mode in the video player options.
- Bakiguy: Download currently airing drama.
- DramaHD: More drama, doesn't like adblockers.
- ForJoyTV: Streaming service that allows you to watch I think any japanese TV channel (formerly known as FujiTVLive). You can make a free account and try it out for a day (or keep making free accounts every single day), otherwise you can buy subscriptions for varying amounts of time. Great value for money and you get access to pretty much every Japanese TV channel.
- AvistaZ: Private torrent tracker with a wide selection of asian media. Lots of hard to find movies and TV shows in good quality most of the time. Sometimes they have open registrations but it's normally invite only. Some people on the discord server might have invites if you ask nicely.
- mhometheater: lots of japanese media as well as dubs of western media
- Ok.ru: russian site with re-streams of a few live TV channels
- MioMio: TV shows of all kinds, not sure if they have a schedule or it's just random uploads
- BiliBili: chinese website with a bunch of TV shows
- FreshLive: more TV shows
- 9tsu: even more TV shows
- Nyaa: a torrent tracker that is primarily used for anime but probably has TV shows on it too
- Japan Encodings: western movies with Japanese dubs
- mhometheater: lots of japanese media as well as dubs of western media
- JDownloader to download more than like 5GB a day or something
- AvistaZ: Private torrent tracker with a wide selection of asian media. Lots of hard to find movies and tv shows in good quality most of the time. Sometimes they have open registrations but it's normally invite only. Some people on the discord server might have invites if you ask nicely.
- Nyaa: a torrent tracker that is primarily used for anime but has movies on it as well
- MEGA folder: (NOTE - THIS LINK HAS BEEN REMOVED AS IT'S DEAD) Big folder of audiobooks of novels and light novels. For a list of audiobooks in the folder that also have books in the DJT library, click here. Supposedly someone has a back of this folder but I'm not certain.
- Audible: The Japanese version of Amazon's Audible service. Huge selection of audiobooks, but soon they're moving away from the model where you pay for access to everything, instead you'll get credits every month to use, as well as discounts on other audiobooks
- Quicksleur: Pimsleur's Japanese lessons with less silence, saving ~10 minutes per lesson, edited by Lucas from the discord. After you listen to the Quicksleur lesson, you should then move on to Trimsleur for immersion.
- Trimsleur: a trimmed version of Pimsleur's Japanese audio course with no English, edited by Nukemarine
- 15 minute audiobook samples
- Matt's music playlist
- inAudible: software for converting and removing DRM from audiobooks download from Audible
- Itazuraneko library: Heaps of ebooks in various formats including mobi, epub and azw3. Primarily fiction light novels but there's some books on there as well. A more up-to-date version of the now dead DJT library. I think it has everything that the DJT library had and more.
- Library Genesis: Contains many nonfiction books or various topics. the search function is mostly broken, so you need to simply search "japanese", make the category "language" and then scroll through the 40 pages to find whatever you want. Most of the files are PDFs though, not ebook formats, although you could try converting them if you want. Downloads can be quite slow sometimes, but if you put the download link into Jdownloader it can speed up the downloads a lot.
- Aozora Bunko 青空文庫: A free library of thousands of public-domain and free books. All their books are actually in a specific format that is just plain text (i.e. .txt files) that can be read by aozora bunko readers.
- Puboo: some free books and manga in ebook formats
- 3000 or 4000 books: Lots of books in the Aozora Bunko format. The link said 4000 but the download says 3000 so I don't know how many there are. There's a booklist here.
- Convert Aozora Bunko to MOBI: follow this guide to convert Aozora Bunko format books into MOBI so you can put them on a kindle (or use calibre to convert them to something else)
- BookLive: you can buy ebooks here, not sure if there's much free stuff though
- Marxist Internet Archive: I dunno, this was on the spreadsheet so I kept it
- Visual Novel Recommendations: google doc full of information about a bunch of visual novels made by the visual novels subreddit I think
- Nyaa: you can probably find VNs here as well
The ability to quickly look up an accurate and informative definition of a word is incredibly valuable, however it should not be a replacement for immersion, as you cannot intuitively acquire the meaning of a word solely through reading its definition. That being said, having access to multiple different dictionaries is still very useful. While physical are nice and all, there are some great online and digital dictionaries out there.
Online dictionaries:
- Jisho.org: a great English/Japanese online dictionary that has many search options and also the ability to search by drawing or combining radicals. A great dictionary for bilingual definitions, however it's definitely not as good as a real monolingual Japanese dictionary.
- Sakura-Paris: A dictionary website where you can search many common Japanese monolingual dictionaries including daijirin, shinmeikai, the NHK pitch accent dictionary, as well as Japanese->English and Japanese->Chinese dictionaries too. Probably the most comprehensive online dictionary out there.
- Weblio: an online dictionary that searches daijirin (so it has pitch accent), wiktionary and other dictionaries
- Goo
Digital dictionaries:
- Qolibri: EPWING viewing software. No longer being developed, but it still works fine on modern systems
- Qolibri dark theme: A nicer, less blinding style for qolibri. Grey text on a black (really it's dark grey) background. Unfortunately the whole UI can't be made in this style, and some symbols are still black, but it's better than nothing. Load it up by editing the dictionary style sheet (the button that says .css on it) and selecting the file.
- GoldenDict: in-development software for reading many different types of dictionry files, including EPWINGS
- GoldenDict dark theme: Copy this file into your C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\GoldenDict folder. It's easy to customize it as well, there's comments in there telling you what each section is for.
- Main EPWINGs: A selection of the most useful EPWINGs. This, as well as the NHK EPWING are recommended for everyone.
- NHK pitch accent dictionary EPWING: very useful EPWING with pitch accent information as well as recordings of words and sometimes entire sentences
- Shinmeikai EPWING with pitch accent: some versions of the shinmeikai EPWING don't have pitch accent information even though they should, this one does
- Lots of EPWINGs: A large amount of EPWINGs, some of which won't be be very useful for most people, e.g. the 医歯薬医学大辞書 which is full of medical terms. There's overlap between this and the Main EPWINGs link.
- Kindle version of daijirin: A kindle version of the daijirin dictionary made using epwing2kindle. Useful since the Japanese dictionary that comes with the Kindle doesn't have pitch accent information, but daijirin does.
- Quickly Grabbing Audio with ShareX: an instructional video Matt made that shows you how to setup ShareX to quickly record audio with a single hotkey, great for quickly grabbing a short bit of audio from something you're watching for use on a card.
- Yourei: search for sentences from native media (books I think?)
- The green sentence site: Search for words and then filter sentences by other parts of speech that appear with that word. Sources sentences from somewhere different to the blue site, but otherwise functions the same.
- The blue sentence site: Search for words and then filter sentences by other parts of speech that appear with that word. Sources sentences from somewhere different to the green site, but otherwise functions the same.
- Forvo: search for recordings of natives pronouncing words
- Wadoku: Japanese/German dictionary that has pitch accent
- Weblio: an online Japanese dictionary that searches daijirin (so it has pitch accent), wiktionary and other dictionaries
- NHK Pitch Accent Dictionary - Scan: scan of the NHK Pitch Accent dictionary, specifically the sections at the back (which aren't in the EPWING) that explain the theory, rules and patterns
- 新明解 Pitch Accent Dictionary 2nd Ed - Scan: scan of the Shinmeikai Pitch Accent dictionary, specifically the sections at the back that explain the theory, rules and patterns.
- Japanese Accent Study Website: useful site with pitch accent information for counters, verb conjugations, place names, surnames and Japanese celebrities
- akenotsuki: a very detailed website on 京言葉 (Kyoto dialect) that also has a cool dictionary
- OJAD Recordings: Pitch accent and audio recordings (not for everything) of a lot of words from different lessons from a bunch of textbooks. While it's not worth going through the lessons for each textbook, it has a search engine that's pretty useful.
- OJAD: generate text-to-speech sentences with somewhat accurate pitch accent (don't assume it's correct)
- subs2srs: Takes video files and subtitle files and cards with screenshots and/or audio for each line in the sub file. Also useful for batch extracting audio from videos.
- SoftEther VPN Client: Easy to use VPN client, ideal for watching Japanese Netflix and stuff. Matt explains how to set it up and use it in this video.
- Jdownloader: free download management tool
- Calibre: powerful, free software for converting, editing and organizing ebooks
- youtube-dl: command-line program to download from youtube and other video websites easily
- youtube-dl-gui: a GUI over youtube-dl
- Switch Converter: video converter
- yomichan: Firefox and Chrome addon that allows you to import dictionaries to get instant hover-lookup of words
- Capture2Text: optical character recognition (OCR) software that allows you turn text from images (e.g. scanned manga) into actual text characters
- JGlossator: a complicated piece of software that I don't know much about but apparently it does some cool stuff, but it's probably more worthwhile immersing than figuring out what it does and how to use it
- Free iOS VPN
- Ebook Readers: honestly the best thing to read ebooks on is either your phone, or even better a kindle or similar ebook reader, but this site has a list of software that allows you to read them on your PC
- FluentCards: drag and drop your kindle vocab.db file into here to extract all the words you've highlighted while you've been reading
- Anki Vocab Import Addon: import kindle database into anki
- Kanji stroke order font: handwritten font with built in stroke order numbers
- Kanji stroke order colored SVGs: Coloured vector graphics files (SVGs) that contain stroke order numbers. The above font is actually based off the SVG data that these files are made from. I prefer these over the stroke order font because they look pretty and they have simplified versions of the kanji that have them (they have
-Hyougaiin the filename), which are the ones taught in RTK and the ones you should learn. - Custom fonts for Mac guide
- Premade subs2srs decks: Pre-made subs2srs decks. Useful if you can't be bothered downloading properly timed subs, although you should still make your own cards, just use the pictures and sentences from these decks
- Japanese Discord Servers: invite links to lots of Japanese discord servers
Link has been removed. Thanks :)