There are so many options for learning Japanese or any language. The amount of choices can be overwhelming. As many beginners have found out, the early stages of language learning can be tough and it is easy to blame the methods, techniques or resources for the slow progress.
So what should YOU use? Of course I’m professional Japanese tutor so take my recommendations with a grain of salt, but I have experience with many different students from many different backgrounds and there are certain things that tend to work with everyone. Someone from reddit has also written this guide which I think has some very good ideas and strategies.
However before you start learning Japanese, or do anything that is going to require significant effort and time commitment, is to start off with some goals in mind. I’ve done another post where I go through the fundamentals of goal setting with language learning which I would really recommend you read and then 1) set what your own goals are and 2) how you will try to achieve them.
Step 1: Learn Hiragana and Katakana
Nonnegotiable. I wouldn’t even bother opening a textbook, starting on a kanji study program or doing immersion before you’ve spent at least 80% of your study time on hiragana. You want to get to the point where you can read hiragana without much trouble and ideally you want to be able to write it as well. Writing it will reinforce your memory a lot more than just reading it all the time. Romaji is a crutch and WILL hold you back. The fact that many textbooks that cover basic beginners’ Japanese insist on using romaji all the way through is a terrible editorial decision and I would not recommend you ever use a textbook (or any material) that does this.
So how should you learn it? Tofugu.com has a good guide that shows you all the hiragana, has pronunciation guides and shows you how to write them. Go through it, then find some flashcard deck or one of the million free hiragana apps and drill them for a while. As soon as you start getting the hang out if, you want to go to NHK Easy and start reading articles. NHK Easy is fantastic for 2 main reasons: every article has an audio recording and an option to turn furigana (hiragana showing the reading of the kanji) off and on. So you attempt to read through the NHK Article, listening to the recorded version if you’re finding it hard to read and then playing back the audio to check you did it right.
Next you want to expose yourself to as much hiragana as possible. One way is by thinking of any Japanese word and then try and write it out in hiragana. Start with car brands (Mitsubishi, Toyota, Honda) and then move to nouns like sushi, kimono. You’ll need to start building some type of word list you can run-through something like anki with. Then you can go down that word list and look at the English column, and then try and remember the Japanese word for it, then write it in Japanese, and then refer back to your word list and compare if you wrote it down correctly. I discuss more strategies here:
Step 2: Get into grammar and kanji
Grammar and kanji will need to be done over time. There are so many strategies for pursuing grammar study and it is hard to say which is best. However a structured approach is likely to work better than an unstructured approach for most people.
Grammar is conceptually difficult no matter what language you learn, and so it is important to not try and speed through grammar guides or textbooks. Generally it is good to pick a point or so and work on it for a while, then move on to something else. At the same time you want to be trying to consume Japanese media of some description, hopefully close to your level, so that you can get experience picking out grammar and vocab that you’ve learnt.
Structured Approach
This would mean learning Japanese grammar points ‘in order’ and following one pattern with another pattern which may build on the previous. This is the general way most textbooks and classrooms will teach Japanese. If you get tutoring with someone like me, I tend to teach by JLPT level if the student has no real plan they wish to pursue. It would also mean following a grammar guide like imabi or Tae Kim.
Ideally you want to start by learning in the plain form and then the ます・です form. This is why I recommend imabi and Tae Kim.
Unstructured Approach
This would be similar to the types of immersion methods. Rather than using a textbook, you just immerse yourself in Japanese media, and try and grab sentences, vocab etc and put them into anki or other learning tools. This would be hard to do with audio-only podcast or subtitle-less TV shows but works well with written works. It has the advantages of being ‘proper Japanese’ as opposed to textbook Japanese, but the difficulty of the grammar, language will vary wildly, especially if it is a piece of media meant for adult Japanese native speakers.
Used correctly, such a method will develop your listening skills, pronunciation and speed which gets you into speaking and understanding Japanese to a near-native level, generally the best case scenario goal of most Japanese learners.
I’ve listed some resources like AJATT and you can also check out Refold.
Kanji
It’s never to early to start on kanji. I’ve talked about kanji a lot in other posts and videos but the main thing to keep in mind is to be careful about how you learn kanji. Textbooks meant for Japanese or non-Japanese speakers are generally not great. I’ve done videos on a great website called kanjidamage.com and this is one of the best ways to learn kanji, including reading and writing.
Step 4: Get a language partner
It is very important to get someone to talk to. Direct interaction via conversation is the best way to learn and practice your skills. There are many options for this, in no particular order:
- Move to Japan
- Get a Japanese friend, partner etc
- Get Japanese lessons (contact me through my website or Cafetalk coupon: 0a77c3de) 👌
- Find Japanese language meetups nearby or use VR Chat, Twitch etc to find Japanese communities
