How to self-study Japanese

I often get asked how I learned Japanese and how I would recommend learning Japanese, so I decided to condense my responses into a brief guide. This guide is purely based on my own experience of learning (8+ years), and talking to many of those who have successfully self-studied (n=~15).

The principles here are the same as in my guide to studying Mandarin.

Disclaimer

This guide assumes you are great at setting up habits and systems and following them, and are sufficiently self-motivated. If that’s you, rejoice! This is going to be very efficient. If that’s not you, my recommendation would be to go to Japan and join an immersion course for 1-6 months that starts from zero. Casual language classes are mostly useless.

The approach in this guide prioritized reading and listening ability over speaking and writing. The assumption is that your first 6+ months are mainly spent on learning how to understand Japanese, and speaking ability will come mostly on its own, or more easily with some practice later on.

After about 6 months of intense study, or 18 months of regular low-intensity study, you should be able to enjoy native media (shows, books, etc), after which learning paths usually diverge, but getting to that point is the hard part.

Resources

Vocabulary app: Set up an app for vocabulary practice. I recommend WaniKani, which has a free trial and is paid afterwards, and 100% worth the money, or Anki (AnkiDroid on Android) with a Hiragana deck like this one and a Kanji deck like this one if you prefer not to spend money.

Dictionaries: Chrome extension for looking up symbols on the web, and Japanese Dictionary Takoboto app on mobile.

Grammar: Free online guide: Tae-Kim's Guide To Japanese Grammar. People also really like the "Genki" textbooks, but I've had great success with just online resources.

Reading: Any graded reader app. Here's a free online book portal. For e.g. news, NHK News Web Easy is a popular one.

Information: Tofugu is a blog/site that has thousands or articles about Japanese learning and Japanese culture. It's great for finding in-depth articles about specific concepts that you're struggling with, or just having fun learning about all things Japan.

First day

Take some time to read up on how Japanese works as a language, and the tools available to you.

First, you should understand how the different pieces of Japanese fit together, and get a high level overview. Skim the following resources with the goal of understanding the terms/concepts and how they fit together:

1. The Japanese writing system: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Romaji
2. Japanese Phonetics. Note that you are NOT supposed to learn all the sounds here. Your goal is to understand how the system works on a high level. You can refer back to this page whenever you’re not sure how a specific character sounds. Note that this page lists all possible sounds and serves as an overview first and foremost.

Then take a look at all the tools listed in the Resource section above and set them up. That's it. You're done for today!

Watch this brief history of Japan video for fun and to celebrate. It's also great for gaining an overall historical overview.

First week

Hiragana/Katakana: Before you do anything else, you'll need to learn Hiragana and Katakana, and along with it, pronunciation. This article has a list of common ways of studying them. Your goal for the first week should be to gain the ability to read and pronounce all of them, and to get good at it. It might seem daunting, but you can learn Hiragana in 1-2 days if you set up your learning well, and can spend the rest of the week getting faster.

Pronunciation: Make sure to try to pronounce every symbol out aloud and compare it to an audio reference. Especially in the first week, this is very important to solidify good pronunciation basics. If you have trouble with specific sounds, use the Japanese Phonetics guide, or look up youtube videos on how to pronounce them. These often come with helpful illustrations on how to move your tongue to form the sound. Counter to common belief in language learning, I strongly believe it’s better to not speak at all than to speak anything that’s not close to perfect, because you will get stuck with an accent otherwise, forever. It'll slow you down the first few weeks, but will save you years of work later.

Second week

Now that you can read and write Hiragana/Katakana, we can start learning some basic vocabulary. From the readings on your first day, you should know how Kanji and Vocabulary interplay. If you don't, re-read it now.

Vocab: Before you start learning any grammar or reading anything, use your vocabulary app to practice these for a week. WaniKani, and most Anki decks, will roughly give you works/Kanji by their frequency of use, which roughly tracks JLPT. You should be able to study about 20 new Kanji/words a day in the beginning, since it'll be your sole focus for now. This will likely occupy 60 minutes to 120 minutes of your time every day for this week.

Understanding Kanji: Read this article about "Onyomi and Kunyomi" to understand how Kanji are used in different contexts.

Keep practicing Hiragana/Katakana: Make sure to keep practicing your Katakana especially. Your vocabulary training will make you practice Hiragana anyway, but Katakana is used more rarely, so you might forget it otherwise.

There's nothing else to do this week!

Weeks 3-6

After you have learned about ~100 characters and ~200 words, you have a good base for starting to learn grammar.

Continue spending 15-90 minutes every day on reviewing and learning vocabulary (based on your desired learning speed), and once or twice a week, sit down for an hour or two with a coffee and study grammar as follows:

1. Go to Tae-Kim's Grammar Guide or use your preferred grammar resource, e.g. a textbook if you have one.
2. Open where you left off, or on the first page. E.g. "States of Being" in Tae-Kim's guide.
3. Read through the chapter. Understand it. If anything doesn't make sense, even slightly, look it up. Follow your curiosity. The goal is to finish a chapter feeling like you own the concepts, even if it takes you longer.
4. Using words you recently learned, try to come up with a 5+ example sentences using the newly learned grammar concepts.
5. Advance to the next chapter. Rinse and repeat.

From now on, you can also spend as much time as you want looking up video content in Japanese, listening to podcasts, etc. You won’t understand a thing, but from tie to time, try to focus on how the language sounds. What sounds are they making? What would that look like in Hiragana? Try to understand how it feels. Let that guide your future pronunciation practice.

By the end of week 6, you should be done with JLPT 5 vocab, Kanji, and grammar. You should be able to read basic sentences now, like the example sentences that come up in the Grammar guide. Congrats!

Months 2-12

Vocab: Continue spending 15-90 minutes every day learning and reviewing vocabulary.

Measuring progress: Levels of Japanese language skill are often measured via JLPT, with levels ranging from 1 to 5, and 1 being the most advance, 5 being a beginner level. JLPT 5 includes about 80 of the most common Kanji, with every following level roughly adding twice the Kanji of the level before, so you have a total of ~2000 by the time you'd reach level 1. Aside from Kanji, every level has standards for grammar, and for size of your vocabulary. By the time you know all the Kanji, you probably also know most/all of the vocabulary you'll ever need (around ~10000 words). You can directly calculate your progress towards that eventual goal by looking at how many new Kanji and words you're learning every day. E.g.

• With 5 new Kanji and 20 words per day, you'll need about a year to learn all the words you'll ever need.
• With 2.5 new Kanji and 10 words per day, two years.
• With 1 Kanji and 4 words per day, four years. Within 12 months, you should be able to get to at least JLPT 3, which, which is about a B1 level of fluency on the CEFR scale.

Grammar: Continue doing occasional session of learning grammar. When watching/listening to media, try to listen for the grammar being used. If you studied something before, e.g. past tense for verbs, but you feel like you're forgetting about it, re-do that chapter.

Reading: Start doing 1-2+ weekly session of 30+ minutes of reading stories on your level, using the "Graded Reader" resources above. Make sure to listen to any audio if provided, and cross-check your understanding with the translations. If anything doesn’t make sense, look it up! The goal is that you feel like you have a good grip on what’s going on. Don’t shy away from 60min+ google rabbit holes if those are fun to you.

Months 12+

All the same months 2-12, but start watching lots of videos, shows, movies, etc, or listen to podcasts. Get as much native audio into your brain as possible.

Speaking: After a few months of high exposure to native content, you’re finally allowed to speak. Go to meetups, tandems, etc, maybe find a language class in small groups for your level, go wild! As long as you keep doing the vocab-reading-grammar cycle, you will eventually be able to read ALL of Japanese news, articles and books (once you hit ~1500 Kanji and ~6000 words, it starts getting really easy to read anything).

Good Luck,

Peter Wielander