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In the years since I originally posted this blog, there's been a few key points I've learned and wished to highlight. While the original guide remains fully intact in its original state, I've included some new comments at the very bottom of this article, which you may find useful or insightful.

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I often get asked how I've been learning Japanese and what methods I use, so I figure it would be easier to write a short guide here instead. I'm also a bit frustrated by how inefficient most people's studying methods are (hi Reddit), so here's a guide that doesn't completely suck.

A few things to keep in mind if you're planning to start studying the language:
- Learning kanji is not an impossible task. Is it a pain in the ass? Sure, but you could still learn the 2000 required for literacy in a couple months if you were so dedicated. Almost every single kanji is made up of other kanji or symbols, called radicals, which will easily let you piece the kanji together if you don't immediately recognise it. For example, 姿 looks like a bunch of incomprehensible chicken scratches at first, but in reality it's just 女 and 次 squished together. Also, some kanji are just ridiculously easy to remember, like 人　or 一 . Even an absolutely crazy-looking one like 驚 you'll memorise just from seeing it constantly. Don't worry about kanji too much.
- Make it a habit to study every single day. Even if you're super busy and don't have much time to study that day, just throw in 15 minutes before you sleep. If you neglect it for a week or more, you're going to come back and find yourself forgetting things. The goal is to improve your understanding of the language, not to remain at the same skill level forever. If you half-ass it you'll never get anywhere. Motivation is more important than anything else.
- You're going to be terrible at the language for a very long time. Don't let it get to you. Think of it like an RPG or something: you have to start at level 1, and you can only level up and have an easier time by gaining more experience. The hardest part in learning the language is at the beginning-- you just need to keep banging your head against it until things finally start to make sense. The more you learn, the easier it gets.

Anyway, if you're motivated and ready to learn the language, here's what I suggest:
1. Start learning the kana. Use RealKana for that. Work on one column at a time in the practice session and add a new one in each time you've memorised all the previous kana. Don't bother thinking deeply about them-- just keep bashing them into your brain no matter how many times you get them wrong. They'll stick. You could easily learn hiragana and katakana in a day each with this method, whereas a college class would spend a month or two on it.
2. Learn basic grammar. Use Tae Kim's guide for beginner stuff and Imabi when you're ready for intermediate topics. Don't worry if some of the things seem overly complicated or don't make any sense to you, because they won't until you start reading and listening to these things in action.

Now, here's where you have a choice: you can either go with my method of reading visual novels with a dictionary (more on that soon), or if you have absolutely no interest in visual novels (my condolences), grinding kanji and vocabulary. If you choose the latter...

3a. For kanji, this Anki deck is a good way to get started with the first thousand or so. Avoid RTK because it sucks and teaches you useless kanji. Don't bother learning all the kun-yomi and on-yomi pronunciations or whatever because they're a waste of time and don't actually matter; just focus on memorising the image and meaning of them for now. As you'll see when you learn vocabulary, most kanji have a billion different pronunciations with each one being used pretty randomly, so it's better to learn pronunciation on a word-by-word basis. For the vocabulary itself, most people use Anki, a flashcard program that will drill thousands of words into your head through daily routine. The Core6k deck is the ones most people use, though I would recommend only learning the first 2000 words and then creating your own deck afterwards.
Now, while this all sounds pretty straightforward, you have to keep in mind that you're only learning through rote memorisation and textbook method, and as a result you're going to have major troubles later on if you don't supplement your studying with actual reading and listening. Try reading manga or light novels, or watch anime without subtitles. The sooner you start doing so, the better. You don't need 100% comprehension to read something. I've seen people who only did Anki for 1-2 years and then couldn't even read a moege afterwards. That's sad. You don't want to become one of them.
It's also worth mentioning that you can speed up the process by completely skipping individual kanji and moving directly to vocabulary, though it will be pretty painful at first. Also, do yourself a favour and don't bother learning how to handwrite kanji. It's a complete waste of time- you won't even need to handwrite if you live in Japan since just about everything can be typed/printed via phones and computers. Prioritise your time by studying things that actually matter, like grammar and vocabulary. If you absolutely feel handwriting is necessary and that you'll explode and die if you don't learn how to, do it after you've already gotten everything else down.

Since the traditional method is incredibly tedious and boring, I recommend reading visual novels instead. It will mean entertainment and study blend into the same thing, and by extension your learning speed will also rapidly increase. One hour of flashcards every day is boring shit, but if you spent six hours on a Sunday reading visual novels, you'd be getting six hours of studying done in that day. Nice. So, anyway, here's how you do that:

3b. Download ITH. It's a text hooker that will instantly grab and copy text from any VN you're running. Next, download Translation Aggregator. It's the program that will be running your dictionary. Bam, you're ready to go. What you'll be doing each time you play a visual novel is attaching ITH to the game's process after you launch it, and then have Translation Aggregator sitting on the side and automatically plugging each line of text through the JParser box. If you don't know a word (and chances are you will understand almost none of them by this point), all you need to do is hover over it in JParser and the definitions will pop up in a fraction of a second. Easy.

What visual novels are friendly for beginners, you ask? It depends on your preferences. If you're willing to handle mediocre garbage, Hanahira is pretty much regarded by everyone as the easiest VN in existence. Most moege (Flyable Heart, Kiminago, Magical Charming) are also incredibly easy to read, but if you'd rather go for something serious and plot-heavy, Aiyoku no Eustia is the perfect choice for beginners. By the time you're done Eustia, you could handle Baldr Sky without much trouble, and from there you could handle something like Kusarihime or Sayonara wo Oshiette. If none of those interest you (or you're looking for something else), I made a list here with a difficulty ranking for all the things I've read so far. Anything I haven't read you can just test yourself and judge whether or not you can handle it.

And, again, don't worry if you're awful at the language and aren't understanding things very well. I was the same way when I started reading and felt like every line of text was a mysterious string of gibberish. You have to start somewhere. If you really, really feel like you're not understanding enough and possibly ruining the story for yourself, you can just come back to it later or even reread it when you're better at the language. Most moege are mindless and have little of importance going on, anyway, so you could always hone your fundamentals with those first if you don't feel comfortable reading something like Eustia right away. However, keep in mind that it is doable if you have the patience. I was reading Baldr Sky and SubaHibi two months after I started studying and managed those just fine.

If you have at least an hour of free time every day, you'd be doing yourself a huge favour by starting as soon as possible. Translations for Japanese media are generally terrible (usually they're done by some 15-year-old who speaks English as their third language), so you'd be allowing yourself to experience the actual story and not a poor interpretation of it. You can also play/read the multitude of untranslated manga, light novels, visual novels and games, as well as open yourself to the possibility of traveling to or working in Japan.


Other things to note:
- If you can't get regular ol' ITH working, try ITHVNR instead. There's a few games that work only with it.
- For learning slang and colloquial speech, I'd recommend watching 実況プレイ on YouTube or Nicovideo. They'll also introduce you to 'natural' Japanese speech and are often hilarious to watch.
- If you're learning through the VN method, you can still do some supplementary studying with Anki to speed up the vocab process a bit. However, if you do, make sure that reading always remains the priority. If Anki starts taking up too much time then delete it and read more instead.
- This is a useful resource if you come across kanji you can't hook (i.e. in a console video game). It has saved my ass on many occasions. You can also use KanjiTomo to search any words you mouse over (useful for images and manga), though its accuracy is obviously not great.
- Video games (JRPGs) have much easier vocabulary than visual novels, so I'd recommend giving them a go if you want to try reading without text hookers and dictionaries.

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2022 Update - 7 Years Later:

So what have I been up to over the years?

In the fall of 2016, I moved to Japan as an exchange student at a Japanese university. Following the end of my time as a student, I transitioned into working in Japan, in a fully Japanese setting that required me to speak fluently. Overall, about three years I spent living in Japan, up until the start of the COVID pandemic which unfortunately sent me back to Canada. Currently I live with my Japanese wife (whom I met in Tokyo back in 2017) and speak exclusively Japanese at home, as that is the only language she can comfortably speak. To this day I speak Japanese more frequently than I speak English, despite living once more on the opposite side of the planet.

There's a few pieces of wisdom I've discovered during this time, and felt it would be appropriate to share by making a small update to this article.

- If a person has no experience living in Japan, take their opinions on the language with a massive grain of salt. This includes Twitter, Discord, Reddit, and many other forms of social media where beginners attempt to teach other beginners their flawed understanding of the language. Living in Japan and speaking the language with native speakers (in a natural environment) is integral to understanding the culture, idioms, figures of speech and much more. Please be very careful about whose advice you listen to, as many self-purported experts actually have little understanding of what they are talking about. It may sound elitist, but experience living in Japan should be considered the baseline for having a voice on the subject.

- No matter how hard you grind, you will never attain a native speaker's level of fluency. It's best to just accept this. Even after a decade of study, working in a fully Japanese environment, and speaking the language exclusively, there are still times I feel frustrated when comparing my level of fluency with that of my wife's. However, you can get close enough that your Japanese is for the most part indiscernible from a native speaker, save for some flaws like vocabulary gaps or the inability to understand poorly-enunciated mumble-speak.

- Even if a work is translated into English, the original Japanese still offers a vastly superior experience. Most Japanese to English translations are so bad that I would just recommend reading anything of value in Japanese instead. This goes for visual novels, video games, literature, and even manga and anime. Case in point, One Piece. I could not imagine experiencing the series in English as 50% of the humour and mannerisms are only understandable through the original dialogue. Most translations are often rushed in order to meet short deadlines, and the original author's heart and intent are deleted in favour of whatever the 40-year-old American man feels like inserting instead. If you can avoid translations, please do.

- If you've survived just one year of study, you're already ahead of 99% of people. Most people who attempt to learn Japanese give up very quickly as their motivation eventually falters. My goal with this guide is to teach people a more entertaining and nuanced method of learning, in the hopes that they will stick through and prevail. If you're still studying Japanese a year after you first began, you've already succeeded and are a winner.

- Writing kanji (i.e. with a pen) is a useless skill. It makes me sad, because I know the people who practice writing kanji every day will most likely never get anywhere with the language. Writing individual kanji does not improve your understanding of the language in any way, as it is vocabulary that matters. I got by perfectly fine in a Japanese workplace just with writing hiragana/katakana and a few very common kanji.

- Speaking Japanese and understanding it are two entirely different skillsets. While I could understand it during my first few months in Japan, I was afraid to speak it, because it was as if that section of my brain was locked off. Only through regular (verbal/spoken) practice with native speakers can you truly find the key to this part of the brain.

- If you are practicing speech, be very careful about the 'r' sounds. While Japanese is generally a very easy language to pronounce, this is one area where foreigners generally trip up. らりるれろ resemble L sounds in English more than they do R sounds. Use the tip of your tongue, and try to produce a mix between L and R. As a side note, keep in mind that Japanese is a mostly monotone language, and that by raising your pitch up and down similar to how most Americans speak English, you will immediately out yourself as a big foreigner to any Japanese person listening.

- At some point, you must take the training wheels off. While dictionary and texthooking software make learning Japanese much more fun and motivating, eventually, you'll have to close the software and consume Japanese media in its natural state. At what point this will be is up to the individual to decide. The benchmark I would personally use is for when you feel like reading visual novels is no longer improving your Japanese in any meaningful way. Personally, this happened a few years into my studies. If you would like a good suggestion of where to start, the Tsukihime remake (PS4/Switch) is a fantastic experience, containing difficult Japanese while still not being completely unapproachable by foreigner readers.


日本語は最初のころ理解不可能でチンプンカンプンに見えるかもしれないが、毎日少しずつ勉強したら、必ず上達する。モチベが落ちたら、休憩しながら日本語と繋がる遊び方を探してください。雲がいつか晴れる。


Last updated: Jan 26, 2022