Learn Japanese - Immersion, the 80/20 Rule, Resources, and More!
Several people have asked me how to learn Japanese, so I'm going to keep all the resources together in this post.
First tip before anything else - immersion!
The most you immerse yourself in Japanese, the more you force your brain to actually use and learn it. The best way is to live and work in Japan (sink or swim!), but reading Japanese media during your free time and even changing some of your software to Japanese mode will immerse you. Every little bit helps. This means even listening to Japanese music during a shower or car ride will help you study!
Also, the media should be Japanese. English media that has been translated into Japanese will teach you less about Japanese culture and way of thinking.
Now what do I do first? Syllabaries and kanji!
You need to learn how to pronounce the letters first. Even if you are only interested in reading or chatting, learning to write will help you improve in other areas more quickly. There are three writing systems:
Hiragana (ひらがな), which looks like あかさた.
Katakana (カタカナ), which looks like アカサタ.
Kanji (漢字), which looks like 亜加薩太.
Learning kana (hiragana and katakana) shouldn't take very long. I recommend Heisig's Remembering the Hiragana and Heisig's Remembering the Katakana. Practice a few times, try pronouncing the kana on a page of Japanese, and move on. You'll master it once you start using it for real.
Kanji is a massive topic, and it takes Japanese people their whole lives to learn. I highly recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. You don't have to read the whole book because kanji is also best learned by actively using it, but his introduction and learning methods are very approachable. He trains you to recognize radicals, which is invaluable when they can be so subtle. Compare 牛 and 午, 鳥 and 烏, and 蠧 and 蠢 to see what I mean.
What do I do next? Start using Japanese!
Start reading and listening to raw Japanese as soon as possible. You will read very, very, very slowly with a high degree of doubt that you are understanding anything correctly at all, but your progress and confidence will snowball over time. The 80/20 rule absolutely applies to Japanese, meaning if you learn 20% of Japanese, you will be 80% fluent! This is why you shouldn't spend too long learning kanji in isolation. You are better off studying the 20% of kanji you encounter 80% of the time!
For the snowball effect to work, the best things to translate are things that you want to read. This is obviously also a lot more fun than reading textbooks.
I think the best place to start is material you already know from context anyway. So go to Japanese websites or change the interface on some software you are very familiar with and try to read the buttons. Japanese Yahoo or Japanese Wikipedia is a safe choice. ログイン is log in, 戻る is go back, 画像 is image, etc. You can also start sounding out 外来語 (loanwords), which are usually written in カタカナ. ニュース "nyuusu" is news.
Jump into real books and song lyrics and TV as soon as you can, though!
Which dictionaries should I use?
Remember, the more you are forced to use Japanese, the better. Also, the closer you are to a purely Japanese source, the better.
How do I study all these new words I am learning?
Daily flashcards! Anki is designed for learning Japanese and works on the computer and phone.
The algorithm knows when the best time for you to review a card is, so make sure you don't miss it due to the review limit. Remove the review limit by going to deck options under the "Reviews" tab and setting "Maximum reviews/day" to 9999. Don't be alarmed by this number; the point is to set it to something you'll never hit.
There are lots of decks to download, but I recommend making your own based off of your own reading. Add all the vocabulary you already know but can't read yet (着物、班長、数独 、照り焼き、布団、など) to dilute your deck at the beginning. Then add in new words you learn through context. You will make errors starting out, but you will be able to correct them over time as you expand your vocabulary and grammar skills and your knowledge of Japanese culture.
My cards look like this:
The word is on the front. The pronunciation, definition, and a contextual image or sentence is on the back. I find including the kanji's definition and pronunciations helps me pick up the most common pronunciations more quickly, so I can more successfully guess how new words are pronounced just by looking at them.
How do I study grammar?
Tae Kim has the best resource for learning grammar. He has a textbook-like website that is tailored to self-study by Japanese learners.
How do you type in Japanese?
The easiest way is to use an IME (input method editor). You type with your normal keyboard, but you can change the IME's output to be Roman characters or kana using hotkeys. As you type, it will auto-recommend kanji.
I heard the most popular IME in Japan is Google's IME. For phone, I also use Google's Gboard, but I don't remember how to set it up. I probably did it in the language settings on my phone or something lol sorry.
Japanese character keyboards do exist, but I always see QWERTY keyboards and IMEs in their media. You can see DAOKO using one in the 水星 music video at around 40 seconds.
What should I read?
Whatever you want. I like watching cute makeup and fashion videos on Youtube, so I started watching さぁや saaya. I also like sewing and cooking, so finding Japanese sewing and recipe books and trying to follow them is super fun.
I don't recommend starting with sci-fi, fantasy, or anything filled with technical jargon from a field you aren't involved in. All the new medical vocabulary you would learn from a medical drama might not be helpful unless it's your favorite genre or related to your job. Slice-of-life is good for anyone, though!
Graphic novels:
- ☆ よつばと! - common first book, since it is a manga that reflects daily life, has relatively simple grammar, and uses kanji. It's also really funny.
- . ガンガンONLINE and pixiv are publishers with lots of free manga.
News and culture:
- • The daily newspaper - Mainichi and Yomiuri are the big two in Japan.
- . 5channel - a widely used textboard, kind of similar to English Reddit. There's a lot of news article summaries and comments reacting to them. I thought it was blocked off to anyone without a Japanese IP now, but I guess they are letting us back in.
- ☆ Futaba Channel - a famous Japanese anonymous imageboard, similar to the English 4chan. There's a lot of internet slang and inappropriate ads, like you would expect.
- ★ PDRさん is a youtuber who performs skits and does reactions, and he's popular with Japanese learners because he is bilingual and sometimes makes his videos available in both languages. I haven't watched him in years, but he seems the same as always.
- • The Bible (聖書) - 新共同訳聖書 is a popular translation. Christianity is not as influential in Japan as it is in the West, but they also tend to not be offended by it.
Games:
- . Phone games - Nintendo usually lets you play in English or Japanese, so Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and games like that are easily accessible. Japan is a separate region on the appstores, and phone companies make it very difficult to switch over without actually being Japanese. If you can do it, though, COLOPL is the top developer, famous for 白猫プロジェクト and other games.
- . Simple Nintendo videogames like Mario and Kirby are good because you mostly learn from context and do not need to know the story to win. The Switch is region-free, and I think the DS is, too.
- ☆ Pokemon - most of the games are in kana and are poor options, but Pokemon Black/White uses kanji.
Should I use any other method for learning Japanese?
Is Google Translate good enough?
It might be okay for other languages, but Japanese is too contextual and difficult for machine translation. Here is an example of an amateur manga translator vs. a translation group that relies on machine translation:
This is an extreme example, but Google is wildly wrong often enough that this doesn't surprise me at all. Japanese is highly contextual, and machines are still struggling with it.
Should I take a class?
I think it is better to learn by yourself than by taking a class. The most common textbooks are the official Japanese learning books approved by the Japan government (GENKI), and Japanese people don't necessarily understand new Japanese speakers' needs as well as foreigners. For example, they are shy to use kanji at early levels, but kanji is much easier to read at early levels than kana, or worse, romaji alone! Classes also have a wide variety of needs (business Japanese, travel Japanese, people interested in Japanese media, etc) and skill levels, so it's difficult to fully cater to any one student. I just wouldn't recommend a class unless you want to hang out with other people interested in Japanese. Language is too individualistic to be taught to in a classroom setting, and classes are too infrequent to immerse you in the language.
Should I use language resources made for Japanese children?
Children learn Japanese very differently from foreigners, especially since they already know Japanese - they only need to improve their vocabulary and learn kanji. Unlike in English where children must learn to spell and pronounce difficult words, Japanese words in kana are never difficult to pronounce nor have silent letters.
Children's media is written only in kana. Since Japanese has many homophones and no spaces, a children's book is actually more difficult for beginners to read than an adult's book. imagineifyouwerenewtoenglishandhadtoreadawholeericcarlebooklikethis. With kanji, it's still hard, but at least you can tell where words begin and end and use a dictionary!
This means beginners need that magic balance of both kanji and simple grammar. Manga and webcomics written for teenagers are a reasonable place to start.
Should I study from the Japanese version of English media? Like the Japanese translation of Finding Nemo, etc.
A lot of a language is the culture and history, so you would be missing out on learning cultural references, historical references, their value system, and their food and geography. Also, translators, especially for such a different language, are not perfect. The original is always better, and you'll realize how differently Japanese media reads compared to English translations soon.
Wrap Up
Most of all, be consistent! Do your flashcards every day, use your new language as often as possible, and find a way to make it fun and interesting. You can do it! Enjoy!!
Last updated February 20, 2024.