How I studied Japanese to fluency as a translator and software engineer with JLPT N1.

Photo by Tianshu Liu on Unsplash

Disclaimer: I made a Japanese study app called Kichi to help people study Japanese the way I did. I’ll talk about it in the article — you do not need it to do any of what I recommend here, but I seriously think it will help most Japanese learners, or I wouldn’t have made it. It’s like Anki but built to help you learn the things you want instead of using community decks.

Table of contents

Intro

• Qualifications
• What is fluency
• What JLPT do I need to be considered fluent?

The rules of study

• Rule One: If it isn’t fun, stop doing it
• Rule Two: If it was worth learning, it was worth reviewing
• Rule Three: Study to be well-rounded
• Rule Four: Aim for fluency, not proficiency

How I studied

• Overview
• Starting out — what to do from zero
• Hiragana and katakana
• Do not use romaji
• Kanji
• Words and grammar
• Conversation
• Media selection, variety, manga, and anime
• The schedule

Kichi

Embarrassing things I have said or done

Working in Japan

Notes on different learning methods

• Personal tutoring and private language schools
• Language exchange
• Premade apps
• Formal Education
• Self-study

What I got out of studying Japanese

Conclusion

Intro

I’m writing this article because I was asked to in my Working In Japan article. This is about how I studied Japanese to fluency, what fluency means to me, and how you can do it the same way I did it. I tried to make it as comprehensive as possible and still fit it into a single article, but it is a monster of an article and might need to be done in a few sittings.

I talk about specific, achievable daily goals that I set and methods that I used to get to where I am today, but please feel free to set your own pace or pick and choose the parts that work for you. I’ve seen people learn in all kinds of different ways — this was the way that worked for me.

I’m going to talk about how I got to proficiency, of course, but I’ll also cover other study methods that I’ve seen (popular language apps, classes, etc.) at the end of the article.

Also, a quick note: Jisho is the best Japanese-English dictionary I’ve ever seen. If you somehow haven’t heard of it, I strongly recommend it.

Qualifications

Hi! I’m Rob. I’ve lived in Japan for about 8 years. I have JLPT N1, I am a professional translator (J->E and E->J) and software engineer, and I’ve worked in all-Japanese-speaking companies my whole adult life. I studied using the methods that I suggest here and I went from about N4 to passing the N2 in about a year. Almost all of that progress happened while I was still living in America.

The N1 took another year. I do not recommend doing it. More on that below.

I also wrote a super in-depth crash course about what my work life has been like in Japan (salary, overtime, etc). If you’re interested, there’s more on that in the “Working in Japan” section below.

All of the things I’m about to mention have almost certainly been mentioned by someone else as well — I just want it to be in one place, digestible, and actionable.

What is fluency

Fluency means different things to different people. I’d like to pin down a shared definition of what fluency means when I say it.

For this article, fluency means:

“Being able to complete moderately complex tasks like opening a bank account or having a business meeting, exclusively in Japanese and while making your intent clearly understood to everyone involved.”

Equally important is what fluency is not. Note that my definition of fluency doesn’t say anything about: using business language, formal grammar, or special financial terms. When you are fluent you can smoothly navigate those situations without needing to know the specific terms involved, much as you could in your native language.

In short, if you can complete a task like the above and walk away knowing all parties have understood each other, you are fluent.

What JLPT do I need to be considered fluent?

Before I answer this, I want to be clear: You do not need the JLPT. The JLPT is a test that can be studied for — it is not necessarily an accurate reflection of your Japanese. It does not test speaking or writing. Studying mock tests can give you a better outcome than just having broad Japanese knowledge. You can pass on luck. Also, when I got my N2, the N5 didn’t exist, so the difficulty of some of the levels was a bit different and things may have changed since I took it.

I think the idea of fluency is best represented by the N2.

The N2 seems to aim for “I can talk about a bunch of things in a bunch of situations, mostly without issue. I can’t read everything, but I can read a lot.” In my experience, this was accurate, and I felt very comfortable with my Japanese when I took it. I also felt very comfortable calling myself fluent at that time.

Something important to remember is to not worry about getting the N2 just to get the N2. Get the skills that make N2 easy, and then get it so you have a paper to show employers / a level of benchmarked progress for yourself (if you want).

I recommend not worrying about the N1. I found learning Japanese for the N2 to be a fairly natural process — it used a lot of everyday Japanese, so just by studying the way that was most comfortable to me I was able to pass. The N1, however, required a lot of vocabulary that I had never seen and usually don’t use in my day-to-day conversation. Some of the grammar was useful, but think less “conversation” and more “news report.” If that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in, you should go for it. The study I did for it doesn’t seem to have been a very good return on investment for me.

Many jobs do not care that you have a high JLPT — when you fill out your resume in Japanese and then reach out for an interview it’s going to tell them more than the certificate you get from passing ever could. The only exception is probably translation work, which very well might be gated behind an N2 or N1.

The rules of study

Before I give my schedule, I want to go over a few rules that I consider essential to success for studying the way I did.

Rule One: If it isn’t fun, stop doing it

In my experience, people that want to learn something find ways to get it done. People that succeed are either good at finding fun things to do in their target language or using developed study skills to learn without needing to have fun. The first is good for long-term learning, the second is good for school and passing tests.

As such, motivation beats everything. When learning, just like any other significant but optional task, the task itself must feel rewarding or the end goal will be much harder to achieve. And so, we must adopt the most important rule:

If it isn’t fun, you are wasting your time.

Consistency beats effort, and consistency needs fun. TV? Good. Textbooks? If you enjoy them, go for it. 17th-century Japanese plays about the joy of rice? If it’s fun for you and done in Japanese, live that dream.

They talk about this in AJATT pretty often (which is a great resource for maintaining motivation, absolutely check it out). You want to burn through Japanese media as fast as you can and don’t be afraid to throw things out. Anything in Japanese counts as study, so you should get your hands on all the Japanese content you can.

As for sorting through the media you want to watch it’s pretty simple: 5 minutes. My rule of thumb was that any new media had about 5 minutes, max, to impress me. If not, trash it and move on — the world is too full of content to worry about dealing with anything that isn’t fantastic. I tend to skip the first few minutes of a lot of anime for this reason — I have no time for slow openers.

Rule Two: If it was worth learning, it was worth reviewing

You need to have some kind of review system in place. I build an entire app for this that I promise is different from the hundreds of flashcard apps out there, and I’ll explain it later, but for now: All words you encounter can be divided into two categories.

Category one: Words that you want to learn. This can be anything that’s funny and that would be a nice conversation piece, a grammar pattern you see repeated a lot, a word from your textbook that you need for a test, etc. Everything in this list should be reviewed, preferably with a review app.

Category two: everything else. This includes words that are common but you don’t think are a priority, words that are too alien and you can’t grasp what they actually mean and don’t care that much, words that have no context so you don’t know which definition to use, etc. Looking up a definition of a word does not mean it has to be remembered. Focus your attention on the words that you care about and the rest comes very naturally.

Rule Three: Study to be well-rounded

This means that you want to have a solid base of general-purpose vocabulary, you want to be able to converse and understand, and you want to be able to write (note: typing = writing, no one cares in practice if you can’t handwrite kanji).

This does not mean that you need to do things you don’t like to acquire different types of vocabulary. For example, I see advice that to be well rounded you should read newspapers, watch news broadcasts or dramas, study from a certain type of book, etc. — I’m going to talk about how I learned lots of different things while still doing it my way and having fun a bit later.

Rule Four: Aim for fluency, not proficiency

My advice will not apply if you’re learning to study a language for travel or are only interested in a subset of the language. There is nothing wrong with learning Japanese for specific purposes! The path that I am going to suggest, however, is not going to be very good for people with those goals because the upfront work is intense and the payoff is a bit delayed for some of it (specifically, kanji).

How I studied

Overview

I started studying Japanese when I was 19. I didn’t even have a good reason to chose Japanese. My university required everyone to take a year of language study, and I was too lazy to register until the last second. I had to choose between the two remaining courses: Japanese or Russian. I chose Japanese. I did 3 years of university study including a year abroad in Kansai before I switched to self-study. In my experience school sucks at teaching Kanji, is good at teaching grammar, and teaches vocabulary at a glacial pace.

Before self-study, I was really, really bad at kanji. After three years, I had finished my last kanji course with a D and could probably read about 400 kanji in total. I could speak at a decent pace because of my study abroad, where I spend a lot of time talking to natives, but my vocabulary was very limited.

Once I started studying, I stuck to the idea that if I plotted a course, scheduled my progress, and threw myself into it 100%, it would work.

For me, immersion was the key to everything. I often hear that “children are better at studying languages.” Biologically that may be true, but their pace of absorption isn’t even close to a motivated adult. Adults can learn 20 pieces of vocabulary a day — children learn at most a few. There is, however, a reason that children consistently beat adults in learning: because children cannot escape to their native language. Children often do not have the luxury of stepping back from language learning or getting tired of it — they just have to keep on going, being comfortable with not understanding things and asking questions constantly to learn. A child taking a second-language course, but not using the language outside of that course, will perform as poorly as an adult in similar circumstances.

So, copy that strength! For me, that meant going AJATT and throwing out almost all of my English media. Outside of work and university, the majority of what I did was Japanese. I watched Japanese shows (Netflix wasn’t even a thing then, so I had to get creative), read a mountain of manga, and did the study steps below. If you are consuming media it should be mostly Japanese. There are some really important caveats covered in “Media selection, variety, manga, and anime” that I’ll get into.

Starting out — what to do from zero

If you have no exposure to Japanese, I strongly recommend looking around for a basic starter course. Once you’ve covered the most essential grammar, I would suggest moving on to the other steps here. For the record: I think knowing at least です、ます、ません、ましょう、and the casual versions of those are a good place to get you started on your journey. I used a book series called “Genki” for this, but the Kanzen master series might be good for that, too.

Hiragana and katakana

If you want to learn hiragana and katakana before starting a course (I strongly recommend this!), try using Heisig’s “Remembering the Kana.” It’s supposedly very good, although I learned my kana as part of a university course.

Do not use romaji

It has a place, of course. If you need to write down a Japanese word for a non-speaker, you could use it. For learning, it is a crutch and should be completely avoided once you have the kana down.

Kanji

You need it.

Kanji via rote repetition is trash. Essentially, native speakers write down kanji over and over because to them that’s like learning to spell a word. For example, you might already know how to say “bee”, and what a bee is, so when you’re first learning the spelling you already have all the context that you need. As a non-native speaker, your encounter with a particular kanji is often the first time you’re seeing the word that you will use it in.

That means that you have to learn the pronunciation, writing, and meaning of the word all at once. As a comparison, imagine if you did not understand the alphabet and someone had you learn how to pronounce and spell “education”. You could write the letters down over and over again until you could write that word from memory, but that would be a terrible way to retain that information long-term. Usually, as adults when we see that word in our native language we already know what it means and (roughly) how to say it. We just have to struggle to remember the often absurd spellings.

To this end: do Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji (abbreviated RTK) and the matching Anki deck. I first found out about RTK when I realized that Chinese speakers in my study-abroad class were crushing the Kanji coursework. This was because they already knew the spelling and had a good idea about what it would mean — they just had to learn how to pronounce it. RTK gives you that advantage. Get the latest edition.

For volume two, only read the first and second sections (Radicals that always have one reading, followed by radicals that have two readings). The rest of the readings are not an efficient use of your time.

Volume three is good for party tricks and remembering some name Kanji, so only do it when you both have time and need to satisfy a kanji craving. I cover how to actually do Heisig in the schedule section.

Words and grammar

This is two-pronged.

The first: Use Anki’s core 6k. I know it’s odd that I have a Japanese learning app and am recommending Anki, but that’s because this deck rocks. Core 6k is a collection of the most common six thousand words in Japanese with example sentences, audio, and pictures for the first 2,000 words. Setting up Anki can be a pain in the butt, but this deck is fantastic and makes learning Japanese feel very automatic. I believe it was based on iKnow’s core6k and was taken down from the Anki servers for a while because of copyright issues, but it seems to be around again. You will need the furigana plugin for Anki (google will tell you how to set all of this up).

The second: Study the words you want to learn! I built Kichi to do this, but regardless, write down the things that you find in your language journey and study those too! If you don’t want to set up Anki to do the above step, do this but make sure that you use some kind of guide or source (textbook, online course, etc.) to get you started with some structure.

For grammar: I had used the “Genki” series of textbooks and school to study grammar until I was preparing to take the N2. There are, of course, a ton of free grammar resources online and I strongly encourage you to use them. In general during my independent study: If I saw something that I would suspect was grammar, I would google it and see what Google Sensei had to say. Then I’d just keep on studying.

Once you’ve got a really solid base down and are thinking of tackling the N2, I would strongly recommend the 完全マスター N2 book for grammar. It is incredible, and with a tutor to help you work through the tricky bits you will learn all the grammar you need to speak about almost anything you’d like. The N2 reading comprehension book is okay — I think it’s useful for covering any remaining gaps in your vocabulary before taking the test, but I found it boring and didn’t finish it.

The N1 book grammar book is solid, too. Even if you aren’t going to take the N1, it’s an easy way to learn the last bits of grammar that you are likely to encounter.

Conversation

Go talk to people online. Using Skype, you can talk to Japanese people as part of a language exchange to practice your speaking. Google to see what the most popular language exchange sites are, and then go for it! It’s a good time.

Be brave and talk about what you want to — in short, try your best not to ask about the weather and boring things like that. Ask the things you actually want to know. Once you’ve developed a strong base of Japanese language skills, you may find that you make friends online with people and develop a friendship that uses primarily Japanese. This is by far the best way to learn conversation. Also, if you can, try to get into or organize group chats online so that you can hear what multiple people talking to each other in Japanese sounds like — this exercise will pay tremendous dividends at your first party.

As for accent and fluency, I found that the best way to improve them is to copy other people relentlessly. You will eventually develop your own style of speaking, but copying speech patterns that you hear native-level speakers use by mimicking a specific person’s style of speech will go a long way towards building an accent that sounds more native. For example, one of the ways I developed my Japanese speaking personality was by copying Masaki Sumitani’s Hard Gay personality. For the record: I regret nothing.

Bonus trick: set your city to Tokyo on Meetup.com and join some online Japanese language meetups!

Media selection, variety, manga, and anime

When choosing media, if it’s too hard to use, it’s not good study material.

In the beginning, watching Japanese movies without English subs is a waste of your time. You aren’t going to understand the majority of what’s going on. It’s totally fine to use English subs if you make sure that you’re trying to pay attention to the Japanese used — it will help train your ear. As you get better, switch to J-subs and change back to English only for the parts that you really struggle with (there will be many of these at first). Just be honest with yourself and make sure to try to learn from the content while having fun — using English subs on Japanese media does not, by itself, count as studying unless you commit to learning. A good rule of thumb: you should be learning a couple of new words at least every 10 minutes. Forcing yourself to learn too many words too often can destroy your enjoyment of a particular piece of media, so don’t force yourself too hard.

When choosing a textbook, they all have problems and errors. In the long run ,it shouldn’t matter too much. The errors tend to be self-correcting over time if the textbook is at least decent. Even in our native languages, we often learn the wrong definition of a word and do not realize until we are adults that it was incorrect. For proof, google “words that people regularly get wrong.” You’ll see what I mean. This does not impede our ability to function in our native language.

A note on manga and anime: They are awesome. I initially didn’t have any interest in manga at all, but then I found the key to enjoyment: variety. I am not kidding when I say there is a manga for everyone. Wanna learn some Japanese historical terms and history, but don’t want to study a history book? Pick one. Like the one about Oda Nobunaga but wish that you read a manga about him being reborn as a dog named “Cinnamon” and then watch the anime based on that manga? Yep.

I used a lot of manga on my way to the N2. You can learn newspaper words, business language, medical terms, etc., all from manga and anime. For example, if you want to learn some medical terms, read a medical-drama manga or watch a hospital anime of some kind. If you want to learn some newspaper words, just pay attention when the tv in a scene gives exposition in the background. The problems from learning from anime and manga occur when you watch one type or genre exclusively. As long as you switch it up, you’ll develop a well-rounded base in no time. Of course, the manga should be in all Japanese.

A note on consuming media in general: you don’t need to consume the whole thing. You can skip the foreword intro, the “character introduction panels”, boring parts, etc. — hop around! The same goes for movies — if the opener is boring, skip until you see something cool, then start from there.

The schedule

1) Once you have the basic grammar down I mentioned above in “starting from zero,” do Heisig’s RTK. Feel free to do it side-by-side with the other parts here, but Kanji must come first. The reasoning is that you will eventually have to learn most of them to be fluent anyway, so you might as well get it over with fast so you can actually read things.

Disclaimer: I realize that some people are incapable of picturing things in their mind — I would recommend searching as to how others in your situation have learned kanji because in that situation this advice will be useless.

Doing Heisig should feel very relaxing— I put on headphones and listened to calming music and the sound of rain. I got a notebook and a nice, comfortable pen. I sat on the floor in my room or a desk at the library and did the following:

Read the description for a kanji. If the provided description doesn’t work for you, or if you can’t think of something yourself that sticks (some of the default RTK suggestions are not too great), use Kanji Koohii to find another story for that Kanji that works for you.

Close your eyes and take a moment to deliberately imagine that kanji as the story. For example, the kanji listed as “dam”, 堰, is comprised of a few parts: Dirt (left-hand side), Sun, Woman, and Box (will make sense when you read the book, I promise). When doing this word, actually close your eyes and picture a woman holding a box of dirt with the sun overhead, on her way to build a dam.

Then write the kanji in your notebook, once.

After doing that, continue to the next kanji for the day. Once done with your daily goal, open the Anki app and review. Start by reviewing any kanji that are due for review that day. Then review all of the kanji that you learned that day. Each review should be the same: write it in your notebook with your pen. I went through a few notebooks doing this. If done correctly, it should feel relaxing and enjoyable.

I worked my way up to doing about 50 kanji a day that way and finished all the daily kanji (about 2,000) in 6 weeks. You should work up to the number of Kanji that you are comfortable with and never push yourself too hard because some person on the internet said they did something with no proof.

After that, either do the first two parts of RTK volume two as I recommended above or just keep reading what you want — RTK 2 is convenient for fast-tracking your reading, so I do recommend it.

2) While doing your kanij study, or after, do the Anki core 6k or more textbooks. Try to work up to about 20 or 30 words a day once you’ve got a strong foundation in the language. This is learning and review rolled into one (the deck is actually teaching you) and tends to be a bit harder because you don’t really create your own stories or customize the cards. Don’t expect the same rate of progress as learning Kanji.

3) Read and consume media as you do step 2, and use Kichi when you do it or add the cards to a separate Anki deck. Injecting your own material into the learning process is important if you want to customize your vocabulary to the media you enjoy — if you want to watch the anime “Bleach”, you are going to have a tough time learning 霊圧 from a pre-made course.

4) Try to talk to a native speaker at least once a week. More is better. Use the tips mentioned above to find someone to speak with.

After you’ve learned about 6k words and have kept up your kanij reviews the whole time, finish out by doing the 完全マスター N2 and then go OBLITERATE that test.

This method, if you are consistent with it, will take ~ 200 days from when you start RTK. This means that you can go to fluency in about a year of intense study.

Kichi

So, I used Anki a lot when I was studying Japanese. And I mean a lot. My Anki account had a total card review count of over 170,000 reviews. I had over 10,000 individual flashcards. And I still had some serious problems with studying Japanese that Anki couldn’t solve and decided enough was enough.

Story time.

One night, I was reading a book before bed and I came across the word “賢者” (けんじゃ). I could not remember for the life of me how to read the first kanji, so I had to look it up. I remember thinking that to make it into a flashcard I would have to: go to the Chinese keyboard on my phone and do stroke-by-stroke input, get the kanji to come up, punch it into Jisho, get the reading, get the compound, switch to Anki, copy it in, and either copy the definition from Jisho and have no context or type in the whole surrounding sentence from my book, one character at a time. It no longer felt like casual reading — now it felt like study.

I remember thinking “Why can I not just take a picture, tap the word, and get all of this done automatically.”

It took me years to build it out, but I did it. I made that app.

Now don’t get me wrong — Anki is free, and it’s great. You should use it to do RTK, and maybe core6k. But it has some serious issues. It takes a bit of time to pick up because you have to read a bit of documentation and it has a steep learning curve. The community decks vary wildly in quality except for the RTK and some of the core 6k decks because they are based on published material. And the card creation is very customizable but slow. I found that if I could use the Anki desktop client it would take me about 2 minutes on average to get a good-quality card made from a word I didn’t know in one of my JLPT 2 books.

Kichi got it down to a fraction of that time.

The way it works is super simple: You take a picture (or use a screenshot of your phone, or any image at all really) and upload it to Kichi. The app processes the picture, and from there you just tap the word that you want, making any small edits to the word if the app didn’t get it perfectly (for example, you wanted 母さんです but it suggests 母さんで). After that, you just tap a button and it gives you a quick translation (for J->E) or opens the relevant online dictionary (J -> J). If the quick translation seems odd, you can of course tap a button and it will open the correct page in Jisho for you on the web. Copy the definition you like to your clipboard and switch back to the app.

After that, it automatically grabs the sentence that the word was a part of and uses it as an example sentence to make remembering the word easier. Then it turns that whole thing into a flashcard for you. The translation/definition from earlier is automatically added to the back of the card. Like Anki, it also manages your reviews using an algorithm based on the Supermemo 2 algorithm.

Of course, you can also simply click “share” from most images /text on the web or drag and drop on an iPad using side-by-side mode. I often take screenshots from my kindle app on my phone and then just hold down on the screenshot, click “share”, pick “Kichi”, and then let the app do the rest.

I used Kichi to play Octopath Traveler in Japanese (I learned some pretty absurd words). I also used it to play Sekiro in Japanese, which was awesome! I had tried it once before I had made Kichi but it was too hard to follow because I didn’t understand Edo-period Japanese. I learned so much by the end of that game that I can goof around with my coworkers by speaking like an 18th-century samurai. Massively motivating.

If you’re interested in making learning Japanese much easier, get it here. It comes with a 7-day trial, and if you like it, get it through the site for about $7–8/month.

Embarrassing things I have said or done

This is just for people who are afraid to make mistakes. These are real stories that I have survived, so you can too!

I tried to ask my friend who had just told me he was getting married what kind of wedding he would have. I was out to dinner with him and his wife and wanted to ask him if it would be a formal ceremony (儀式). Instead, I asked if it would be like a funeral to him (葬式). His wife thought that was hilarious, he realized what I was trying to say and thought it was great.

I was studying abroad and hadn’t really learned a lot of the language yet. This is a complicated story, but basically, I was staying over at the house of my girlfriend of the time and her family. When she was in the shower, her mom “wanted to see American culture” and asked me to hug her daughter when she came into the living room. I thought that was super odd, especially considering that in Japan you do not show affection in front of family, but I wasn’t going to refuse.

My girlfriend comes into the room. I hug her. She told me はなして. Now, this is important: That word has a few different meanings. She meant “Let go of me.” I did not know that meaning, I only knew the meaning “talk”. SO I STARTED SAYING RANDOM ENGLISH IN FRONT OF HER MOM. Her family found this hilarious, she switched to English and said “Let. Go.”.

And yet, I live. If I can survive that, you can survive it too. Don’t worry about mistakes.

Working in Japan

If you want to see what my life as a software engineer is like right now, I wrote a mountain about working in Japan, which you can see here:

Working in Japan: Myths, Realities, Salary, Culture (By A Software Engineer)

That covers a lot of what working at a Japanese company is like.

As for English teaching, there are a ton of articles on it. Here is the abridged version:

It is probably the easiest way to get a visa unless you have technical programming skills and good Japanese. Your visa belongs to you, so if you get here and don’t like your company, leave. No one cares, including immigration. Just make sure to tell them within 2 weeks when you stop working for any company and start working for another company.

In general, English teaching sucks. The people you teach are usually awesome, the administration is usually oppressive, and your organization will be carefully constructed to minimize the benefits that you get. Because of the eager waves of people willing to teach English so they can experience Japan combined with the very low bar to entry, you have no security at any particular company. The upside is that industry turnover happens to be very high, so you can also change jobs fairly quickly.

It is not a career for most people. If you teach English with a master’s or Ph.D. at a university or have your own business, the situation can be very different. Otherwise, you’re typically going into a situation where you’ll be paid a very low salary in a turbulent field. I have taught as a private teacher and as a direct hire for a board of education. Get direct hire — a couple of months of paid vacation and much more money and a better schedule.

Notes on different learning methods

Let’s get this out of the way right now: any method or person that promises fluency by just showing up and doing the coursework or taking lessons is lying. No matter what you choose, 90% of the work is you, and you will need to study whatever you are taught or discover in your own way to make it work for you. Achieving fluency as I described above will usually take a couple of years, but getting to basic conversational is a much faster process.

Personal tutoring and private language schools

I used to be a personal English tutor and also taught in a private language school. It was a lot of fun, but it also gave me a lot of insight into how the tutoring industry works for people who are pursuing a language as an adult. This advice will not apply to people that are pursuing a tutor for school — this is for the situation where you want to learn a language with help from mainly one person or some online service.

Online tutoring and private lessons are either great or terrible, depending on who’s selling the idea. The reality that I have experienced (and lived, as a private English tutor): this type of teaching usually isn’t designed to make you learn, most of the time. It’s designed to let you have fun — you have to be the one to put the work in to make it worth your while. A lesson that is effective but boring is not going to see repeat students, which is not a sustainable business. A lesson that is fun but not terrible educational will keep people coming back even if it isn’t the most efficient way to learn.

This disconnect between actual education and the appearance of education is highlighted in a really obvious way — many of the people teaching in the private sector don’t have any teaching background or qualifications other than being a native speaker of the language they want to teach. This is unfortunate because they might not understand how to adjust their teaching style to different types of learners or make well-rounded lessons for non-native speakers. Of course, there’s also the fact that being a native speaker doesn’t automatically mean you’re capable of teaching the language, but private courses seem to have no issue implying that. This is because a native speaker, while not necessarily the best for you, can look the best if you aren’t aware of your options.

Of course, learning and fun are not (and should not be!) mutually exclusive. But as a private business, it makes more sense to prioritize fun over learning because it’s better for business. There are certainly exceptions: No-nonsense full-immersion language schools tend to be private, but get great results. They depend on these results to cause more students to join from word-of-mouth. They also tend to have an admissions process or very high upfront fees because the drop-out rate can be high and the workload is demanding. I’ve seen great results from them and would recommend them if they seem interesting to you. Always do your research first.

If you feel the most comfortable with online tutoring or private lessons, I would recommend using them as a review of what you recently studied or are currently learning. For example, if you have a textbook, have the tutor teach you specific pieces of grammar or elaborate on cultural points. Do all the homework (that you want) on your own time, and then ask them for corrections and specific guidance. This is especially useful for beginners. I also recommend having a tutor if you are studying for a test and have specific questions for the test, especially for grammar which can get very tricky with similarities between structures.

Language exchange

Language exchange is something I strongly recommend for beginners. Once you get to a more advanced stage, you’ll want to switch to finding a way to talk in Japanese exclusively.

Upsides:

• Great way to learn Japanese while building a real friendship because you can both communicate to a degree.
• You can learn spoken Japanese a bit more easily if your partner has some English skill because they can communicate words you don’t know

Downsides:

• The person with more language proficiency can easily but unintentionally dominate the conversation.
• Inefficient way of practicing speaking once you can string sentences together quickly. This would be an ideal time to switch to finding a way to talk in Japanese exclusively.
• Writing down new words can kill the flow of conversation if you do it too often.

Premade apps

Duolingo, Memrise, Etc. — Apps that have premade courses and have you practice learning in a logical progression.

Upsides:

• Tend to have fun feedback mechanisms or game-like mechanics that make it easy to continue
• The courses are already made for you — just show up and learn in a logical order
• Great for learning how to communicate for short travel!
• Great to get some exposure to a language and see how you feel about it
• Easy to track progress
• Easy to do on a train or with a bit of downtime

Downsides:

• Word pronunciation is often gimmicky. They use machine recognition to see if the word sounds “close enough.” Unfortunately, there are times where this feedback can be fairly inaccurate.
• They will not give you fluency — or even conversational proficiency — by themselves. Most apps that have pre-made courses can help you start your journey to fluency but aren’t going to get you very far without outside help.
• Duolingo reminder owl will haunt you in your dreams.

Formal Education

Expensive but very structured. Think college courses. I did these for three years.

There are a few solid upsides to learning this way.

• If you need structure and outside expectations to perform reliably, set class times and a grading system can provide that.
• A lot of feedback. You will have a solid grasp of how quickly you are learning the parts of the language you’re studying, which can be motivating and validating for certain types of people.
• Unlike most private courses, they genuinely need you to learn instead of just having fun. There tends to be a stronger focus on learning the material and working towards a better understanding of the language.
• A professional to ask questions. Many professors have office hours and would love to discuss the material with you, so it can be nice to hear a professional break down the grammar for you.
• The structure of the course has most likely been refined over several iterations, so you’re getting a professionally designed course based on the instructor’s experience.
• A degree — if language learning is your passion and you want a four-year degree, why not do both together?
• Excellent for transitioning to study abroad!

And there are a few solid downsides:

• Financially prohibitive in many situations.
• Time restrictive. You don’t always get to choose what time the courses take place, so if it doesn’t fit into your schedule, it means you’re out of luck.
• Inflexible homework: You have to do homework to get a good grade. This isn’t an issue if the homework is productive but in my experience any homework that has you “write each kanji 10 times each” is wasting your life because that is a terrible way to learn kanji. See above.
• Group pace: The class moves forward at a set pace. It might be too fast or too slow, but you have to stick with the group for the most part. In reality, if you are willing to talk to the professor during office hours you can get extra study time if the pace is too fast, but if it’s too slow your options are somewhat limited. This can kill motivation for certain types of people.
• Textbooks might not be the best for you. If so, you don’t have many options here.
• You learn what the course teaches — these courses rarely equip you with skills to learn material outside of the course that you are interested in, so studying custom words can be difficult. You also aren’t graded on how much Japanese you learn, you’re graded on how much of the class-taught Japanese you learn.
• Grading is inflexible — My biggest peeve about learning a language in class is that you have to learn it exactly the way they teach it. For example: “How many books are on the bench?” “Three.” “Wrong. The correct answer was: There are three books on the bench. 1/5 points.” That is not at all how language works, and yet that is how we grade it.

Self-study

Completely custom study program! This is what I did.

Upsides:

• Can be a very inexpensive option
• Very easy to mix and match study methods
• Take everything at your own pace
• Learn exactly what you’re interested in
• Tremendous freedom in choosing your study time and place
• Builds study skills that will last you for the rest of your life
• Anything you do in that language counts as study so it’s easier to have fun. When you don’t have to study specific words for a course or lesson, every word you come across counts!

Downsides:

• Making your own flashcards takes a long time, usually (see Kichi)
• Choosing a textbook or online course to use can take a lot of time to figure out
• Confusing to start from zero — lots of conflicting sources of information
• Hard to feel progress unless you track it carefully
• Rarely external motivation — no grades mean nothing forces you to keep going

What I got out of studying Japanese

This is kind of difficult to articulate, but I get to live in two worlds at once. I get to read any kind of manga I find interesting and browse Japanese Twitter or read articles on things I’m interested in from a Japanese perspective. I get to make both Japanese and English jokes with my girlfriend, which is a really cool feeling. I can have informed opinions on things in Japanese culture from firsthand, deep experience. I get to experience all of the cool and unique aspects of Japan like Izakaya and snack bars. It’s had a ton of positives and was a really rewarding experience. Plus, a huge benefit is that a lot more doors in Japan are open to you when you speak Japanese.

I’ve also made a living that uses these skills and had the chance to lead a really fulfilling life, so there’s that.

On the downside, the more proficient in Japanese you become, the more you’ll realize that most of the stuff written about “Mystical Japan” or “Japan is X based on my very limited experience” is pure cringe. I am specifically talking about motivational-speaker-type bloggers and the army of Reddit armchair experts.

I have also dealt with some very serious, overt racism when it comes to apartment hunting and certain other situations, outlined in the Working In Japan article I mentioned above.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading all of this. It’s long, I know. As a wrap-up, here are some weird language notes for you. I hope this helps some of you studying.

んい is different than に and has a different pronunciation. Consider having a fluent speaker pronounce:
はんい （範囲）
かに (蟹)

Also, 雰囲気 is pronounced ふいんき
言う is often pronounced ゆう
You will learn that “can eat” is written 食べられる. That is correct, but the far more common form in speaking is 食べれる. This is called “らおち”, and is awesome.

Party icebreaker: ask someone what their 意外な面 is.

Also icebreaker: The word for deserted island is 無人島. Ask people what/who they would bring.

Have fun learning, and shoot me a message on twitter or leave a comment if you have any questions!