Don’t Learn Japanese
Or Go From Zero To Hiro
Unless you truly want or need Japanese, don’t.
Outside of Japan and maybe Hawaii, there is little use. The time put into this could be used to become a millionaire with a crazy start-up idea — or an opera singer.
The Not-A-Guide Guide
It’s hard to find the right method that suits one personally. Japanese is quite the journey and even trying to put it into numbers or summarize all the different ways is quite an odyssey.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the products mentioned in this article. They work best (for me).
Learning Japanese In One Year?
Time is finite, money not. If you got even a little spare change available I strongly urge you not to go for free alternatives just because it doesn’t cost you money. Use trials or the shortest subscription time service offers and give them all a chance. Gear up!
Don’t waste weeks instead of hours to save 10 bucks.
An Alternative Way
Since most guides and articles I found on the subject are fairly similar, let me try a different approach. Let’s learn the easy letters, phrases, and be a bit lazier with vocabulary. We will finish with hard characters and a grammar garnish.
Let’s take the first day to learn the basic symbols. Then start everything else at once and also split study between morning and evening.
The Worth Of Guidance & Tools
Paid: 2200h
Free: 4967h
Free options can be 2x the time! (But so can the paid! Try both, keep the winner)
Generally speaking, there is too much on the internet. You lose a lot of time trying and searching. Get guidance.
The Official Time Schedule
Google “N2 time” or “how long to learn Japanese” and you see this:
The lower estimates are very optimistic — especially for native speakers of entirely different languages.
If you are guided well, I’d wager somewhere around the upper estimate is accurate. Without, at least twice as long.
Basic Symbols
Japanese uses 3 alphabets and ours referred to as Romaji. The two basic ones are Hiragana and Katakana or collectively Kana. The hard ones are the Chinese symbols or Kanji.
Pay: Dr. Moku’s Hiragana & Katakana. Lots of memory aid like mnemonics and depictions. Works great & there is a free trial. Their Kanji app is bad.
Free: Go row by row in 5er blocks.
Warning. This:
Quickly turns into this:
This needlessly makes it look a lot harder than it is.
Note: Learning to hand-write Kana is useful. Skip Kanji. More on that later.
Writing Is Useless
With Kana, drawing the characters helps to memorize them, with Kanji there are too many.
To type, switch to the Japanese QWERTY keyboard and type the corresponding letters in English. For example nihongo for にほんご. Kanji versions appear as buttons below.
Basic Phrases
I tried flashcards, schools, movies, podcasts and even immersion.
It all works — but slowly (again, this might just be me).
You are told in many places to start with some basic greetings and common words by memorizing them.
This makes sense — if you booked a flight for next week or only planned to learn little.
Otherwise, play the long game. There is no in-between with this tongue. Don’t go slow. The learning curve is steep and your brain a pattern recognition machine. Bombard it with material and do so efficiently. If life keeps you busy, try to slow down — but don’t quit.
Free: NHK Easy Japanese, Anki flashcards, Language teachers and exchanges. Google: most common phrases or 100-word core. YouTubers: Matt and Dogen.
Pay: Rosetta Stone. 3 whole lessons a day.
Bonus: The minimum subscription time of RS is 3 months. With this schedule, you get good fast — are done before it resubscribes.
Charges~$50 (which it will advertise as ~16 per month). Expensive, but worth it. The first lesson is free.
(Reminder: this is not a sponsored article)
Why Rosetta Stone?
Comprehensible Input
- Flashcards rarely come with pictures and when they do, they are often bad. You can make your own deck or spend time searching and trying.
- There is no English after the menu in RS. None.
- Professional voice actors
- You get prompted to speak. The program cleverly detects if what you said was right or how much of it.
- No Furigana. Not needed — you can hear the words.
After Rosetta Stone:
Language Teachers
Meeting up, scheduling video calls, class costs— it all adds up, but a guide is the most efficient.
As English speakers, we have no connections and text is useless to us for a long time spare children's books.
Acquiring Instead Of Learning
Babies have to learn context too. Adults know this and language. They should build on this.
This sells grammar books. It’s valid and it helps to know even just a few grammar rules, but it is simply far slower. You manually build sentences in your head. Memorization is hard. This is memorization on steroids.
Plenty of studies prove that acquisition is better. Jeff Brown learned Arabic likes this.
The Acquiring Recipe
Personal teacher + magazines + children’s books.
Dice to: 1/6 magazines 1/6 commands and 4/6 children’s books. Garnish with the following rules.
- Rules with your language partner
- To 95% no English
- Teacher does not correct you (waste of time, does not work)
- If stuck, move on. Say “it’s not important”
- Simple material. Don’t talk about concepts like inflation.
2. Learn how to say
- yes/no
- what is this/why is that
3. Start with clothes and colors. Ask about them. Answers should be more than one-word
What is this?
An expensive red shirt with short sleeves.
Why is it expensive?
It’s a famous brand from overseas.
4. Commands
Stand! Sit! Use your body to follow them.
5. Stories
Stop your teacher often to ask questions about the character's items or the plot. Don’t try to repeat the narrative.
Vocabulary
Learned along the way by the other parts of this guide.
Grammar
We just need a tad so we don’t get confused by grammatical non-words. You can’t translate word for word.
Watashi ha tomu desu — I am Tom
- ha, desu =?
Pay: Bunpro.jp
One month for $3 suffices.
The first half of N5 — the beginner level — is enough. The first 60. If confused, ask YouTube.
After completing Rosetta Stone you know most answers intuitively.
Advanced Symbols
There is no reason to learn to handwrite these. If you do want to regardless, I recommend RTK or Remembering the Kanji by Heisig volume one.
Pro arguments for drawing:
- To not get confused by similar symbols
Just go on. 80–20 rule. No need to fill thousands of pages. Or maybe only a few hundred ;)
2. For context
WK (see below) teaches us sufficiently.
WaniKani
~10$ per month
WK is a blend of memory jogging tricks (mnemonics and stories) and spaced repetition making it highly effective — but it still consists of a daily 1,5h grind on average.
Reminder: Split learning between morning and evening.
Scripts: Free upgrades. List of the best ones below. Setting them up takes a few minutes, but it’s a worthwhile investment.
First, install Tampermonkey.
Then, type WaniKani + Script + ScriptName into Google.
You will end up in a forum thread. There, click the hyperlinked name of the script. Then click the TM icon.
Script list:
ConfussionGuesser: When you enter the right answer for the wrong Kanji
Hide Review Accuracy: Distracts.
Double-Check: You can correct a wrong answer. Use when WK doesn’t accept a logically correct answer. For Example when you type “small finger” and it says “wrong: little finger”
Fast Abridged: Program instantly moves on after you give it a correct answer. Saves time.
Lightning Mode: Program runs more smooth.
Mistake Delay: If an answer is wrong, the program pauses for a second. Prevents accidentally moving on.
Open Framework: Necessary for some of the scripts to run
Reorder Ultimate 2: So you solve Kanjis first in your reviews before vocabulary. Helps.
Speed: More Speed.
WK Does Not End With Level 60
After level 60, start burning. Reading increasingly harder texts is also a great way to march forward.
Dictionary recommendation: Imiwa.
Online Practice Test
Some context first.
Levels
Japanese language proficiency is described in levels from N5 to N1 and assessed with the JLPT test.
The real thing costs ~$60 and takes place twice a year. Register early.
Checklist
You:
- know all Kana by heart
- finished the entirety of Rosetta Stone (Japanese)
- reviewed the 50 grammar rules of N5 on bunpro
- reached at least level 40 in WaniKani
- did lots of reading
Why Is Japanese So Hard?
The Learning Curve Is VERY Steep
And highly underestimated.
Say you were learning French with movies + subtitles. It’s similar enough to English for your brain to recognize patterns.
Later on, you can even change the subtitles.
English has but one alphabet with 26 letters. Pronouncing has few exceptions. Words either one or few and similar meanings.
Japanese has over 50000 characters. 46 Hiragana + 46 Katakana + ~50000 Kanji. Luckily knowing 2000 is sufficient.
Each Kanji has 2 to 10 ways to read it — which is often different from how you speak it — and 1 to 20 meanings — which change according to how they are combined with other symbols or even numbers.
Not only that, but the subtitles are the wrong way around.
Audio: This is ok
Subtitle: Ok this is
That’s because English is SVO while Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb).
Conclusion
Japanese is hard, but not for the reasons people expect.
Difficulty to Japanese is like bulky to weight.
It’s the sheer volume that makes learning it such an ordeal. It’s entirely different and if knowledge is a tree, this is not growing a branch but planting a whole new plant.
It’s too late to learn a hard language as an adult anyways
Not entirely true. Your brain is like a messy storehouse with an aged janitor.
Studying Japanese is like cleaning it up and sending your guy to the gym.
Bonus:
Answering The Age-Old Question: Is It Easy For Chinese?
When I took classes in Japanese for a few months, I was surrounded people of many nationalities.
Around the fifth week, I noticed a change. Many people quit and eventually I was literally the last person left that wasn’t Chinese.
I’m sure my case was one of the more extreme ones. However, when I asked around, this seemed a common theme. The reason is simple. Being able to read the Chinese characters is a huge help.
Even the absolute beginner books have them from the start, supplemented with Furigana and English.
This is how the same text looks like if you can read Chinese:
Not all symbols to be fair. Some Chinese characters were simplified over time to make them easier to write, while Japan stuck with the originals.
Still, learning a few hundred new meanings and pronunciations beats starting from scratch by miles.
