This document can be found at this url: https://gist.github.com/Riizade/6f391084eb779a83e4e7c4a80e4d7ec4
In no particular order, here are various learning materials and methods I used to study Japanese. Read what you like, take what you like, and ignore anything you don't.
Also, I don't speak Japanese, so maybe this whole guide sucks.
You can find digital versions of some of the content in my collection here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/135lGOJdEP8bToB08NrNU-AIHJ7mDVWXx?usp=sharing
Do whatever you can, but try to do something every day. The most important thing is to be exposed to the material often. Even if it doesn't feel like you're learning, you probably are. The resource you're likely to be constrained on is motivation, so do whatever is easiest to make a routine (like 20 minutes of Anki flashcards) or whichever is most fun (like reading manga or watching TV in Japanese). With that said, making something a habit is a very powerful way to encourage yourself to do something regularly, so consider scheduling 20-30 minutes whenever convenient (like maybe before sleep) for flashcards or reading manga or whatever.
It often won't feel like you're improving, but you are. For a while, I was just reading the Pokemon manga for study. From beginning to end, I felt like I was struggling the same amount and wasn't really learning, but I made sure to time myself. On my first volume, a chapter took me a little over an hour to read. By the 7th volume, a chapter took me about 15-20 minutes to read. At the start, a fair amount of JLPT N5 questions would trip me up, but by the end I felt like N4 was definitely reachable.
Have your study material available. Keep some on your phone, iPad, Kindle, whatever you might carry with you. If you get a burst of inspiration to study for 5 minutes waiting in line, great, do it. Your most limited resource is likely to be motivation, so you want to remove other barriers to studying so that when motivation strikes, you can study, even if just for a hot second.
People say "don't watch anime/read manga to learn Japanese becuase you'll sound like an anime character" and that's horseshit. If you like anime, watch anime. You have to enjoy the learning process, or you won't do it consistently. If you learn via anime and come out 2 years later speaking exactly like Naruto, that's fucking dope. It'll be way easier to unlearn a few speech patterns and idioms than learning the entire language from scratch again. I'd rather speak like Naruto and understand an entire language than not speak or understand at all.
Try to have furigana available for the material you're reading. Looking up a kanji without knowing its pronunciation is possible, but takes 2-3x as long, longer in some cases. Typing a quick few kana into a dictionary is easy, handwriting a kanji or searching by radical can take a long time depending on how good your handwriting is and how good the character recognition is on whatever app/keyboard you're using.
I recommend avoiding Google Translate as much as possible, instead prefer a dictionary app and struggling through the translation yourself. Japanese and English are so different that Google Translate gives you a weirdly awkward translation more often than it gives you something straightforward. I've misunderstood manga chapters before because Google Translate gave me a translation that was unrelated or wrong.
I use Akebi.
It's a super-fast offline Japanese dictionary app. It's very well designed and is the fastest way I've found to look up Japanese words/text.
On PC/browser I use https://jisho.org. Similar functionality to Akebi, if a little bit less pretty.
I do not recommend using these, but here are the best two I've found:
- Mango
- Duolingo
The above apps can help you get started if you're totally lost and the textbooks aren't your style, but I'd say they stop being useful pretty quickly. They never graduate beyond basic grammar, and their examples are usually stilted and awkward as a result.
Mango is better than Duolingo in my opinion, but still isn't amazing.
(Duolingo has a profit motive and wants you to feel like you're learning more than actually help you learn; its examples are too easy, and the difference between the first lesson and the last lesson is actually not large, the lesson tree is mostly to give you the illusion of progression).
- Genki I+II
- Minna no Nihongo I+II
- Tobira
I recommend reading through Genki and Minna no Nihongo's first two books each. I didn't do the exercises, and don't recommend doing them. This is because they're geared toward being gradeable rather than being useful.
I haven't yet read Tobira, but after finishing the other books, I think it's easier to move onto straight grammar dictionaries and entertainment material after your first 2 books. I'm not saying Tobira is worse than the others, I don't know that, I'm just saying reading a 3rd textbook on the same material is probably less useful than moving onto other stuff.
Some of the above textbooks are available in PDF form in my collection: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/135lGOJdEP8bToB08NrNU-AIHJ7mDVWXx?usp=sharing
These are essentially textbooks, but I find the explanations for grammar concepts to be more in-depth and understandable. They also focus more on giving examples and diving into why a certain grammar construction means what it does, which helps with remembering the concepts.
Essentially after finishing the beginner textbooks, I replaced textbook studying with Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui's dictionary series: "A Dictionary of (Basic/Intermediate/Advanced) Japanese Grammar"
You can find PDF files for these in my collection here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/135lGOJdEP8bToB08NrNU-AIHJ7mDVWXx?usp=sharing
YouTube is great for learning specific grammar/vocabulary concepts. I tend to put on a video in the background and listen at 1.5x-2x speed while I play video games or whatever.
Some good channels include:
- https://www.youtube.com/c/japanesepod101 (JapanesePod101)
- https://www.youtube.com/c/JapaneseAmmowithMisa/videos (Japanese Ammo with Misa)
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsQCbl3a9FtYvA55BxdzYiQ (Miku Real Japanese)
The number one thing to remember is that understanding will come over time. You won't remember every kanji perfectly, or its meaning, and it will be a struggle at first. As you practice, you'll find that meanings become second nature, and you'll start to intrinsically associate certain kanji with their meanings. Over time, it gets easier and easier as you intrinsically remember more kanji and more radicals, and complicated-looking kanji you recognize easily because it's just two simpler kanji smushed together.
Pratice every day. Figure out how much studying you can handle each day, and just do that much; no more, maybe a little less to be safe. Let the flashcard app handle which kanji to show you.
Spaced repetition works. If you just do it every day, even if you don't feel like you have a solid handle on the kanji when you finish for the day, like you'll forget them all tomorrow, it doesn't matter. You probably will forget them; but when they come up for review, you'll learn them faster. And by the time they come up the 3rd-5th time in review, you'll probably not even have to think about the meaning, it'll just pop into your head involuntarily. Sleep and the passage of time help learning. It's easy to think of learning as something you have to actively do, but for material like this, often letting it sink from short term memory into long term memory is the most important part. That happens by just seeing it every so often and getting good sleep.
Keep in mind that if you want to see 10 new cards every day in a deck, you also have to account for the review cards that come up as well. In my experience, you'll review about 4-7x as many cards as there are new cards (depending on deck size and memorization difficulty). e.g., if you set Anki to show you 10 new cards per day, you'll also have to review 40-70 cards per day. But of course, reviewing cards takes much less time than learning a new card. Currently (Dec. 2022) I review about 900 cards per day, and it takes about 100 minutes (1h40m) including re-reviews due to not remembering a card, so that's about one card every 7ish seconds. So 30 new cards a day, 200ish cards total (due to reviews) should take about 25 minutes at the same pace. Not a huge amount at all. Doing that will get you past 10,000 passive vocabulary in just under one year, which is theoretically JLPT N1 level (vocabulary wise).
I've made some modifications to some Anki decks I downloaded (mostly added examples to N1/N0 kanji that had none and removed misleading pictures such as a picture of the metal "lead" for a verb "to lead (someone to a place)".
You can find all the Japanese Anki decks I use here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TKrjmefYjd--Xm8f1czVlFo6qqqeIFqN/view?usp=share_link
I think these are helpful to introduce and to some degree reinforce grammar points. I just started doing these recently though, so I haven't been able to notice/estimate any improvement.
They say C1 level and JLPT N1 requires about 10,000 passive vocabulary words. That is, you can recognize 10,000 different "language units" (lexemes/words), but not necessarily use them in conversation.
To that end, vocabulary flashcards are very helpful. It's very much a marathon and not a sprint. It takes years to learn a language, so pick a date far in the future and set a goal for yourself that corresponds to that date. For example, if you want to recognize 10,000 words in a year, you can do about 30 new flashcards a day (with about 170 review cards per day), which will take about 30 minutes each day. Seems reasonable to me!
The flashcard sets I use show each card twice when studying. The English side, where you're supposed to recall the kanji, and the kanji side, where you're supposed to recall the meaning.
I used AnkiDroid for flashcards, but any Anki app should do the same thing.
Before you start studying kanji, I recommend looking through the list of common radicals a few times so you're familiar with the pieces. Maybe even get a separate flashcard deck to study the radicals. It's so much easier to remember 4 radicals and their positions than to try to remember an entire kanji without pulling it apart into radicals. It also helps with distinguishing similar kanji. For example: 緑 and 縁 look extremely similar, and trying to memorize their shapes without knowing the component radicals would be extremely difficult. But you can recognize both are "silk/thread" on the left, "yo/use" on the top, and the left kanji has "water" on the bottom, and the right kanji has "pig" on the bottom.
- https://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_frequency
Each card has a ton of supplemental information.
I recommend memorizing the following for each kanji:
- the most common on-yomi (typically the first on the card)
- either the most common kun-yomi (typically the first on the card), or the verb root it's associated with
- ~2ish example words (ideally one kun-yomi and one on-yomi)
- Each radical and its position
For example, for the kanji 会, memorize the following:
- あう (the verb "to meet")
- カイ (the on-yomi)
- 会社 (かいしゃ, company) / 会う (to meet)
- radicals: 人二厶
When either side comes up, recall all the above information. If you can't, don't mark it as being correct. If you get it correct, even if you think you'll forget it the next time you see it, mark it as "good" or "hard". You don't have to memorize it forever, you just have to recall it once. You'll solidify the understanding when it comes up for review.
When the English comes up, write the kanji in your head. If you don't get it correct, mark that you were wrong. Don't hit "good" until you can write it in your head or on paper. Once you get it correct once though, you can skip it. You won't remember it, but that's okay, when it comes back around on the study list, it'll be easier to remember.
When starting out, you'll want to read manga that has furigana (pronunciation guide kana), and preferably something aimed at a particularly young audience.
I'd say roughly half of manga I browsed had furigana, but be careful. A lot of the good stuff (seinen like Tokyo Ghoul, Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Rurouni Kenshin) is aimed at an older audience and does not have furigana, and will use lots of technical terms.
Your first manga in Japanese doesn't have to be amazing, just good enough that you'll continue reading it.
I read Pokemon Adventures (ポケットモンスタースペシャル/Pocket Monster Special) volumes 1-7 (the Kanto/original arc with Red and Blue), and I'd probably not particularly enjoy it in English, but it kept me interested enough to read a chapter a day, which was enough.
I also recommend when starting out to get both the English and the Japanese version of the manga. Read the Japanese, and if you don't understand a word, look it up in a dictionary. If you still can't figure it out, check the English version for reference. When reading Pokemon Adventures, for volume 1 I was basically just reading both. By volume 7, I'm actually not sure I ever opened the English version.
You can get manga from https://nyaa.si, just be sure to search the Japanese title and pay attention to the category name. If the category name is in English ("Books"), the material is probably in English. If the category is in Japanese ("本"), the material is probably in Japanese.
You can also find manga on https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/manga/subete.html but the images tend not to be as high-quality. Maybe check there if what you're looking for isn't on https://nyaa.si
For reading manga files, I recommend YACReader on iPad.
I also have lots of manga pre-formatted for YACReader, but they're too large to put on Google Drive permanently, so you'll have to let me know and we can schedule a transfer time.
Language Reactor is a Chrome extension that allows you to put two different language subs onto Netflix or YouTube, and to hover over words in the subtitles to display translations and additional info. Among other features.
https://www.languagereactor.com/
This is a great way to enjoy learning. To begin with, I recommend using the "dual subs" feature to put both Japanese (kanji with furigana) and English subs onto the video and watch that way, trying your best to pay attention to the Japanese. When you get a little more advanced, it's better to skip the English and watch slowly in Japanese, hovering over every word you don't understand.
Not every Japanese show on Netflix has Japanese subtitles though, including most of the anime unfortunately. Skip these. Make sure the show has Japanese subtitles. The ones with the Netflix logo in the corner of their title image tend to have Japanese subtitles, but not all of them.
Additionally, you can use a VPN to switch your location to Japan in order to get a larger selection of Japanese content (even some shows available in the US only have Japanese subtitles on the Japanese version of Netflix).
Here's some stuff I watched:
- Terrace House
- Love is Blind Japan
- Hi-Score Girl
Terrace House in particular was great because there's a huge amount of content, and it's actual conversational Japanese, not weird anime-speak. The caveat is that while there's no script, like all other reality TV, it is directed and mostly fake, so keep that in mind. Terrace House really tries to seem more authentic than other shows, but it's extremely curated and controlled, so it's not a particularly accurate way to learn about Japanese culture and attitudes toward certain topics.
Several video players support dual subtitles on the same video. I currently use PotPlayer (https://potplayer.daum.net/), but I'm sure other good ones exist.
To watch videos with dual subs, you'll need the video (of course) and both subs available. Finding anime to watch is fairly easy, as you can browse your favorite tracker such as https://nyaa.si/ or finding another method to get the video files onto your machine.
Usually these will come with English subtitles (or often, subtitles for many non-Japanese languages), but you'll have to download the Japanese subtitles separately.
Here's a short list of websites where you can find subtitles in Japanese (and often other languages):
- https://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=subtitles%2Fjapanese%2F
- https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/library/sub.html
- https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search
Unfortunately, often the downloaded subtitles are out of sync with the video, and even worse, the English and Japanese subs may also be out of sync with each other. If your video player allows you to adjust subtitle timings individually, great! PotPlayer does not though. To fix this, I download a subtitle editing program (I use SubtitleEdit). I use PotPlayer to view the subtitle timings, figure out the correct offset, and then use the bulk edit functionality to mass edit all the Japanese subtitles at once to a more correct timing.
Once you have the sub timings corrected, you have to enable both subs. I do this by right-clicking on the playing video, hit "Subtitles -> Add/Select Subtitles -> Load Subtitle..." and select the Japanese subtitles. Then I Select "Subtitles -> Add/Select Subtitles -> 2nd Subtitle" and select the English subtitle (loading it if necessary). This process can be a bit finnicky; for example, if you select the 2nd subtitle first, then load a subtitle into the primary subtitle slot, the 2nd subtitle will be cleared and only one set of subtitles will be displayed. A little awkward, but not too bad once you get the flow down.
Once everything is set up, most of the advice applies here as it does with Netflix and Language Reactor; try your best to use only the Japanese subtitles, referring to the English only when you get totally lost or there's a word you don't recognize and can't pick up from context. It's really easy to accidentally revert to reading the English subtitles the whole time, but then you're not practicing!
Light novels are great practice. They force you to understand everything you're reading without relying on images or facial expressions for context. The downside of course is that it's pretty advanced, and almost all light novels come without furigana, meaning reading without extensive knowledge of kanji is difficult.
Luckily, there's a solution. You can add furigana to an ebook using this CLI Python module: https://libraries.io/pypi/furigana4epub
I've taken the liberty of doing so for several light novels already, and you can find my collection here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/162xagadOeKIesCn2FNgCif41n-WxS7Wv?usp=sharing
Unfortunately, the furigana is correct only about 70% of the time. Computers have a hard time with context, which is needed in many instances to determine the correct pronunciation. Compare 今日（きょう）/ (today) to 今日（こんにち）/ (these days, konnichiwa).
However, even when the furigana is wrong, it can be useful as a guide to look up the characters via their pronunciation instead of having to try to use a handwriting recognition keyboard on your phone.
Finding a podcast to listen to is insanely good listening practice, since you don't have any text to help you and it's real people speaking colloquial Japanese. It's also great for understanding certain aspects of culture and vocabulary specific to your interests since the cast will be extremely into whatever topic they're talking about.
I recommend listening at less than 1x speed. (typically 0.75x-0.8x because the audio is weirdly choppy at slower speeds, and timing cues for jokes don't come across at slower speeds)
I listen to the following gaming podcasts:
- IGN Japan しゃべりすぎゲーマー
- ゲームなんとか
There are two ways to interact with podcasts:
- Listening and understanding what you can as it plays
- Pause and look up every word/sentence you don't know
I recommend the first approach because looking up words can be difficult when listening to a podcast, they might use a colloquial pronunciation, it may be a dialect or extremely new slang, or you might mishear it. It's much easier to look up an unknown word in a book or manga or something with subtitles, so I recommend using those for vocabulary building.
The first approach may seem like it doesn't help, but it solidifies your understanding of the concepts you already know, and it helps you understand more quickly in your mind what's being said, both of which are useful.
Primarily I find podcasts useful for multitasking. I tend to listen when I'm at the gym or playing a particularly mindless videogame.
I love video games. However, I think they're a little difficult to use for study for three primary reasons.
- If the game doesn't natively support furigana (most don't), there's no realistic way to add it
- Even in slow JRPGs like Pokemon, there tend to be cutscenes where dialogue plays with no way to pause, so if you don't read as fast as a native, you will miss context and have no way of getting it back.
- Many fantasy games use archaic Japanese, Monster Hunter: Rise is actually notorious for this, to the point where I've read that native Japanese speakers sometimes struggle to understand parts of the game.
So I've mostly avoided it up to now. I think once I feel somewhat comfortable reading a light novel, I'll give video games (especially ones targeted at younger audiences like Pokemon) another try.
Alternatively, Let's Plays might be a really good way to learn because you can pause, and Language Reactor may even have dual sub support for the Let's Play series.
Twitter has a huge Japanese userbase (because the old 140 character limit was extremely generous in Japanese compared to English). You can follow some conversations there if you're into Twitter. I don't really get it though.
Japanese nerds tend to gather on BBS systems like 2chan (the predecessor of 4chan and 8chan). They're archaic technology, so I recommend using a BBS browser like ChMate on Android or something similar to read them. It's basically Japanese reddit, and you'll pick up all the slang and memes there.
- Satori Reader (https://www.satorireader.com/) seems great; it breaks down every sentence in its stories/articles by vocab and grammar point. I haven't used it though because I'd rather struggle through a fantasy manga than read about a cat's daily life. Maybe I'll try it someday if I feel like other grammar resources aren't working.