This post is mostly a personal note for myself to write up everything I’ve read so far on learning Japanese in an efficient way — but if it helps someone else along the way, all the better!

I just want to clarify that I am not proficient in Japanese (yet). I learned it for some time and then stopped because I missed my Anki reviews for a few weeks, and catching up was very hard for me (don’t skip your Anki reviews!). If you don’t know what Anki is, I’ll give a brief description of it later in the post.

Motivation

I think before you even start considering learning a language, you should ask yourself why you want to do it in the first place. This rule applies to a lot of activities, but I think it’s especially important for language learning, as it’s a long-term journey and motivation matters a lot.

For some, it’s career; for others, media consumption; for others still, pure enjoyment. In my case, it was a mix of the joy of learning a foreign language and a fondness for Japanese culture. I tried to learn Chinese and Korean as well, but I didn’t feel the same affection for them, even though they’re both fascinating languages with rich cultural heritage.

Basics

Writing and Reading

First, it’s crucial to be able to read Japanese. Therefore, the first thing you want to do is learn kana. Kana are the systems used to write and read Japanese. There are two: hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is used for native Japanese words, whereas katakana is mostly used for foreign loanwords.

I think it’s relatively easy to just rote memorize them, since you’ll be reading kana (and kanji) a lot later on and they’ll get stuck in your memory. I find Tofugu’s guides on hiragana and katakana pretty cool since they leverage the benefits of mnemonics for memory retention, but you could use pretty much any resource as long as it sticks with you.

There’s also kanji, which is another writing system that uses Chinese characters. There are thousands of kanji, so it would be pretty hard to tackle them in the same way as kana. Yet, they’re used very often, so it’s important to learn them in a more manageable way, which I’ll cover in the next section.

Foundation

I think almost every person who has tried to learn a foreign language has encountered the term “comprehensible input”. You consume content in your target language the way a native speaker would — watching films/shows, reading books/articles, etc. You progressively level up the complexity of the material as you go to keep it just above your current level.

Yet, before we even start doing that, it’s important to have a solid foundation, since we can’t build up this kind of progression if we don’t understand most of what we’re trying to grasp.

Vocabulary

It’s crucial to learn the most important words early on — it’s way more productive to learn the most frequent words rather than trying to remember random words you probably won’t use from the beginning. If you’re not familiar with spaced repetition and Anki, I recommend reading this cool comics-like article on the benefits of SRS apps like Anki.

In short, Anki is an app that uses a technique called spaced repetition, which schedules flashcards in a smart way that results in better long-term retention of the material.

Luckily, there are many great Anki decks (collections of flashcards) for Japanese. Personally, I find the Kaishi deck to be pretty good. Most learners find themselves comfortable with 15–25 new cards per day, though the right number is up to you. It’s better to learn 10–15 new cards per day consistently than to learn 25 for a few days and then stop because it was too much.

WIP: I’ll be writing more about immersion when I have a somewhat solid foundation to do so, plus maybe additional tips/advice.