Some Stuff about learning Japanese

20 Jun 2021


Last Update: 2023-01-07

This is a list of resources I use(d) for learning Japanese, plus some blabbering.

General introduction

Tofugu (Very accessible and helpful overview of the Japanese language)

Kana (the Japanese alphabet)

Tofugu and Real Kana (I highly recommend learning both Hiragana and Katakana from the beginning. I’d even say manually practising Katakana is more important, because it is less common).

(Side-Note) Romaji:

I wouldn’t recommend learning Japanese using “romaji”, meaning Japanese written using Latin letters (e.g. “kawaii desu”), not even to start with. It will only make everything more difficult and confusing. Just because the first few steps feel easier, doesn’t mean it is a good idea. And while learning a new alphabet might seem a bit daunting, it really isn’t difficult and you will quickly get used to it.

Grammar

The commonly taken approach to Japanese grammar in English textbooks (and consequently most online resources as well) is a bit of a mess, trying to explain Japanese through an English lens, instead of accepting that Japanese grammar simply works fundamentally different from English. There unfortunately still doesn’t seem to be a textbook, at least as far as I am aware, which fully overhauls this antiquated approach.

There is however this Youtube video series.
「なに⁉」 you might be thinking. Clickbait titles, a poorly animated digital head, a grating voice?!
Yeah, the presentation is kinda strange, certainly not very confidence-inducing, but the person behind these videos really knows what they are talking about, and, if you can get over the presentation, it really is the best, or definitely the most logical and structured, explanation of Japanese grammar that I am aware of.

If you can’t get used to the style of Cure Dolly, which I can’t blame anyone for, my other recommendation would be to read Tae Kim’s guide (here is a pdf version for offline reading, though it unfortunately hasn’t been updated in a long while).
Tae Kim tries his best to improve on the ways Japanese grammar is usually taught in English, and his guide really is very good, but there are still places where he fails to properly explain the fundamental structure of Japanese grammar. I would recommend, maybe after you have gone through the “basics” section of his guide, to at least watch these videos by the above-mentioned channel, which point out a few places where Tae Kim’s explanations fall short.

Though honestly, the only way to really ‘get’ Japanese grammar is by reading a lot of Japanese, and developing an intuition for yourself how things work. No matter what grammar guide you go with, it ultimately will only serve to get you started with deciphering the basic structure of sentences. Though it of course is still helpful to build your intuition on a stable basis.

Kanji

I have tried Wanikani (way too slow, zero customisation, don’t like the mnemonics, monthly fee) and RTK (odd and archaic keywords, intended for learning handwriting).
In the end I went through RTK, but using a mix of RTK keywords, Wanikani keywords and my own keywords…

With hindsight, I would not recommend trying to learn “all” kanji (i.e. the few thousand most commonly used ones) in one go. While it is very helpful to attach some meaning to common radicals, in the end, it’s a lot easier to learn kanji as one comes across them, with some helpful context to their meaning, rather than trying to blindly shove them into one’s head, with at most some English word to associate them with.
And, in the end, the only thing that really matters with kanji, is to learn their readings, especially their on-readings. And the best way to do that is to just see words using a kanji a lot of times, every time querying your mind for the reading, and if you can’t remember, looking it up, until it sticks.

Handwriting

Don’t bother.

Unless you want to get into calligraphy or just enjoy the challenge, there is absolutely no reason to learn to write kanji by hand. It takes an enormous amount of time and will not help in any proportional way in understanding Japanese. And even with writing things, these days it’s much more important to be able to type on a PC, than to write by hand, especially if you have no intention to live in Japan.
Of course, once you know the language well, it still might be a good idea to learn handwriting, but not only will it be a lot quicker to pick up at that point, but you will most likely know for yourself whether it is necessary or not.

Vocabulary

I did try a few pre-made “Core 2k” Anki decks, but found them in various ways frustrating, so I’ve decided to make my own over time as I come across words. And I would recommend doing the same, since it is a lot easier to remember new words when they come with some context.
Also, I wouldn’t recommend spending too much time practising vocabulary “dry” (i.e. in Anki), but rather to instead just read as much as possible. With a PC and some experience in entering kanji by radical, it’s no issue at all to just look up a word a few times, until it sticks in your head.

One middle approach that I’ve converged onto for myself, is to save all words which I had to look up during a reading session to Anki and afterwards go through them a few times for review, before deleting them again.
And ultimately, the only thing you really have to beat into your head are the readings of kanji. The meaning of words is much better understood by encountering it in various contexts, rather than directly associating it with some specific English translation, which, especially with a language as distant from English as Japanese, will in a lot of cases do more harm than good. I even have the “meaning” field hidden by default in Anki, only revealing it when I don’t remember at all what a word means.

Also, something you might notice when starting to read/watch something new, especially if it is in a genre or by a creator you don’t have any experience with, is that you will suddenly come across a lot of unknown words or even have difficulty following the story. Almost as if you have been set back in your learning progress. However, this is simply due to every individual having a different writing style and every genre having it’s unique terminology. You will notice this especially if you go for something from a different time period.
Don’t take that as a blow to your confidence in the understanding of the language, it’s just another opportunity to become familiar with new grammar and vocabulary.

Reading

For the very beginning, I’d recommend starting with Japanese fairytales (more here and here) and other stories intended for children, since they usually feature simple vocabulary and grammatically clear sentences. See also : Tofugu and Crunchy Nihongo for more recommendations.

Though contrary what you’ll find said in a lot of places, I personally don’t think it’s such a bad idea to just jump into normal manga you enjoy. While it’s true that due to the often times more colloquial and/or stylized dialogue it can be challenging to figure out sentence structure/grammar and you’ll be bombarded with unknown vocabulary, the increased motivation from reading a story you like can easily outweigh any of that, at least that has been the case for me. You will just have to accept that each page will take it’s time, and you will not understand every single sentence.

There is a nice website called “Bilingual Manga”, which gives you the Japanese (as convenient copy-paste-able/Yomichan-able text!) and and an English translation side by side. Unfortunately it only has a small selection of manga, most of which are incomplete, so it’s more to get started, than to read a lot.

If you want to buy manga, books, etc. from Japan, there are a few websites available. Probably the most convenient option is just ordering from Amazon Japan, though with some products, it might say “This item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location.” for some reason, so good luck. Another option is CD Japan, which, contrary to what the name suggests, also sells Japanese manga (and all sorts of other stuff).
Of course there also is the option to get E-Books, though beware that most websites will not give you the manga as something like an EPUB file, but rather require you to use their apps. If you’re fine with reading on the phone or PC, that’s no problem of course.

(Side-Note) Furigana:

The fact that a lot of manga & novels (in particular those aimed at a younger audience) have full furigana (i.e. the reading of kanji are written above/besides them) is in parts a blessing and a curse for learning Japanese. Furigana obviously make both reading itself and looking up vocabulary easier, so in turn making for a much more pleasant reading experience, letting you focus more on things like grammar or, well, the story itself.

The problem is that, the moment you take away the furigana, even for a word seen many times over, you will notice that you most likely don’t remember it’s reading, you might not even recognize the kanji. In reading, your brain automatically focuses much more on the easy to read hiragana than the kanji besides them. In fact, even if you try, consciously ignoring the furigana and only reading the kanji themselves is quite difficult.
The result unfortunately being, that, while a great help in getting comfortable with reading Japanese, furigana are of no help, or even counterproductive, towards learning kanji. And since you will inevitably come across situations where the readings of kanji will not be readily provided, I would highly recommend sooner rather than later to begin reading manga, novels or just stuff on the web without furigana (and without going over every word with Yomichan). It is painfully slow at first, but it’s the only way to learn to read kanji, and therefore properly read Japanese. As noted above, I would also recommend reviewing vocabulary (and therefore the corresponding kanji readings) of words you had to look up after a reading session.

Novels

If, like me, you start out with reading mostly manga, once you try reading a novel, you will be hit with quite the learning curve.
In manga you are mostly only exposed to the language of dialogue, and you will notice that the language used to describe a scene in a story tends to be a completely different register. Just like with every other language, the words and grammatical constructs used in Japanese prose differs quite a lot from the normal spoken language. It might even feel at first like learning from zero all over again.

Don’t let that discourage you. You will have to accept that just like in the very beginning, each sentence, each page will take it’s time, and you will have to look up a lot of new vocabulary at first, but it won’t be long until you get accustomed to this new form of the language. You just have to get over the initial hump of a lot new things at once.

Listening comprehension

This is a part I more or less ignored as I was learning Japanese, much more interested in learning to read than to understand spoken word, to the end that at a point I was comfortable reading Japanese novels, but could barely understand even audio material that was specifically made for learners. And in hindsight, I don’t think that was a good idea. After specifically practising listening comprehension for a while, I’ve noticed that it has helped me a lot with also parsing written text much more fluidly, especially when it comes to stuff like colloquial dialogue / onomatopoeia / etc., things that when written down are missing much of the context and intonation you have in spoken word, which can only be alluded to.
So, my recommendation would be to get started with listening comprehension and reading in parallel. You might end up progressing much quicker in one or the other, so there is no need to keep then in sync, i.e. to read the same level of material as you are listening to.
One big challenge with practising listening comprehension is to find good material that suites your current abilities, vocabulary and interests. You might find something that suits two of those, but most likely not all three. And I would highly urge to prioritize the first two over the last one. There is not much value in listening to something far above what you can comprehend, where you only can make out single words in a soup of meaninglessness, or grasp snippets of a sentence from time to time (in my experience).
Instead, I would recommend an approach commonly called “Comprehensible Input”, which in essence is the idea, that you always try to find material that you can fully understand, but still contains a small proportion of words you do not understand, who’s meaning your mind automatically deduces from the context. One website fully dedicated to this approach (and the only language learning website/app I’ve ever found useful at all), is Lingq. It is not very well designed, and is kinda buggy in a few places, but what it does offer, is a quite sizeable collection of stories/articles/podcasts/etc., all with both audio and a transcript. These start from very simple mini stories and go through a gradual progression of difficulty, up to regular Japanese texts like news articles. If you can somehow find your way through the awful user interface, there is quite a lot of decent material to be found there. Alternatively, you can just go look around for podcasts or Youtube channels focused on listening comprehension.
In terms of method, besides being honest with yourself and not trying to listen to stuff far above your current understanding in hopes of it somehow magically falling into place (which I was very much guilty of myself), my primary recommendation would be to listen to the same text a few times (maybe even a dozen or so times in the very beginning), ideally spread out across multiple days, until you can fully comprehend it without having to pause & rewind, check the transcript, or look up a word. If the text is challenging, try listening to it while reading the transcript alongside it, so that you have a good idea what is being said, before listening to it again without the transcript.
And don’t listen it stuff the way you would perhaps with a podcast in your native language, where you do something else at the same time, only loosely paying attention, while still getting the gist of what is being talked about. This only works if your mind already is well attuned to parsing what is being said. To comprehend a new language, you really have to focus on the comprehension. Give it your full undivided attention, listen closely, but try not to concentrate on individual words or grammatical rules you might recognize. Rather ensure that you get the meaning of what is being said, that you stay with the story as it is told, and if you missed a word or a detail, ignore it and move on. If you get lost, loosing context for what is said afterwards, then you do pause, check the transcript, look up vocabulary, or ponder over the sentence for a while, before you rewind and listen again.
One major challenge when are just getting started, is that you really have to spend quite some time with the most dead-simple and dull texts imaginable, so that your mind gets used to parsing sentences in Japanese, and that can get boring really fast. It doesn’t help that a lot of beginner material features just the most generic and boring stories, which do not help in the slightest in remaining engaged. Hearing about XYZ going to the restaurant is just not very riveting. So it is worth it to seek out stuff that is at least marginally interesting to you. Though as said before, you’ll have to restrain yourself from latching onto material that’s too far above your current abilities, hoping for the best. If you’re just hearing a lot of sound with a sprinkling of key words and phrases that you know, you are not going to learn much. If your mind is not parsing what is being said, but rather only listening out for hints to get an idea of what is being talked about, it is not all too useful listening comprehension practise.

Anime with Japanese subtitles

While with reading it is easy to go at ones own pace and to look things up (at least once one gets used to inputting kanji by radicals), with spoken word, it can be very difficult, especially in the beginning, to follow even a simple sentence, and sometimes even to just figure out what Kana are being said to look up a word. But on the other hand, we want to somehow practice listening comprehension (and watch anime, of course), so what to do?
Japanese subtitles!
You can find Japanese subtitles for a lot of anime on Kitsunekko. The files you can download there only contain the subtitles, so you’ll need to get the video from somewhere else. Luckily, you don’t need to buy DVDs from Japan for this; As long as there is the original Japanese audio on it (which with anime luckily usually is the case), you can just buy the anime locally, pick Japanese audio, and load the Japanese subtitles instead of the built-in local ones.

While watching, you will of course come across words/kanji you don’t know, so to easily look them up, I would recommend using a video player that has some way to copy the currently shown subtitle line to the clipboard. Unfortunately this is not a common feature.
On Windows there seems to be Pot Player, which according to this StackExchange thread allows you to copy subtitles while watching. You can also probably adapt the below method to Windows, though I haven’t tried either.
On Linux you can use mpv with
c run "/bin/sh" "-c" "printf '${sub-text}' | xsel -ib"
in the file
~/.config/mpv/input.conf
, which will make it so that pressing the C key while watching will copy the current subtitle to the clipboard. Combined with an open browser window with Yomichan’s search-page with Clipboard Monitor enabled, looking things up takes nothing more than a single key-press between pausing and having the full sentence ready to analyse in Yomichan.

Though generally, I would recommend to try to pause as little as necessary, and not to get into the habit of parsing every single line spoken with Yomichan. If you don’t quite understand a sentence or word, keep going, it might become clear from context. If you get lost and no longer can follow the dialogue, then skip back, check what the words you didn’t know meant, and watch the scene again with the additional context. Learning from context is a lot more powerful than learning through translation.
If you’re feeling confident, you can also try to deliberately ignore the subtitles, and only glance down if you can’t quite follow a line spoken, or again, skip back, and watch a scene again with subtitles, so you get the context for whatever comes afterwards.

(Side-Note) English subtitles:

I would think this would go without saying, but I’ll add it for completeness: You can’t learn Japanese with English subtitles.
Not only will your brain just tune out the spoken Japanese and only read the English, no matter how hard you try, but due to the fact that the Japanese sentence structure is so completely different from the English, what is said and what you read in the subtitles won’t even match up semantically. So even if you would manage to take in the subtitles and the dialogue simultaneously, you would have to wait for a full sentence to be said, then match up the corresponding parts in your mind (for which you would have to mostly have understood the Japanese sentence already), and finally go through the Japanese sentence again with the newly understood words. In short, it doesn’t work.

Learning software

Anki (Very useful, especially since Yomichan neatly integrates with it. I would highly recommend this over manual/physical flash cards. If you want, here are my own Anki cards, just make a new card type with the right fields and copy the corresponding HTML/CSS)

Dictionary

Jisho.org (has some very useful features, like entering kanji by radical and searching for example sentences; The sentence decomposition is useful too, but in my experience Yomichan is better),

goo-辞書 (In Japanese, but sometimes more helpful in explaining the actual meaning of a word than a list of context-dependent English translations),

Furigana.info (For disambiguation between different readings of Kanji)

Akebi (Dictionary for android; Not perfect, but very usable)

Miscellaneous

Yomichan (It can not be overstated how useful this browser extension is. It allows you to quickly and easily look up any Japanese text on the web, with some really great features, like one-click-adding of words to Anki and built-in sentence parsing. If you want, here’s my config),

Tatoeba (A collection of example sentences with translations from and to various languages),

HiNative (A Q-A forum, where people who speak a language natively answer questions about it. Very handy for questions about the real-life usage and nuances of words, which neither a dictionary nor random example sentences will provide),

sljfaq’s handwritten kanji recognizer (While there are a lot of handwritten kanji tools, this one is the only one I’ve had consistent success with, especially with the “Ignore stroke order” option it’s very handy for looking up kanji where one doesn’t recognize any clear radicals)

Reverso (A site with a huge collection of examples sentences with translations. I use it a lot whenever I think “This phrase in English, how would you express the same sentiment in natural Japanese?”. A lot more helpful often times than consulting the dictionary)

A general note

Make sure when choosing learning resources that you keep in mind for what purpose you are learning Japanese.

For example Genki, probably the most popular text book for Japanese, is really made to get you started with conversational Japanese, giving you a lot of set phrases, with little grammatical explanation, which might be handy if you want to visit Japan and get around without asking “Do you speak English?” all the time, but if you want to read Manga or watch Anime in Japanese, or, simply put, actually want to understand the language, it will be of little use.

On the other end of the spectrum, you will find a lot of people, including some online Japanese “teachers”, who are obsessed over Japanese as a challenge or even a competition, not really as means to an end, who will preach about the importance of stuff like handwriting or pitch accent, anything that makes the language look more difficult.
Also, note that most learning resources you will find online (apps, Youtube videos, websites) are, simply put, crap. I like 「木・林・森」 as much as the next person, but you won’t get much besides some instant gratification from that kind of tutorial.

All that said, I also wouldn’t recommend wasting money. There are enough good free resources out there, that spending a lot of money on expensive books or monthly memberships really isn’t worth it (Looking at you Genki & Wanikani). I hope I have highlighted a few here that are helpful to you!

Have fun & がんばれ！