A Year to Learn Japanese

Table of Contents
3. Foreword
4. Start Here: One Page of TL;DR (05/01 added, thanks for your feedback)
5. Introduction
6. How long does it take to learn Japanese?
Why learn Japanese?
7. About this document, about me
8. How to use this document
9. Some closing words
10. Stages of Language Acquisition (05/17 added)
11. Stage One: Building a Foundation (05/17 added)
12. Phonetics (05/26 updated to v2)
22. Kana
29. Kanji
38. Grammar
49. Vocabulary
64: Stage Two: Immersion
XX: Input
XX: Output
XX: Creation + “Mastery”
XX: Interviews
XX: Idahosa Ness on Pronunciation
XX: Matt vs Japan on Pitch Accent, Kanji and The Journey (Waiting for MvJ’s okay of 6/14)
XX: James Heisig on Learning the Kanji
XX: Nelson Dellis on Memory and Language Learning (currently drafting as of 6/18)
XX: Steve Kaufman on Input
XX: [somebody] on Output
XX: Brain Rak on Making a Career Out of Japanese (interview ~7/17)
XX: Dō gen on Post-Fluency & Creativity in a Second Language
XX: Appendix
XX: On Learning: Further reading to help you learn more ef iciently
XX: Administrative Stuff
XX: Links (aka cool stuff that will de initely be included when I ind a place for it)
XX: Changelog (05/14 added)
XX: To-Do List
XX: Thanks
XX: A Request for Feedback

** Please go to view > show document outline . The document will be much easier to navigate.

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Foreword
Hey there! I’m u/SuikaCider and, two odd years ago, I responded to a post by a guy who said he had
a year to learn Japanese. This was actually my irst post to Reddit and, unsure what to expect, I
wrote a much longer reply than was necessary.

Wordy as it was, the post was quite well received. I’ve since gotten several dozen messages from
people seeking clari ications or asking questions that were beyond the scope of my original post.
I’ve kept track of these (here), and it eventually became so chaotic that I decided to organize it.

That in mind, I’ve got a couple goals with this document.

● I’d like to replace the old sticky with one that’s easier to follow
● I’d like to include re lections on learning, both about language and in general
● I’d like to expand the scope of the original post to include questions I’ve since gotten
● I’d like to reach out to people who learn languages for reasons beside reading, hopefully
making this document relevant to a wider audience.

Page 4
Start Here
1. A few guiding bits of food for thought
a. If I could only give you two pieces of advice, they would be: Zipf's Law + The 50% Rule.
b. A lot of learning is just stumbling into something important and recognizing it as such.
Experienced learners have a good idea of what they’re looking for and where to ind it;
you’ve got to igure it out as you go. I’ll do my best to give you a bit of structure.
2. First, establish a foundation. Stage one is all about preparing for stage two:
a. Understand that l anguage isn’t math: You won’t become luent by just learning enough
vocabulary words and grammar points. Period. That being said, a good foundation helps.
If consistency isn’t your strong point, learn about habit triggers and build a
trigger-action plan to ensure you work time for Japanese into your daily life.
b. Consider investing in pronunciation: E verything you will ever do in Japanese sits on
the pedestal that it is pronunciation. That being said, building a pedestal is an
investment. If you don’t care about sounding foreign, it might not be worth it. That’s OK .
c. Cover the kana : Japanese has three "alphabets". First learn the kana (hiragana and
katakana), on Read the Kanji's website. You'll commit them to memory by engaging with
Japanese over time, so treat this only as a crash course. Being ef icient > being busy.
d. Skim through grammar : Start working through Genki I, Genki II and their workbooks.
If you plan on following my suggestions, I’m suggesting one grammar point per day.
e. Get acquainted with Kanji . I used Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji with a
structured-repetition system called Anki, but there are many viable approaches.
f. Build a core vocabulary base : Start learning vocabulary words. I started with this anki
deck, then later on focused on reading to build my vocabulary. Ten per day is plenty.
3. Next, build a house on that foundation. Learning becomes more personalized.
a. Month Six : Japanese isn’t one thing, it’s a holistic compilation of many interrelated
skills. You’re in initely closer to being competent in any one of those skills than
mastering all of them. If you want to read, start reading. Want to watch anime? Do that.
Want to have conversations? Have them (II). At some point, you must begin immersing.
b. Month ??? : Immersion exposes you to many new ideas and you can learn a lot from it,
but you’ll ind that you feel a bit fuzzy in some areas. Introducing workbooks as a
warmup helps clarify fuzzy areas. Progress is a cycle of expansion and re inement (II).
4. Finally, upgrade to a mansion if you need and want the space. If you don’t… don’t.
a. Year ??? : An intermediate learner can do most things with preparation; an advanced
learner can do most things at the drop of a hat. Do you need souped up Japanese?
Probably not. Very few people need to be as pro icient as a native speakers, and even
native speakers have limitations. I can’t understand computational luid dynamics, for
example: I’m 25 and have never once needed to discuss it. What do you need i n Japanese?

This document is about setting ambitious goals, then later trimming to it your needs.

I understand that this is very sparse; it’s the highest level overview I can give you of the process.
● For a slightly more in depth post and sample plan, see my original post.
● The rest of this document is an expansion on the ideas presented here

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Introduction
The post I originally responded to was by a user in /r/LanguageLearning who explained that they
had one year to prepare and wanted to learn as much as possible before going to Japan.

Similarly, many people want to know how long it will take to learn Japanese and, based on their
unique circumstances, whether or not they can do it within a certain period of time. I want to brie ly
touch on both of these questions before getting started.

How long does it take to learn Japanese?

This question is dif icult to answer, but a few organizations have tried to do so. There is a
discouraging (yet understandable) lack of congruence in the numbers they’ve put forward.

● The JLPT themselves estimated that it will take about 900 hours to pass the N1
● The US Government estimates it will take around 2,200 in-class hours (not including homework.
● A 2010-2015 study of students studying Japanese full time, in Japan, estimates that takes
3,000-4,800 hours for students without a background in kanji to pass the N1.
● I’ll take the N1, the highest-level pro iciency test, in winter 2020. My numbers might not be
particularly relevant, given that all I wanted out of the language was something to read and
thus never focused on the JLPT, but I’ve so far spent ~5,000 hours on Japanese.

Whatever you might take from these numbers, they don’t really tell us all that much and also leave a
few important questions unanswered:

● What does an hour of studying entail in the irst place?

● Are all hours of these “hours” equal in nature? Are some more valuable than others?
● Do they have to be “hours of study”? What about hours conversing? Reading?
● How should you block out those hours—all at once, or in short bursts?
● How pro icient must you be to say that you have “learned” Japanese, anyway?

The only answer I can possibly give you is that learning Japanese takes a lot of time, and depending
on your particular goals, it might take more or less time. Reaching a conversational pro iciency
takes comparatively little time, for example.

If you’ve never thought about what level of pro iciency you’ll actually need to do what you want,
here’s a graphic modeling what sort of sentences different CEFR levels can make. It’s sort of silly
and I don’t want you to take it too seriously, but it’s nice food for thought.

The more important takeaway is that you don’t have to be bilingual to express yourself. Although it
would be cool to be perfectly luent in Japanese, you can probably achieve your goals with far less.

Page 6
Anthony Lauder on measuring time spent studying
Anthony Lauder, author of the Fluent Czech blog, suggests that we focus on minutes, not years. His
suggestion comes from a quote by the pianist Michel Petrucciani:

Every hour I am at the piano feels like a minute.

Every minute I am away from the piano feels like an hour.

Forming the crux of his video, Anthony ultimately suggests that the secret to learning a language is
to absolutely love it:

[To study in such a way that] Studying isn’t a chore, merely a task to get out of the way so
that you can reach that luency you lust for—no. Lust izzles. But if you love the language, if
you love the language learning process—those hours, those months, and those
years—they’ll ly by, and it’ll feel like minutes. And that’s the way to luency; to fall in love
with the process … and then to do what you love, for hours and hours a day, for years and
years, but for it to feel like minutes.

This idea of “loving” the language has been an integral part of my personal learning philosophy. I
believed that the only thing I could be con ident of was that learning Japanese was going to take a
lot of time, so I wanted to be sure that I would enjoy myself.

As Lydia Machova, a polyglot who interviewed lots of other polyglots, says: We aren’t geniuses… the
one thing we all have in common is that we [ ind] ways to enjoy the language learning process… all of
us use different methods, but we make sure it’s something we personally enjoy.

If you come out of this post with anything, I hope you come out of it with a furrowed brow, curious
about how you can connect Japanese to the things that are important to you.

Why learn Japanese?

I personally love reading, so I made a job of inding something that I wanted to read in
Japanese—something that wasn’t available in English and that I wasn’t yet good enough at Japanese
to understand. It turned out to be a collection of short stories by 結城昌治 (Yuuki Shouji), a guy who
doesn’t even have an English Wikipedia page.

I believe that everybody will learn a language to as pro icient a level as they need to—no better, no
worse—and that, frankly, most people have no need to learn a language. That in mind, I think that
step one for every single learner is discovering (or creating) a reason to learn Japanese that is
concrete enough to let you to personally justify the time you’re going to spend on it.

Your irst job is iguring out why you are going to learn Japanese.

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About this document, about me

About Me: Should you listen to me?

I’ve gone from zero to (at least) functional in four languages: Spanish, Japanese, Russian and
Mandarin. I’ve also done this mostly over a span of ~5 years, and looking at so many languages over
such a short time frame means that I’m far from perfect in any of them. I’m planning to take the N1
later this year, plus a B2 exam for Spanish. Maybe the HSK5, if I get around to it.

● I have lived in Russia, Japan and Taiwan; these languages have been parts of my daily life.
● I love reading. I care much more about literature than conversation/movies.
● I like writing. I’ve written for FluentU, LingQ and random stuff on Reddit.
● I tutor adults and also do test prep; I’ve seen the results of many learning styles.
● I don’t have any certi ications, but [here’s a video of me speaking my languages].

In short, no . I don’t think that I am quali ied to teach you Japanese. I don’t plan on doing so.

About This Document: What am I doing here?

While I don’t feel comfortable giving you lessons on Japanese grammar or a history of the kanji, that
doesn’t bother me too much. There are knowledgeable and passionate people who have already
made (many) resources doing so, and I do feel comfortable pointing you towards that content.

After four languages, more than anything, I feel comfortable talking about the big picture behind
what learning a language entails. I’ve learned formally and informally, with and without immersion,
as a broke student and as an adult working 60 hours/week, via English and via my target language.

My goal here is to guide you to a point where you can begin focusing on immersion, learning by
doing the things you enjoy doing. In my personal experience, I felt ready to start immersing at
around the N3 level. In this document I’ll talk about what you need to do to get there.

Think of this as being a kind of interactive syllabus, or maybe a map. I’ll tell you generally where you
need to go, present many resources and help you plan your route so that you can go more ef iciently.
Ultimately, though, a map is just a piece of paper. You’ve got to do the learning by yourself.

As an aside, I don’t have anything to sell you, either. I will make zero pro it from this.

In a nutshell
This entire document can be summed up in a few bullet points. It is:
● A re lection on my journey through Japanese, loosely organized into a timeline
● An organized compilation of resources that I used while learning
● A lot of discussion on everything to do with learning Japanese, plus further reading

Page 8
How to use this document
There are many different types of people, and all of these people conceptualize, approach, deal with
and re lect on the problems they encounter in different ways. I’d like to ensure that everyone can
make use of this document in the way that best suits them, but I don’t know you, your level in
Japanese or your background in linguistics. That makes my job very dif icult.

Eventually, this document will be optimized for people seeking three main things:

● TL;DR —Each chapter begins with a one-pager telling you what to do and when, but not
why. This is for people who just want to be pointed in a direction and given stuff to do.
● Depth —All the background thinking that went into the TL;DR, and then some. This is for
people who don’t just want to learn Japanese, but to become a better language learner, too.
● Resources —A dump of all the resources, articles and videos I introduced in the chapter.
This is for people who have their own methods, but are looking for new tools.

That in mind, each chapter is comprised of a few different key sections:

❖ Opening Words
Motivational words, my general thoughts on the topic and my goals for the chapter

❖ Start Here
What I absolutely expect you to do is highlighted orange.
What I recommend, but can accept that not everyone cares about, is highlighted purple.
What I think could be useful to know, if you’re interested, is left unhighlighted.

❖ Expansion
An expansion on the above: how to do it, why I’m suggesting that you do it, further reading
and some essay-type sections covering the most important insights that I’ve had.

❖ Resource Dump
I’ll put all the links I’ve covered in the given chapter in one place.

My hope is that organizing the document like this will allow different types of learners to derive
value from my document. Some people might just want help getting their feet under them, others
might just want food for thought about a speci ic topic, some learners might want to have their hand
completely held. I’m game for all of that. Hopefully there can be something here for everyone.

Important note : I don’t intend for this document to be read straight through. At any given time,
you’ll likely have homework from a few different chapters.
WIP note : The above format is my end goal . I’ve re-structured the pronunciation section to re lect
it; the rest of the document is still in draft 1 format. Please let me know which one you prefer.

Page 9
Some closing words
I began my original post by stating that one year was an obnoxious timeline, and I will do the same
here. I have never taught anybody Japanese; I have no idea if this is feasible, let alone reasonable.
Please do not take this as a tried, tested, or foolproof timeline. It’s not.

What I can say is that I only spoke English until I was 20, but now at age 25 am comfortable reading,
watching dramas, and chatting in Japanese. I don’t have a special knack for languages—I studied
Spanish for six years before Japanese, but only got to an ~A2 level—so I’m sure that you can ind
your way through Japanese, too. A lot of learning a language is learning how you (you ) learn.

Here’s a zoomed-out timeline of my personal year through Japanese:

Year One : I spent a year at a university in Japan; 4 days of Japanese per week.
Year Two : I returned to the US; no Japanese coursework available, so I slowly revised kanji.
Year Three : I returned to Japan; didn’t like my classes, focused on reading/immersion.

Year Four : I moved to Russia for work; lots of reading, got into j-dramas.
Year Five : I moved to Taiwan for work; even more reading, got into Japanese standup.
Year Six: I began focusing on Mandarin, but got into Japanese audiobooks/e-lectures

You can make progress even if you aren’t a perfect student. I wrote my original post iguring that if
you were to study more consistently and without so many breaks, you could probably even
accomplish in one year what took me three. This is how I’d go about doing that.

Page 10
Stages of Language Acquisition
There are a number of conceptual stages of language acquisition, several theories attempting to
explain how we progress through those stages (II) and each language has tests that attempt to
assess which stage we’re currently at. In Japanese, that test is the JLPT.

People have devoted their entire lives to iguring out how we learn languages, and I think that
serious learners will bene it from becoming familiar with these major schools of thought. Having
said that, as an independent learner, two key particular transition points stick out to me. Given that
this document is my own re lection, I’ll base it around the three stages those points suggest.

● Stage One : Y
ou don’t yet know enough to learn independently and you understand so little
Japanese that any sort of activity, be it input (reading/etc) or output (speaking/etc) is
unbearable. This stage is de ined by active study and memorization. Everything we do will
be for the purpose of tipping the scales to allow you to meaningfully engage with Japanese.
○ The ‘Nope’ Threshold : This is the transition between stage one and two. This is the
point in time where you subjectively feel that immersion is now tolerable. Not easy,
not natural, not even ef icient, but tolerable . You can stomach it.
● Stage Two : You’re now capable of taking the reins and engaging with content that you ind
meaningful. Doing so will present you with all sorts of problems, and in overcoming them,
you’ll develop the unique skills you need to engage with Japanese in the way that is most
enjoyable and meaningful to you . During this stage I’ll step back and focus on providing a bit
of structure to help you get the most out of your immersion and work on your weak spots.
○ The Epiphany Moment : This is the transition between stage two and three, the
point in time where you’ve worked out enough kinks that immersion is beginning to
be enjoyable. The world occasionally disappears and you ind yourself getting lost in
your content. At some point you’ll stumble across something profound or beautiful
and be moved. As a result, you feel intrinsically motivated to immerse in Japanese.
● Stage Three : You should now be completely in charge of your learning and have an ever
growing list of content you want to consume in Japanese. Whereas immersion during stage
two was merely tolerable, you’ve now improved enough that it’s a thoroughly enjoyable
experience. There is still a lot for you to learn, especially in the areas that are less
emphasized by your preferred means of engaging with Japanese. During this stage we begin
re ining knowledge and strengthening weak areas to become more well-rounded.

On Moving Through Stages

These stages are not ixed. Some learners might feel comfortable moving on at a point where others
would still feel uncomfortable. I think the stage one>two transition is sped up by three things:

1. Patience (how willing are you to look up things you don’t understand?)
2. Tolerance for ambiguity (how bothered are you by not understanding?)
3. Motivation (do you have something you really want to do that’s only in Japanese?)

Page 11
Stage One: Building A Foundation
There are a lot of different ways that we can use language, and depending on what you want to do
with Japanese, you’ll need to develop different skills. All of these skills exist on a spectrum. Stephen
King, Angelina Jolie and Dave Chappelle are all native English speakers, all renowned in their
respective ields, and all making use of different skills to do what they do. You aren’t simply “good”
or “bad” at language, you’re better or worse at speci ic things in that language.

I think that you’ll develop the skills that you personally need to better do what is important to you
as a natural byproduct of simply doing those things, whether it’s reading or conversing. My irst
priority is bringing you to a point where you can begin doing those things, whatever they are.

1. Chapter One and Two: The kana and their sounds (~1-2 weeks)
This knowledge will be necessary to use practically any Japanese learning resource
a. Pronunciation : Learn about the sounds that exist in Japanese
i. Phonemes : Some sounds are the same as in English, some aren’t. At the least,
become aware of these new sounds so you can listen for them.
ii. Prosody : This is about how sound connects: rhythm, intonation patterns, etc.
Japanese prosody works quite differently than English prosody does.
b. Kana : Learn the two syllabries that Japanese uses to represent those sounds.
2. Chapters 3-5: Build a vocab/grammar base so you can begin immersing (~6 months)
a. Kanji : There are 2,136 “daily-use” kanji; some occur more often than others (II).
i. Learn how the kanji are constructed and used
ii. Learn to recognize (and, optionally, write) most of these daily-use kanji
b. Vocab : You need remarkably few words to begin conversing, more to do other things
i. We’ll begin working through the 2,000 words that occur most frequently in
Japan’s main newspaper. You’ll also get a feel for how kanji and kana interact.
ii. Language isn’t math. I’ll talk about why just learning words won’t cut it.
c. Grammar : Grammar is how you describe the relationship between words.
i. We’ll work through Genki I, II and the associated workbooks. There’s much
more, but you’ll see the grammar in these books come up everywhere .
ii. Grammar isn’t something you cover once and then master. I’ll talk about why.

The 50% Rule : How you know when to move on

My stages are less concrete steps and more a suggestion of what to prioritize and when. Moving
onto step two entails signi icantly decreasing the time you spend actively studying and investing
that time into whatever feeds your soul. If you aren’t engaging with Japanese content already, I
encourage you to regularly "check in” with something . I’ll give more explicit instructions later.

For now, this is a litmus test. For a while, all Japanese content will seem like a brick wall. Or Greek.
One day you’ll say wait a minute, I think I could do that — b
oom, you’ve cleared The Nope Threshold.
But to have this realization, you must “check in” with Japanese and give yourself a chance to have it.

Page 12
Pronunciation

How English sounds to non-English Speakers : Step one is learning to recognize Japanese sounds

Page 13
Opening Words
I’m going to begin by saying that, while pronunciation is important to me, it might not be to you. It’s
a big deal, but it’s also not. It mostly comes down whether sounding foreign bothers you or not.

● The sh s ound in Japanese し (/ɕ/ ) and English she (/ʃ/) are not the same, but people will
understand you just ine even if you always pronounce し as /ʃ/. You’ll just sound foreign.
● Pitch accent is a thing, and it is a big thing—but unlike Mandarin or Vietnamese, people will
be able to understand even if you frequently make mistakes. You’ll just sound foreign.
● This more or less goes for every other point I bring up in the pronunciation section.

Having said that, there are a few reasons why I like to start with pronunciation:

1. I think that an important irst milestone is just getting your foot in the door, and sound is
accessible. Despite being a foreign language, Japanese shares many sounds with English.
2. Over the next 6-8 months you’ll be memorizing about two thousand simple words. A crash
course in phonetics now lets you work on reducing your accent while learning them.
3. Our ears often deceive us (II), and foreign accents are often a result of imposing
pronunciation knowledge from our irst language onto our second. Knowing where
Japanese and English pronunciation differs from the get-go lets you avoid headaches later.
4. It’s fascinating, frankly, and it’s everywhere . Learn the basics of phonetics and prosody and
you’ll ind yourself noticing cool stuff when you listen to anything in any language.

Finally, I’ve got a few basic goals in this section. I based the progression on Antimoon’s post why
pronunciation is important and The Mimic Method, so consider checking them out, too.

Basics i s for people who otherwise will skip pronunciation. Please, give me one hour.
Prosody/Phonetics introduces key knowledge that will help you to pick stuff up as you go
Practice c onsists of resources and exercises for learners who want to learn by doing

When we speak with a foreign accent, what we do is we take patterns that we know from our native
languages… and then apply them to English. We don’t do it consciously, that’s just what organically
comes to us. But if the patterns of our native tongues are different than those of English, the result is
that the… message... isn’t going to be clear.

Although you know how to construct the sentence, the words are accurate and you don’t make any
grammar mistakes… but if you don’t distinguish the right words, if you don’t stress the right words and
put emphasis on the words that are stressed, you become unclear.

[Pronunciation is about] recognizing your speech patterns and listening to how native
speakers speak, which helps you to understand how English should be spoken.

~ H
adar Shemesh on Melody, Stress and Rhythm in American intonation

Page 14
Start Here
As I explain in the grammar section, I think that there are several steps involved in learning
anything and that they tend to happen over time, rather than all at once. While very few achieve a
native-sounding accent, an accent that’s easy to understand is within reach for anyone.

The information here is the densest part of the entire document. It will take time to sink in.

Basics —
to be done alongside the kana section. If you do nothing else, please skim this.
1. Get started with an easy overview of Japanese sounds in relation to English. I, II and III.
2. Do not dipthongize or reduce your vowels. You probably do this without noticing.
3. A few more no or low-effort steps you can take to sound better: I and II
4. Please read this post on why pronunciation is important

Prosody —
to be done alongside the kanji, vocab a nd grammar s ections. Work it in when you’re in the mood.
1. Figure out what prosody is. You’ll want to know about stress, rhythm and melody;
connected speech and phrasing; intonation and pitch.
2. Once you’ve got your head around that, listen for (below) when you consume Japanese:
a. Pitch Accent: In 10 minutes, in written form, with visuals, compared with English
b. Rhythm: the basic rules and in comparison with English
c. Connected Speech: It’s all over English (II). It’s not a thing in Japanese. Don’t do it.
You should be saying ka-n-ji, 3 beats. Not kan-ji, 2 beats.
Phonetics —
also important, but I think you’ll get more bang for your buck with prosody . Do this afterwards.
3. Learn how to read the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It is a blueprint for making
any sound, telling you: Where it’s made, how it’s made, if it’s voiced, and more.
4. Compare and contrast the sounds that exist in Japanese and in English — like this.
5. Vowels are more lexible than consonants. Learn how they’re described, learn how to read a
vowel quadrilateral then compare the vowels of Japanese and English.

Practice —
further reading/practice that I feel is useful enough to warrant giving space to in this TL;DR
1. Understanding something, nailing it in practice and using it spontaneously are different
things. Incorporate these steps into your practice and listening. Two examples: I and II.
a. Here’s how I approach listening to stuff (see bottom) and practicing new sounds.
2. When practicing Genki dialogues, use ones that display pitch accents. Genki I and Genki II.
3. Consider following Dogen’s course on Pitch Accent; otherwise learn how nouns and
verbs/adjectives work, then slowly memorize pitch accent conjugation patterns (don’t do
the entire deck; it’s just for getting a big picture of how the patterns work).
a. Covered in more detail in the vocab s ection, utilizing MIA Japanese + Core 2k
4. If you’re generally interested in pronunciation, look into Fluent Forever’s app (review).
5. I like “shadowing”when I’m listening to something or doing lashcards in Anki. Having said
that, not everyone approves of it. I see shadowing as a discovery process that helps me
identify weak areas to practice, so irst and foremost, igure out what you’re listening for.
6. The free Speechling app lets you get free feedback on your pronunciation, ~once per day.

Page 15
Pronunciation Homework

Basics
You might not care about developing a natural accent, and I’m not about to try convincing you one
way or the other. As a rule, I’m going to do my best to simply provide an overview of what options
exist, point you to relevant information about each, then let you make your own decisions.

That being said, even if you don’t care about pronunciation at all, I’ll ask you to spend 30 minutes
working through the below videos. These are the most fundamental things you should know about
Japanese pronunciation, and if nothing else, you’ll bene it from at least being aware of them.

1. Watch Fluent Forever’s video on Japanese writing systems + pitch accent (10m)
2. Watch Fluent Forever’s video on Japanese consonants (12m)
3. Watch Fluent Forever’s video on Japanese vowels (8m)

4. Japanese words are composed of kana (hiragana or katakana). Every single kana gets a
single metronome beat of equal length. かんじ is pronounced ka-n-ji, not kan-ji. English
tends to chunk sounds together (what are you → wha’cha). Japanese doesn’t chunk.
5. English has a pretty complex vowel system; the letter a represents some seven different
sounds. Japanese vowels are pretty simple. あ is あ is あ is あ. Be consistent.

I don’t expect you to memorize all of that. It’s dense stuff and will take time to sink in.

After you’ve had a bit of time to process all of that information:

If you’d like to go just a tiny bit further with pronunciation, slowly work through these posts:
● If that was a bit too complicated, here’s a more simply-worded recap of the above videos
● If you’re a native EN speaker, you’re probably pronouncing vowels incorrectly in Japanese.
● Even if you don’t worry too much about pronunciation, pay a bit of attention to these things.

If you’re still on the fence, here’s a video on how pronunciation its into your Japanese development

● Unlike when reading, you have to parse words by yourself when listening.
● If you haven’t had the time to internalize how Japanese sounds work, it’ll be dif icult to
correctly parse the language, muddying your perception of what was actually said
● Even if you master Japanese pronunciation, you still might not be able to make sense of
what you’re hearing. The video discusses this at ~17m and I elaborated it on a post about
assessing why you don’t understand what you’re hearing.

Finally, please read this post on why pronunciation is important.

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Prosody
When most beginning learners think of pronunciation, they’re thinking of phonetics, the individual
sounds in a language. Having said that, there is another dimension of pronunciation that’s referred
to as prosody , concerning stuff that happens “above” the level of individual sounds.

An example of a phonetics problem is someone saying d because they can’t say th

An example of a prosody problem would be saying comPAny instead of COMpany.

First, watch this video to get a quick overview of what prosody is. Next, get familiar with how
prosody works in English. Start thinking about what sort of patterns exist in your English speech:

Stress, Rhythm & Melody | Connected Speech & Phrasing | Intonation & Pitch (dude)

After you’ve gotten a feel for this stuff in English, start listening for it in Japanese. You don’t have to
dissect people’s speech, just pay attention from time to time and see what patterns you notice. If you
can’t hear [a sound] , Hadar says, you won’t be able to make it. R
ight now, you just want to discover it.

Rhythm: The low-hanging fruit of Japanese prosody

The below two points can be treated as rules of thumb and applied universally. They’re very
low-effort steps you can take to improve your pronunciation in Japanese.

● Japanese rhythm is consistent: each mora gets an equal beat. To-o-kyo-o, not to-kyo
● Japanese speech is not connected: each mora is distinct. Ka-n -ji, not kan -ji.

Pitch Accent: The harder pill to swallow

Pitch accent has recently become something of a buzzword in the Japanese learning community, but
it’s not really as complex as it sounds. You’re already familiar with the concept of an accent:

● English employs a stress accent to help differentiate words. In the word univer sity, the
syllable ver is pronounced slightly louder and longer than the others.
● Japanese employs a pitch accent instead of a stress accent . Rather than “attacking” a syllable
to accent it, it uses musical pitch. In the word for ‘to eat’, ta-be-ru , the pattern is
L ow-H igh-L ow. You can try this out on a virtual piano. Press any white key, then the white
key 2 to its right, then your original white key. It’s speci ically this pattern, not HLL or LHH.
● Here’s a longer post on pitch vs stress vs tone in JP/EN/CN, if you’d like more information
○ Here’s a comical video about the difference between stress accent and pitch accent
○ Here’s a video talking about intonation vs pitch accent

That basic de inition in mind, here’s a crash course on how pitch accent works in Japanese”

- Dogen on Japanese Pitch-Accent in 10 minutes

- Matt from MIA on “the challenge and intrigue of pitch accent” (~2.5k words)

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From there, we can begin looking at pitch accent in a bit more depth. Japanese nouns follow one of
four pitch patterns, and you can see each of these patterns covered in more detail here:

- Japaneasy - Mora and Pitch Accent (7m)

- Yas - Intro to Pitch Accent: Heiban vs Odaka patterns (17m)
- Yas - Pitch Accent II: Atamadaka and Nakadaka pitch accent (7m)

Unfortunately, it gets more complicated than that.

- Sentence ending particles, such as 'よ' and 'ね', are also affected by pitch
- Verbs and adjectives conjugate in Japanese, and you need to igure out how pitch works with
conjugation. Thankfully, you only really need to learn two sets of patterns.
- Pitch exists not only at the word level, but also at the sentence level (in more detail).
- As in English, our intonation changes depending on our emotions

Practicing Pitch Accent

As somebody who primarily studies Japanese because I like reading, this is as far as I’ve personally
gone with prosody. I understand how it works and am slowly picking stuff up over time, but frankly
speaking, that’s probably not going to be enough. Eventually I’ll have to put time in with Anki.

If this is important for you, and you’d like to get it right the irst time, here are some resources:

- Dogen has a Patreon video series (US$10/mo) designed to be an accessible intro to pitch
accent for beginners. It’s very thorough (~80? videos); you can work through it in a month.
- MIA made an Anki version of the NHK Ojad Pitch Accent Dictionary. While I wouldn’t
complete it, you can use it to (a) learn each of the 4 pitch-accent patterns in isolation and (b)
visually compare the pitch accent pattern of most verb/adjective conjugations. Your goal
here should be discovery, not memorization; ind patterns you can look for elsewhere.
- MIA made an Anki addon called MIA Japanese Support that, among other things, is capable
of parsing entire Anki decks in order to color-code each word by its pitch accent pattern. In
my personal opinion, it’s easier to associate a word with bluessness than heiban-pattern .
- We’ll be using the Core 2k Vocab deck to build a base of vocabulary. If you care about
pitch accent, I encourage you to use the deck in conjunction with MIA’s addon..
- Here’s a pitch accent resources dump from the WaniKani forums. There’s a lot of useful
stuff; beginners might be most interested in this pitch accent companion for G
enki I + I I .
- The Mimic Method has a few free courses on rhythm and intonation

Page 18
Phonetics
In this stage we’re going to explore and compare how sound works in English and Japanese. There’s
a lot of technical information to work through, so I’m going to break it into several smaller bits.

Language, and how we represent language

At an objective level language is absolutely nothing beyond a set of conventions for communicating
through sounds, and we also have means of representing those sounds on paper (aka, orthography).

Unfortunately, it’s not quite so straightforward. Language learners quickly run into a few problems:

● Our paper-conventions don't always line up with our spoken-conventions. English has 44
phonemes despite having only 26 letters, and the letter “a” i s associated with seven sounds.
● Different languages don’t always follow the same conventions. Compare the sound of pinyin
c (as in c ǎomé i, strawberry) to its English counterparts in c at or danc e.
● Just in case you were starting to wonder: why is English spelling so weird?

The International Phonetic Alphabet

Out of a need for consistency, Linguists created something called the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA). The IPA is a standardized and universal alphabet: /a/ r efers to one thing and one
thing only, whether it’s in English or French or Klingon. That means that there’s no more funny
business like gh representing one sound in through , another in tough , and still another in taught .

While it’s called an alphabet, I think it’s easier to think of the IPA as being a set of blueprints. Every
single letter in the IPA has a three part name, and each one of those parts gives you important
information about how the sound is made. Here’s a crash course in how it works.

Consonants and the IPA

Let’s get started by learning about what those three parts are for consonants:

1. Place of Articulation (II): the only real difference between P and K is that P is made purely
with your lips, K is made with your tongue/soft palate
2. Manner of Articulation (II): the only real difference between P and F is how much air is
blocked. With P air stops and “explodes” out, with F air is restricted but still lows out
continuously
3. Voicing (II): The only real difference between P and B is that B is voiced and P is unvoiced

So, let’s take that P that I kept bringing up. It’s a voiceless bilabial stop , meaning that it’s a sound
made using both your lips in which you let air build up and then explode out, all without letting
your vocal cords vibrate. If you know the IPA, you get all this sort of information about every single
sound, rather than just “it’s kind of similar to [English word]”.

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Vowels and the IPA
Vowels are also described in three parts, but they’re not the same ones. While consonants involve
certain parts of your mouth touching, vowels don’t involve any touching. This can make it a bit more
challenging to feel where your tongue is, exactly, so it might take more time to get your head around.

1. Height, Backness and Roundedness (II): Very slowly say a few random vowels; you should
notice that your lips are making different shapes, your tongue is moving around and your
nose sometimes gets involved.
2. Formant Frequency , (De)voicing and Vowel Length: A 10-minute expansion on the above
concepts discussing further ways to alter vowels, some of which is relevant to Japanese
3. How to Read a Vowel Quadrilateral (in more detail): While consonant charts are pretty
straightforward, vowel charts are more visual. Here’s how to make sense of them.

Now we’ve covered almost everything you need to know about consonants and vowels. Take a
break, and then come back in a few days to read through Tofugu’s post on Japanese pronunciation.
It covers the same information as the above two sections in layman-friendly language.

Using the IPA to learn unknown sounds
Now that you’ve gained the ability to look at sound more objectively, we can put this knowledge to
use to both discover what are going to be trouble sounds and also how to correctly make them.

1. Contrast the full list of sounds that exist in both English and Japanese.
a. I suggest printing out a chart of English consonants and then using a different color
to ill in the Japanese consonants, making them easier to contrast.
b. Again, I suggest printing out a chart of English vowels and then using a different
color to ill in the Japanese vowels.
2. Use your knowledge of IPA to igure out unknown sounds.
a. For example, Japanese has this sound: /ɸ/, a voiceless bilabial fricative . English
doesn’t have that sound, but that doesn’t mean it’s foreign. Our /f/ is a voiceless
labiodental fricative . We thus know that these two sounds are identical, only
differing in place of articulation. We’ve also got /p/, a voiceless bilabial plosive . All of
/ɸ/’s “parts” are familiar to you, you’re just not used to putting them in this order.
3. Reference Glossika Phonetics ’ YouTube channel for breakdowns of each sound. You’ll need to
understand IPA terminology to make sense of these videos, but they’re helpful.
4. If you wish, use free tools like audacity to more accurately compare your pronunciation to
that of a native. The closer your frequencies are, the better.

Idahosa’s Input ( also see his interview later on in the document)

Our end goal is being able to mimic the mouth movements of a Japanese person, and the IPA is
just a means to that end. The IPA is a step-by-step guide that tells you how to move and use
your mouth: if you aren’t already familiar with how your mouth works, it won’t be very useful.
As you’re learning about this stuff, make sure you’re connecting it to what’s physically going on
inside your mouth.

Page 20
General rules of thumb provided by this IPA comparison
In short, the soundscape of English and Japanese differs in a few speci ic ways.

1. English has some sounds that Japanese doesn’t. Don’t make these sounds .
a. like the r in green, /ɹ̠ /, or the l in gleen, /ɫ/
2. Japanese has some sounds that English doesn’t. Learn these sounds.
a. /h/ becomes /ç/ when preceding /i/ or /j/, and /ɸ/ before /u/
3. Some sounds will be affected by interference from English. Clarify these sounds.
a. The sh sound in she , /ʃ/ , is not the same sh sound used in Japanese し, /ɕ/
4. Some sounds are so similar that they’re considered to be the “same” sound, even
from an IPA perspective, but they’re actually “ornamented” slightly differently.
a. Diacritic markers provide even more nuanced information about sounds.
b. English T/D sounds are apical , meaning they’re made with the tip of your
tongue. Japanese T/D sounds are laminal , meaning they’re made with the
blade of your tongue instead. See the Japanese phonology wiki for more info.
c. This chart provides a visual representation of the parts of your mouth. Then,
here’s an interactive IPA chart and other goodies from the IPA association.

This knowledge helps you to be certain that you’re associating the right sounds with the kana.

Other stuff you might be interested in

1. So far as I know, Fluent Forever is currently the only language-learning app available that
puts an emphasis on IPA. It was originally a series of pronunciation trainers that got turned
into an app. There unfortunately isn’t a Japanese course out yet, so this might not be very
useful unless you also speak another language or are just very interested in phonetics.

A more thorough review of what I think about the app is available here.

2. Speechling is a lashcard app for pronunciation training. Each lashcard has a “record”
option, and you can send 35 recordings to native-speaking coaches for free per month. Your
coach will respond within 24 hours to let you know if your pronunciation was clear, and if
not, they’ll point out where you sounded “off”, read that part for you, then read the entire
sentence again. The feedback isn’t very detailed, but it is native feedback for free.

I think that the review from All Language Resources is relatively balanced, available here.

3. We referred to Arti ixian’s videos for an introduction to the IPA; he has more content. If
you’d like to look at these concepts in more detail, here’s a playlist of virtual lectures.
4. Here is a playlist of videos that goes into much further detail about English . I think it’s useful
to get a grounding in English before trying to apply these concepts to Japanese.
5. Microlectures, covering a variety of topics in under two minutes: phonetics | phonology

Page 21
Closing thoughts
A lot of people think that studying pronunciation is for the purpose of sounding like a native, but
you don’t either have a good accent or a bad one. It’s a spectrum.

- Unintelligible : Your pronunciation mistakes prevent you from being understood

- Tedious : You’re intelligible, but deciphering your speech is a high-effort chore
- Understandable : You’re intelligible, but the listener has to pay attention to understand
- Easily-understandable : While obviously foreign, you speak very clearly
- Pleasant : You make small mistakes that give you a “cool” accent which people like
- Native : You would be mistaken for a native speaker over the telephone

Unlike Mandarin or French, it doesn’t take much work to have understandable p ronunciation in
Japanese. I’m concerned with edging you towards easily understandable.

I recognize that this was a pretty dense section, but if you consider the fact that you’re about to
commit to learning

● 92 kana (46 hiragana/katakana)

● Over 2,000 kanji
● Several thousand words

I think it’s worth taking a small pit stop to get your head around

● The 30 odd sounds/phonemes that exist in Japanese, many of which are shared with English
● The 3 ways that individual sounds are conceptualized
● The 4 main aspects of prosody (aka suprasegmental elements )

As Matt from MIA says:

[The root of a good accent] is being able to actually hear what [a given sound] is supposed to
sound like —and once you have that down, learning how to actually produce [that sound] and
get your tongue moving in the right way is not so dif icult.

Whenever you’re listening to your target language, you’re hearing it through the ilter of your
native language. All the sounds are going to [seem] a little closer to your native language, and
this is why people end up with strong foreign accents... Y
ou’ll never be able to surpass your
own level of perception; you’re never going to be able to pronounce things more
accurately than you’re able to hear … if you’re concerned with improving your
pronunciation, what you really have to do is hone your listening skills, and get better at
hearing the different sounds in a language.

Page 22
Kana

Kana: Attaching symbols to those sounds

Now that we’ve learned about the sounds that exist in Japanese and how they’re made, we can take
the next step of learning how these sounds are represented in Japanese. Once we’ve gotten a solid
grip on how they’re represented, we can start mixing those sounds together to create words. From
there we can do the same with words to create phrases, sentences, etc.

So… on the off chance that you skipped the above section, just remember: All of the symbols
you’re about to learn are nothing more than representations of sounds . Given that you’re going
to commit to learning 92 kana (46 hiragana/katakana), over 2,000 kanji and several thousand
words, I think it’s worth taking the time to make sure that you’ve more or less got down the sounds
these symbols stand for.

After all, there only 30 odd phonemes in Japanese, and many of them are shared with English.

Anyhow, that’s my soapbox.

During this section we’ll cover 46 hiragana and 46 katakana; these are sort of like our alphabet
(technically they’re called a syllabary). Each kana is directly associated with a sound.

In the next section we’ll approach kanji, the chinese characters used in Japanese. Kanji are
phonosemantic, meaning they carry information about sound and m eaning. If that raises more
questions than answers, check out the sections about Logographic systems and Syllabic systems in
Wikipedia’s article on writing systems or this video comparing Japanese’s three scripts.

Page 23
Kana Homework
Unlike many of the other sections, you need to cover everything here. There aren’t very many kana
to learn, but since they pop up everywhere , you also don’t need to learn them especially well (for
now). Look a word up in the dictionary? Kana! Open your textbook? Kana! Glance at the subtitles?
Kana! You’ll naturally commit these to memory over time without much effort.

That in mind, I don’t want you to spend a whole lot of time on this. Just get loosely familiar with
them and then jump into the rest of the stuff—you’ll reinforce the grasp you have on kana by doing
literally anything with Japanese. At irst it’ll be very unwieldy and writing any kana from memory
will take quite a lot of effort, but before long, it becomes as natural as writing the ABC’s.

Complete Level I over the course of the next few days. Once you inish it, move onto learning Kanji.
Work through Level II while you’re progressing down the timeline.

Level I: Build passive recognition.

Make an account over at Read the Kanji , sign in and work through the hiragana / katakana. The
system gradually introduces you to new characters as you master old ones and also keeps track of
how often you get each one right or wrong, showing you less of what you’ve got down and more of
what you don’t. You can do as many reviews as you want in a single session, so unlike more
traditional memorization tools, this allows you to cram a lot of content into a short period of time.
Sit down and cruise through these over the course of a few hours.

I normally wouldn’t take this sort of brute-force approach, but since you’ll be seeing these things
literally everywhere, I think it’s better to just get through them and get started with Japanese.

If you prefer reading, check out Tofugu’s Hiragana Guide.

If you prefer watching, check out JapaneseAmmo’s hands-on walkthrough. (... as a music video)
If you’re not taking this too seriously and just want a break, here’s sambon juku.

Here are some cool charts, if you’re a more visual person, by:
Coto Academy | u/Danilinky | u/heimsins_konungr | Tofugu Hiragana / Katakana

Level II: Practice active recall.

Download the app Drops (free on iOS/Android) and start plugging away at their units for hiragana
and katakana.

There are a lot of mixed reviews for this app, and many people complain that it imposes limits on
how long you can study (5 minutes per 10 hours) and also that there are better resources available
to memorize vocabulary. That’s all completely true, but it applies mostly to using Drops as a tool to
learn vocabulary . We’re just here for kana practice.

Page 24
Here’s what I think about Drops, personally:

1. There are de initely much better ways to memorize vocabulary. We’ll go over them. For now,
though, all we care about is getting more comfortable with the hiragana/katakana, and so
far as that goes, I think Drops is great.
2. Drops has very high quality audio for each hiragana/katakana. Hearing the right sound each
time you see the kana (as opposed to the inaccurate one you’re likely subvocalizing) is a
good thing.
3. Remember that guy Hermamm Ebbinghaus I talked about in the Day 0 section, and that
idea—The Serial Position Effect—that he introduced? By studying only 5 minutes in the
morning and evening you give yourself a lot of starts and ends to study sessions. This helps
you commit the kana to memory very ef iciently and also prevents you from spending more
time on them than you need to.

Why approach the kana with two different resources?

We’ll be talking more about how memory works as we go along, but for now, I’ve introduced one
resource that is optimized for your short term memory and another one that’s optimized for your
long term memory .

Short Term Memory

Read the Kanji (or any other tool you might use to cram a ton of kana in within a short period of
time) is employing the rather weak encoding method of rehearsal to quickly create the mental space
needed to process new information. This will give you what you need to start working with the kana
right away, but the memories you’ve built are quite transient and you likely can’t do much beyond
recall the kana when you see them. They’ll also fade away quite quickly.. But that’s okay. All we’re
trying to do right now is get all the kana in your head so you can play with them.

It’ll likely take you several hours over the course of a few days and sessions to do that.

Long Term Memory

Drops (or any other SRS tool you might be using) is taking a more spaced out and thorough
approach that helps you commit the kana to memory—and keep them there. This is the reason I
don’t suggest you pay for Drops Premium, unlocking unlimited use of the app: we aren’t using Drops
to cram . That is what Read the Kanji was for. We’re using Drops to ef iciently and gradually reach a
familiarity with the kana that will create very strong memories, help you to speed up the recall
process and to write them out from memory.

It’ll only take you 2-3 hours worth of 5 minute blocks over the course of a month or so.

I f you really don’t want to use Drops, I’d use the below anki decks instead. Do 4 cards per day.

Textfugu’s Hiragana | Textfugu’s Katakana | Stroke Order / Mixed

Page 25
Kanji
Kanji are a very big hurdle to overcome for all learners of Japanese, and due to the herculean nature
of the task, many methods have understandably been proposed to learn them. Due to the variety of
approaches available, discussions on how to learn kanji almost always seem to get very heated.

To be honest, I’m almost frightened to discuss this. Approaches to kanji are so polarized that, no
matter what I might write, there are still going to be some who will criticize me.

I’d prefer to avoid as much of that as possible, so I’m going to approach this section very cautiously.
It might come off as being redundantly and needlessly cautious, but I think that’s necessary.

I’m going to approach this section like this:

1. I’ll give you a more optimized version of what I did in the homework section.
2. I’ll tell you what I actually did: what I liked, didn’t like, and learned along the way.
3. I’ll sum that up into my personal stances on 4 hot-button issues concerning kanji
4. I’ll link to a few other resources so that you can look into other approaches, too

My goal is that, by the time you inish this section, you’ll have accomplished a few things:

1. You’ll understand how Kanji work

2. You’ll accept that you need to learn them
3. You’ll more or less have decided how you’re going to conquer them
4. You’ll begin following that plan to learn the kanji

A few things to keep in mind

1. You don’t become Lance Armstrong or Marianne Vos just because you outgrow your training
wheels. All it means is that you can clumsily ride a bike—you’ve still got a long way to go
before you can ride comfortably, let alone competitively. Don’t mistake your Kanji
tool—whatever it is—as the end all be all. There’s still a lot more Japanese to learn.

No matter what method you decide on, it’s ultimately nothing more than a pair of training
wheels. The point of training wheels is to support you until you can ride your bike well
enough that you no longer need them. That’s it. Training wheels are very limited in function.

2. You’re going to forget stuff. A lot of stuff. You will forget stuff no matter how seriously you
take this, no matter how much you’re paying attention, no matter how good your resources
are, no matter how smart you are. That’s okay. Forgetting information, and then recalling it,
is a necessary part of convincing your brain that it’s worth remembering.

Page 26
Kanji Homework
Level I: Figure out how the squiggles work

So long as you’re doing something that’s more involved than staring at squiggles on paper until
their likeness becomes seared into your retina, any tool that you might stumble into is going to be
based on the same few basic concepts.

I’d like you to spend 30 minutes or so getting familiar with these concepts so that you can make a
more informed judgment about what I’m going to suggest and the alternative options I share.

1. Read through Kanji Damage’s overview of how kanji work. It’s a bit… coarse… but I think it
does a really good job of presenting the most important information about kanji in an
accessible way. If you’d like to learn even more about kanji, follow that up with the
University of Chicago’s Introduction to Kanji (history, types of kanji, stroke order, radicals).

Here’s kanjidamage every modern Kanji learning approach in a nutshell:

2. Wonder what go, mountain, the director a nd pi h

ave to do with 微 (delicateness)? They’re
chunks that get used to make mnemonics to help us to memorize stuff. Here’s how a guy
used mnemonics to memorize Moby Dick, and if you’re down to digress, Moonwalking with
Einstein is a book that documents an average dude’s journey from forgetting his keys to
competing in memory tournaments, using these same basic ideas.

3. Spend some time learning about spaced repetition in more detail; most modern systems use
an algorithm to determine when it’s most ef icient for you to review content.

Here’s what it is in 4 minutes and how to apply it in 8 minutes.

If you’re willing to put another hour into this, a Cambridge university med student put out
two great videos on applying these concepts. Check out spaced repetition (26min) and
active recall (20min). If you don’t have time now, make time for these later.

Page 27
 Level II: Decide which route you’re going to take through the kanji
While learning the kanji is actually pretty straightforward after you get into the routine, picking
your resource can be dif icult. Many people struggle through several tools before inding one that
works for them. The result is that they end up hailing that particular tool as being “the way”, and are
often able to back up their statement with thorough explanations of why their tool is the best and
others are lacking. When everybody supports a different tool, this gets really confusing.

Each of these tools can work for the right person, and given how different everyones’ styles and
situations are, I don’t think I can say that one is better or worse than the others. So long as you ind
one that you can tolerate and consistently keep up with, you’ll be ine.

Whatever you choose, you’ll be investing at least a few hundred hours into this. Before you do
so, please set aside a couple hours to skim through the different approaches available and
decide which one seems to best suit you.

The inal Anki deck I ended up committing to: All in One Kanji Deck (RTK Order)

RTK (sample available here) treats kanji as being like lego constructions: mix different legos in
different ways to get different kanji. In each chapter he gives you new “blocks” and shows you what
kanji/”constructions” you can make with them. Many systems employ the same strategy.

What’s controversial is that Heisig feels that learning the kanji is such a monumental task that it
requires your full attention: he suggests learning what ~3,000 kanji mean, and how to write them,
before you begin doing anything in Japanese. Before even learning how to pronounce them. No
vocabulary or anything, just kanji and an associated English keyword.

With heisig, you’re basically attaching a bunch of fancy symbols for English words.

Other options (alphabetical order):

- Kanji Damage is another take on RTK. He ignores a lot of kanji that he feels aren’t worth the
time to learn (ie, characters like this one (桐) for “paulownia”, a type of tree). He aims to
introduce only the kanji you’re practically going to need. Sort of NSFW/crude style.

He’s got several explanatory pages on his website, so go check out what he has to say.

- The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course is popular among people who don’t like RTK/Heisig. A
couple core differences between the KKLC and RTK is that the KKLC system rejects Heisig’s
claim that it isn’t helpful to learn readings/vocab alongside kanji and that it’s important for
learners to make their own mnemonics. All of this information is provided for you.

Each kanji in the KKLC is introduced like this: sample page KKLC

Page 28
 - Mass Immersion Approach’s Recognition RTK is a condensed version of RTK that goes over
the 1,000 most frequently occurring kanji; these 1,000 kanji cover 90% of written Japanese.
This deck is designed to get learners into Japanese as soon as possible, but you’ll have to
spend time illing in gaps later.

MIA has a very thorough explanatory post on Production RTK (Heisig) vs Recognition RTK
(MIA) here. If their approach sounds logical to you, check out the rest of their timeline.

- NihongoShark has been in the community for ages and this is his take on the most
optimized way to learn kanji. It’s a condensed version of what I presented (2,200 vs 3,000
kanji). He trimmed the deck down to include only what you need to know for the JLPT.

He talks about what he recommends you to do and why he organized the deck like this in his
post on learning the kanji—if you like his style, he offers a whole guided system.

- Read the Kanji, the resource we used earlier to learn the kana, is actually a kanji resource. It
breaks the kanji up by JLPT level and allows you to cram; unlike the kana, each kanji comes
with an example sentence. There is/was a pretty active community that comments on each
sentence/kanji, too. This system doesn’t break down the kanji for you, though.

If you’ve been following this guide then you should already have an opinion about Read the
Kanji. If you like it and don’t mind breaking the kanji down yourself, feel free.

- WaniKani holds your hand the whole way. You have to follow their program, but they’ve
organized everything for you, so all you’ve really got to do is log in every day and do what
they tell you. You’ll learn ~2,000 kanji and ~6,000 vocab using those kanji, supposedly in
about a year (but probably closer to two).

Here’s a really long re lection by someone who inished Wani Kani: 368 Days of WK

Here is someone else’s take on many of the above resources, plus a few more.

Whatever you ultimately choose to do, just remember, these are your training wheels. Whether you
know only the rough shape of the characters after inishing your tool or you know how to
pronounce a few vocab words using them, whether you can or can’t write them from memory,
whether you learn all the JLPT kanji or only a segment of them, you won’t be done with kanji.

I talked about just how limited I think this irst pass through RTK is in another post, and I feel that
this applies to any method you might use. Getting through the kanji is just step one.

In my opinion, this step is all about getting comfortable with / getting over a fear of kanji so that the
rest of your journey through Japanese becomes smoother.

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Level III: Start Learning the Kanji
If you’ve chosen to use another deck, you should be following their system for the rest of this
section. I encourage you to do so. If not, this is how I would re-approach the deck that I used.

Learning to recognize
1. First, take 10 minutes to review what kanji are and how their stroke order works.
2. Figure out how Anki works (less detail/more detail). I use these addons/modi iers, too.
3. Go download this deck that follows Heisig’s RTK.
4. In Anki, go to browser > search by card type > “card:Recall” > suspend all of the recall cards.
This isn’t about being thorough, it’s about achieving a minimum marketable product . I do this
to get into content asap, and then s pread out the process of learning to write the kanji.
5. Set “new” to 5 per day. Do 5 cards every day and you’ll inish in about 2 years (see below) .
6. Download the associated radicals deck (what radicals are for) and work through them as
they become necessary for the kanji you’re learning with the above deck.
(If you’d prefer to use the physical RTK book, you don’t need to do this).
7. The deck I’ve suggested includes a lot of information about each kanji, including vocab
words that include it. If there aren’t any vocab words, or none of them seem useful to you,
search the kanji in a dictionary and pick a few vocab words that you think are better.

( You don’t have to try to memorize any of that stuff; just have them there so that you see
them when you do your reviews. I think that step one is just knowing what exists. )

8. *** I get it, 5 cards isn’t very much. I ask that you start with ive cards in order to orient
yourself, but you can gradually up your daily card count from there. If you up the new card
counter by 3 daily cards at two week intervals, growing from 5 daily cards to 20 over the
course of ten weeks (below), you only end up losing a month compared to if you had started
from 20 daily cards right away. I think that’s an alright tradeoff to avoid burnout. On an
unrelated but convenient note, the grammar section is also six months long.

Week · Pace W2 W4 W6 W8 W10 Day 150 D182

@20/day 280 560 840 1,120 1400 3,000 ---

@5/day 70 --- --- --- --- --- ---

@8/day --- 182 --- --- --- --- ---

@11/day --- --- 336 --- --- --- ---

@14/day --- --- --- 532 --- --- ---

@17/day --- --- --- --- 770 --- ---

@20/day --- --- --- --- --- 2370 3,000

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Learning to write (h
ow I approach this )

9. I take a bit of an unconventional approach to learning to write kanji and I discuss this in the
section Kanji: Discussion . I made a comment discussing how I do so, and we’ll begin that at
around the six month mark. Again, feel free to take a different approach.

10. We’ll begin making the monolingual transition at around the 9 month mark. If you choose to
keep following my advice, at that point you’ll start writing down words and their Japanese
de inition down as you stumble across stuff while reading. This enables you to gradually
commit characters to memory while working through stuff that’s important to you; nothing
arbitrary or mind-numbing.

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Kanji: What I actually did
Unless we’re talking about stubbornness and inef iciency, I don’t think I’m particularly special.
In this section I’ll walk you through my relationship with kanji. Hopefully it’ll give you some ideas
about what to expect, help you discard a few bad ideas and, ultimately, save you some time.

Here are the TL;DR points:

● You can get through all of RTK in a few months if you really want to. I did.
● It took only six months of no-Japanese for me to forget most of RTK, afterwards.
● You’re better off sticking to and inishing one resource than bouncing around.
● Learning all 3,007 kanji from RTK is not necessary. Getting through the JLPT kanji is enough
to get started reading; realistically, you don’t even need all of the JLPT kanji (cough 麿/朕)
● Flashcards are excellent in the beginning but come with diminishing returns. Know where
your line is and don’t feel bad about moving on from Anki once you reach it.
● You don’t need to know nearly as many kanji as you might think to begin reading
● Reading comes with many wonderful bene its—kanji practice included.
● I’m now reading my second book in Mandarin but haven’t intentionally studied any hanzi. I
knew enough kanji that I have been able to learn the hanzi I didn’t know via exposure. There
is a point where you can begin focusing on organic learning, moving mostly away from Anki,
reserving it only for the things you think are particularly important.

August 2014: Clueless

I irst arrived to Japan in August 2014 and was immediately put off by kanji—umm, maybe I’ll just
learn to speak Japanese? Isn’t 46 hiragana and katakana enough? More than anything, they just
seemed incredibly redundant to me. Writing out the word for to go in hiragana takes three strokes:
いく. Writing it out in kanji takes seven: 行く. Why double the necessary amount of strokes?

I did my best to ignore kanji at irst: I learned the ones I needed for class and nothing else. To
prepare for kanji tests I’d open the back of my genki book and write out each kanji with its readings
(no vocab included) ifteen times.

Needless to say, I very quickly learned to hate kanji.

December 2014: Introduced to RTK

One day I was sitting in the library, preparing for my inal test, when a much more advanced friend
(six? seven? Semesters ahead of me) walked by to ask how it was going. I took the opportunity to
voice my Kanji woes; his jaw went slack and his heart dropped so far that I heard it bounce off the
loor. Dude , he said, Please tell me you’re joking. Are you really doing that?

I wasn’t joking.

My friend introduced me to RTK and suggested that I do 10 kanji per day. He spent the next week
walking me through the method, insisted that I had to follow Heisig’s instructions to the letter and

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let me borrow his Amazon JP account to purchase the book. I wasn’t completely sold but decided
that anything would be better than what I had been doing; I’d begin after inals.

January 2015: Cue hundreds of hours of RTK

I’m slightly embarrassed to say that RTK was one of the most thrilling rides I’ve ever taken. I had
originally intended to stick to 10 per day, as my friend had suggested, but ended up doing 15 in my
irst session ( inishing chapter one). Within a week I was doing 50 per day, within two I was
spending nearly ive hours on kanji per day. Not speaking much Japanese, my newfound recognition
of kanji meant independence. I could make sense of signs around me, generally understand what I
was eating, follow news headlines in Japanese as they came up on TV.

I had followed Heisig’s instructions nearly to the letter: 3,000 hand-made lashcards (see page
43/45). I even gathered 9 shoeboxes and made a physical spaced repetition system to determine
what cards I should be reviewing and when. I reviewed only keyword to kanji, and although Heisig
said not to, I liked kanji so much that I wrote each kanji from memory with every review. I
handwrote ~1,000 kanji (not necessarily unique ones) each day for three months.

April 2015: Conquered RTK (or so I thought)

If I felt free before, I felt like Superman now. I recognized practically every kanji I saw, and if I
happened to see a new one, I could memorize it in less than a second. One day I went to the hospital
with a friend who nearly broke her ankle dancing; I understood what was written on the intake
forms at the hospital, she didn’t. She was a full time student at our university and was doing her
coursework fully in Japanese; I was thinking about taking the N5. RTK was wild, man.

This all got to my head (if you can’t tell) and I actually dropped out of my Japanese class. I worked
through Genki II by myself, continued practicing kanji, then went home in July.

July-Dec 2015: No Japanese

I returned to my home university and we had no Japanese courses. I intended to study by myself but
didn’t get around to it. I had zero contact with Japanese in any form during this time.

Jan 2016: Started WaniKani

The study abroad advisor sent me an email saying that a few Japanese students would come to
study at our university and it’d be great if I could help out. Part of that included writing welcome
letters in Japanese to include in their goodie bags. To my surprise, half a year was all it had taken to
forget the kanji. Given that all I knew about them in the irst place was what they looked like and an
English de inition, admittedly, there hadn’t really been much to forget.

I decided to follow WaniKani because I wanted to try a more guided approach to the kanji, and WK
also taught two or three vocab words alongside every one.

July 2016: Stopped WaniKani

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I left the US for Japan again and volunteered during the summer; no reliable internet access meant
no WK. I’d gone much slower, due to WK’s pacing, and learned vocab words for ~600 kanji over the
course of the spring semester. I didn’t re-learn to write, but I felt good about WK.

Oct 2016: Graded Readers

The semester began at my 2nd Japanese university, I took a placement test and the results confused
my teachers. My score on the vocab test suggested that I go into class level 5 of 7; N3, preparing for
N2. My reading/listening/grammar/vocab scores suggested I go into level 2 or 3, N5/N4 courses.

It turned out that while I had forgotten how to write characters from memory, I still recognized
many characters. I recalled the meaning to enough of these characters that I tested above my level.
I ended up being placed in level 4, was directed to a stack of White Rabbit graded readers and told
to read as much as I could. Hopefully my con idence with kanji could support my other skills.

Naturally a reader, I really liked this approach. I read all of the White Rabbit graded readers (N5
through N2) in addition to both of the Read Real Japanese books: Essays and Fiction

Feb 2017: The First Book

I spread out the graded readers so that I’d inish them by the end of the semester. Upon inishing I
began reading Black Fairy Tale by Otsuichi, keeping track of the new words I felt were important
enough to write down. By the end of the book I had over 500. Slow and painstaking, but satisfying.
(Already linked, but I kept track of everything I read and wrote a post about it).

From this point on, I have basically just read books.

September 2017: Re-learning to write the kanji

I went to Russia to teach English for a year after graduating, spending ~3 hours a day in a train.
Having already done RTK once and having done ⅓ of WaniKani, I proceeded to spend ~250 hours
over the course of another y
ear working through RTK again . I don’t think it was very useful.

September 2018: Onto Mandarin

I severely limited my use of Anki for Japanese so that I’d have more time to focus on Mandarin (and
for my own sanity). Now I read in Japanese on the way to work, have changed how I practice kanji
and work through a JLPT prep book after arriving to work. I ind this to be much more sustainable.

Dec 2019: In Re lection

I’ve spent nearly 1,000 hours on kanji over the last 5 years and that was complete overkill. I have to
read a lot of scribbled Mandarin for my current job, so it hasn’t been a total waste, but I think I’d be
further along with Japanese if I’d spent 700 of those hours doing literally anything else.

Kanji: Discussion
Many arguments over how to best learn kanji seem to boil down to a few points:
1. Should you, or should you not, learn to write kanji by hand? If so, how?

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 2. Should you, or should you not, learn readings as you go? If so, how?
3. Should you focus on kanji, or focus on learning vocab alongside the kanji?
4. Should you learn kanji at once, before other studies, or as you go?

I’d like to share my opinion on these points so that you can better understand why I suggest
approaching the characters as I have. Spending some time to igure out where you personally stand
on each one will help you choose a kanji resource that better aligns with your values.

On Learning to Handwrite Kanji

Learn to write the kanji , but spread the burden of doing so out over time. Over a long time.

Knowing how to write kanji has been incredibly useful for me and I regret zero seconds of the time I
spent learning to do so. To be honest, I enjoyed it. That being said, if I had to do it again, I don’t think
I’d put so much effort into learning to write them right away. Here’s why:

1. The method that most ardently promotes learning to write the kanji by hand (ie, the one I
followed) was irst published in 1977. Smart phones didn’t exist then. There was no
convenient way to look up a kanji you were shaky on or didn’t recognize, and if you didn’t
recognize a kanji, how could you look up an unknown word using that kanji? The answer is
slowly . G
etting all the characters down pat before really beginning to engage with Japanese
would have saved you some massive headaches in 1977. It’s 2020 now. We have cellphones.

2. There’s a phenomenon called Character Amnesia, irst documented in Japan in the 80’s, in
which native speakers have been becoming increasingly less able to handwrite characters.
There’s even an idiom for it in Mandarin: 提筆忘字 (loosely speaking: lift pen, forget
character). I’ve personally lived in both Japan and Taiwan and assure you that you could
very easily get around without knowing how to write characters from memory—there are
very few real-world situations where you couldn’t just quickly look them up on your phone.

The can of worms I’m hesitating to open here is that, in our ever digitizing world, the ability to
handwrite characters just might be less relevant and important than it was at the time the guy who
wrote that book wrote it, as much as I love him and his book.

I think it’s more practical to reach a point where you can recognize them quickly and then spread
out the burden of learning to write them over time.

On Learning Readings with the Kanji

Learn readings via vocab, not via kanji. Whether you learn kanji irst and vocab later or learn both at
the same time is up to you. Just make sure you aren’t attaching arbitrary readings to isolated kanji .

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The Japanese system of kanji pronunciation is incredibly convoluted. Almost all kanji have more
than one reading and many kanji have several. 生 has like 12 readings, for example, and just look at
日曜日 (nichi youbi ). The same kanji (日), within the same word, gets read in two different ways. On
top of that, it still has 3 other ways that it could be pronounced. Even if you were to have memorized
all of these readings, you wouldn’t really know which one to use when.

This mayhem is partly due to the fact that Japanese people didn’t invent kanji—they took them from
China and imposed them upon the Japanese language. This lead to a few issues:

● In addition to whatever [Chinese] word the character originally belonged to, Japanese often
also had its own equivalent word. Both got kept. This led to a necessity of having two
reading systems, one [Chinese] and one Japanese, the On’Yomi and Kun’Yomi.

As a rule of thumb:
If you see kanji and hiragana together, you’ll use kun’yomi.
If you see multiple kanji stuck together, you’ll use on’yomi... But:

● While Japanese borrowed kanji from Chinese, Chinese isn’t a language. It’s an entire
language family: there are tons of Chinese languages. Mandarin is currently deemed to be
the standard one, but this wasn’t always the case. Japanese had been borrowing kanji from
China and tacking them onto Japanese words over a long period of time, and this led to
borrowing readings from multiple different Chinese languages. There are actually multiple
different categories of on’yomi.

Here’s a much more eloquently put explanation about that: how Japan overloaded Chinese
characters ( 6min) by NativLang, a linguist on YouTube.

● See sljfaq, imabi (part II) and Tofugu and Wikipedia for more on the history of Kanji

On Learning Kanji and Vocab

Make your own decision about this. It doesn’t really matter in the end.

There are two main stances on this issue that tend to go back and forth:

1. We need to take in a lot of new information—the sounds of Japanese, the kana they’re
associated with, Japanese words, and the kanji associated with those words. That’s too much
to do at once. We should simplify the process by dividing and conquering.

2. We’re trying to learn Japanese, not fancy symbols for English words. It’s inef icient to learn a
kanji without a vocab word to go alongside it. Furthermore, it’s practically useless to learn a
kanji that you may never, ever use (there are a lot of kanji for speci ic types of trees and stuff
like that). We should ensure that all of our learning is practical.

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I think both of these positions have valid points that can be demonstrated by literally just looking at
random words. Here’s one that means clear/obvious: 明白 (めいはく).

1. If you were to follow approach #1 (the RTK approach), you’d see this and think “bright +
white”, but that doesn’t really help you to understand what this means. It makes some sense
after you see the translation, but you’ll be thrown off until you look it up. This sort of thing
happens quite often. Several of RTK’s keywords don’t end up being super practical beyond
making mnemonics. There’s a lot left to do after inishing RTK, to put it mildly.

2. If you were to follow approach #2 (most other approaches) and make a point of learning
vocab alongside each kanji, this word would probably look like a great candidate! Being able
to say that something is clear or obvious is important. But there are more common ways to
express this in Japanese. It’d sound sort of weird if you suddenly dropped this word in
conversation. Unfortunately, you can’t really know that until you start consuming media or
engaging with Japanese people. I do t hink this helps to learn the readings, but this method
isn’t foolproof, either. There’s still work to do after inishing the kanji.

In a nutshell:

● Approach #1 will get you through the kanji faster but leave you with a lot of backtracking.
● Approach #2 will take a bit more time but also take you further along the kanji journey.
● Whichever approach you use, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time consolidating a
dictionary when you begin reading. The endgame of both methods is, essentially, a different
starting point for your ability to engage with written Japanese in any meaningful capacity.

To be honest, I think the most important criteria in determining your ideal method is (a) patience
and (b) tolerance for ambiguity.

● If you don’t mind having to (constantly) check a dictionary when you begin reading, RTK
will allow you to get into Japanese content more quickly than approach #2.
● If you want to have a smoother transition into native materials—you know, so you can enjoy
them—any of the other approaches I’ve shared will better prepare you to do so.

You know yourself. As Steve Kaufman says, pick your own solution.

On when to learn the kanji

RTK suggests working through all of the kanji before you do anything else i n Japanese; lots of
people think that is a ridiculous suggestion. I agree. Sort of.

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 ● Approaching Japanese without having to worry about the kanji will give you a huge leg up
with your learning. It makes literally everything easier, I dare say incomparably so.
● A lot of kanji, even the “everyday use” characters, don’t really show up all that often. If you
get through 3,000 kanji before you crack open your irst textbook, you’ll be sitting on a ton
of very advanced kanji that you won’t see for years, if ever. You’ll forget them and just end up
having to re-learn them again later on, effectively wasting your time both now and later.

TL;DR

After spending way too much time trying way too many approaches, my opinion is that kanji should
be approached as part of a routine, worked through in small doses every day, and you’re better off
sticking to your method (great or not) than jumping ship a few times. So choose your method wisely.

The only exception I would make is to say that particularly dedicated learners (those willing to put
several hours a day into this over the course of a few months) might ind it worthwhile to power
through a core base of the most common kanji. After getting through this base, I would still tone
things down and focus on sustainability and consistency. Language is a marathon, not a sprint.

Finishing any of these kanji methods brings you to a position that I think is comparable to that of an
English speaker beginning to learn a romance language, just much more watered down.

● You’re still at zero, in that you don’t understand the language, but now you’re at an
optimistic zero. Japanese looks familiar to you, whereas before it was squiggly lines. In other
words, after hundreds of hours of kanji, you approach a French learner’s day zero. Sort of.
○ Just as an English speaker could guess the meaning of organización o r fenomenal,
you can occasionally recognize words on sight, like 消火器 ( ire/put out/utensil= ire
extinguisher) or 赤血球 (red/blood/ball=red blood cell)
○ Just like an English speaker’s pattern recognition occasionally leads them astray, as
with embarazada m eaning pregnant, not embarrassed, you’ll also see words like 大
家 (big + house) and come up with something that doesn’t mean landlord .
○ More often than not, you’ll have to look up words even if the kanji make sense.

The silver lining is that Japanese front-loads the vocabulary burden whereas English back-loads it.
After 5 years I rarely see a kanji I don’t know, a fact that makes remembering new vocab very easy. I
can’t say the same for English, even though it’s my native language.

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Grammar

Source: u/yep_fate_eos on r/LanguageLearning

Page 39
Grammar Discussion: What’s a forest and why are we spending so much time here?

Before we begin talking about Japanese grammar, I want to take a page to think about learning
grammar in general. It never goes away, so let’s avoid making trouble that isn’t necessary.

On consuming information in general

There’s a really cool book called How to Read a Book t hat offers a few obvious, but important, ideas.

● Catching a ball is as much an [active] activity as pitching or hitting it [is]. → Whenever you
consume new information, you should be trying to categorize it, iguring out how it relates
to what you already know. Reading/studying is an active a ctivity.
● The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitch — fastballs and curves,
changeups and knucklers. → N
ot all materials are equally relevant/important to us at a given
time. Understand what you want to get out of a material and approach it accordingly.
● Writers vary, just as pitchers do. Some writers have excellent “control”; they know exactly what
they want to convey, and they convey it precisely and accurately . [Others don’t ].→ No resource
or tutor is perfect; you’re going to need to put in a bit of effort meeting them halfway.
● Reading is a complex activity, just as writing is. It consists of a large number of separate acts,
all of which must be performed in a good reading . The person who can perform more of them
is better able to read . → S ound familiar? Kolb’s stages of development. It’s everywhere.

On the necessity of “multiple passes”

Anyhow, what I really want to say is that you should expect to have to approach the same grammar
points multiple times and from a variety of angles before they really sink in. Consider this:

...Like a c ubist painting (I I ), whose various elements are related simply by contiguity, novels
like Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury can be understood only when they are perceived 'all at
once,' for the various elements unfold not chronologically but in a fashion that seems at irst to
be almost random.

It is often said that you cannot read such novels for the irst time unless you have already read
them. In other words, you must have their facts and their stories in your head (as you would
when looking at a painting) before you can understand them as their narratives unfold.
~ Essentials of the Theory of Fiction by Michael J. Hoffman & Patrick D. Murphy

I think that the same thing can be said about learning grammar: You can't learn a bit of grammar for
the irst time unless you already know it. As I said in the beginning of this document, I think that the
mustard seed anecdote is a great way to think about learning. If you’ve never seen a grammar point
before, its basic function is going to be more important to you than its nuance. As you get a better
grasp on that grammar point and many others, it becomes easier to appreciate the ine details. I
think that this process looks something like this:

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1. There is a building and it appears to have four loors. I have located the front door.
On the irst pass we are just seeing what exists; what is and isn't possible. You aren’t
worrying about committing it to memory, let alone mastering it. All we’re concerned about
is becoming very loosely aware of the corral that we’ve got to run around in.

2. If I get hungry, there’s a ramen shop located on loor two. “Give me a ramen, please.”
Over the course of the next few passes we begin accumulating key structures and “go-to”
patterns that we can repurpose for ourselves. We aren’t very concerned about all the little
details yet; we’re just picking up some conversational connectors and key structures that
enable us to communicate. Speech is possible at this stage, but stilted and formulaic.

Hungry? Ramen, loor two. Thirsty? Cafe, loor three. Bathroom? Floor one. Bed? Floor four.

3. What kind of ramen? Shio, tonkotsu, shoyu, miso…. Maybe a tsukemen? S ky’s the limit .
Eventually you’ll reach a point where you have a means to express whatever’s on your mind,
however choppy or roundabout it might be. From there, you’ll become interested in
variations of these common structures for nuance and also begin splicing together multiple
simple sentences into one more complex sentence. It helps to know how and when to do so.

I think this is a process that will come naturally after getting lots of input. At irst you’ll be
content knowing that ~が早いか and ~や否や both mean “almost immediately upon/after
~”, which is true, but eventually you’ll ind yourself curious as to why the hell there are two
structures for seemingly the same thing. Does the JLPT exist just to torment poor learners?
Boom, suddenly grammar resources have become useful and you’ve joined the dark side.

4. Pescatarians can’t eat ramen because the broth is pork based, even if there’s no meat chunks.
People don’t like grammar because there are a lot of seemingly dumb rules to be
memorized: why do intransitive verbs take が, not を? Well, knowing a bit about transitivity,
direct objects and agents helps make sense of that, but alone doesn’t teach you Japanese.

Just like with the above step, I think there’s also a point in which you’ll begin seeing value in
learning about not only Japanese linguistics/grammar but also grammar/linguistic concepts
in general. It can be really useful to have an outside frame of reference on Japanese. What’s
important is that you see a need to do this. We’ve got Google, so there is zero point in having
knowledge just for the sake of it. If you don’t see a point in doing so, don’t learn it right now.

As you work through Genki, and as you get further along down the road, remember which “pass”
you’re on and think about what sort of info seems valuable. What does will change over time.
You don’t need to learn every little thing at once. It’s great to know that one use of を is to mark the
accusative case, but it’s probably more useful to know that you tack it onto the food you want to eat.

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Grammar Homework
I’m one of those weird people who loves grammar. To me, grammar is a means of self-expression…
and interesting. Grammar is the stuff that allows you to show other people what’s going on in your
head. It’s what allows you to talk and communicate—and as you can see, I clearly like to talk. A lot.

Having said that, I’ll also be the irst to admit that it’s easy to waste time going down a rabbit hole.
Furthermore, no matter how well you prepare, your irst conversations are going to be sort of
rough. Everybody has heard of that guy who passed the N1 but can’t hold a conversation.

I don’t want you to be that guy. To speak well, you need to speak—but before you can speak, you
need to have some sort of grounding in the language. It doesn’t have to be an incredibly irm
grounding, but you’ve got to have something to stand on. Mustard seeds and stuff.

Level I and II: Grammar-centered, consumption hopeful

I believe that languages should be lived, so the “mandatory” section of this guide contains only the
bare minimum that I think you’ll need to stumble through native content. I don’t mean to say that
you’ll now be able to understand that content (you probably won’t), but rather that you’ll have
learned enough to igure out why you don’t understand. If you can igure out why you don’t
understand something, you can Google around to resolve your issue. In other words, you’ll have
become self-suf icient. So long as you continue enjoying yourself in Japanese, whether or not you’re
seriously studying, you’ll improve. That’s a cool place to be, and it’s closer than you think.

These stages are all about inding your shoes. Once you do so, you can run away if you want.

Level III, IV, V and VI : Consumption-centered, routine grammar re inements

Now, I think that input and grammar have a sort of cyclical relationship. You learn grammar so you
can consume stuff, you consume stuff and get a feel for lots of grammar points by osmosis.
Eventually it becomes useful to backtrack through the fuzz and feeling to check a grammar
resource; you’ll igure out some nuance and it’s a super cool aha! m
oment. Then you go back to
input with more precision, depth and ease of understanding than you had before. And so forth.

What’s important to me is that, at this stage, the grammar resources are no longer a meaty daily
task—they’re a quick warmup that you check in with. At this point most of your time should be
going into input and immersion; the resources I talk about in level IV-VI are part of a process of
gradually honing your comprehension. You can only cram so much into your head at once, so for the
sake of ef iciency and sanity, I think this should be stretched out over a longer period of time.

Those stages are about revision, routine and exploration. They’ll become increasingly personal.

Page 42
 Level I: There’s a forest. It’s leaves are, to the best of my understandably shaky knowledge,
green. Or maybe they’re blue.

Japanese is considered to be one of the most dif icult languages for English speakers to learn, and
after ive years and four languages, I think this dif iculty comes down to familiarity—or rather, an
utter lack of familiarity. (Don’t be discouraged by this—I actually had a much less painful experience with Japanese
than Spanish because I had more motivation and better resources. Dif iculty is very subjective.)

While I’ve personally enjoyed it more, Japanese has taken much m ore work than Spanish. This is
because there are tons of parallels that you can immediately draw upon when you learn a language
that’s close to your native one. Consider the following sentences:

1. I want to go to the sea today because the weather is nice.

2. Quiero ir al mar hoy porque el tiempo es estupendo.
3. 今日 天気
は がい いか ら に きた 、海 行
いで す 。
The English and Spanish sentences line up nearly perfectly, and this is a huge advantage. The
English and Japanese lines, on the other hand, don’t match at all.

● It’s easy to draw parallels between English and Spanish content when you’re consuming,
from structures to vocab, enabling you to learn a ton of stuff sheerly by osmosis. See it,
recognize it, start using it. Very little conscious effort is required.
● If you aren’t sure how to express something in Spanish when speaking, you can nearly
always just translate word-for-word from English. Even if it isn’t the most natural sentence,
it will almost de initely be intelligible. That doesn’t work in Japanese.
● You aren’t really beginning from zero when you’re learning a language that’s close to your
native one. You’ve got similar looking legos and they’re more or less in the right place
already. When you learn Japanese, you’ve got to cast all your linguistic legos, print them,
then re-draw the blueprints for whatever it is that you want to build.

That in mind, I’d like you to spend an hour or so taking a survey of Japanese as a whole before we
get into grammar. I want you to understand the major differences between Japanese and English
and, generally, to understand what you’re getting into. I think that understanding this will help you
to avoid frustration when you get stuck and also to better diagnose problems you run into later on.

P.S. I also speak Spanish. I’ve talked at a bit more length on my experience learning to read in Spanish
vs Japanese i n another comment . If you’re curious about the role that p ositive language transfer plays
in learning, or just aren’t sold on it, please also see that comment.

Page 43
Please work through the following before moving onto level II:

1. 80/20 Japanese: Check out the graphics comparing English and Japanese word order. You
can read the whole thing if you want, but if not, ctrl+f and read the following sections
De ining Different Roles, De ining roles in English, a nd De ining roles in Japanese.
2. Imabi: Notice how all bubbles in the above graphic are all around the central “English”
bubble but mostly left of the central “Japanese” bubble? Read the sections on Left-Branching,
Basic Word Order, Omission, a nd Agglutination .
3. Smile Nihongo: Imabi is great, but it can be dense. Read this much more accessible article on
sentence order that comes with nice visuals. If you’re sick of reading, you can watch this
(sort of corny) video instead.
4. Japanese Professor: You’ve now covered some of the major things you’ll need to get your
head around. Now that you’re familiar with them, read this article that nicely sums
everything up.

5. JapanesePod 101: If you’re feeling adventurous, skim through some of these sentence
structure comparisons. You don’t need to really understand everything that’s going on - just
look at the romanizations and compare where parts of the sentence are.

I want you to begin like this because, as you’re learning, some things aren’t going to be clear. In
other cases the examples in your textbook will be clear, but you won’t feel like they’re thorough
enough: Yeah, ok I get that it works like X, but does this structure also work like Y and Z ? — questions
for which there won’t be a clari ication. You’ll have to seek clari ication on your own.

There are going to be times where you feel dumb because seemingly simple stuff doesn’t stick (I got
hung up for more than an hour on the fourth lesson in Genki, a lesson that basically teaches you
how to use ‘s (apostrophe s / possessive case) in Japanese).

You aren’t dumb. This isn’t only you; it’s everyone. It’s okay to feel frustrated. Japanese is hard.

It’s a very logical language, but unfortunately, it wasn’t built on the sort of logic you’re used to
working with. You’ll have to igure out all this stuff from zero, and from time to time, that’s going to
make you feel like a baby. But it’ll get easier as you go.

When you’re ready, move onto Level II. It’s time to begin with Japanese grammar.

Page 44
 Level II: Starting to see the forest for the trees (at least, they look like trees)

You might have caught onto this by now, but I’m big on starting small and building a routine. If you
improve 1% each day for a year, you’ll end up 37% better off than you are right now. As James Clear,
the author of Atomic Habits says, success is the product of daily habits, not once-in-a-lifetime
transformations. You’ll inish Genki (or whatever textbook you use) eventually, and if we can
physically carve a space out for it in your life, we can then ill that space back in with whatever it is
you decide to do after Genki. And so forth. Eventually you’ll put together a well-tailored routine
such that, so long as you wake up, you’ll be improving in Japanese.

I get that this is exciting and you want to dive into Japanese, but take a breather for a second. There
are only 137 sections in all of Genki I and Genki II. Do one per weekday and you’ll be done in about
6 months. That’s what most Japanese university courses accomplish in 3-4 semesters.

Humor me and take six months to get through Genki. Doing so gives us the time to get through the
irst pass of kanji and almost all the way through the 2,000 most frequently occurring vocab words.
That gives you all you need to start stumbling through native content—not too shabby, right?

1. Purchase your textbooks. I assume you’ll be using the following:

Genki I: Textbook / Workbook | Genki II: Textbook / Workbook

If you’re not in a position to buy the books, try out these free resources:
Tae Kim | Imabi | ( I will update this with helpful alternatives; PM me).

→ I don’t expect you to take notes, but if you want to, here’s how I do it.

2. Work through one single section per day. To be clear, I mean that I want you to do numbers
today, time tomorrow and telephone numbers the day after that. Etc. It might help to watch
the content being presented or check out different explanations ( I / II / III / etc)

3. Complete workbook sections on a one week delay. To be clear, I mean to say that you won’t
touch the workbook for week one. After week one, you’ll begin completing the workbook
sections one week after you’ve completed the corresponding textbook section.

I want you to do this to take advantage of the forgetting curve and serial-position effect that
is discussed in the appendix section on learning . Waiting a week will force you to struggle a
bit recalling the information which will help you to build stronger memories.

4. Take Saturday and Sunday off. Put the time you would have spent on Genki doing anything
else related to Japanese. Explore YouTube or something. Building a backlist of content to
immerse in now will make your life easier when we start focusing on input.

Page 45
Level III: I swear to the melon-pan sama that there were trees here...

If you’re reading this now, you’ve likely just inished Genki II. Congrats!

I also have a sneaking suspicion that if you were to look at that Genki syllabus again, you’d probably
feel slightly disheartened by how much of it you don’t feel con ident about. Maybe you’re shaky on a
few sentence constructions, or maybe the concept of transitive/intransitive verbs went straight over
your head. That’s okay. I forgot, too. That’s why we have Level III. This is the place where we igure
out where the gaps are and ill them in.

This looks like a lot of stuff, and it will take ~5 months, but it should not be time consuming. It
should only take 10-20 minutes to inish each day’s tasks, so it’s easy to squeeze in somewhere.

1. Read this post on habit triggers by James Clear and Trigger-Action Plans by Less Wrong.

One of my big goals is that, by the time you’ve worked through this book, Japanese will have
come to have a tangible and undeniable place in your everyday life. I think that the easiest
way to do this is to piggy-back Japanese onto unavoidable parts of your schedule. Figure out
a place you can reliably shoehorn Japanese into your day.

2. Pick up Shin Kanzen Master’s N4 Grammar review book. This book is broken into 58 topical
two-page units that you’ll progress through at a pace of one per day. The left page has
grammatical explanations/sample sentences, the right page has practice questions. There is
a review test every 5 units—skip these for now, start working through them once you inish
the book. Again with the forgetting curve stuff.

3. Once you inish, pick up Shin Kanzen Master’s N4 Reading Comprehension book. My
personal opinion is that this is the book all of your studies have been leading up to. This
book will test if you’re actually comfortable enough with the Genki grammar to make sense
of Japanese text—again, do one per day.

4. Once you inish, try taking a JLPT N4 mock test. See how you do. I personally never bothered
with the JLPT, and don’t necessarily expect you to, but hey, milestones.

You’ve now got a pretty solid foundation—enough that you can start working through stuff
independently. Give Input - Level I a shot. If it’s too dif icult, or you’re just a person who likes
structure / doesn’t mind textbooks, come back for Grammar - Level IV .

P.S. - I think that you’ll get the N5 content down just by working through Genki and beginning to
consume content, but if you don’t feel prepared for N4, start with Tankobon’s N5/N4 prep book to
make sure you’ve got all your bases covered and then ease into the SKM N4 books afterwards.

Page 46
Level IV: Golly gee, there are bushes amongst the trees!

Do not begin this section until you’ve spent a bit of time in the i nput section. You might be
surprised what you can pick up by immersion, so spend a bit of time inadvertently loating around
and see what turns up before coming back to this more structured and intentional learning. You can
probably pick up a lot of this stuff for free by doing so, so why work harder than you need to?

I personally stopped almost all structured learning after Genki II and began reading stuff. I began
working through JLPT prep books after reading Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,
my second book by Murakami Haruki, and discovered that I had become familiar with all of the
grammar in Shinkanzen Master’s N3/N2 books and about half of what was in the N1 book just by
reading and looking up stuff as a I went over the course of a few dozen books.

But… If you really like the structure, here are a few textbooks options:

Post Genki II, the more conventional route:

1. An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, popularly dubbed as “Genki III”
2. After Genki III, start working through Tobira: Gateway to Advanced Japanese

The books I personally used after Genki II (curriculum at my Japanese University)

1. J Bridge to Intermediate Japanese
2. Chuukyuu wo Manabou 56
3. Chuukyuu wo Manabou 83 (can’t ind link?)

(Again, I didn’t really follow textbooks after Genki, so I’m not sure what to recommend.
I’ll continue to update this as people PM me their recommendations ).

Do the same as you did with Genki; work through one grammar point per day, be consistent.

Page 47
 Level V: Having emerged from a wall of bushes, I found even more trees

This is like Level III, but for levels N3/N2/N1. A few things:

● Referring back to the “Multiple Passes ” concept from the discussion, I think this type of
stuff is most ef icient for inding and illing in gaps. I worked through the below resources
after encountering them in textbooks/the wild and after I already had an idea of how they
were used. This stage is about consolidating knowledge and comparing similar grammar.
● Referring back to the “forgetting curve ” from Day 0, this is not content you should binge or
cram. You’ll learn most ef iciently if you do a bit, consistently, each day.
● Referring back to “action triggers ” from Level 3, I think it’s easiest to be consistent with
these studies if you tie them into another thing you do each day. I personally treat them as a
warmup; it takes me ~10 minutes per day to do, and I do it irst thing after getting to work.
● It took me about a year t o work through a grammar workbook/reading comprehension
workbook for N3, N2 and N1. I’ve started again, from N5, because I still ind stuff to learn.

So, continuing where you left off with N4:

1. I made a comment detailing workbooks I’ve used from several different brands. If you don’t
already have a series, click through it and pick the one that looks best to you.
2. Start with an N3 grammar workbook
3. Move onto an N3 reading comprehension book upon inishing
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for N2/N1
5. If you feel like you did really poorly, or are running into all sorts of new information, work
through another book for your JLPT level from a different brand before going up a level.

If you plan on using Shin Kanzen Master f or grammar, I’d like to say:

1. I think these books are better used for reference than review. They give a lot of information,
and it’s good information, but it’s also organized by topic. You’ll see several grammar points
that mean the same thing, just with a slightly different nuance. This is excellent for
comparison, but I don’t think it’s a very good irst-resource. Unless you’ve already got a
strong grasp on the grammar points, I don’t think it’s very conducive to reviewing.
2. Because it’s so thorough, I’ve got a special routine that I use speci ically for the SKM
grammar books. You don’t have to follow it if you don’t want to, but please skim through it
so you can see what’s going through my head and why I approach them this way.

I’d like to get an imgur gallery up that includes the covers of books, their table of contents, a sample
practice test and answer key. That being said, all of my books are Mandarin versions, not English ones.
If you happen to have copies of any of the books I mention in t hat comment , please let me know. Then,
these are my two favorite workbooks (N 5/N4 /N
3+ ) but there isn’t an English version.

Page 48
Level VI: You might not believe this, but trees have r oots

At this point, if you aren’t yet sick of grammar, I think it would be bene icial to learn more about
theoretical linguistics and how grammar works in general. This sort of general knowledge can often
help give some sense of meaning to what might otherwise seem like arbitrary rules and distinctions.
If you’re interested in learning languages other than Japanese, this sort of knowledge will also help
you to take what you learn here and apply it to your new language.

For example, consider the following sentence:

葉っぱが落ちている
は
っぱがおちている

Depending on the context, this single sentence may have two meanings:

1. Leaves are falling

2. Leaves are (sitting on the ground)

This has to do with something called verbal aspect (in more detail). You probably know that there
are different parts of speech (ie, nouns and verbs) and you might have heard of some complicated
terminology like modal verbs or verb participles . That’s just scratching the surface, though! There’s
actually a ton of different ways to discuss verbs (and all of the other parts of speech).

In this case, a difference exists because there are two “different” 落ちる’s at play, so to speak.

1. One 落ちる is functioning as a dynamic verb of achievement . In this case, ~ている indicates
that the action is still in progress. Leaves are falling.
2. The other 落ちる is functioning as a static verb. In this case, ~ている indicates that there
has been a change of state (not fallen>fallen) that is persistent.

I recommend you pick a topic you’re interested in and, at a point in time where doing so seems
useful to you, ind a relevant Wikipedia entry. Read it, then start working through the listed
references and Googling around.

Page 49
Vocabulary
You’ve stuck with me for over 50 pages, I’m shocked. Word, man. (terrible pun absolutely intended).

I’ve pushed vocabulary off for another week for two main reasons:

● This is enough time to get through the irst chapter of Genki, so you can now start playing a
little bit with the words you learn. Vocab is more fun when you can use it.
● I believe the factor which will most affect your success in this early stage is how consistently
you stick to your learning schedule, whatever it is. I don’t want to overload you.

Page 50
Vocabulary Homework

This section is going to be a bit funky. On one hand, there’s not a lot to say about vocabulary:

Keep adding pennies to the stack and eventually you’ll have a dollar.
Three dollars or so buys you a freshly baked melon pan. Melon pan is good.

On the other hand, there is a lot to say about communication and how we use all of that vocabulary.
Language isn’t math; learning lots of grammar points and vocab words isn’t enough to sound
natural. As Matt vs Japan says (in that video):

Human language is highly speci ic in entirely unpredictable ways. One aspect of this is that
different languages express the same ideas in entirely different ways. [ie, English speakers
“play” the piano -- Japanese speakers “pluck” the piano]... different languages also regularly
express different ideas in the irst place.

A corollary concept to this is that native speakers tend to express common ideas via arbitrary,
set phrases. There’s no real rhyme or reason to this; they’re just arbitrary set phrases, except
native speakers almost always express these ideas in the same way with the exact same words
in the same order every time. It’s not a creative process, it’s just set in stone.

If your strategy when speaking a foreign language is to essentially think in your native
language and then use grammar rules & vocabulary to translate those thoughts into the target
language -- best case scenario, you’ll be understood but sound a bit weird. Worse case, you
won’t be understood at all.

That in mind, I’ve got two main goals in this section:

● Talk about how you can acquire the Japanese words you’ll need to do… well, anything
● Talk about some of the problems that you’ll run into with this “math” approach
● Talk about why the input section is important: it’s where you igure out what a Japanese
person would say in a given scenario or in response to a given stimulus, rather than just
using Japanese words to express English ideas (that will likely come off as unnatural).

First, please read this article. It is one of the most useful things I’ve read about language learning.

The Power Law Distribution and the Harsh Reality of Language Learning

Page 51
Level I: Intentional Learning & The Construction of a Vocabulary Core
I believe that the best way to build a strong vocabulary is to immerse a lot, particularly by reading
or listening to books. Writing is an intentional and prepared presentation of language that gives
authors all the time they need to use what they feel are exactly the right words in exactly the right
fashion; we just don’t drop words like assiduous or perennial in everyday speech.

As someone who reads above all for pleasure, I also believe that it’s a major headache to force your
way through content that’s above your level, and at this stage of the game, pretty much everything is
above your level. That in mind, we’ll irst learn just enough vocab to make reading become tolerable.

That’s where Anki comes in.

Basic Anki
1. Download Anki and igure out how it works (less detail/more detail)
2. Download the Core2k deck and import it into your Anki. Unfortunately, this deck doesn’t
line up well with RTK; you’ll run into many new kanji. Learn the word now, the kanji later.
(If you like MIA’s approach, buy the N5 Tango book and get MIA’s basic vocab deck instead)
3. Adjust Anki to have the deck give you 11 new cards per day; you’ll inish in 182 days

To get more out of your time on Anki / if you’re interested in pitch accent
4. Download the MIA Japanese addon
5. Following Matt’s instructions, you’ve got a few things to do:
→ Use the active ields feature to inject MIA Japanese’s javascript into the Core 2k deck, or
→ Convert the Core 2k note type to the MIA Japanese note type
(You’ll have to map the ields of the Core 2000 note type to MIA Japanese:
+ Expression > expression | sentence-English > meaning | sentence-audio > audio
+ Everything else, including audio on front, s hould be mapped to nothing
+ I recommend adding two ields to the MIA Japanese note type:
vocab-EN (m ap kanji-furigana to this) a nd vocab-JP (map vocab-english to this).
You’ll need to edit the cards template, adding vocab-jp to the card’s front and
vocab-EN to the card’s back.
→ Mass generate furigana and pitch accent for each card. This will add furigana to all of
The kanji and also color-code each word to show what its pitch accent pattern is.
If you like MIA or Anki, you might also be interested in MIA’s addon morphman
6. I personally like low-key anki, also from MIA
7. If you’re at a higher level, you can use Nayr’s Core 5000 instead of the Core 2000. The
sentences in this deck are slightly longer and use more advanced grammar.

From Matt: Human brains are hardwired for color. If every time you see the word が
くせい (student) it’s
blue, you’ll unconsciously associate it with blueness. Blue means heiban in my system, and if you know that,
then you’ve just memorized this word’s pitch accent. You’ll memorize some accents “for free” over time.

Page 52
Level II: Natural Acquisition & The Construction of Lexical Associations
While there’s a lifetime worth of words and concepts to learn in Japanese, or any language, there is
only a inite amount of language contained within any given piece of Japanese media. The average
adult native speaker of English might know up to 40,000 words or so, but there are less than 6,200
unique words in the irst book of Harry Potter. That’s a pretty massive difference, and good for us.

It means that you are much closer to being able to consume a given piece of content in Japanese
than you are to mastering Japanese. You can give yourself an easier time by doing two things:

● Going out of your way to ind shorter content. Less total words = less unique words.
● Focusing on vanilla/slice-of-life content that doesn’t call for many unique/technical words.

Given how few words you need to consume something like NHK Easy News or Harry Potter
compared to how many words a Japanese person would actually know, I think this makes a good
transition point. I intentionally learn/cram words until I reach a point in which consuming some
sort of content is possible. After that point, I begin focusing on input and learning more organically.

That’s a cool point to reach and, ultimately, is where I’m hoping to take you . Here’s how:

1. The sentences in your Core 2000 cards are where we start. Never mind 6,200 words for
Harry Potter, your irst reading tasks will start from 5 or 6 words in length (Anki sentences).

2. You’ll eventually (quite soon!) be able to move on to actual Japanese. Here’s a few options:
NHK Easy News | Matcha | Watanoc | Satori Reader | LingQ’s Mini Stories | Other NHK

3. When you’re feeling con ident with the above content, start reading for real. Here’s a blog
post where I discuss all the books I read from graded content to Murakami Haruki.

The “right” time to move on will differ from person to person because it depends on:

1. How well you tolerate ambiguity, as not everything will make sense right away
2. How patient you are, as due to this ambiguity, you’ll be Googling lots of stuff

I don’t think there’s really a right or wrong time; everybody is different. I do think that most people
wait longer than necessary to begin immersing, but that’s part of learning how to learn.

You can make your progress more tangible by mining sentences to use with Anki (part II). If you
don’t, you’ll forget most words you look up and thus have to look them up again later. That being
said, you can only look the same word up so many times; eventually, it sticks. I’m happy repeatedly
looking up words because I enjoy reading much, much more than grinding on Anki. You do you.

Page 53
Level III: Cramming & Important but Low-Frequency Vocabulary
While I don’t personally enjoy using Anki, learning a language involves lots of memorization. I
personally chose to take potentially a less ef icient but (for me) more enjoyable approach to vocab: I
read. A lot. In the beginning, reading was less about the story and more about exposing myself to
new vocab and grammar/sentence structures.

That being said, I still make regular use of Anki. There’s some stuff that just must be memorized,
and for that stuff, nothing beats Anki. If you’re interested in how your usage of Anki might change
over time, here’s how I personally use it today:

1. Pitch Accent

I didn’t learn about pitch accent until I was comfortable reading Murakami. I didn’t feel like
the opportunity cost of learning accents was worth it for a long time, so I didn’t. I instead
spent time learning about how it worked, iguring I’d pick it up over time if I understood it.

A couple months ago, I discovered MIA’s addon, MIA Japanese. Personally speaking, it’s been
a game changer. I used a random deck of Japanese sentences, ran them through MIA
Japanese’s addon to color code the words by their accent, and I’m slowly memorizing the
pitches of common words. It’s pretty quick going, as I already know all the words/grammar.

2. Speci ic/technical vocab

I spent two years in Japan during university, and during my second year, I took a psychology
gen-ed that was conducted in Japanese. I used Anki to memorize lots of speci ic vocabulary
words for different parts of the brain; stuff that was important for class but I didn’t feel I
could expect to learn via conversations or reading stuff for fun.

Anki is great for cramming technical vocab that you might need, for whatever reason.

3. Sentences mined from stuff I’m reading

As I mentioned earlier, I make quite a few notes in books while reading. If I stumble into
unknown words, a useful sentence structure or just a beautiful line, it gets tagged with a
number and noted in the margin. I ind that a fair bit of this gets committed to memory over
the course of the book, but if I really want to remember something, it goes into Anki.

In other words, I think that Anki is sort of like an insurance policy. You’d probably be ine without it,
and the stuff that you do forget probably won’t really get in your way… but just to be sure, when it
comes to the things you’re particularly concerned about, there’s Anki.

Page 54
Vocabulary Discussion
The three levels I’ve proposed for this vocabulary section are rooted in the way I feel about a
number of important issues related to language and our memory. I’d like to walk through a number
of them so that it’ll be easier to ind out where we do and don’t agree with each other.

Many of these topics are interrelated, so it might be better to think of these as being section headers
for one cohesive idea (the homework levels I laid out), rather than a random list of topics.

We’ll talk about the following things:

1. Learning vs Acquisition: The “stages” of language acquisition
2. The “Nope” Threshold: How many words you need to learn
3. Beyond Anki: Why even native speakers must take literature classes
4. Circumlocutions: The superpower you get from monolingual dictionaries
5. The Arcane: Memory palaces and “obscure” memorization techniques

Mortimer J. Adler on vocabulary and communication:

If the author uses a word in one meaning, and the reader reads it in another, words have
passed between them, but they have not come to terms. Where there is unresolved ambiguity
in communication, there is no communication, or at best it must be incomplete. (c h10 )

// 5 things a 4x memory champion learned while memorizing 2,000 words in 90 days //

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Learning vs Acquisition: The “stages” of language acquisition
The way that you interact with Japanese, including how you approach vocabulary/grammar/etc, will
change over time. I think that there are, loosely speaking, three stages: intentional learning, organic
acquisition and then ine-tuning. Different knowledge is important at each stage.

The levels I proposed in the homework section were inspired by a video from Steven Kaufman, a
polyglot with decades of experience, in which he discusses three stages of language acquisition, his
response to a presentation by the linguist Stephen Krashen. Here’s what they mean, to me:

1. Stage One, Intentional Learning

A particularly determined learner could jump right into a text, with zero background
knowledge, if they really wanted to. They’d spend signi icantly more time with their noses in
a dictionary or grammar resource than in the text itself, as little to nothing on the page
would make sense to them, but they could do it. It just wouldn’t be a very fun experience.

While anything we consume in the language is just “noise” at this point, as Steve puts it, it is
far from being random noise. I’ve suggested you start with Anki because I believe that
spending some time to intentionally pre-learn the most frequently occuring of these noises
will save you enough dictionary-time to make the “nope” threshold more reachable.

Where the threshold falls, exactly, will differ from person to person. Wherever it is, though:
- Before this point, reading is such a burden that we “nope” out of any sort of immersion
- After this point, while still a burden, reading/immersion will have become tolerable

2. Stage Two, Organic Acquisition

There are countless words that we could need to know, but unless you’ve got the know-how
to parse all of the material you want to consume, it’s dif icult to know when you’ll need
them. That in mind, I believe we should only intentionally learn what we can con idently
expect we’ll need to know, no matter what we consume. Anki helps us to do this.

In other words, Anki is not a silver bullet. Some knowledge, like collocative meaning or
pragmatics, can only be obtained by immersing in the language. Anki can teach you only
what you know you don’t know, but you’ll more often be inhibited by the things that you
don’t know you don’t know, which we’ll discuss in the sections on comprehension + anki.

3. Stage Three, Fine Tuning :

While Anki isn’t perfect, it’s excellent at what it does: helping you to remember the stuff you
make a conscious decision to remember. Some things occur so rarely (particular names or
especially striking lines) that we won’t remember them unless we choose to do so.

See also: Learning vs Acquisition | Stephen Krashen on Language Acquisition | The Role of SRS

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 The “Nope” Threshold: How many words do you need to learn ?
The irst set of 1,000 words offers you over 250x more “coverage” than the 10th set of 1,000 words
does. That in mind, you probably want to approach your irst and tenth set of 1,000 words differently.

You’ve likely heard that 1,000 most frequently occurring words make up ~79% of a given text, or
something like that. While the exact words that irst thousand is comprised of and how far they'll
take you differs a bit from text to text—Net lix subtitles, economic newspaper articles and YA
fantasy books are not made equally—there’s a de inite pattern to be observed here.

It looks something like this:

● The irst 1,000 words yields ~78% coverage of vocabulary in a given text
● The second 1,000 words yields ~86% coverage
● The third 1,000 words yields ~90% coverage
● The fourth 1,000 words yields ~92% coverage
● From 5,000, each additional 1,000 words yields less than 1% additional coverage
● From 10,000, each additional 1,000 words yields mere tenths of percent additional coverage

We get a few coverage points from proper nouns that aren’t on these lists, so we actually only need
~5,000 words to hit 95% coverage. A language like French has 27% lexical similarity with English,
further reducing the amount of words you need to learn. Japanese, unfortunately, has close to none.
In other words, if French learners begin their studies at “square zero”, Japanese learners start at
“square [negative number]”. In other words, it isn’t just you.

Anyhow, on coverage vs comprehension:

● At 80% vocabulary coverage, zero of 66 students could pass a reading comprehension test
● At 90-95% coverage, students begin passing the test, but most still fail.
● A 98% coverage... [seems necessary for dictionary-less comprehension of a iction text]

This is somewhat oversimpli ied, so go ahead and read the actual papers if you’re really interested
in this sort of thing (for good measure), but I’m basically trying to demonstrate four things:

1. Here’s what 80% comprehension feels like. I’m con ident you want more than this.
2. The irst few thousand words offer a hugely disproportionate amount of value, but
3. If you want to consume any sort of real content, you’ll de initely need more than that
4. 95% coverage means 1 in 20 words is unknown. The average length of a sentence in Harry
Potter 1 is 12 words, so you’ll encounter an unknown word every other sentence.

Ultimately, no matter how many words you memorize, you’ll still run into trouble when you begin reading.
That being said, there is a threshold of words at which you’ll be running into little enough trouble as to ind
your immersion tolerable. I refer to this as the “nope” threshold . I believe that we should intentionally learn
vocabulary until this point, and then focus on organic acquisition after reaching it. As we keep immersing,
tolerable will eventually become more and more enjoyable.
 Beyond Anki: Why native speakers must take literature classes

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According to the Brown Corpus, the word “the” accounts for 7% of English text. If you were to delete all
words except “the”, however, you would understand not 7% of the message being conveyed but 0%.
Vocabulary coverage does not equal comprehension, so at some point, you must go beyond Anki.

Does knowing 6,000 most common Japanese words mean understanding Japanese? I don’t think so.

For one, from where did this frequency list come from? The language of an economic newspaper
article, Harry Potter and everyday speech is not the same. In other words, the 2,000 words you
learn might not necessarily be the ones that you need to understand what you're trying to read.
More often than not, you'll ind yourself reading Mad Libs: enough vocab to understand the
structure of what's being discussed, not enough to understand what is b
eing discussed. Again with
the power law distribution, long-tail words are disproportionately valuable for comprehension.

Continuing on, you o nly need to learn 135 words to familiarize yourself with 50% of modern
English text (modern being 1961). That being said, being able to identify 50% of the words used in a
text doesn’t enable you to distil 50% of that text’s meaning. This holds true as we increase our word
counts, too. After all, quipped a Japanese professor, Japanese people can all read, so why in the hell
must Japanese students take Japanese literature classes at university?

His answer, in so many words, is that comprehension is a multi-dimensional thing. We engage with
language on many levels, big and small, and the level of isolated, individual words (ie, anki) is only
one such level. Reading , says this professor, is carefully examining the surface of something (a text),
and from what you see, trying to discern what lies underneath it; to understand what lies at its core.

Let’s take a brief overview of some of these levels, again referencing Van Doren & Adler’s book:

● Basic orthography : Can you connect the correct sounds to the correct kana?
● Individual words : Can you follow a string of phonemes or kana well enough to recognize a
Japanese word as being Japanese? Know its translation? Understand a simple sentence?
● Kanji: Can you recognize a kanji when you see it? Can you associate a kanji with the phonetic
and semantic information tied to it? Do you know what words a kanji is associated with?
● Between words : Words don’t exist in a vacuum, so you can’t really know a word without also
knowing all the words connected to it. You don’t know densha j ust by knowing train (cool
resources: JP / EN); you also need to know that trains run , rather than sliding or rolling .
● Around words : Words exist in vast inter-related families. For example, vehicle + train have a
relationship of hypernym + hyponym; train and plane have a paradigmatic relationship.
● Grammar: G rammar is what tells you how words are related to each other, or in other words,
the sigmatic relationships between words. Like words, there are also relationships between
grammar points: when you hear if , do you not expect to later hear then?
● Sentences : If you understand the words being used in a sentence and the grammar that’s
connecting them, you can think on the level of phrases, clauses and sentences. Can you keep
track of the low of sentences, putting this one in context of the last one?

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 At this point, you’ve established a “surface level understanding” of Japanese; given familiarity with the
words and grammar, you can understand what is being said. That being said, when dealing with
longer texts, you might not understand why it was said.

Up until this point, we’ve been reading at an elementary level : we are merely concerned with what
is sitting on the surface, what the author is literally saying. (see p7; ch2 “the levels of reading”). You
may ind that you get vocab right in Anki, but can’t use it in a real conversation. It’s a spectrum.

After this point we get into analytical reading . It takes a much higher level of understanding to
succinctly explain the function of a paragraph or the point of an entire book than it does to follow a
command or make sense of an isolated sentence.

● Paragraphs: Sentences work together to build stuff. Can you follow their low well enough to
understand the purpose of a given paragraph? Why did the author include it?
● Essays or chapters: P
aragraphs come together to establish the spokes of an argument or to
progress the plot.Why did the editor think this one was so important they didn’t cut it?
● Texts : People don’t write books for no reason. Can you explain, in one sentence, the point of
this book? What was the author most trying to say?

Like words, books don’t exist in isolation, either. We can keep going with this: synoptical reading .

● Authors: What makes a Murakami book a Murakami? What tropes do we ind in his stories?
What do his main characters have in common? We can talk about a lot of stuff.
● Genres: W
hat makes a romance a romance? How does this particular book conform or
subvert the expectations we have of a [genre] of novel?
● Periods: W
hat makes a 1971 horror story like The Exorcist different from an earlier one, like
H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 The Dunwich Horror or the 2014 Bird Box? How are they similar?
● Cultures : Although they both involve scary creatures in a dark house, what separates a US
ilm like Lights Out or The Exorcist from a Japanese one like The Grudge or The Ring?
● Movements: A uthors of the same zeitgeist will share many in luences; how does a modern
novel differ from a postmodern novel?

Anybody with a basic understanding of the language can explain a sentence by using a single
sentence (in our case, that’s what we’re doing in Anki) but not everybody can paraphrase a
paragraph into a sentence. Fewer still can explain the function of a chapter in a sentence, and very
few readers can explain an entire book in a sentence. It’s very easy to read without understanding,
hence even Japanese people need to take Japanese literature classes—and, ultimately, while you’ll
eventually need to move beyond Anki if you want to reach any real level of pro iciency.
Circumlocution: The superpower you get from monolingual dictionaries
Circumlocutions are phrases that circle around a speci ic word without directly using it; de initions in
a dictionary, for example, are circumlocutory. A dictionary uses words you do know to explain words
you don’t know. If you can do the same thing, you gain signi icant freedom in communication.

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A problem that comes with learning vocabulary is that not all words are created equal.

● The word not is an incredibly valuable word: it basically doubles the amount of ideas you
can express. If you know not and cold , you can express the idea of hot , too.
● The word giraffe is not a very valuable word. Whereas the word not is generative and
continues creating value as your vocabulary grows, a giraffe is just a giraffe.
● Many words are sort of useful because they can be used for metaphors. Take the word coffee ,
for example. If you don’t know the word inspiration , you could describe something as being
coffee for my life and the person you’re talking to would get the idea. It gives you energy.

Placing words in these sorts of mental hierarchies is an integral part of deciding which vocabulary
to learn. Ideally, the words you’re learning at any given time are ones that (a) unlock the most
degrees of freedom or (b) solve a concrete problem you’re trying to deal with.

● Another valuable word is want . If you know want and not , you can automatically express
four ideas with any verb you learn. Modal verbs are great to know, too.
● The word penicillin is pretty speci ic, but it’s very important to me, personally. My life
literally depends on my doctor knowing that I am allergic to it.

Unfortunately, it can be dif icult to know how useful a word is before you look it up. Say you come
across the word (海馬)状隆起 in Japanese, for example. If you’ve gotten through the kanji section
already, you’ll see it and think “sea… horse… status quo… humps… rouse…,” t hen lament that you’ve
wasted your time* when you plug it into a dictionary and see that it means hippocampus .

Hippocampus is, unfortunately, not a very useful word. I learned it three years ago when I took a
psychology gen ed in Japan and I haven’t used it since; it’s a giraffe. If you looked this word up on a
Japanese-English dictionary, you’ll have just lost three seconds of your life. You are almost certainly
going to forget this word before you get the opportunity to use it, if you ever do.

The Bene its of a Monolingual Dictionary

That being said, your time wouldn’t have been wasted if you’d used a Japanese-Japanese dictionary
instead. The fact that you’re probably not going to drop 海馬状隆起 in a conversation anytime soon
doesn’t change, but you make up for this loss by getting exposed to a variety of important structures
and vocabulary that you well could use in your next conversation.

See Weblio's de inition of hippocampus:

大脳の古皮質に属する部位で、欲求・本能・自律神経などのはたらきとその制御を行
う。Located in the cerebral paleocortex, [it] facilitates the working and regulation of our
desires, instincts and the autonomic nervous system.

Something like that brings you more value than the one word translation that is hippocampus

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 ● It’s reading practice that’s got a much lower bar for entry than novels or blog articles
● A ten word de inition offers much more clarity than a one word translation. If you translated
the word 制御 from above then you’d see that it translates to control … but what sort of
control? Is it positive or negative? Is it control as in regulate, direct, manage, oversee,
restrain, guide, dominate, rule over, govern, in luence, handle, manipulate, or suppress?
● You get a lot of juicy information about word associations that a translation lacks
● Consuming a lot of de initions helps you to master the structures that Japanese employs to
explain things. You can repurpose them for your own purposes in a conversation.
● By nature, a dictionary explains complicated words with more basic ones. While
hippocampus is probably useless to you, words like desire , such as or [location ] aren’t.
● Less tangibly speaking, the ability to make sense of complicated Japanese by using simpler
Japanese means you’re becoming independent: that’s a cool feeling.

Some reservations

While I think that everybody should strive to make the monolingual transition as soon as possible,
as Matt vs Japan calls it, I don’t think it’s practical to do right away or in all scenarios.

● Some foundational knowledge is necessary. If you don’t know the words located, control,
instinct o
r desire , you’ll also have to look up those words. You can quickly ind yourself
clicking through a dozen words and grammar points if you start too easily.
● Some words (particularly nouns) just don’t lend themselves to de inition. Take the word
pine , for example: any of a genus (Pinus of the family Pinaceae, the pine family) of coniferous
evergreen trees that have slender elongated needles and include some valuable timber trees
and ornamentals. T hat’s a mouthful in English, nevermind my bothering in Japanese.

Steps to transition, even at a low level

1. Look up the translation of your word in question
2. Look up the same word in a monolingual dictionary
3. See if you can make sense of the de inition, knowing what it’s describing
4. If not, look up translations of unknown words in the monolingual de inition
5. If you’re still confused, Google around to igure out the grammar that is confusing you
6. Eventually, start skipping step one. Read the de inition, then check if your guess was right.
7. When you’re comfortable with that, start using a monolingual dictionary for step 4.

Ultimately, circumlocutions are the difference between being silent and saying uhh.. That thing that
hockey players wear on their heads when you don’t know the word helmet. B
ig improvement!

On memorizing stuff
// I need to heavily revamp this. For now, s tart with this video by a 4x memory champion //

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Memorizing anything basically entails linking something you wish to remember to something that’s
irmly rooted in your memory and easily accessible. Several approaches to doing that which are more
creative than a lashcard. While they’re not for everyone, you might as well give them a shot.

A caveat
I want to preface this section with something that’s going to come off as being very contradictory: I
make zero effort to intentionally remember the vast majority of all vocabulary I come across. As the
guy behind Drawabox explains from 17:47-18:50 of his video on drawing lines:

1. There is one particular angle where you can most easily draw excellent lines—for right
handed people, it extends from left to right and away from your body at a 45° angle
2. Many other lines exist: vertical lines and ones that go instead from right to left
3. Ideally, you’d be able to con idently draw great lines from every possible angle, but
4. It’s not worth taking the time to learn to make all of these lines right now:
a. There are bigger ish to fry, especially considering that you could just rotate your
paper. Developing other skills will allow you to progress faster.
b. You will gradually get better at making many different lines over time just by
drawing. It’s a waste of time to grind out those skills right now, out of the context of
a piece of art, because you’ll pick them up for free along the way.

My experience learning languages has been absolutely parallel:

1. For whatever reason, some words stick with zero effort.

2. Tens of thousands of words exist
3. The more words you know off the top of your head, the less time you spend in a dictionary
while immersing and the more precisely you can express yourself in speech/writing
4. It’s not really worth taking the time to memorize all, or even most, of them right now
a. Of all the things that might possibly show up in your next conversation, surgical
operation or buddhist temple probably won’t. But they’re included in the Core 2k.
b. You will gradually memorize a ton of words over time, just by engaging with
Japanese, s o I want you to spend more time in Japanese than in lash cards.

I say the vast majority a nd not all for two reasons:

1. Some words are incredibly useful and could realistically come up in your next conversation.
2. Some words are just cool, beautiful or feel unique to you. The only time I’ve ever used 花吹
雪 (hanafubuki; sakura blossoms luttering in the wind as if they were lakes of snow ) is when
somebody asked me what my favorite word was… but I went out and learned it anyway
because I think it’s beautiful and would be disappointed if I forgot it and never saw it again.

I’d like you to keep this in mind as you work through the Core 2k. As I expanded on in a comment, so
far as I’m concerned, the point of this is not learning the 2,000 most frequently occuring words in

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the Asahi Shimbun. Going back to the above entry Beyond Anki , there are multiple levels in which
you can engage with a Japanese text.

● To understand a single word, you’ve got to connect characters to sounds a concept or

English translation
● To understand a single sentence, you’ve just got to know the words in the sentence and what
sort of grammatical relationships exist between them. There are dif icult sentences, but the
amount of problems you need to overcome are very limited.
● To understand a chapter, you’ve got to keep track of many sentences and how they relate to
one another. We’re no longer dealing with sentences in isolation, we’re dealing with this
sentence on top of those sentences . The same sentence could mean many things, depending
on what precedes it. We’re dealing with much more complex stuff now!

For me, the Core 2k is the simplest reading practice you can obtain with Japanese. Once you’re
comfortable parsing the ive or six word sentences contained in the Core 2k, you can start working
on parsing the longer sentences in resources like Match Easy JP, NHK easy news, Satori Reader or
Tadoku. While reading through content in resources like these you’ll be exposed to all of these
words, and if you don’t know them, you’ll have to look them up. Eventually you’ll get sick of looking
it up and your brain sort of goes alright, alright, I’ll remember the damned thing .

I want you to learn, not to suffer. To that end, I want you to save your energy memorizing the truly
important stuff you need to know now or iguring out the stuff that’s stumping you. No sense
wasting your energy on stuff you’ll naturally acquire for free along the way.

But anyhow, for the stuff you deem it worthy to memorize:

Pictures: we don’t always need a translation

As anyone who has tried using a monolingual dictionary has found out, some types of words lend
themselves to de inition more easily than others.

Red: of a colour at the end of the spectrum next to orange and opposite violet
P
inecone: the conical or rounded woody fruit of a pine tree, with scales which open to release the seeds.

These de initions aren’t incredibly helpful if you don’t already have the technical knowledge
necessary to understand light’s refraction or a big enough vocabulary to know words like conical o r
scale . In contrast, they’re things you’d recognize immediately if you saw them, even if you didn’t
have an English word for them.

A big part of Fluent-Forever’s irst steps involve connecting forweign words to concrete images --
akai to a red background, not the word red . Here’s how Gabriel goes about doing so.

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Memory Palaces: we might as well take advantage of evolution
I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday or which words I underlined in Ka ka on the Shore
an hour and a half ago, but I can close my eyes and walk the halls of my elementary school or a
childhood friend’s house with surprising ease. Humans have a pretty incredible memory for spatial
layout.

People exploit this fact to memorize all sorts of information. In a nutshell, it works like this:

1. Pick your palace—it can be anything spatial. The street layout of your childhood town, your
school building or of ice, your grandma’s house. Just pick some place .
2. Turn the things you’d like to remember into a vivid image. Nelson Dellis, a 4x USA memory
champion, describes this process as “see - link - go”
3. Place your images at various physical points in your “palace”
4. When you close your eyes and “walk” your memory palace, arriving at that physical point
will trigger your memory, bringing up your image and reminding you of the vocab word.

I think this is particularly useful for remembering certain traits about words, like which verbs are
transitive and which are intransitive. Create a symbol for transitivity (say, a swiss army knife) and
one for intransitivity (say, a pink rabbit) and work it into your see-link-go image.

If you’d like to learn more, or give it a shot, check out:

● Fluent in 3 Month’s step-by-step walkthrough
● Nelson Dellis’s book, Remember It!
● Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein

GoldList Method

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Stage Two: Immersion
[Just a placeholder for now]

Page 65
Page 66
Input

Immersing is important; so is thinking about the content you’re immersing in.

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Opening Words
First, congratulations. This is a huge milestone, and personally speaking, it's the reason I study
languages. This is where Japanese becomes part of you, rather than just something you’re studying;
a means to explore your interests and relax, rather than lashcards and textbook problems.

It’s also a very ambiguous stage that’s dif icult to give any tangible advice about, or really even talk
about. As someone who loves reading, I’m personally partial to Stephen Krashen’s Input Hypothesis
(in brief)—you might have encountered terms like comprehensible input or i+1 b efore. Even if not,
you’ve likely seen immersion touted as some sort of silver bullet, but it isn’t quite that simple. Dr.
Krashen’s work has garnered quite a bit of criticism (more layman friendly; auto-downloads .pdf).

While I’m not a linguist and won’t weigh in on these arguments, I think it is important to point out
that nobody is saying that input isn’t important. Here are a few random points, paraphrased:

● Perhaps not all input needs to be comprehensible. Sometimes incomprehensible input is

useful. When we get negative feedback (realizing we don’t understand something), we’re
encouraged to learn. In other words, you’re more likely to ill a hole that you know exists.
● “Input is the only causative factor driving second language acquisition” is a very s trong
statement. Even if input is paramount, there are likely other things that contribute, too.

I think it’s safe to say that you must consume tons of content. In my personal opinion, though:

● I feel more comfortable speaking Russian than Japanese, but I got practically no input in
Russian and I’ve read ~20,000 pages in Japanese. To learn to speak, you must speak .
● I think low-pressure feedback that nudges you in the right direction is important. See this
post that links to 11 journal articles and TL;DR’s six major linguistic theories on immersion.
● I think that study is important, as re ining your knowledge lets you immerse more ef iciently

Anyhow, a few general comments that I think are relevant to many people:

● If you’re comfortable not quite understanding everything and (likely) spending a lot of
time in a dictionary or grammar reference, you can start immersing quite early.
● If not , you can always wait. Learn a bit more irst. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.
● If you’re not sure if you’re ready , ind a few things you’d like to consume and check in
once or twice a week. Eventually they will seem doable. At that point, go for it!
● If you’re nervous , read Tofugu’s article on The First Page Syndrome. Things get easier.
● Quantity eventually becomes quality. Once you ind something you like, do a lot of it.
● It will be slow going at irst, but soon you’ll ind yourself drowning in stuff you’d like to
consume. YouTube keeps recommending videos that suit your tastes, you ind an author or
director whose work you want to explore, you randomly stumble into stuff that looks
interesting. This is a matter of inertia, and you’ve got to get the ball rolling.

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Start Here
Given that Japanese is a skill, it’s not dif icult to point out basic fundamentals and say whatever
you’re aiming to do, you’ll need to know X, Y and Z. Here’s how you can do that . Now that you’ve got
those fundamentals down, however, I can’t con idently say what you (you ) need to work on. What
you do and don’t need from here on out depends heavily on what you plan to do with Japanese.

That in mind, I’ll irst introduce a few rules of thumb you can apply to guide yourself. Next, I’ll
outline what I did in order to provide examples. This is a framework; make it work for you .

Principles—whatever it is that you want to do, I think these things will make your life easier.
1. There are many ways to read a book. Know what you want out of a piece of content before
starting and approach it accordingly. ie, extensive reading vs intensive reading.
2. Each author has their own quirks. It’ll be easier to read 10 books by one author you’ve
gotten familiar with than 10 books by 10 authors, each of whom you must also get to know.
3. Learn to work with Smart Howard and Dumb Howard (~5:30-6:30). We’re both of these
people at different times, and you should understand how to work with each of them.
4. Some work is more taxing than others, and we’re each at our best during a certain part of
the day. Figure out when your most productive time is, then apply the 90-90-1 rule.
5. Something that’s hard now will be easier later; go through it then. For now, focus on
engaging with content that you can make consistent and signi icant progress through.

Reading—whether you start with reading or listening is up to you. I like reading, so I start with it.
1. Mandatory: Work through stage 1, 2 and 3. This content will bene it everyone.
2. Follow your interests; the order of the remaining stages isn’t necessarily ixed.
3. Consider learning about: Overlearning (II, III); Sentence Mining; The Monolingual Transition

Listening—whether you start with reading or listening is up to you. I like reading, so I start with it.
1. Mandatory: Read through the “listening homework” home post where I outline different
listening problems; no matter what you’re consuming, you’ll be dealing with this stuff.
2. Follow your interests; I don’t expect you to work through all the levels. I’ve just generally
organized the content in terms of categories I feel become progressively more dif icult.

Output—Find stuff you struggle to express while conversing, then pay attention for that stuff while immersing.
1. //a few points on how input and output feed into each other
2. //this is “separate” from the dedicated output section coming next.

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Reading Homework
As I’ve learned more about writing, the way I look at reading has changed, too.

During my junior year of university I received a D+ on an essay I wrote. The professor was kind
enough to walk me through the essay, giving me suggestions about how I could have approached it
differently for a better grade. It turned out that biology teachers put values on different things than
literature professors do. I had a similar experience the irst time I wrote a news article, which was
supposed to be lat and objective, did product copywriting, which seemed verbose and soulless to
me, and submitted the irst chapter of a novel I began writing for feedback. Lots of learning curves.

In other words:

Not all writing is the same . Different types of content are put together differently and pursue
different goals. This is really important to understand as a writer, but it’s also important to
understand as a reader. Different sorts of content should be approached differently .

My goal here is to help you pick content suitable for your level and think about how to approach it.

This isn’t a ixed order, it’s just how I did it. I was afraid of length, but not dif iculty, so I worked
through progressively harder short stories until I felt more con ident. You don’t have to do that. You
might skip around, skip an entire level, read 20 books in one level compared to my handful. I think
that stage 1, 2, and 3 are logical for everyone, but beyond that, this is about you and your interests.

If you’re inding it dif icult to be the judge, here are a few rules of thumb to apply:

● If I’m really struggling with a book , I put it down. My experience is that in the time it takes
me to struggle through one book, I can enjoy two or three easier ones… and during that
time, improve enough to read the thing I originally wanted to read.
● If I’m really enjoying an author , I stick with them for a while. I read almost everything by
the author Otsuichi, a YA horror author, even though I found him to be quite easy. Getting
familiar with an author’s style lets you focus on the language issues you struggle with.
● If I’m changing mediums , I expect to have a more dif icult time. Because not all writing is
the same, I know I’ll be dealing with different challenges. Reading manga is not the same as
reading a novel, a newspaper article, threads on a message board, content in a business
email, etc. Each of these formats has their own lingo, structure and learning curve.

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Stage 0: Getting set up
I’m going to be up front with you, and this is not an attempt at empty encouragement: These irst
few steps are some of the hardest ones you will take in Japanese . The obvious fact that you’re
still learning Japanese aside, there’s a lot of infrastructure that you’ve got to get in place:

- Finding a dictionary you like

- Until you get better at kanji, looking up words by drawing them is a real hassle
- Figuring out how to use a Japanese dictionary
- Figuring out how to deal with stuff you can’t ind in a dictionary
- Figuring out what to do when you don’t understand despite knowing all the vocab/grammar
- Finding authors you like, inding stuff that’s near your level… or
- Finding content that’s available in Japanese in the irst place.

While these things aren’t necessarily dif icult , they are very much a hassle and take time.

Then, here are a few other things you might want to check out before getting started:

● u/Shade0000 made a nice post with several resources useful for reading
● u/Kymus made a post aimed at beginning readers with links to some reading clubs
● I personally make brief notes about stuff that I think is important while reading. This helps
me to minimize interruptions while reading and also minimize stuff that I put into Anki.

● Sentence Mining : By now, you know how you feel about Anki. If you like it, you can get more
out of your reading by keeping track of useful sentences that you stumble into.

○ Antimoon: It started with two Polish guys 20+ years ago. See what they have to say.
○ AJATT: Took the concept and ran with it. Khatzumoto on why it’s useful, how to set
up lashcards, where to get sentences and what to focus on learning irst.
○ Fluent Forever: put it on a spectrum where you start with individual sounds, work
through simple noun:image cards and eventually get to sentences. Here’s Gabriel’s
thoughts on Japanese speci ically and here’s a review/overview of how it works.
○ MIA: Expanded on many of these concepts. Here’s a step-by-step guide from them
about how to work it into your routine, plus a few apps they’ve made to streamline
the process of making Anki cards: MIA Dictionary Addon and MIA Japanese addon.

Stage 1: The Core 2k

The vocabulary practice we’ve been doing with the Core 2k doubles as the simplest form of reading
practice we can get: while a book or chapter might be too much for now, anyone can get through a
single sentence. We’ll build a very basic foundation here, then extend into content that gets
gradually longer and gradually more dif icult.

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For the time being, just focus on reading through each sentence. This is reading practice. A lot of the
words will work themselves out even if you don’t make a conscious attempt to memorize them.

● This is about discovery. If you see a new structure, Google around to learn how it works.
● Feel free to take steps to memorize something that you feel is useful and/or cool
● You’ll ind that you consistently get certain words wrong, for whatever reason. For me, it
was 抱く vs 抱える’s pronunciation. Give trouble words a bit more attention: Link and Go.

In my opinion, the most important part of this stage is just getting more comfortable seeing
Japanese so that you feel more con ident when you pick up a page of Japanese text. It can be sort of
daunting to pick up a page of unfamiliar squiggles, but it gets easier over time.

Stage 2: Graded Readers

Eventually you’ll have covered enough fundamental vocab and grammar that reading is a pretty
smooth experience where learning happens organically. For example, I recently stumbled into ひい
ては while listening to an audiobook. Upon Googling it I found that it’s a JLPT grammar point, so I
read a quick explanation of how it works. Now I’ve got a basic idea of what function it serves, and as
I continue to see it come up in content I consume, I’ll continue to re ine my current understanding.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot o

f vocab and grammar to work through, and that can get pretty
overwhelming. For this reason, graded readers are excellent: they’re intentionally written with the
needs and capabilities of a certain level of learner in mind. If you pick up an N3-level graded reader,
you can be con ident that virtually every vocab word and grammar point contained in the book will
have been covered by the N3 level. This ensures that your reading practice is as ef icient as possible,
letting you focus on reinforcing your understanding of the stuff that you’ve just learned about.

- Quick tip: Reverso Contexto is an excellent tool to help parse stuff you don’t understand
- Research on ‘overlearning’ (II) suggests that there is value in continuing to practice even
after you understand how something works. Your brain continues to become more ef icient
at performing a given task, requiring less and less energy to perform it, even after you’ve
reached a point where you feel comfortable with it. In other words, you can bene it from
extensive reading even if you don’t feel that you’re learning something “new”!

Here are several resources you can use to get started with. Work through as many or few as you
need, and once you feel like your feet are under you and you’re ready for a challenge, move onto the
next section. During this stage, you’ll be doing e
xtensive reading (t adoku ).

Free online stuff

● 900+ pages of graded readers—starts from N5, works up through N3/N2-ish stuff
● Choco-Choco—A few simple foreign fairy tales written in Japanese
● Hukumusume—lots of stories aimed at elementary Japanese kids
● LingQ mini stories—60 stories written in progressively more dif icult Japanese

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 ● Matcha—online magazine written in simple Japanese
● Nihongo Tokuhon—a few (homemade?) low-level graded readers
● NHK easy news—news articles that have been re-written in simple Japanese
● Teacher’s Stories—bilingual essays in simple Japanese and English w/ vocab lists
● Wasabi—a few simple Japanese fairy tales written in Japanese
● Watanoc—online magazine with graded articles (I've linked to the N5 section)
● WithNews + TBS News—(more dif icult, but not sure where else to put these)

Apps/books

- 10min readers—graded from "year one" to "year six", topical books that each contain an
article/story that the publishers think a Japanese kid of that age should be able to get
through in 10 minutes
- Japanese io—similar to LingQ/Manabi Reader but free and only available online
- LingQ and Manabi Reader—apps that let you upload your own materials, or see those
prepared by others, which get supplemented by a pop-up dictionary and SRS system.
Manabi Reader is free but requires a subscription for SRS/stats; LingQ is $12.99/mo.
- Minna no Nihongo Graded Readers—One for N5/N4, one for N3
- Satori Reader—Several series (horror, romance, everyday life, textbook dialogue, etc) that
are written by an in-house Japanese author and professionally voice acted. You can click
on each word in the text for a pop up dictionary/grammar explanation. $9/mo; $89/yr..
- White Rabbit—sort of the golden standard for graded readers, but quite expensive. If
you're near a university, check the library out.

Stage 3: Read Real Japanese: E

ssays and F
iction
Re lecting on every resource I’ve ever used in six years of studying Japanese, this is what I think I’d
deem as being the most useful. All hyperbole aside, they’re worth their weight in gold.

Both books follow a similar format:

- Right-hand page is a genuine piece of Japanese content from a famous author. The only
modi ication made is that furigana is included for each word’s irst occurrence.
- Left-hand page is a sentence-by-sentence gloss in English. Just enough information to help
you work out trouble sentences, not enough to make sense without reading the Japanese.
- The back-half of the book is a running grammar-dictionary for each story. Every grammar
point that wouldn’t be covered in Genki I (ish) gets brought up and explained: what it does,
why it’s used here, the nuance it carries over [similar grammar point covered earlier].

In other words, these books are a pair of training wheels. They’ll introduce you to the most
important concepts you’ll need to igure out in order to make sense of Japanese writing. In many
stages, the book simply says: This is [Y grammar point], and it’s the same as [X grammar point]. The
difference is that [X] is used in speech and [Y] is used in writing.

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As a heads up, this is real Japanese. It’s a step-up in dif iculty from the graded-readers you were
working through earlier, and you’ll feel it. If you’re coming from the last level, I expect you’re going
to get stuck here. Unlike in the last section, this is probably going to be intensive reading for you. Go
slowly, make notes of stuff you learn, come back to the grammar explanations from time to time.

You might particularly like one of the authors you like—in that case, read more of them, rather than
the stuff that I’ve listed! I personally really enjoyed the short story from Otsuichi, so I read several of
his books. I’ve included a few in stage 5, 6 and 9.

Stage 4: Manga
As I said in the beginning of this section, each different style of writing comes with its own
conventions. Each one is easier in some ways and more dif icult in other ways.

When I think of Manga, here is the key bene it and the key pain-point that sticks out to me:

- Manga includes pictures, meaning the author can use pictures to set scenes and show the
action rather than relying on words and exposition. This serves to greatly reduce the
grammar/vocab barrier needed to tell a story. For this reason, manga/web comics have a
signi icantly lower barrier of entry for reading than that of novels/essays/etc.
- Manga is mostly dialogue, which can be good and bad. On the one hand, there is a lot of
slang/casual grammar structures/character tropes that you might not be familiar with. On
the other hand, depending on the genre of manga you’re reading, you can be more con ident
that you’ll run into stuff you could actually use in a conversation.

That in mind, here are a few things to get you started (please help me update this list!):

- A Beginner’s Guide to Manga and Types of Manga

- A comment listing several free/partially-free and legal online options
- A spreadsheet with several manga (and other) recs, organized by dif iculty (original)
- Crystal Hunters(reddit link)—if you know 87 words, you can get through this manga
- Matcha Manga—a free manga series discussing common mistakes learners make
- N5/N4 Manga Recommendations
- Pixiv Comics—Amateur? Manga online. Newest/oldest chapters of each manga are free.
- 五等分の花嫁—Recommended by someone who just passed the N3

We’ve of icially left behind the “learner materials” and moved onto “real” Japanese. Understandably,
the dif iculty of a given manga can vary considerably. You should know the difference between
intensive reading and extensive reading (tadoku) by now, so as you approach each new manga, take
a few minutes to skim the language and decide which style of reading to employ.
(I didn’t actually read manga when I began Japanese, but I read quite a few webcomics in Mandarin.
I think that experience was valuable, especially in the visual context it gave me to understand how
certain exclamations ‘feel’. If I could go back in time, I’d read a few manga in Japanese, too)

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Stage 5: Easy Short Stories
Look at you! At this point you’ll start working through pages of pure and genuine Japanese. That might
be a little daunting—or at least, I thought it was. For that reason, I began reading on a Kindle.

A Kindle gives you a boost that will let you begin reading Japanese books before you’d be able to
read a paper one. The ability to just click on a word for a de inition makes learning to read in
Japanese much less of a hassle. Matt vs Japan has a great video on the topic; also see Rikaichan.

I personally would start with these books. They’re very plot heavy (meaning there isn’t a lot of
description or subtlety; it’s all about what’s happening), so you can focus on getting through the stories.

- Zoo 1 and Zoo 2 by Otsuichi

Very short horror stories aimed at a YA audience (so they aren’t that scary). I wasn’t a horror
buff before I got into Japanese, but I really fell in love with the genre: scary is scary, no matter the
dif iculty of the language used. The books are simple, but still enjoyable.
- Kino's Journey (several volumes) by Keiichi Shigusawa (anime)
Tons of little stories following the gender-ambiguous Kino as they travel through foreign
countries with a sentient motorcycle. Kino stays in each country for only three days, and
each time they discover something unique that leads to some philosophical brooding.

Stage 6: Slightly Longer Short Stories

By this point in time you’re hopefully beginning to feel a bit more comfortable in Japanese. While you
might not quite be ready for it, I encourage you to begin thinking about the monolingual transition.
Japanese de initions tend to be clearer than one word English approximants, and it’s also a cool
feeling to make sense of Japanese you don’t know by using Japanese that you do know.

I personally use daijirin, but there are several, including the free online Goo Dictionary. Then, just
because you’re using a J-J dictionary doesn’t mean that you’ve got to use it all the time. Try the
Japanese dictionary, and if it doesn’t make sense, refer to an E-J dictionary. For example:

● Nouns don’t lend themselves well to description (here’s apple f rom Merriam Webster, for
example: the leshy, usually rounded red, yellow, or green edible pome fruit of a usually
cultivated tree (genus Malus) of the rose family. T
his is a mouthful even in English. )
● Sometimes you’ll ind a kind of abstract word with a confusing de inition
● In rare cases, the J-J de inition won’t be all that helpful (ie, the de inition of しつよう in my
dictionary is “in a しつこい way”, which doesn’t help you if you don’t know しつこい!)

These are similar in dif iculty to the stories in the previous section, but more lengthy.

- 失はれる物語 by Otsuichi
I would call these stories more bizarre than scary; if you enjoyed Zoo, de initely check this out.

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 The story of a girl who suddenly begins receiving calls on a pretend-telephone, a boy who can
absorb or transfer the injuries of others and a mysterious talking plant.
- キッチン by Banana Yoshimoto
Banana comments that her writing concerns “the way terrible experiences shape our life”,
and this story involves a girl who moves in with a lorist and his transgender mother upon
the death of the girl’s grandmother. It’s a touching story of sorrow, love and confusion.

Stage 7: Normal short stories

This is another step up in dif iculty, similar to the one you dealt with when we went from graded
readers to short stories . If you’re having trouble with the content, I would personally recommend
giving pre-reading sessions a shot:

- Run your eyes over the lines of the text without trying to understand anything
- Make note of unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar points
- Take some time to look these things up and add them to Anki/etc
- Read each short story after getting familiar with its key vocab/grammar points

Three suggestions for you this time:

- 女のいない男たち by Murakami Haruki

A series of seven unrelated stories all involving men who have either lost an important
woman in their life or didn’t have one in the irst place. Each one is an adventure, but the
irst few pages of story #3 are especially dif icult. Consider reading #3 last.
- 死神の精度 by Kō tarō Isaka
A compilation of short stories following the day-to-day life of a shinigami tasked with the
dead-end job of making sure ethereal spreadsheets line up. In each story he pays a new
person a visit and goes about determining whose time has and hasn’t come yet.
- Short stories and excerpts on Kokokoza
Quite a bit of reading content aimed at Japanese MS/HS students. There is a variety of content
available for many subjects and from many authors; comprehension questions / discussion
questions are often included, too, to help guide your reading.

Stage 8: Meiji-era Short Stories

The stories in this section are all very short, but the language is a signi icant step up from the stories
you’ve read so far. You will struggle and might need to take multiple stabs at these. Having said that,
I would like you to give these books a shot for two reasons:

- In the next section the dif iculty goes way down, but the stories are about 10x longer than
anything I’ve suggested so far, Kitchen aside. I want you to get used to beating your head
against these stories so that the next ones feel like a breeze and you can focus on the length.
- These are some of the most revered authors in Japanese; the story by Natsume Sosheki was
described by a professor of modern Japanese literature at my university as being “one of the
diamonds of Japan’s literature”. They’re really special, and I hope you enjoy them.

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So, anyhow, here are four pieces of genuine literature to take a shot at:

- 待つ by Dazai Osamu
You’ve probably heard of 人間失格 / “No Longer Human”; this is a sort by the same author
that’s only a few pages long. A person is sitting at a train station and waiting for someone…
but who? Dazai’s writing style is special, and this is personally where I fell in love with him.
- 高瀬舟 by Mori Ogai
A police escort is taking a prisoner down the Takase river to Osaka during the Edo period.
He feels unnerved because this prisoner is quite unlike the others; the story climaxes with
the prisoner explaining his crime. The story’s twist is the most shocking one I’ve ever read.
- 羅生門 by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa
Akutagawa is famous for whodunnit style stories, and this short one begins with a
lumberjack taking shelter from the rain under a red gate in 8th century Kyoto. There was a
series of murders, and we hear the sequence of events as recounted by several characters.
- 夢十夜 by Natsume Sō seki
Ten short stories, each one involving ten different dreams that span from the “age of the
gods” to the Meiji era. All of the stories are quite surreal and quite bizarre, each one
beginning with the phrase こんな夢を見た: this is what I saw in my dream.

Stage 9: Short novels

While the language of these books isn’t as dif icult as that of the previous ones, that doesn’t mean
they’re easy reads. Whereas 待つ by Dazai Osamu was four? pages long, the shortest book in this
section is 352. Length adds just as much challenge to a text as dif iculty does, in my opinion.

My favorite series of books growing up was Pendragon; each book is around 400 pages long and I
got through them in a single day. When I read in English, I often feel as if I don’t notice the words on
the page. They disappear, and I see the book playing out as if it were plugged into my occipital lobe.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen with Japanese for a long time. It took me nearly three months to
get through that 352 page book, dragging out the pacing way longer than I was used to. Having to
look up so many words/grammar points, I also struggled to get into the book and enjoy it.

Anyhow, what I want to say is that although these books are easy, they present their own challenges.

- 暗黒童話 by Otsuichi
The book begins with a blind girl being befriended by a talking crow; it pecks out peoples’
eyeballs and presents them to the girl. When she puts them in, she sees glimpses of their life.
Most of the story comes from the PoV of a girl named Nami who lost an eye in a freak
accident, but gets set up with a transplant… and soon starts seeing unsettling things.
- コンビニ人間 by Sayaka Murata
I haven’t actually read this book yet, so I’ll refer you to its wikipedia/goodreads.
This has quite recently been recommended as a irst read due to its simplicity/length.

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 - ペンギン・ハイウェイ by Tomihiko Morimi
I haven’t read this book, either, so I’ll refer you to its wikipedia/goodreads.
Again, this book is another common irst-read by people getting into Japanese books.

Stage 10: Novels w/ Anime

The dif iculty of these books isn’t that much higher than those of the last section, but they are quite
a bit longer. By the end of this section you’ll have gotten through a 1,000 page book in Japanese. You
might want to watch the anime before reading the book to help you connect dots while reading.

- Another by Yukito Ayatsuji (anime)

A student transfers to a small inaka town from Tokyo and quickly inds that something
strange is going on: everyone, including the teachers, seem to be ignoring the existence of
one girl. He begins to befriend her, and shortly afterwards, people begin dying in accidents.
- 新世界より by Yusuke Kishi (anime)
In 2013, a small percentage of humanity gain psychic powers and wreak havoc on the world.
Eventually a group takes power and genetically modi ies psychics so they’re unable to harm
other humans. Toss a subservient group of monster-rats into the mix that are seen as being
less than human and you’ve got an interesting story that gives lots of foot for thought.
- Overlord by Maruyama Kugane (anime)
The servers of a super-realistic VR video game shut down, and a person who was logged
into the game at the time inds himself literally stuck in the game. He goes looking for
answers and to see if there is anyone else—chaos and adventure ensues, 14 novels worth.

Stage 11: Easier-to-read novels

Congrats, you’re at the point where you’re ready to read “real” books in Japanese. I’ll suggest two
easier books to get you started, but all of the books by both authors are very readable, so feel free to
explore the rest of their works if you feel so inclined. You’ll improve a lot along the way.

- ノルウェイの森 by Murakami Haruki

A very straightforward read and one of Japan’s most famous modern author’s most famous
books, Norwegian Wood is a story of love, loss and growing up. While not as surreal as Murami’s
other works, it does include a love triangle (square?), two suicides and a student revolution.
- 重力ピエロ by Kō tarō Isaka
Haru and Izumi are two brothers; one cleans graf iti off the streets and another is a detective(?)
who gets word that the graf iti precludes acts of arson. Getting to the bottom of the mystery is a
violent and emotional roller coaster that makes you think a lot about what “family” means.
- u/Ripace posted 30 books that they read before taking the N2: Part I and Part II

Stage 12: Start Exploring

At this point you have enough of a foundation that you should be able to work through most things
relatively comfortably. It might not necessarily be a walk in the park, but you’ll have reached a point
where you often understand what you see, and if not, have the tools to igure it out (in Japanese).

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From this point on I suggest that you start exploring your interests and reading widely. Explore new
genres, read the wikis of your favorite authors and read the authors that they say in luenced them.
Maybe you look into pop-science novels, economics books or even poetry. There’s a world of stuff.

If you’re feeling lost, here’s a useful post talking about how to ind stuff to read in Japanese.

Just in case you don’t know what you want to read, here’s a few copy/pastes from another post (II)

3652 by Isaka Kotaro

If you chose to read his novels/short stories, you might like peeking into the author’s head via some
of the essays he has published about how he sees the world. This is a selection of diary-like
re lections written over the course of a decade. If you like these, it seems relatively common for JP
authors (I / II).

チーズはどこへ消えた? by Spencer Johnson

This is a translation from English, but it really took off in Japan. It’s a quirky story about two mice
on the perpetual hunt for their cheese, used as a means to put forward a few archetypal
perspectives about how we see the world and what that means for how we approach goals.

夏の花 by Tamiki Hara

To me, one of the most powerful qualities of literature is that it grants us the ability to see the world
from someone else’s perspective as they wish we would see it, free from our own biases. In Japan,
an entire trove of atomic bomb literature exists; as a US citizen, it’s incredibly sobering to read.

夢をかなえるゾウ by Mizuno Keiya

My favorite kind of self help-help book… if you could call it that. It’s kind of a novel. One day a
salaryman failing to live up to his own expectations buys some cheap gimmick. It turns out the
gimmick summons Ganesh, an Indian deity who for whatever reason speaks heavy kansai-ben. The
elephant follows him around giving him everyday suggestions to change his life. It’s great. Really.

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Listening Homework
I’ve learned two particularly important lessons about listening comprehension:

1. Listening is a holistic skill. There are multiple reasons you might not understand something.
2. Skills are interrelated. Getting better at reading also improved my listening comprehension.

I discussed this in depth in a post on listening comprehension, and I don’t want to plagiarize myself,
but the gist of the post is this: practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

I’m sure there are more, but I discuss six reasons you might not understand what you hear:

1. Pronunciation Issues (II): Because you don’t suf iciently understand how Japanese
phonemes can mutate and/or how the sounds of spoken Japanese get mapped to written
Japanese, your ears provide less reliable information than your eyes (reading) do.
2. Knowledge Issues: Even if you had a pair of perfect ears, you still wouldn't understand
everything you heard. You’ve also got to know the word in the irst place, the nearby words
providing context and the grammatical relationship between all those words.
3. Register Issues (II): Japanese sounds “shift” in fairly predictable ways to become more
formal or casual, and until you learn these patterns, you’ll be thrown for a loop when you
hear them. There are also common sound shifts that occur in different accents.
4. Processing Issues: Sometimes the issue isn’t that you don’t understand something, just that
you can’t process it quickly enough or that you can’t retain all of what you heard. If you can
take multiple listens, all of these issues will work themselves out without further aid.
5. Matching Issues: Japanese is a high-context culture (II) and omits several words; this leads
to situations where you understand what’s being said, but you aren’t sure who or what it’s
referring to, causing ambiguity, or you don’t pick up on a key piece of information.
6. Focus Issues: Disappointingly often, I ind that I don’t understand something because I’ve
been spacing off. Experiment with listening at different times/places or while walking. I also
meditate (II / III), and I like it, but I igure you’ve already got your own opinion about it.

Listening comprehension isn’t a multiple choice test where you’re simply right or wrong. Each of
the above issues contributes a bit of blurriness, and if there is too much blurriness, you won’t be
able to make out what you’re hearing.

I personally believe that quantity eventually becomes quality, that a lot of issues will work
themselves out with enough time spent listening to stuff, but that’s a longer term solution. If you
want to do something beyond simply waiting patiently, diagnose the reason that you don’t
understand whatever it is you’re listening to and respond accordingly.

No amount of pronunciation training will help if the real issue is that you don’t know what key
vocabulary words mean, or that you’re spacing out for a few seconds here and there.

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Stage 0: Reading
As odd as it might sound, I feel that reading more was just as important to developing my listening
comprehension as actually conversing and listening to content was.

- Vocabulary : The most obvious one, a bigger vocabulary helps us to make sense of stuff.
When we don’t understand something we tend to go huh? and in the half-second it takes to
do that, we also miss the next 3 words that we would have understood if we hadn’t blanked.
- Associative meaning : I also discussed this in the vocabulary section, but there is much
more information associated with any word than merely its translation. As you read more
you’ll start picking up on associative meanings that will help you make inferences and
connect the dots even when you don’t quite understand everything.
- Sentence structure : Just like words, grammar points do not exist in isolation. Certain
structures tend to go with other structures (ie, if I say “if I could have,” are you surprised to
then see “I would have .” ?) With practice, you’ll get a better idea of what structures might
come up later in a sentence based on what you hear in the beginning of it. This helps to
automate things a bit, letting you direct more focus to whatever you’re struggling with.
- Overlearning : Not only does your knowledge increase as you consume more content, your
brain literally gets more ef icient at performing that task/processing that content.

I can’t say that it’s a requirement—I’ve only read a single book in Russian, but I feel comfortable
conversing in Russian and enjoy watching TV shows/YouTube videos or listening to podcasts all the
same. The difference is that I spent a couple thousand hours conversing in Russian to reach that
point, a number I’m very far from in Japanese.

I guess I mostly just want to underscore the value of reading, and I also think that it’s easier to
diagnose the root of your misunderstanding (and thus ix it) while reading than listening.

Stage 1: The Core 2k

I won’t repeat myself here because what I have to say is basically the same as in the reading section.

The sentences in the core 2k are isolated (meaning you don’t have to keep track of or process any
prior information to understand them, as you would with a novel or TV show), contain only basic
grammar and the most common vocabulary words, on top of well articulated and clear audio.

From time to time, close your eyes while you do Anki and see if you can understand via audio alone.

Stage 2: Random listening and discovery

Each level of pro iciency comes with its own boons and hurdles, and a particularly annoying hurdle
of the beginning stage is that there isn’t all that much you can understand. I personally address this
simply by adjusting my expectations and the value I’m expecting to get out of a piece of content:

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 - Discovery, not comprehension : I know that I’m not going to be able to follow whatever it
is I’m watching without subtitles. Trying to do so leads to frustration. Instead, I choose to
adopt a discovery mindset: I pay attention for useful phrases in the English subtitles and
then make a point to listen out for that in the audio. This is a more positive experience.

I’m de initely not going to understand the movie, but I can pick out conversational
connectors (II) like to tell the truth or that being said that will be useful to me right now.

- Mimicking Pronunciation : The fact that you don’t really understand anything puts you in a
sort of unique sandbox. Explore it. Review some of the ideas we talked about in the
pronunciation/prosody section and just listen for stuff. A big part of our foreign accent is
applying patterns from our native language onto Japanese when we shouldn’t be doing so…
so this is an opportunity for you to get up front and personal with your preheld notions.

Maybe you pay special attention to how someone’s voice changes when they get angry, or
perhaps you listen out for K sounds. Are they similar to English? Does something sound off?

- The 50% Rule: Less important than that you don’t understand right now is that you will
understand someday. The issue is that it’s dif icult to know when, exactly, without regularly
testing yourself. Just checking in with content from time to time ensures that you don’t end
up waiting longer than you actually need to in order to begin your immersion.

So, when you feel like it, just explore. Focus on the cool little tidbits you can explore because they
add up, and celebrate the stuff that you do understand here and there.

Most importantly, keep track of the stuff that you like. One of the biggest advantages you can give
your future intermediate self is a treasure trove of content that you’re excited to consume.

Stage 3: Learning about Japanese… in Japanese

You can arti icially limit the amount of words you need to know by focusing on content that’s within
a very speci ic area. (I’ll update this list periodically, but please leave suggestions!)

- Nihongo no Mori
Japanese grammar points get introduced in simple Japanese, with lots of
terribly/wonderfully scripted actions to help drive the grammar’s meaning and usage home.
Particularly great for someone who knows a bit of Japanese but is struggling to break into
audio Japanese content. (However, the playlist I’ve linked to assumes you know nothing).

- Benjiro’s Beginner Japanese

In each episode Benjiro skypes with someone in Japanese and, on the right side of the
screen, he writes down key phrases/vocab you might want to learn.

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 - Learn Japanese Pod
Several hosts discuss a variety of scenarios in a “no textbooks allowed” approach. After
talking in Japanese they break down key sentence structures and present key vocab.

- Learn Japanese with Manga

Naoto creates a lot of cool content, but I especially like this one that I linked to. He plays
through video games, and on the left side of the screen he has taken the time to organize a
running grammar/vocab dictionary of the games dialogue so you can learn while watching
him play.

- Japanese Immersion with Asami

A pretty cool example of the natural method in action. In each episode Asami brings a
simple story (with pictures) and then builds a story with the student by asking a series of
simple questions that build on each other.

- Moshimo Yusuke
A guy walks around Japan aiming to show off what Japanese people see in their everyday
life. There aren’t a ton of uploaded videos, but his content is quite long and always has
bilingual subtitles available.

- Sambon Juku
Aimed at low-intermediate learners, Sambon Juku creates a lot of cool videos discussing
commonly misused Japanese and/or small expressions you can work into your own speech.
He tends to discuss a variety of things in each video, has very clear pronunciation and most
of his videos feature simultaneous E/J subs.

- Seemile Korean | Lingua Club Spanish | Kensuke Uchida Russian

There’s a wide variety of content in Japanese teaching the basics of other languages. As only
basic grammar/vocab is being taught, you can probably follow quite a bit of it, especially if
you know some of the other language! Search for[Japanese name of language] + 基本 or 101.

- Quite a few more suggestions in this thread

Stage 4: Slices of Life, Podcasts and Let’s Plays

Slice of Life—presentations of everyday life—is a surprisingly popular genre in Japanese. It’s
literally just a collection of scenes ( “slices” ) taken from everyday life. This quality makes content of
this genre very accessible compared to other types of content.

- Shirokuma Cafe
An anime about a lazy polar bear who, facing the ire of his mother, goes out in search of a
part time job. The anime is chock full of dry humor and centers around the day-to-day
adventures of him and the other animals that frequent the cafe. It’s not for everyone… but

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 it’s genuine Japanese, and I found it accessible just after inishing Genki II.

- Animal Crossing Let’s Plays

As the title suggests, a girl talks while playing Animal Crossing. She does a pretty good job of
narrating what she is doing, so this is especially good for covering everyday objects/vocab.

- Hikakin Plays Minecraft

Hikakin speaks quite quickly and there aren’t subtitles, but everything he says follows what
he’s doing in game, so it’s not too bad to follow. There are hundreds of episodes. (I’ve chosen
not to list them because I think they’re more dif icult, but more gaming channels here)

- Let’s Learn Japanese from Smalltalk

Two Japanese girls studying abroad in the UK have conversations about their experience
and contrast life there with the UK. They’ve got a good grasp of what words are dif icult and
either explain them or translate them. Very accessible, yet engaging, podcast.

- Nihongo con Teppei

I haven’t personally listened to this… but a lot of people really like and recommend it. Aimed
at beginners, in each episode he talks about a speci ic topic (from space to chopsticks).

- Lots of threads on podcasts, particularly in this thread

Stage 5: Conversations
I’ll discuss this in more detail in the following section. Before we get there, though, I’d like to
comment that I like to think of conversations as “interactive input” rather than “output”.

- During conversations you get the opportunity to get used to a variety of styles of Japanese
speech and voice types with a safety net: if you don’t understand something, you can ask!
Each conversation is a team-effort in which you work together to communicate about a
given topic, so the dif iculty level of a conversation will adjust to your level.

- A major bonus of conversations is that they very naturally point out the stuff you don’t
know, can’t express as comfortably as you’d like to, or maybe that you know but had sort of
forgotten about. Once you ind something you struggle with, you thus are primed to notice
that thing while consuming content. Structures that you could have used to express the idea
you failed to express suddenly stick out, enabling you to get a bit more out of your input.

Stage 6: Vlogs and YouTube Speakers

As I suggested earlier and in the last section, you can help make up for your current lack of Japanese
by taking steps to ensure that you’re engaging with a restricted amount of Japanese. There is much
less unique Japanese in a given video than in Japanese as a whole language.

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That in mind, you can make things much easier on yourself by following a single person extensively,
rather than a wide variety of content. In time you’ll get used to the quirks of that person’s speech
and get comfortable with their accent/pace, enabling you to focus less on parsing the speech and
more on understanding what’s actually being said. Going from “40 year old of ice salary man” to “21
year old college girl” is a major adjustment; it’s easier to stay within one persona, at least for now.
I’m going to do my best to provide a wide variety of igures. Pick one and keep up with them.

- Osha Taigu
A Buddhist monk who takes viewer questions / struggles and offers his perspective on
them, covering everything from serious topics like happiness and death to lighter ones like
lighter ones such making friends or dealing with motivation struggles. He speaks very
clearly and quite slowly, and several videos have subtitles. The video I’ve linked to is a
practical guide to everyday happiness and literally changed my life.

- Aoi’s Channel
Aoi posts videos about fashion, makeup and travel. Her videos are shot from the shoulders
up so that it looks like you're skyping with her when in full-screen (but mostly shows off her
makeup). She is a dynamic speaker and there are no subtitles, but most of the time she is
discussing what she’s doing, so you can follow along even without catching everything.

- Bell’s Bungaku
Bell is a very friendly vlogger who creates videos aimed at people who like to read. Most of
her videos are re lections/reviews on stuff she reads or book recommendations, but there’s
also a bit of variety/travel content thrown in as well. She speaks very clearly and (I believe)
all of her videos have Japanese subtitles.

- DN-Utube
A workout progress / lifestyle blog. Though Yosshi’s more recent videos are more traditional
and re ined, his earlier videos are largely composites of his daily life: working out, walking
around Tokyo and partying. He speaks in a pretty rough/masculine way in some older
videos, but his recent ones are much more neutral/professional sounding.

- Kazu
The opposite of Renehiko, Kazu is a Japanese guy documenting his experience living and
working in Shanghai. His videos are very active and feature moving shots that he narrates
over. This is the most pronounced “lifestyle” blog of everything I’ve listed—you’re literally
tagging along for his daily life—but the subtitles are in Mandarin and his speech might be a
bit hard to understand, though as he’s narrating, you can probably follow along anyway.

- Renehiko
A german dude living in Japan who (used to) post vlog videos discussing his everyday life in
Japan as a foreigner. He’s not a native speaker, there are no subtitles and he speaks quite
quickly, but I think that his content is especially relevant for foreigners thinking about living

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 abroad or considering staying in Japan longer term.

- Russian Sato
Part cooking, part food and part discussion, these videos are about a small girl who
consumes large amounts of food (mukbang). She isn’t speaking for the entirety of the video,
but most (all?) of her content has subtitles and you’ll learn a ton about food. Plus get hungry.

- Tenjou Inue
A Japanese guy living (studying) in the US who posts slightly longer form video
essays/discussions/re lections on more serious topics: racism, social differences, cultural
differences, stuff like that. There are no subtitles but his speech is quite clear.

- Yoshihito Kamogashira
From McDonald’s Manger to Motivational Speaker, Yoshihito is a very energetic speaker who
travels around Japan talking about happiness, motivation, business and generally how to
interact with people. Click-baity titles and not the clearest speaker, but he is very
enthusiastic and likeable.

- Yukiniru
A girl who posts a pretty wide variety of content that sometimes consists of her travels,
sometimes consists of her personal life and sometimes consists of her dates/going out with
friends. Her speech isn’t as clear as Bell’s and there typically aren’t subtitles, but her videos
cover a much wider variety of content and give you more chances to get to know her.

- Yusuke Okawa
A designer/photographer who produces very professionally looking blog videos where he
talks about his life, photography and also gives users pointers. I think that his speech is
much more natural than some of the other guys (he’s not a motivational speaker or a manly
man), but there are no subtitles and a lot of the emphasis is on the cinematography.

Stage 7: Anime and Educational Content

I’m putting this here because, generally speaking, I ind anime to be easier to follow than dramas. It
could go anywhere—there are some very easy to understand anime (like Shirokuma Cafe above)
and then there is also stuff that I can still hardly follow, even with subtitles (like Gintama). I don’t
personally watch much anime, but there are tons of recommendation threads, so Google around.

As for “educational” channels that I will recommend, I’ve put them here because they cover slightly
denser content than the above vlogs and I think are nice preparation for some of the more complex
language you’ll hear in audiobooks, discussions and dramas.

- Abataro
A guy reads non- iction books and talks about their key points. Tends to focus on
business/tech. His speech is relatively clear, but he covers complex content and there is very

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 little in the way of presentation/visuals, so you really have to listen.

- Brightside Japan
Kind of a pop-science channel; lots of videos about a variety of topics

- Gakushiki Saron
A guy reads non- iction books and makes presentations about their key points. Tends to
focus on self-improvement, learning and communication; recently he has been branching
out into non-book content. Speaks quickly but notes are on screen.

- Nakata “University”
An enthusiastic dude in a suit and serious whiteboard organizational skills presents lectures
on a wide variety of content, covering everything from philosophy to physics to history. He
speaks quickly and the content is dif icult, but he also regularly asks questions to see if
you’re following and follows the notes he has written on the whiteboard very well.

- Karawaka Rabo
A slightly more serious but lower-budget science channel than Brightside Japan.

- Saratame San
A guy reads non- iction books and makes presentations about their key points. Tends to
focus on self-improvement, pop-psych and history books. The videos are “speed drawn”, so
while their aren’t subtitles, you don’t have to rely completely on your ears.

Stage 8: Dramas and Comedy

I haven’t watched a ton of dramas so I’ll only list a few, but if you’re struggling to ind stuff you like,
I’d recommend following speci ic actors. Find one thing you like, watch the rest of their stuff.
Dialogue in dramas tends to be more dif icult than in animes but it’s more realistic, and you can use
it to sample the Japanese in different environments: a construction lot vs of ice vs high school, etc.

- DELE
In a sort of morbid insurance program, people sign up with a company who offers to ensure
that their digital footprint and communications will be totally erased upon their death. The
drama follows the ‘new guy’ who is tasked with verifying the death of clients and taking
steps to erase their data… but just happens to often get personally involved and take steps
to try to do what he feels is the right thing, even if it’s against company policy.

- Hana Kimi
A girl goes undercover and abroad to transfer to an all-boys highschool in a different
country, all in order to get closer to her idol, a track star at the new school. There’s tons of
ridiculous trouble that occurs, but it’s quite touching at the same time, concerning a bunch
of kids learning to deal with life, their situation and people different from them.

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 - Gomen ne, seishun!
A Buddhist boy’s high school and a Catholic Girl’s high school are facing a merger. The
drama follows one “test class” who gets merged early and tasked with working together to
throw the school’s culture festival… plus some romance and an interwoven backstory where
we ind that something that happened in the male teacher’s high school days is related to
the current situation. It’s over the top but I really enjoyed it.

- Mr. Hiraagi’s Homeroom

Students get called to their homeroom one day, on the top loor and corner of the school,
and the teacher announces that he is taking them hostage. He has rigged the school with
bombs and threatens to kill students at regular intervals unless his demands are met.
There’s a huge twist that I think is predictable if you’re paying attention, but it’s fun.

- Shinigami Kun
The story follows a shinigami tasked with balancing the ethereal spreadsheets. In each
episode he appears to a new person and tells them that they’ll die in three days; some
believe him, some don’t. It was fascinating watching the shinigami trying to grapple with the
value of life and how different people approach their imminent death.

I’m personally a huge fan of Konte/Manzai, a very Japanese style of situational humor that features
two people, one more serious and one kind of ridiculous, often in a different role or position that
skews their outlook on the situation and leads to a variety of humorous miscommunications. As
there are so many different skits, I’ll just link to a particular one that I enjoy.

- Baikingu
A guy walks into a ramen shop and causes lots of problems.

- Tokyo 03
A friend inally explodes after an “accumulation” of small annoyances over time

- Anjasshu
One guy thinks he’s walking into an interview; the boss thinks he’s dealing with a shoplifter

Stage 9: Audiobooks and Native Podcasts

Audiobook.jp has a limited (but quickly growing) amount of audiobooks available, and unlike
Amazon/Audible, they can be purchased without a Japanese credit card/billing address.

I’ll leave you to your own devices, but if you haven’t listened to an audiobook before, I recommend
starting with a few easier reads (even if you’re otherwise comfortable reading).

- 世界から猫が消えたなら by Genki Kawamura

A man dying of terminal cancer is approached by the devil with a deal: he’s gotten
permission from God to extend this man’s life by one day per each thing he removes from

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 the world. The touching story details the man’s perspective on how the world changes with
each thing removed, and how he deals with the fact that he’ s dying.

- 君の膵臓をたべたい by Sumino Yoru

(Currently listening to this book, but it’s a pretty easy listen). A high school boy befriends a
classmate only to ind out she is dying due to issues with her pancreas. The story begins
with her death, then involves him re lecting on the progression of their friendship and her
outlook on dying. If you like this author, the site has several of her books.

Stage 10: Multi-Person Discussions

While conversations are pretty straightforward because the people you’re talking to will adjust
their level to suit you, and vlogs aren’t too hard to follow because one person is talking without
being interrupted, even many advanced learners struggle when they ind themselves in a situation
where they’re stuck in the midst of a discussion with many native speakers at once.

- Democracy Times
Not-quite-as-long-form (30-45m) videos discussing complex and pressing issues, but
typically is a conversation between two people. If you’re struggling with Sakura TV, try this
channel irst.

- Sakura TV
Long-form (often multi-hour) discussions on serious issues facing the world and Japan
featuring a few regular hosts and some invited experts. Complex topics, a variety of speech
styles, no subtitles. You’ve just got to follow the discussion as it bounces around.

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Output

WIP. Will hopefully inish in May, 2020 June, 2020 July 2020

Comprehensive guide to making language partners

The problem with language partners (literally do anything else)

On learning to think in Japanese / not translate from English (include this?)

- English as a “supervisor” -- we don’t need to think about konnichiwa , but when we stumble
into something we’re not comfortable with, English steps in and we try to igure it out. To
start with, stick with simple manners of speech that you’re more comfortable with.
- If you can output directly from Japanese, it means that the Japanese word or phrase holds
enough inherent meaning to you as to be nearly tangible. Whenever you see a desk, it
proudly stands up, puffs out its chest and proclaims that it is a tsukue . You won’t have that
kind of connection just because you made a lashcard that says desk:tsukue. Continue
getting input, give the words/language a change to sink in, and it’ll come eventually.
- English isn’t the world, it’s sort of like a thin veil that’s been sitting on top of the world for so
long that we’ve forgotten about it. Or maybe it’s better to say that our inner world is an
ocean, and English is a river leading from that ocean. Learn to think about the ideas you
want to express rather than the words you’d use to express that idea; draw from the ocean,
not the river.
- Unfortunately, we don’t perceive objectively. We selectively ignore many things, so
when we irst begin, it can be dif icult to understand what exactly we’re trying to say.
Here are a few examples:
- Take a piece of paper and hold it in front of your mouth. Say the word pit
aloud -- the paper will billow up a bit. Now say the word spit . It should billow
much less, if at all. Why? The P in spit and pit is not the same; spit has an
unapirated P, pit has an aspirated one. Most English speakers don’t
recognize they’re different sounds because we don’t distinguish them, but
for a Korean speaker, these sounds are as different as B and P.
- Just as with sounds, some languages pile a lot of different meanings onto a
single structure. Take is ~ing - - the meaning of this structure changes
depending on what type of verb we’re dealing with.
- He is falling (he only falls once, and we’re observing him in the
process of falling)
- He is blinking (he blinks several times in quick succession)
- He is wearing clothes (he has put clothes on and remains in the state
of having clothes on)
- Perhaps you’re more smarter than I am; the point I want to make is simply that we
probably aren’t aware of what all we’re actually communicating when we say
something in English. Unfortunately, to speak Japanese, it’s necessary to understand

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 what we’re trying to say and to choose the corresponding grammar structures. You’ll
get better as you go, but again, this takes time.

Section: Minding the Gaps Between Learning, Correct and Perfect

→ A lot of learners focus on grinding: if I learn 3,000 kanji, I can inally read! If I learn these
200 JLPT grammar points, I’ll be luent! Etc
→ Pro iciency doesn’t work like that. The gap between learning and producing generally
correct and coherent language is big, but the gap between coherent language a nd
admirable/excellent language is incomparably bigger
→ I’m a native English speaker. My job is writing. I work for a large company and create
global-facing news articles/press releases. Everything I write gets reviewed and revised by
at least two people. The fact that my writing is intelligible, mostly natural and has few if any
outright errors doesn’t mean that it is engaging, concise or effective at doing the job I was
trying to do.
→ So, even though my writing is “native level” and coherent, it isn’t necessarily “good” by
native-speaking standards. Look at how hard I got critiqued in draft 1 and draft 2 of the irst
chapter of a novel I’m writing. You don’t even have to read, just skim and look for highlights
and comments. Practically none of that is talking about grammar; it’s talking about voice,
making edits for ease-of-reading, avoiding tropes, etc. All of that stuff is correct, native
English … but it’s bad English writing
→ There’s a huge gap between myself and “good” authors like Stephen King or JK Rowling…
but even though those are huge names, they aren’t necessarily good writers . Don’t get me
wrong, I couldn’t write something like that, but what carries them isn’t the physical
writing/prose itself. JK Rowling is a master world builder and Stephen King has an uncanny
grasp on the human psyche that lets him build characters we can sympathize with.
→ There’s a similarly huge gap between the physical writing that JK Rowling, a good writer,
creates… and that of a lyricist, someone known for their physical writing. Just skim the most
quoted lines (via kindle/GoodReads) of the Harry Potter series and The Great Gatsby, plus
any random sentence from my own drafts linked above.

Every single quote from Gatsby here is like a line of poetry (and the whole damn book reads
that way, it’s beautiful). The lines from HP are consistently passable, although they aren’t
particularly memorable. More than half the comments on my own iction writing are about
how phrasing it this way is unwieldy because so and so… (ie, not-passable writing). Writing is
my damned job, and I still stumble all over the page. You couldn’t call my writing good , but
it’s leagues better than something a learner will be writing.

→ My point is that I think it’s a waste of time to fret about crossing all your T’s and dotting
all your I’s because there is a huge gap between “native” and “good”. You’re not getting
“perfect” inside of Anki, you’re getting the minimum knowledge necessary to hold things
together. So since it’s already far from perfect, I think you should just run with what you do
have and learn how to make it more serviceable as you go.

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Focus on outcomes , not output .

As an initial milestone, having your irst conversation is important.

For your irst few conversations, the most important thing you can do is just become comfortable
hearing yourself speaking the language and navigating the conversation.
Eventually (likely sooner, rather than later) you’ll reach a point where it’s just not a big deal to sit
down and chat for 30 minutes or an hour. As soon as you reach this point, it’s important to start
placing higher standards on your output. What are you getting f rom it? If lost, start here:

● Intentionally go over your head; discuss something complex that you can’t do comfortably.
Work it over with your tutor, repeat till you’re comfortable.
● Make the primary goal of your conversations to take something away. Go in with a speci ic
idea you aren’t sure how to express in Japanese (if you don’t have one, bring up a random
news article and scan till you ind a dif icult sentence). Ask your teacher if they could
paraphrase the last few things you’ve said because you want to see how they’d express
those ideas -- compare what you said to what they said.
● Ask your teacher about speci ic situations. Do Japanese people say bless you a fter someone
sneezes? What do you say when you want the salt, but it’s at the other end of the table?
When the person walking in front of you drops something? When you’re seeing something
that you can’t believe you’re seeing? Etc. There are tons of “go to” phrases that almost
always are used in a certain situation; you can e xpress a given idea in other words, it’s just
that Japanese people tend not to. Start iguring these situations out.

Input > scripts/shadowing > output

My opinion on the needs of different leveled students & getting the most out of iTalki

Something has to give / making time in a full life (maybe should go in intro)?
Knowledge vs Ability

My experience
Section on passive vs active memory -- why you can read books but not have a conversation?

FluentForever actually has quite a nice intro to iTalki -- I think his explanation of how to form
circumlocations (in the advanced section) is especially nice

It’s okay to be passionate about language

Talk about paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships here (video)

What 80% comprehension feels like

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Vocab retention

The Power Law Distribution (&& Zipf's Law?)

→ Also, this eventually limit the bene it you get from conversation? Given that the last (~20k
words) only yield (??%) extra comprehension, native speakers can vastly reduce the complexity of
their speech without it necessarily coming off as simple. Speaking with 100% of their vocabulary vs
40% of their vocabulary is a difference of 9X% comprehension to 99.X% comprehension… not really
balanced.

TL;DR -- how many words do you need? Good question. Hard answer.
- Surprisingly few words to have good conversations
- Here’s special relativity in less than 750 words, according to planetcalc
- FloFlo, interesting stats on how many words you need to read a variety of books /
comparison of dif iculty level of books by different publishers

Note: I think that looking at bilingual texts ( lash cards or subtitles) is important, too. When I began
translating I was shocked to ind that it wasn’t easy rendering Japanese texts into English even
though I knew exactly what was being said in Japanese. I could talk abou what was meant, why
certain grammar points were used over others, and explain the entire situation… but laying down a
concrete English sentence was surprisingly dif icult.

You’ll likely ind the same thing, at some point in the future. Just because you can understand what
something means in Japanese, and explain it in Japanese, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll know an
equivalent English phrase.

I think that these “equivalents” are important, especially to getting you started. So in the beginning
you see an English card that says something like to tell the truth or I guess…. A
nd think, hey! That
looks useful. Then you double check how it works in Japanese, and bam! You’ve illed in a small hole.
You’ll probably ind that the usage scenarios don’t 100% overlap, but it’ll get you started. A lot of
language is idiomatic, even if it doesn’t overtly seem so (what does the sum of the words get along
with mean?) -- but if you’re concerned about function , you can skip the bits about mincing words
and move onto how a given idea would actually be expressed.

So you aren’t concerned with how to literally say I’m surprised to say… you’re just concerned with
how Japanese people preface another statement to indicate that they’re surprised. And then when
that situation comes up, you drop in your functional statement.

Each level has 1,050 - 1,120 words

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Creation and “Mastery”

Voices in Japanese Studies Podcast: Interviews with people who pursued careers in Japanese
Studies

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Interviews
Before we get into the conversations, I’d like to brie ly explain how I went into these interviews and
then quote a paragraph from a book on writing to elaborate on why I wanted to do it like this.

Simply put, I had two goals going into every one of these conversations:

● Be able to present something concrete and useful to learners; replicable approaches and
tangible insights that might not otherwise be apparent to a beginner.
● In some small way, give each creator a platform in which they can share with learners a bit
of the sense of wonder they ind in their areas of specialization.

That in mind, I’ve intentionally strayed away from pointed and/or negative questions. My goal here
is to gather insights that can help you , and I believe that each creator here has something to offer.

As Ronald D. Tobias says in 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them :

If you use your characters to say what you want them to say, you’re writing propaganda.
If your characters say what they want to say, you’re writing iction.

I’m not interested in serving language learning propaganda to you. There’s plenty of that out there.

How, then, do you avoid writing propaganda? First start with your attitude. If you have a score
to settle or a point to make, or if you’re intent on making the world see things your way, go
write an essay. I f you’re interested in telling a story , a story that grabs us and fascinates us,
a story that captures the paradoxes of living in this upside-down world, write iction …

You can always tell propaganda because the writer has a cause. The writer is on a soapbox
lecturing, telling us who is good and who is bad and what is right and what is wrong. Lord
knows we get lectured to enough in the real world; w e don’t read or go to the movies so
someone else can lecture to us some more.

Isaac Bashevis Singer claimed characters had their own lives and their own logic, and that the
writer had to act accordingly. You manipulate characters in the sense that you make them
conform to the basic requirements of your plot. Y ou don’t let them run roughshod over you. In
a sense, y ou build a corral for your characters to run around in. The fence keeps them
con ined to the limitations of the plot . But w here they run inside the corral is a function of
each character’s freedom to be what or who he wants within the con ines of the plot itself.
- Tobias, Ronald B.. 20 Master Plots (p. 51-52). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The plot we’re dealing with here is your own learning, and the “corral” I’ve placed each creator in is
that they must work towards bene itting your learning; helping you to do what they specialize in.

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Idahosa Ness on Pronunciation
Idahosa believes that phonetics is the foundation upon which language learning rests; he
encourages people to learn languages by ear, tuning into its array of elemental sounds.

I ind Idahosa to be very personable and good at approaching the stuff he discusses in a manner
that’s relevant to his audience. I think that the study of pronunciation gets a bad rap amongst
language learners, so I approached him in the hopes of making it more tangible and real:

● Why people should care about pronunciation in the irst place, anyway
● What the process of going from zero to speaking a foreign language looks like, to him
● What is a simple way that people can practice their pronunciation for free
● What are the most common pronunciation mistakes an English speaker will make?

What is listening , actually?

Something that I think a lot of people miss is that audio input is actually a combination of two
things: objective sounds that can be measured , yeah, but also our subjective perception of
those sounds . I can perfectly understand and replicate English sounds because of the mirror
neuron effect: as a kid I heard the people around me making certain sounds with their mouths, I
mirrored those sounds and after a few years I became able to perfectly mimic my peers. This basic
set of sounds formed the foundation upon which everything else I ever did in English rested upon.

You might say that we’re “in tune” with English. We’ve got the tuning knob set to 100.8 or wherever
it is and all the waves are coming in nice and clear, which then enables us to correctly make out
what people on the radio are saying. When we can make out what they’re saying we can then
process it, engage with it, and respond to it . Being in-tune with English is essential for us to
function in an English speaking society.

That being said, it also creates some problems for people that later on try to learn a different
language. Each language has its own “radio station” of objective sounds, so to speak. When we hear
a foreign language for the irst time it’s just static on the radio. Working on pronunciation is just a
process of messing with the tuning dial to ind clearer channels, gradually reducing the static
until we’ve found the right station . Once you’ve got that, it’s not a problem to bounce between
96.4 French and 100.8 English, or whatever your languages are.

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An Exercise: How can complete beginners begin thinking about pronunciation?

There are lots of fancy tools like the international phonetic alphabet that help us describe sounds
more accurately, but all of that stuff is ultimately just a means to an end. The end goal is just to be
able to move your mouth in a way that accurately mirrors a Japanese person’s mouth. The
irst step to that goal is simply noticing when discrepancies exist between the sounds coming out of
your mouth and a Japanese person’s mouth when you’re talking. So here’s what we do:

Here’s how you can start learning the phonemes that exist in Japanese:

1. Get ahold of some brief recordings of Japanese speech; a few seconds at max.
(Sui: you might take the MP3s from the C
ore2k on Anki , look up r andom words on
Forvo or t ake audio clips from Japanese YouTube vloggers )

2. Record yourself trying to mimic whatever you just listened to

3. Download a free program like Audacity that lets you slow the tracks down, layer
them on top of eachother and listen to both at once (tutorial).

4. Listen for discrepancies.

For now we aren’t worried about why these discrepancies exist and we’re also not
worried about how to ix them. Write out what you were saying, listen along and
then just mark whenever something sounds funny to you.

(Sui: If you’ve ever played music, Idahosa is basically talking about c onsonance and
dissonance . Where do your sounds match natural Japanese, where don’t they?)

If you can, it’d be great to grab a Japanese person to help you with this. Again, they
don’t have to know why you sound funny; we’re not worried about the why for now.
Just have them listen along and mark your speech up—you sound like a gaijin here,
here and here.

5. As you go on, try to observe patterns of discrepancy that exist between your
speech and Japanese people’s speech and make a short list of them. You’re going to
get a lot of them right, because Japanese and English phonemes have a good amount
of overlap, but you’ll also notice some stuff that doesn’t quite feel right.

6. Once you’ve got your list, start paying attention for those discrepancies . Be active
about it; mimic what you hear, and don’t just do the same thing. Change the shape of
your lips, move your tongue around a bit. Experiment and look for stuff that lessens
the discrepancy between your speech and a Japanese person’s speech.

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General Pronunciation Training

A bit of knowledge becomes helpful at this level. You could approach all this stuff in so much more
depth, so you don’t have to step here, but to put it very simply:

● Consonants and vowels are articulated in speci ic ways.

(Sui: those “speci ic ways” he’s referring to are p
lace of Articulation , manner of Articulation ,
and v oicing . You can also describe vowels in terms of h
eight, backness and rounding .)
● Syllables are arranged melodically : (Sui: see below sections two and three).

Depending on how much you know about pronunciation, spending a bit of time learning about how
this stuff works might be bene icial. Anyhow, at this stage, you’ve got a couple main goals :

1. Learn to correctly say all of the syllable combinations that exist in Japanese
(Sui: the “combination of sounds” is referred to as “p honotactics ”... super cool!
In Japanese, this basically amounts to learning the kana. Idahosa is technically referring to
what’s referred to as m orae and contonation … a m ora is basically a kana, but not always.
Sometimes putting two kana together will yield one mora , as with きょ - k yo .)

This involves a lot of just playing around, too. Just talking about vowels— whether your
tongue is up or down, forward or back, whether your lips are rounded… all this stuff affects
the sound that comes out of your mouth. Move your tongue around and see what effect it
has on your sound. What’s the difference between a vowel that’s more forward and one
that’s more back? What happens when you make a small, tight circle with your lips?

2. Isolate its intonation patterns ; for now, just practice by humming along with speech.
(Sui: this means learning the b asic pitch accent patterns ; what patterns are, and are not,
possible in Japanese? && there’s an activity/example on page 3 of the irst link).

3. Pay attention to the rhythm of Japanese speech : make some nonsense sounds to the beat.
Shall I com- pare thee to a sum- mer day?
ti T
A ti- T
A t i T
A ti T
A ti T
A
Does rhythm work the same in English and Japanese? English has stressed syllables and
unstressed syllables; does Japanese? English dices up sounds and m akes liaisons ; does
Japanese?

Japanese speech is pretty fast, so you’re probably not going to be able to mimic at full speed right
away. Take some time to learn about how sound is made and, armed with that knowledge, start
mimicking it. You’ll gradually “tune in” to Japanese the more you actively listen. As you begin
hearing more clearly and noticing more patterns, try to replicate them in your own speech.

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Building Lines and Stacks

You need vocabulary words to speak a language, but it’s important to remember that words are
not isolated little specks of language . What’s more important is the lines and the stacks that
these vocabulary words are parts of. (Sui: he’s talking about the p
aradigm and syntagm here).

I don’t think that there’s a really good tool focusing on this speci ic stage of language acquisition, so
I’m currently in the process of putting together an application called Stax. The app is designed to
help you learn to freestyle rap and is based around organizing stacks ( actors, actions, objects and
settings) in different ways to create unique lines , which you then put to a beat. You’re basically
getting practice making sentences that focus on these elements.

For example, I don’t speak Japanese, but I have picked up a few random words from the interactions
I’ve had with Japanese media. I know a word for I, ware , a word for rice, gohan , and a word for eat,
taberu . Now I’ve got a basic line: ware, gohan (wo) taberu! T
his line is made of three different
“stacks” -- actors, action and object - and as I learn more words, I can swap different ones in and out
with other words that are in that stack’s “word cloud”— all the words the relevant words I’ve been
exposed to that are within my grasp of Japanese. That cloud will gradually grow as I encounter more
words that I’ve got a real-world need for.

It isn’t the mere presence of these words that matter, it’s the connection between them that
matters. I’m not using the words ware… gohan… taberu… I ’m using the l ine that I’ve drawn
between those words. Language learning is a process of accumulating more and more lines
that bend in ever more abstract ways.

After all, we don’t just want to memorize words; we want to integrate them into our lives. We do
that by having meaningful experiences with these words, and creation is one type of meaningful
experience. The more you mimic and create, the more resourceful you become. It isn’t enough to
just know the word for rice , you’ve got to be con ident and resourceful enough to use it at the drop
of a hat in a real conversation.

You’re building that con idence and resourcefulness during this stage of pronunciation
practice —both putting in the mouth work you need to be comfortable making Japanese
sounds and the mental work you need to be comfortable building Japanese lines.

This is a skill that needs to be practiced, even in our native languages.

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Scripting

A script is, fundamentally, a prepared conversation.

During this stage you’ll be identifying and practicing scripts. You might:

● Take a clip of a native speaker speaking

● Write a self-introduction or a paragraph in your native language, send it to a native speaker
to have it translated into your target language. Ask them to record themself reading it in a
natural fashion and send it back to you.

Once you’ve got your script, approach it in the same way you did the activity from earlier.

1. If you’re here, you should understand Japanese at a syllabic level. You know the
sounds that exists in Japanese and you can make them mostly accurately.
2. Practice stringing all of the syllables together to make the words of your script, the
words to make phrases, the phrases to make sentences, and the sentences to make
your paragraph. Each new level builds on the previous one.
3. Keep practicing until you can match native speed. You’ll need to put in some
signi icant mouth-work to feel comfortable doing this.
4. After you’ve got the words down, spend effort to also match the rhythm and
intonation of the native speaker.
5. Keep tweaking stuff until your recording sounds as close as possible to the original.

Now bring that script into a conversation.

● Focusing on making use of the words in your script and further committing them to memory
● Look for opportunities to build your “stacks” and expand your “word cloud”
● As you accumulate “lines”, play around with them. You can recycle lines and stacks to
express a lot of new and novel ideas.

Eventually you’ll accumulate enough words and lines to communicate, and with that comes the
con idence necessary for spontaneous conversation. From this point on, you should always be on
the lookout for new lines.

Idahosa walked one of his team members through this process, which you can watch on YouTube
(the bit about scripts is Episode 4). Re lecting on the experience in Episode 9, Mike comments:

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 It was really helpful to go back and review the things I was saying on my calls with a tutor or
whoever I was talking to. It helped because I could see exactly what I was doing and the bad
habits I had in the middle of a conversation —s tuff I didn’t necessarily notice in the moment.
After viewing that I could go back and igure out how to say something better or more
naturally.

Closing Thoughts

The 80/20 of pronunciation mistakes that native English speakers will make in Japanese

● Pay attention to the length of your [mora]. They vary in English, they don’t in Japanese.
● Pay attention to your tongue; where it is, what it’s doing. There is tongue movement in
English vowels, but there isn’t any movement in Japanese vowels. (Sui: Idahosa is talking
about diphthongization of vowels, which he talks about in t his post on accent reduction ).
● The Japanese R sound is different than the English one; igure it out.

And a few closing thoughts to leave you with:

● Learning is complex. Be it language or any new skill, it’s super complex at irst. At irst y ou’ve
got to use the logical/analytical part of your brain to p ut all the pieces together manually
at irst , but with good practice and repetition, a ll that eventually gets pushed into the back
of your brain, your intuition, and b ecomes automated.

We started by talking about hearing phonemes. At this point you might not even know what a
phoneme is and it takes a lot of conscious effort to sort all the sounds out, but over time, it
becomes automated. Once that’s automatic your brain space will be freed up to focus on other
stuff: rhythm, intonation, etc. Once that’s all automatic you don’t have to worry about how
you’re saying something and can focus purely on what you’re saying: building vocabulary,
using more complex grammar, etc. It all builds on itself.

● Believe that it’s possible —u nderstand that pronunciation is movement. To ix your
pronunciation is to change your movement patterns . Know that as a human being, you
have the capacity to change the movement patterns of your mouth, just as you can do so for
running form or any athletic form. If you believe, pay attention, put in the smart effort… You
are capable of changing your habits.
● Don’t just rely on your ears —s tare at peoples’ mouths and try to mimic the way their
mouth is moving . The act of bringing your conscious attention to that space will make a huge
difference.
● Turn on a variety TV show or something where you can actually see peoples’ mouths moving
and put it on mute. Try to match their mouth movements, head gestures, etc. F acial
expressions, physical gestures, and how you carry yourself are all parts of communicating in
another language , too.

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Matt vs Japan on Pitch Accent, Kanji and The Journey
Matt has a very advanced level of Japanese and leverages his experience
to create content that helps learners get started and deal with hurdles
they encounter. A co-founder of the Mass Immersion Approach (MIA), he
encourages learners to spend as much time in their target language as
possible and believes that output abilities are eventually acquired as a
natural result of comprehending large amounts. Immersion, he says, is
the most important part of the process.

I was excited about how willing Matt was to elaborate on his thinking and found that he is very good
at coming up with metaphors to make the complex ideas he’s presenting more tangible. We ended
up covering much more content than I expected, but our discussion centered around:

● Pitch Accent—what it is and how to approach it

● Kanji—insights he’s obtained by observing the progress of over 100 learners
● Anki—what it’s for and how you use it will change over time
● The “Journey”—some thoughts on planning your own learning

On Learning Pitch Accent

Note: If you haven’t worked through t he earlier section on prosody yet, or you’re just here for the
interview and aren’t following the document, please spend 20 minutes getting an overview of pitch
accent before continuing. This will be easier to follow if you’ve got a loose idea of what’s going on.

- Japanese Pitch-Accent in 10 minutes (II)
- The Challenge and Intrigue of Pitch Accent (~2.5k words)

Before we get started, do you have any general comments to make about pitch accent?

I’d like to begin by saying a few things:

- I like to separate pitch accent from pronunciation. I know people who have excellent
pronunciation but make many mistakes with pitch accent, and I also know people who have
pitch accent down but get a lot of the sounds of Japanese wrong.
- People can reach a very high level of Japanese without picking up on pitch accent, especially
if there isn’t a similar feature in their native language. It takes intentional effort to igure out.
- Even if you completely ignore pitch accent, it doesn’t really become an impediment to
communication. You can almost always rely on context to make sense of what you hear.
- This doesn’t mean pitch accent isn’t important. The fact that you’re able to be understood
doesn’t mean that your Japanese sounds good to a native speaker. (English examples).

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Perhaps most importantly: I think there’s a lot of people who brush off pitch-accent because they
can’t perceive it and don’t realize how signi icant it is.

What would you tell someone on the fence about the value of pitch accent?

Even if you completely ignore pitch-accent, you’ll still be understood. Sometimes messing up
pitch-accent does interfere with communication, but most of the time a pitch-accent mistake will
just cause you to sound foreign—as if you were constantly stressing the wrong syllables in English.

In my case, I’m a perfectionist. Pitch-accent is important to me. Having said that, if you really don’t
care about how you sound… I can see that maybe studying pitch accent isn’t worth your time.

That being said, I think if you just learn the very basics of pitch accent (the rules, the difference
between pitch accent and intonation, the general rules to how it works), enough to become aware
that there are these 4 patterns and they roughly sound like this … that enables you to listen for it .

Knowing the basics is the difference between having and not having a framework. It’s much harder
to learn if you don’t have a general idea of what you’re looking for. If you don’t get this framework,
you might ind that you genuinely can’t hear the difference between correct and incorrect accents.

While it will take a long time to master pitch-accent, you can learn those basics in 30 minutes.

If someone is struggling to hear the differences between each pattern, what should they do?

I actually just recently worked with someone who was having exactly this issue, and in his case, it
was a straightforward ix that anybody can do on their own at home.

1. Learn about the four basic patterns (ie, go through those links above)
2. Take a piece of paper
3. Split it into 4 different quadrants
4. Assign each pattern to a different quadrant (ie, top left=heiban, top right=atamadaka,
bottom left=nakadaka, bottom right=odaka).
5. Figure out how to use a Japanese-Japanese dictionary and ind a word’s pitch accent
(in incredible depth, in ~3 minutes, via the MIA Dictionary App)
6. Look up common words you know until you ind 10 words for each pattern
7. Place those words into their respective quadrants on your piece of paper
8. For now, don’t even worry about how pitch-accent works for verb/adj conjugations or any
rules like for compound nouns. That’s too much to learn all at once, but if you build a good
foundation, it will start to come together over time.
9. When you’re immersing and you hear one of your 40 words come up, rewind a few seconds,
listen again, and really focus on the pitch pattern. What does the pattern feel like to you?
10. It’s natural if you can’t hear pitch at irst; it’s a skill you need to develop. You need to give
your brain a system of feedback: if you’re playing marco polo, but the other person

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 never says polo, you could progress super far… in the wrong direction. Unwittingly.
This is a process of hearing an odaka word, like hana , and being like hey, that’s odaka! And
eventually, after hearing a lot of odaka words in many contexts, it eventually sinks in.

Before that point, though, you’ve got to get through the dif icult process of reconciling [what
you think pitch-accent is, based on your interpretations of someone else’s explanation] and
[what pitch-accent actually is].
11. Once you get better at Japanese, try to read the back of the NHK accent dictionary or the
shinemikai accent dictionary. There’s a solid explanation… it’s just in Japanese.

So, to put that in really general terms:

- First just learn what the patterns are
- Next, learn to hear each pattern
- Next, learn the patterns of common vocabulary words
- Eventually you’ll start picking up on rules/exceptions and how conjugations work
- Way down the road you’ll get into really particular rules

This progression should play out alongside the rest of your studies. There’s no reason to think that
you’ve g ot to learn all this right now.

● For beginner/intermediate learners, it’s enough to just know the patterns of isolated words
and be able to listen for them.
● Once you get more advanced, and you’ve got more of a foundation in Japanese, you can start
worrying more about conjugations and stuff. It’ll be easier to get your head around then
because you’ll (a) have developed a more accurate sense of intuition about how Japanese
sounds and (b) be able to use Japanese resources, which have more detail than English ones.

That’s a lot of memorization… can we Anki our way through pitch-accent?

I think that it’s really important to hear a lot of natural Japanese. There’s only so much detail you
can it into a single anki card, and there’s a lot of subtle stuff that you might not perceive (and thus
not be able to put on an anki card in the irst place). That aside, anki is a great tool for memorizing
the basic pitch accent patterns that are associated with each individual vocabulary word.

So, for people who use Anki, we made an addon that color codes pitch accents (and other stuff).

Assigning each pitch-accent a color is an idea that we took from the Mandarin community, actually.
Humans have really good visual memories; if the word nihongo is blue every time you see it, you’ll
unconsciously and naturally build a connection between the word nihongo and blue. N ow, if blue
means heiban to you, it just becomes second nature to pronounce nihongo in the right way.

What’s the most important insight you’ve personally had into pitch accent?

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When you irst learn about the patterns, you hear that the drop is the most important thing. That
makes sense—each pitch pattern is literally de ined by an accent drop (or lack thereof). The thing
is, that’s not really what Japanese people listen for. Each pattern has its own unique feel to it, and
your brain has to learn to identify these archetypal patterns/”feelings”.

- Heiban has a sort of eerie, lat ring to it.

- Atamdaka has a big release of energy right at the beginning
- Odaka has a sense of building up to a peak, then suddenly dropping

If you were to take a random word, plug a recording of it being spoken into Audacity and then look
at the sound waves of that recording, there are times where it might not be clear from that
information what the pitch-accent is… but the features of those “feelings” are still there. Getting
better at hearing pitch-accent is sort of a process of internalizing these patterns.

Say that I’ve got the basics down and I speak some Japanese. How can I start taking my
knowledge of pitch accent a bit further?

Start iguring out the major patterns that govern how pitch accent interacts with conjugations in
order to cut down on the amount of memorization you have to do. There’s a really good explanation
on the back of the NHK accent dictionary or Shinmeikai dictionary, but again, those are in Japanese.

In a nutshell,

- Verbs and adjectives are the only things that conjugate in Japanese
- So far as pitch-accent is concerned, there are only two types of verbs/adjectives
- We made an anki deck to help you memorize patterns associated with each conjugation of
both kifuku and heiban verbs/adjectives

On Learning Kanji
What have you learned from observing the progress of people following MIA?

After working with many students, I’ve come to believe that there isn’t any single “right way” to
get through the kanji . There are lots of different learners out there, there are lots of individual
differences. The same thing might work really well for one person, but another would really
struggle with it. It just depends on who you are, your upbringing and how you do things.

For example, I used to recommend that people completed the original Rembering The Kanji book
(RTK)—learning to write two or three thousand characters from memory—before doing anything
at all in Japanese. Now, that’s possible, and it works. People who get all the way through it tend to
ind that, although they might have approached it differently if they could go back, it did give them
most of what they wanted. They got through it and don’t really have issues with kanji anymore.

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As I’ve done consultations and worked with more learners, however, I ind that it’s something that a
lot of people really struggle with. They ind it really tedious, boring, and generally dif icult to get
through. It’s an awful experience for a lot of people.

Anyhow, what I want to say is that it’s not really a “one size its all” thing. I do think there are certain
principles that apply to everyone, but how you make use of those principles might differ.

Kanji: All at once, or spread out over a longer period of time?

I think it depends a lot on your goals. I like to break kanji up into two stages:

● Learning how to read (recognize the kanji when you see them)
● Learning how to write (by hand, from memory)

In modern Japan, if you can read and you can speak, you can automatically type in Japanese. You just
write out the hiragana and then choose the right kanji when it pops up, meaning you can work on a
computer or text without being able to handwrite any kanji at all. They’re separate skills.

So the real question for learners to ask themselves is: is it important to learn to handwrite kanji ?
I used to say yes… but now I think that, for most people, the answer is no . Even Japanese people
have fewer and fewer opportunities to write things by hand because so much is done digitally in
today’s world. The result is that people are forgetting to write characters by hand, and while people
from the older generations might think that’s a bad thing because youth are getting worse at this
skill… it’s happening because there isn’t a need for it.

Now, there are c ertain situations where you do have to write things out by hand. You might have to
ill out paperwork or something… but in those cases, you can just look the characters up on your
phone and then copy them out—even natives do that. So, practically speaking? Being able to write
out kanji from memory isn’t really that important.

But, some people might still want to learn to write the characters. I’m not going to say don’t d
o it.
Some people might be interested in calligraphy, enjoy writing, or think it’s a valuable skill. And
that’s perfectly ine.

What it means for learners is just that it’s necessary to make a decision: If you eventually d
o want
to learn to write things out by hand, you’ve got two options:

● First learn to read/recognize the kanji, then learn Japanese, then learn to write the kanji
● Learn to read and write all the kanji before you begin learning Japanese.

Option two is possible, but it’s hard. If you don’t know Japanese, you’re not going to have any
connection to these characters. Just re lecting on how RTK works—it’s demanding on your brain to
connect the strokes of a kanji to what are sometimes arbitrary English keywords—wait, was this the

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kanji for angry? Mad? Furious? —At that point it’s not even an issue with the kanji i tself, it’s a matter
of keeping track of similar and arbitrary keywords… that aren’t even Japanese.

I recommend that learners do the bare minimum so that kanji won’t be an obstacle for them as they
continue their journey through Japanese, and then later on, after they’ve got a good foundation, to
go back and learn to write the characters. Learning to recognize the characters is pretty easy, and
learning to write the characters once you know Japanese is pretty easy because you’ll have seen
them so many times in tons of different situations.

The end result is the same, it’s just much less painful of a process when spread out.

Past a certain threshold, can you learn characters on the ly as you go?

Well, let’s start by qualifying the word learn .

- A lot of people think that you either know a kanji or you don’t, in a very black|white way.
- I think it’s more like a spectrum: how deep is your knowledge of a given character?
○ On one end, you can sort of recognize it. When you see it, it looks familiar.
○ On the other, you know all the readings, meanings, can write it out by hand, etc.

How much “kanji infrastructure” do you feel you need before you can start learning words?

You can move on at a pretty low point along the spectrum—just being able to distinguish this
character from that one, to recognize it as this character and not that one, is enough. If you reach
that point, you can move right on to learning words. And given the nature of kanji, as a natural
result of learning vocabulary, you eventually will naturally get a hang of the individual kanji
readings, too, despite never having made an intentional effort to actually memorize kanji readings.

For example, say that you learn the words 明確 (meikaku), 説明 (setsumei) and 明治 (meiji). Now
you’re reading and you see 発明... how do you think that 明 is going to be pronounced? Mei! Now, we
never put 明 - mei on a flashcard, but your brain is a pattern recognition machine. So long as you give it
stuff to work with, it can connect a lot of dots by itself. As you continue to grow your vocabulary, you’ll
eventually develop an intuitive understanding of kanji readings.

I think learners should do the minimum amount of pure kanji study necessary to jump into actual
Japanese content. I’ve whittled it down to 1,000 kanji that cover 90% of all written Japanese.
- Learn the character well enough to recognize that you’ve seen it before
- Ideally, you’ll also be able to recall one of its meanings in a rough sense
- We’re not worried about the readings, only the meaning of the kanji
- The most important thing is reaching a point where, when you see a new kanji, it isn’t
just a random blob of lines. It’s got a certain distinct form that you can recognize.

Once you inish those 1,000 kanji, you can start focusing on words:

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 - You still don’t know readings, you’ve only got a rough idea of the meaning of the characters
you know and there are many characters you don’t know… but you’re at a point where if you
want to learn a word, you can isolate and memorize the characters in it.
- You start memorizing the meaning of full words without worrying about the readings of
individual kanji. As long as you can read every word, you'll be able to read Japanese. But,
after a while, you will ind that you’ve naturally picked up many individual readings, too.
- After you see enough words, you start picking up this information automatically. And as you
learn more words, you cultivate an ability to make logical guesses about how a given kanji in
an unknown word will sound.
- Eventually you do reach a point where you can just list off readings, and you can pull them
out of a hat. You never really memorized that, though, it’s just something that you learned
naturally through experience in Japanese. Rather than memorizing all that information
out of context, you did it in a way that plays to the strengths of your brain . Instead of
just memorizing random information, you’re problem solving: You’re trying to read real
Japanese, and your brain will step up and do what it needs to solve that problem.

On The Role of Anki

What’s the role of Anki for a beginner vs intermediate vs advanced student?

At the beginning, when you’ve got no foundation, it’s very hard to learn anything at all from
immersion alone. So in the beginning you’re using the SRS to help you get this structure, to build a
base of basic grammar structures and one or two thousand common words.

What might be surprising to someone new to language learning is just memorizing a word doesn’t
necessarily mean you’ll be able to recognize it when you stumble across it. I go into this more in my
video why you still can't understand your target language , but it basically boils down to this:

Knowing a word—having conscious knowledge of its existence—is not the same as having the skill
that is being able to pick it out of native speech and intuitively understand it, or of being able to pull
it out of our brain on the spot to express a certain idea or emotion. Learning the words in an SRS
is a good start, but it won’t take you to the point people think of when they think of “ luency”.

Again, there’s a spectrum of knowledge for words :

- At irst, we simply memorize a word. We’re aware that it exists.
- As we continue to listen to a language, we begin hearing it, but it often goes over our heads
- Eventually we can pick it out consistently, but might not understand why it’s being used
- After enough exposure you’ll reach a point where you can understand it effortlessly and
know exactly what it’s doing whenever you hear it used
- Way down the road, you become able to con idently use it yourself

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I mean, take the word okoru , to get mad. If you look up a translation of it and know that it means to
get angry , that gives you a pretty good sense of what it means. You’re much better off than someone
who didn’t know the word at all. Having said that, it’s still pretty vague compared to a Japanese
person’s understanding of the word: the stuff that does and doesn’t count as okoru’ ing.

It’s kind of like carving a statue out of a marble slab . When you learn a new word, you get a
new slab of marble. Just being aware that it exists means that you’ll be more likely to notice it
while immersing. From there, every single time you see it used, you chip a little bit away to
reveal the unique statue lying underneath the marble’s surface. But that takes time, and you
only get that understanding of the word by seeing it used in tons of different contexts.

So, if we bring this back to the levels you mentioned above:

- A beginner has such a small foundation in Japanese that they’ve got nowhere to put these
slabs of marble and thus need something like Anki to help them get started.
- An intermediate learner is someone who has reached a point where they’re familiar
enough with Japanese that they can start picking stuff up themselves by immersing.
- An advanced learner picks stuff up just by naturally engaging with the language. They’ve
got such a strong foundation in place that new information its right in, effortlessly.

So, past the beginner level, should you keep using Anki?

That depends on your personality, really.

- Some people really like Anki. It gives you a sense of security—so long as you make a card,
you can be almost certain you’ll never forget that word. It gives you statistics so you can
track your learning and also is a consistent thing to work into your daily life.
- Other people hate the SRS. It seems really regimented, it feels arti icial and its opportunity
cost is time that could be spent engaging with and immersing in actual Japanese content.

I think that the intermediate stage is where you’ll really see people starting to split off and go their
own way. Some people will be relying on SRS tools less and less, investing all their time into
content, and others will keep up with their SRS regimen.

Whether or not you keep up with Anki, I think it’s important to bring up the diminishing returns
involved in using one.

- The irst 1,000 words you learn is huge in terms of bang for your buck. You go from 0%
vocabulary coverage to 80% coverage.
- As you learn more words, the relative value of each word in terms of the % coverage it offers
you becomes exponentially smaller
- Someone at an advanced level needs to deal with such a massive amount of words that it
just isn’t practical to rely on an SRS to learn new words. The amount of words you need to

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 know to approach a native level increases exponentially, but with Anki, you progress
linearly.

So I think that SRS is incredibly valuable during the early stages of language learning, but as you
become more pro icient, it begins making more sense to move towards immersion.

Does that mean that advanced learners have no reason to use Anki?

No, not necessarily. Even at an advanced level, you can still get value out of an SRS.

- Maybe you keep track of super rare words

- Maybe you use it to learn the names of prefectures, names, foods, etc
- Maybe you use it for technical vocabulary that occurs very frequently in the content you
enjoy consuming, but less frequently in daily life
- Generally speaking, SRS is helpful for illing in weaknesses

The SRS is a lot like one of those machines in the gym for targeting speci ic muscles.

You might have some body builder who’s like oh, this one little tiny muscle in my back isn’t big
enough! A
nd so he goes to the special machine which targets that one speci ic muscle. That’s an SRS.
But for most people, who are content with being healthy, those machines aren’t necessary.

In other words, if you just want to be a pretty good tennis player, you can just play a lot of
tennis and you’ll naturally build the muscles you need. If you want to play competitively
you’ll need to go further than that, but for most people, you can learn by doing .

Of course, we come into Japanese way below the level of “being able to run around and swing a
tennis racket”, so to speak. So it’s not quite that simple when it comes to learning a language.
Imagine that you just woke up from a coma and you’d been bedridden for like ten years. You’d
have lost almost all of your muscles, so you couldn’t just get out of bed and go play tennis . You’d
have to start off with physical therapy at irst: very arti icial, very controlled. As you progress you’d
begin transitioning to part therapy and part daily life. Eventually you could focus on playing tennis.

You don’t need to do that. You could be like a baby and just jump into the wild, but I don’t think
that’s very ef icient and it would probably be frustrating. We use an SRS and rely on it heavily at irst
to build a foundation, then we gradually wean off of it once we get to a point where we can start
growing from real life. But maybe keep it up if you like the habit or want to be Roger Federer.

On The Journey
The ‘path to mastery’ is not a linear line

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A lot of people think that progress is linear so they don’t really plan their journey, thinking that
they’ll just start walking now and decide when to stop walking later on. The issue with this sort of
thinking is that the ‘path to mastery’ is not a linear line; there are a multitude of lines. If your goal is
to reach a level of mastery, your irst year will look very different than someone who just wants to
reach a basic level of conversational luency.

I think that there’s a certain threshold of knowledge and your route depends on whether you see
yourself landing above or below it: do you want to be able to consume media without
subtitles/translations comfortably and have conversations without feeling handicapped ?

- If yes, the approach you take should re lect that from the beginning. It needs to be much
more thorough, something more than just memorizing random phrases.
- If not, a thorough approach might not be necessary. You don’t really need kanji or a high
level of comprehension if you’re just going to go to Japan as a tourist.

How can somebody without a background in linguistics or experience learning another

language know what level of pro iciency they need to reach before getting started, though?

I would recommend trying to have conversations with people who have learned a language to a high
level; or at least look around on YouTube. I made a video a few years ago where I re lected on
literally everything I did from zero to that point, for example. So watch that and ask yourself:

- What stuff would you be excited to do? Willing to do?

- What stuff seems like a bit of a stretch, or even a waste of time?
- What is important to me, what goals do I have, how much time am I willing to put in?

I think that part of this problem stems from the fact that people think luency is like a switch where
before a certain point you suck and after it you’re perfect. The issue is that pro iciency is a
spectrum, and different people place “ luency” at different points along that spectrum. Furthermore,
if you look at native speakers, even though they’re all “ luent”, some are much better writers or
speakers than others. Personally, I think about luency in terms of a 6-Point Model.

A few things to think about:

- Not a lot of people are really talking about the realities of language learning, because most
language learning tools that people come into contact with are just marketing fronts for a
product, and their goal is to make money. Your actual learning comes second.
- When looking for someone or something to follow, be wary of The Fluency Illusion. The fact
that you can’t perceive mistakes being made doesn’t mean they’re not being made.
- It’s dif icult to know what’s possible before you know what exists, and that’s always going to
be a problem: you can’t know what it feels like to be [X-degree luent in Japanese] until
you’ve reached that level of luency.

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Concluding Thoughts

Is there anything you’d like to bring up before we inish talking? Recurrent mistakes to avoid,
important habits to build, that sort of thing?

- I think it’s important to get in the habit of immersing in Japanese as much as possible.
Whatever you’d like to consume after you’re luent? Start doing that right now. That is easy
for some people, dif icult for others. It really comes down to your tolerance of ambiguity.
- Eventually you’ve got to make the leap of faith, jump into the ocean and learn to swim. No
matter how much you study, you won’t ever become 100% prepared for real Japanese
content. If you’re waiting until you’re ready to start immersing, you’ll be waiting forever.
- We put a lot of importance on understanding in the west. You’ve got to understand A to
move onto B and C etc. And as an adult, we’re used to understanding everything and often
on a pretty deep level. That leads to people thinking that they can’t read manga because they
won’t understand all the words or grammar... but learning doesn’t have to be like that.

I think children can learn so quickly, in part, because they aren’t afraid of not understanding.
They still enjoy the movie even if they didn’t catch everything. Cultivate that sort of childlike
mindset and gett better at being okay with not understanding: focus on and celebrate what
you do understand, even if it’s only a word here and there.

If someone ignores everything in this interview but one thing, what should it be?

Spend just a bit of time each day or week—the key word is each , it should be a regular thing—
trying to tackle a piece of content in real Japanese. All that stuff that you’d be watching or reading if
you spoke perfect Japanese? Start trying to do that stuff right now.

At worst, this is just a reality check, reminding you what real Japanese is like.
At most, it’ll change everything: one day, you’ll realize that you are ready for real content.

Doing this ensures that you don’t waste time by waiting too long to begin immersing.

(sound familiar? This is basically t he 50% rule that I mentioned on p
age two, line one . It’s important! )

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Nelson Dellis on Memory and Language Learning

[drafting writeup from interview; temporarily moved]

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Appendix

On Learning
Generally speaking, I’m a big believer in using J apanese rather than preparing t o use Japanese. To
that end, I’ve done my best to link you to stuff only once it becomes relevant to what you’re doing at
each stage of the timeline. I don’t want to waste your time with stuff that you don’t need, and I don’t
want to go to the trouble of inding resources that nobody else will use.

Unfortunately, even after a lot of spring cleaning, I still found myself with some stuff that I wanted to
share but wasn’t sure where to put. That in mind, everything in this irst section is either:

1. Foundational ; I think it provides context important to the document as a whole

2. Giving me a headache ; I think it’s important, but wasn’t sure where else to put it.

If you’re really going to give me such power over your life as to let me play a hand in blocking out
the next year of it, please take a bit of time to look into where the ideas I’m presenting to you come
from. It would be unfortunate if you disagreed with me on a fundamental level but only discovered
that six months from now.

First, two general suggestions about approaching this document:

● Appropriate and repurpose my timeline to it your needs—or even discard it completely if

you really feel uncertain about something. This is your own learning.

● I’m about to list 12 suggestions of stuff I think would be bene icial to look into before you
start with day 1. For here, and for every other page of the document, I’m absolutely not
expecting all of this to be done in one sitting (or even at all).

Break it into multiple sessions, read one per day, anything goes. You know how you work.

So, anyhow, here are things that will help you to learn Japanese, although they aren’t explicitly
resources for learning Japanese.

1. See Bakadesuyo’s compendium on A

chieving Goals: Everything you need to know

Learning, in some sense, is a process of consistently achieving goals. But how do we actually
achieve goals? This is a repository with dozens of links about doing so, most of them
connected to scholarly articles and published books you can look further into.

Just take a gander and click on anything that seems interesting. We’re constantly setting

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 goals in one way or another, so take some time to learn how to set better ones.

2. Check out Kolb’s Learning Cycle

Learning isn’t just something that happens; it’s a pretty well documented process. Take
some time to igure out how learning works so you can go about it in a way that is actually
useful for you.

I like Kolb’s model, and I think it helps put the concepts of input and output in context. If
you’re missing any of these four steps, you aren’t learning as effectively as you could be.
- Kolb’s Learning Cycle: The four steps we must go through to learn anything ( p1)
- Kolb’s Learning Styles: The four different styles of learners

(Relevant: Take the Time to Learn How to Learn )

3. Get to know H
ermann Ebbinghaus and his contributions to the study of memory

Memorization is an unavoidable part of language learning, and if you’ve ever spent 5

minutes on Reddit or Googled for advice about better memorizing stuff, you’ve almost
certainly stumbled onto stuff that has roots in Ebbinghaus.

For now, I’d like you to just ponder over a few of his major ideas

- The Forgetting Curve:

You’re going to forget pretty much everything you ever learn, and over the course of
just a few days at that, but we can strengthen these memories. Hermann advocates
for the use of spaced repetition (the idea that tools like Anki and Memrise are based
upon) and mnemonics (little stories to help you remember stuff -- N ever E at
S hredded W heat).

- The Learning Curve:

Have you ever heard something referred to as having a steep learning curve ? If so,
you’re familiar with Ebbinghaus. No matter how smart you are or how serious you
approach learning, you’re not going to master this on the irst try… but most things
get easier with time and/or trials.

- The Serial Positioning Effect:

We recall the irst and last item in a series better than items in the middle of it. In
other words, it’s good to break up your studying across multiple sessions - doing so
gives you more irst and last items. (aka the ‘priming’ and ‘recency’ effects )

4. Check out some timelines/re lections put together by other people

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 You’re about to read my timeline, and it’s heavily steeped in my personal biases and
preferences. Yours might not be the same. Plus, my resources might be a bit outdated: I
haven’t followed new apps about learning Japanese for three or four years.

Check out what other people think to get a better feel for what is established advice (ie, it’s
not just me saying this) and then what stuff is just me going off on my rocker (and you can
likely discard if it doesn’t jive with you).

I’ll periodically update the below list with new content as I stumble into it. I will also include
links I’m directed to if they aren’t low-effort cash grabs (ie, if you’ve written something that
you think should be included here, PM me a link on Reddit).

Stuff with a product behind them

- [How to] Learn Japanese Online by Cure Dolly
- Walkthrough - Your Journey through Japanese by Japanese Level Up
- 365 days, 500 hours of Japanese by u/Kidvibe
- Hacking Japanese Supercourse by u/Nukemarine (see also: LLJ / SGJL )
- Learn Japanese: A Ridiculously Detailed Guide by Tofugu

Other peoples’ timelines

- Resources by JLPT level / JLPT study guides by u/[Deleted] :’(
- TL;DR / Megapost for the Self-Learner by FestusPowerLoL
- Awesome-Japanese Guide & Resource Dump by [folks at GitHub]
- Minimal Guide to Learning Japanese by u/Foodhype
- All Japanese All The Time (AJATT) by Khatzumoto
- Genki Survival Guide by u/Kymus
- Learn Japanese - A Six Step Study Plan by KumaSensei
- Two Years of Japanese Resources (II) by u/Jo-Mako
- The Mass Immersion Approach by Matt vs Japan and Yoga
- Two years of studying + a year in Tokyo by u/Oleandersun
- How I kinda okay at Japanese in 24 months by u/Renalan
- My Japanese Year-in-Review by u/Romelako
- Vlog documenting 800 hours(1yr) of Japanese progress by Shawn
- The Best Way to Learn Japanese by TheTrueJapan

5. Thinking about paying for something?

If you’re thinking about paying for any resource, whether it’s one I’ve suggested or you’ve
found yourself, please irst do some research about it on All Language Resources (the hub
for reviews of resources about language learning resources - here is how they do reviews)

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6. Become aware of mindfulness in language learning ( pun intended)

The concept of mindfulness pervades my entire learning philosophy. I think that achieving a
high level in anything requires being mindful. My favorite introduction to mindfulness is The
Four Roads to Happiness by Osha Taigu (EN subtitles).

The four principles of happiness shared in this video ultimately make up the backbone of
my entire language learning philosophy. They are, paraphrased, as follows:

- Some things make you feel good (productive, ful illed, motivated, whatever);
igure out what these things are, do more of them.
- Take steps to ensure that you can continue doing these things , or that you won’t
enter a situation where you can’t do them (I like reading; I take a book with me
everywhere, just in case I have downtime).
- Some things makes you feel bad (burned out, regretful, whatever); igure out what
these things are, do less of them.
- Take steps to ensure that you don’t accidentally wind up doing these things ( I
often sleep in till noon on Saturdays, my only free day of the week. I immediately
regret this because… well... It wastes my only free day. It also throws off my sleep
schedule for the coming week. I’ve begun scheduling iTalki lessons for 9:00 AM on
Saturday. It forces me out of bed and ensures that my day begins with something
important to me).

Ideally, if you apply these steps, your learning will become progressively more
tailored to what works for you . Eventually, as Petrucciani comments, language
learning becomes an integral and indispensable part of who you are.

7. Understand t he Pareto Principle

Not everything is worth your time; according to the Pareto principle, 80% of the value you’ll
derive from this comes from 20% of the content. Depending on what you personally want
out of Japanese, different parts of this guide are going to be more or less important to you.

For example, pitch accent is a pretty hot topic in the Japanese learning community and it’s
an important part of developing a natural accent. That being said, Steve Kaufman, a polyglot,
doesn’t worry about it because he “isn’t a perfectionist and is quite prepared to be imperfect
in [some aspects of] a variety of languages… “ he says, “whereas in [Matt vs Japan’s] case,
[he’s] focusing on one [language] and wants to be as complete as he can be in [Japanese].”
Steve also prefers massive input to spaced repetition.

He concludes, “All of these things are c hoices , and for different choices there are
different solutions ”

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 For me, this is the main point of the Pareto Principle.
- Understand what you want to get out of Japanese
- Do more of the stuff that moves you closer to that goal
- Do less of the stuff that doesn’t

8. A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Science and Math

This is a super cool book about learning that is applicable to everything. I’ve already covered
some of these ideas, but I’ll also list them here just for the sake of thoroughness. All of these
are major concepts that will lead to more learning ef iciency; work through them over time,
see what resonates with you and try to incorporate them into your learning routine.

- Active Recall
- Test Yourself (I’ll just again suggest you read the stuff in point 3)
- “Chunk” Information (II)
- Spaced Repetition
- “Interleaving”
- Take breaks in a structured fashion
- Explanatory Questioning (explain what you’re learning by making a metaphor out of
something else -- like the mustard seed analogy I make to begin the phonetics s ection)
- Focus
- The 90/90/1 rule

9. How to make a behavior addictive

Some habits stick, others don’t. Why? She introduces Tony Robbins’ six human needs and
suggests that any behavior which meets 3 of the 6 criteria will become addictive.

- Certainty: A
certainty to avoid pain and gain pleasure. If you do X, you’ll get Y.
- Variety: W
hile certain, [thing] isn’t dull; there’s spontaneity and new engaging stimuli.
- Signi icance : [Behavior] makes you feel special or unique
- Connection : A feeling that you’re part of a community of people [who also do the thing]
- Growth : While doing [thing], you get the feeling that you’re improving/progressing
- Contribution : While doing [thing], you get a feeling that you’re helping others

A lot of people dabble with languages and never really achieve any notable level with
pro iciency; if this sounds like you, spend some time iguring out how the things you
consider integral to your life meet these criteria. How can Japanese become signi icant, too?
Do you even want it to? Does your life have room for another “signi icant” thing?

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10. Figure out if you’re in love, or if y ou’re in “ ish love”

In a video discussing love, Rabbi Dr, Abraham Twerski points out an interesting way in
which our language allows us to skew our perception of reality. You don’t love ish , he says,
you love to eat ish. True love is a love of giving, not a love of receiving.

Similarly, when we say “I want to learn Japanese”, I think that there’s more there than meets
the eye. Very few people are really saying that they want to do the very pure and sterile
thing that is learning Japanese; they want to do something that, for whatever reason, they
feel they can only do in Japanese—or, at the least, that would be better done in Japanese.

Whatever it is that you really want, you might not actually need Japanese to do that thing. I
think that being excited about Japanese will enable you to do can only lead to frustration
and failure; you should be excited about the process, the way that you’re spending your time
right now. If not, you might want to re-think your interest in learning Japanese.

It takes a long time to learn any language, and that’s a lot of time that you could be instead
spending on the thing that you actually want to do.

11. Read Alan Belkin’s L etter to a Young Composer

I presume that you’ve opened a long and wordy document that you found on a forum of
language learners because language is important to you, maybe a little too close to judge
honestly. But any sort of learning involves a lot of honest judgments. Sergei Yesenin writes,
in Letter to a Woman , nose to nose, our faces go unseen; we must step back for clarity.

That in mind, this is Alan’s re lection on his life and career, and what he’d like to tell young
composers who are just beginning to pursue music. A lot of his words apply equally to the
journey you’re about to embark upon, and even if you can’t tell a violin from a snare drum, I
encourage you to at least give it a skim. There is a lot of meaningful food for thought.

If that’s too much to ask, at least check out this excerpt:

At times, most honest composers of “serious” music, especially if they are not part of whatever
clique is “in” wherever they live, ask themselves: Why bother? You are writing music which has
no large public, which some of your colleagues may not even respect, and where the rewards
are few. There is no easy answer to this one. B
ut I can say that “real composers” write
because it is part of them, because they love the music they write themselves. In other
words, they love doing it. If you are also a performer, you will have the pleasure of playing
music (including your own) all your life. And nobody can take that away from you. M aking
music should be an activity which enhances your quality of life , and which allows you to
share what is best in yourself. It is worth quite a lot of work to make that happen.

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 12. Look into some linguistic theory .

People have been interested in how to best approach learning a language since.. well..
forever, probably. Take some time to skim the major approaches, then re lect on how/why
they do or don’t align with your personal values.

u/TottoriJPN condensed several major approaches into takeaways and TL;DR’s.

- Learning Methods 101: Natural Methods
- Learning Methods 102: Linguistic Methods

u/Virusnzz has created an extensive starter’s guide that addresses many FAQs, provides
advice on different aspects of language learning and introduces many key concepts.

u/Nonebb has created an in depth outline of several language-learning strategies for

different types of learners that includes further reading and supplemental activities.

Anecdotes and Re lections

I’m not a linguist and I probably won’t cite anything, but if you’ve stuck around for this long,
perhaps you’d be interested in hearing how I look at some more meta-learning topics. These topics
have in luenced this document, but I didn’t feel that they were directly relevant to the concrete thing
you were working on at the time.

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Sudoku and Zones of Proximal Development
[placeholder here]

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Administrative stuff, for lack of a better word

Links that I probably want to use somewhere

Basic pitch accent info

How kanji work | Tofugu

Kanji stroke order | Tofugu
On looking words up
The 217 kanji radicals

Verb conjugation
How particles work
Cool verb conjugation chart
Visual grammar explanations
Lots of grammar points, explained in clear Japanese | Similar site (outline, examples, body)
Learning plan by JLPT level
Marshallyin Grammar explanations
Edewakaru
YouTube walkthrough of Genki
Intro to Japanese -- [quite technical] online grammar textbook
Did I mention lippantry? Just in case
Anime/games/manga by readability (+resource dump) by jo_mako
Lots of free resources
Free online Japanese course from Kyoto University

the intermediate plateau (part II)

Anime/Drama lashcards (... use with morphman)

The original ajatt - might be some useful stuff

How to make a behavior addictive
the like switch

Tons of FAQs about learning Japanese

Useful resources dump

Constructive practice and effortless practice

Genki Companion Website | Genki (Companion?) Videos
JapaneseComplete guide product behind it, but very simple/accessible intro to grammar topics

The basic structure of a story

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The importance of familiarity, buildup and expectations (also this)
Top 10 breakthroughs in the science of learning

colorful words / slang (idk where to put this)

Learners given task… they became more ef icient while practicing, and by the end of the task, it took
20% less metabolic power to perform the task. As you master simpler skills, you remove
energy-constraints from your brain in a very literal sense that allows you to spend more energy
focusing on the important/dif icult parts of your tasks at hand. You can perform better at someone,
even if you don’t know anything more than they do, sheerly because your body works more ef iciently.

The Dip by Seth Godin - the extraordinary bene its of knowing when to quit. WHen you irst begin
anything, there’s a burst of excitement and everything is new/novel. Remembering new stuff is easy.
Quickly, all this stuff starts to build on each other and we realize how much there is to learn -- the irst
wall. Most people quit at this wall. This book is about how to get over it.

Edward Thorndike & The Start of Educational Psychology

→ Quantity eventually becomes quality
→ While cats had a clear “success” signal (they could inally get out of the damn box), you
Probably don’t. How can you change that? (TL;DR)

Not 6 degrees of separation, but 3.5 (II)

What I’ve learned working in PR and spending a year exploring freelance writing -- we’re
pretty closely connected. It’s not really that hard to get in touch with people… but most
people don’t. As this is the only thing I have data about -- there are currently 60 concurrent
non-idle readers of this document; that number has slowly increased from 30 since I shared
it. It’s got ~2.5k upvotes total. I’ve received 9 pieces of feedback on the survey; I’ve
incorporated much of it. Perhaps 20 people have sent in small questions/clari ications. Two
people have had extended (over a couple weeks) conversation with me.

On the Fluentin3months website, Benny Lewis at one point commented that practically all
the people working for him were people who just reached out -- hey, I noticed your site
doesn’t have [thing]. I do [thing]. Here’s how it can help. Would you be game to Skype for half
an hour and talk about it?

Well, only one person has offered to pitch in: he offered to help turn this into a website. I f I
was interested in expanding, he’d have a job (or at least, a shot) -- and all he did was ask.

So far I’ve written for or worked with ive language companies, some small and some large
In all of these cases, again, all I did was ask. Sometimes it was just an email with writing
samples, other times I put together a presentation with some SEO data and offered

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 suggestions to improve their blogs. Often times I was able to connect with people well
enough to keep in touch with them even if it didn’t turn into a job.

So, if you want to do something, reach out . Very few people do.

Changelog
- 04/29 : began chatting with /a company/ about shooting a small video for one of their
series. Still in the works (have to get my talking points veri ied), but it’s of icially in the
works. I’ll do ive 2 minute segments, one in EN/SP/JP/RU/CN.
- 05/01 : added one page summary to beginning of document, moved old “day zero” content
to appendix
- 05/06 : received con irmation to do an interview with the CEO of Satori Reader; nothing set
in stone yet, but he’s willing and I think he has a lot to offer ^^
- 05/08 : added inal chapter to the section on vocabulary (on memorizing stuff ) but I don’t
like it. I’ll re-do it later once things are further along.
- 05/09 : inished draft of mini-chapter based on interview with Matt vs Japan; will be
available soon
- 05/12 : added introduction to the input section, currently organizing the chapter.
- 05/14 : added changelog so it’s easier to see what I’ve been up to
- 05/15 : Outlined the input homework: reading section
- 05/17 : I’ve been receiving good feedback about the one-page summary from 05/01, so I’ve
expanded upon it a bit. I’ve added three new sections: stages of language acquisition, stage
one and a placeholder for stage two. I also re-worked the how to use this document section
of the introduction. Hopefully these changes will make it easier to navigate this document.
- 05/19 : Revamped the irst two sections of the phonetics section: opening words a nd TL;DR .
- 05/26 : Revamped the pronunciation chapter’s section on homework.
- 05/29 : Have been thinking about the input section. Added the section opening words and
began outlining the start here section.
- 05/31 : I spent the afternoon writing a long-winded and wordy post instead of inishing up
Matt vs Japan’s interview. Sorry guys, and thank you Matt for your endless patience.
- 06/08 : Finished the Input section’s opening words, part of its TL;DR and the introduction to
the reading section. Next I’ll lesh out the homework sections for reading and listening .
- 06/15 : Finally inished the write-up of the interview with Matt vs Japan. Just waiting to get
the green light from him and then it will be added -- 11 pages! (Sorry for the delay -- we’re
preparing for a global conference at work and I haven’t had time to write recently).
- 06/19 : Added Speechling as a resource in Pronunciation’s further practice section.
- 06/22 : F leshed out ~half the section for Input: Reading Homework
- 06/23 : Finished thet Input: Reading Homework section. Might trim/reformat later.
- 6/27+28 : Began putting together a ~15 minute video showing me speaking my languages.
English overview, then ~3 minutes elaborating on an idea from that overview in
SP/JP/RU/CN. My irst take was ~40 minutes long and mostly just rambling… I decided that

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 nobody really wants to see another person just speaking languages, so I’ve tried to condense
it down into something actually helpful. Also, there’s so much I didn’t know about
presentation/making video content. I gained a ton of respect for YouTubers this weekend.
- 06/29 : Added in a few “stage 12” starter’s reading suggestions after someone’s feedback
(thanks!) -- also began leshing out the listening comprehension section.
- 06/30 : Added Matt vs Japan’s interview!

To Do List (based on feedback)

- 5/31: Maybe something to think about- instead of organizing by section (grammar, vocab,
kanji, pronunciation) you organize by skill level: what beginners/intermediate/advanced
should be doing in each “stage”. What resources are suited for which levels. → I agree that
this sort of organization would probably make more sense than what I have. For the time
being, I’d like to inish the main body of the document so that the foundation is there. Once it’s
done, I’ll create a beginner’s landing page and an intermediate one. This will link to relevant
pages of the document, providing a more clear overview of what I expect you to be doing at a
given time, rather than making you read through each chapter simultaneously.
- The main bit of advice I’ve garnered from your feedback (thanks!) is that my original post
was useful because it was concise, packed with resources and actionable. In this document
I’ve greatly expanded, resources are more spread out and it’s more of a discussion, rather
than a series of commands. While these changes are useful for people who are committed
already, it makes this document signi icantly less accessible for. → I’m in the process of
re-structuring the document to be easier to follow. See my plans on the page on “h ow to use
this document ”.
- Include a resource dump somewhere that TL;DR’s resources by section, including some stuff
that didn’t it into what I originally wrote, like Rikaisama/an IME → As I’ve outlined in “h ow
to use this document ”, I will (V2) add a resource-dump page to the end of each chapter.
- Include a few online dictionary (J>E and J>J), links to videos showing how each sound in
Japanese is made and add an appendix on keigo. → For the time being, I recommend that you
look up which sounds are in Japanese via the J apanese IPA wiki and then copy and paste the
symbols into a YouTube search for content by G lossika Phonetics . For example, -- [ɸ] glossika
phonetics -- brings you to t his video on how to make the Japanese F sound. You will need to go
through Artifexian’s videos on the IPA system that I linked to in the phonetics section to
understand these videos.
- 6/29: Quite a few people have left feedback requesting extensions of the guide to cover
more advanced topics/through the N1/etc. When I otherwise complete this document I might
add some of that, but I want to emphasize that my main goal here is to help beginners reach a
point of independence in which they feel comfortable iguring that out for themselves. If
anything, I could see myself expanding the grammar section to introduce more
resources/options, expand the input section with reading suggestions for getting into different
genres, and stuff like getting the most value out of your time reading. There is just so much
content you could cover in the advanced stage that it just isn’t really practical to cover… what

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 you learn at an advanced stage largely depends on you and your unique needs.

For example, I have a 150 page reference book that discusses o nly Japanese emails. It walks
through the structure of Japanese emails, in depth looks into several different types of emails
for different purposes, reaching out to different types of people/businesses depending on your
status (consumer, competitor, worker, boss, colleague, etc).... Useful for me, and necessary for
my “advanced”, as I will be helping to coordinate a major event with the Japanese branch of my
company next year, but I really doubt that this sort of thing would be useful for most people.

Thanks
[something or other about a lot of work went into this from a lot of people, but in particular]
- A huge thanks to Virusnzz, the moderator at r/LanguageLearning, for his invaluable
feedback.
- A huge thanks to all of the busy content creators who took time out of their day to meet with
me for a bit
- A huge thanks to the nine of you (so far) that have left me feedback; I’ve incorporated many
of your suggestions while making revisions to the document.
- A huge thanks to you, for putting up with my writing.

Leave Me Feedback
I’m not interested in your money, but if you could spare me a few minutes of your time, I would
appreciate your feedback. This is the longest piece of writing I’ve shared publicly, and if I’ve learned
anything from writing circles, it’s that everything needs revision and a second draft.

Based on feedback so far, I’d appreciate if you’d let me know how I’m doing in terms of:
● Approachability . Language has been a huge part of my life for the last 5 years, so sometimes
it can be dif icult to step back and think about what a beginner needs. Do you feel like my
document is accessible, or do you feel like you’re being thrown into the deep end?
● Organization . Overwhelmingly, the feedback I’ve gotten says this is great, but… followed by a
comment about how there’s a lot of content, people aren’t sure where to start and that I
could have presented my thoughts more clearly. I’ve been trying to address that by
re-working the structure of the document. How am I doing?

If you’re willing to leave me feedback, or you’d like to request that I cover certain topics, you can do
so here. ( 9 questions, all optional, no login required )

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