Learning Japanese? Here’s How to Start

Sep 30, 2024

Learning Japanese? Here’s How to Start

It’s no secret that learning Japanese is difficult. Learning any language is no easy feat, but Japanese is particularly challenging — it can even seem impossible when you’re a complete beginner. However, by taking the right first steps, you’ll build a strong foundation upon which to progress and reach your desired level of proficiency.

Step 0: Be Realistic

Japanese can most definitely feel intimidating – After all, the United States has a language ranking provided by its Foreign Service Institute on the hardest languages to learn with Japanese right down at the bottom as “exceptionally difficult.”

But the truth here is that while you will most certainly struggle with the language, it is by no means impossible. It is just significantly time-consuming.

If you are here for just a year or so, consider just learning enough to not trouble those around you – Learn your hiragana, katakana and enough kanji to, say, read a calendar or understand basic things like where a toilet or the subway entrances and exits are. (More on what those are below) These are low-hanging fruit as most cities have adopted bilingual signs to significantly aid your understanding.

If you plan to be here for several years, set a goal for yourself each year. This goal could be via the JLPT  (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) series or a personal goal like being able to handle a certain type of conversation by yourself.

As you travel down the language road, it is important that you both strictly keep to a schedule and, paradoxically, be nice to yourself. The moment you take a “few weeks off” to not study, those weeks will have magically extended to several months. And yet, you will find, despite all of that productive studying, a frustrating situation will occur that would have taken mere moments to resolve in your native language. Why am I spending all this time studying if I cannot even request for no pickles on a burger?!?!

This is where you need to nice to yourself. Take a deep breath and remind yourself that basically every single foreigner here had the exact same issue. If you use social media (like, say, Reddit) that can cover a wide variety of topics, then try a search for your exact kind of conversation and bask in the number of other foreigners who also failed. Every person trying to learn Japanese has struggled with the same problems.

Japanese can feel like a mountain at first, but you will find it is just a series of somewhat steep hills. None of the steps in front of you are particularly difficult per say – memorize these Chinese characters, practice using that grammatical phrase smoothly – but your brain will most certainly need time to digest things.

Step 1: Practice the Alphabet

The Japanese alphabet is called hiragana and is made up of 51 characters. While this is more characters than the English alphabet, the good news is that the Japanese characters are phonetic and only have one sound. In other words, once you know hiragana, you’ll be able to pronounce any Japanese word.

Since you’re just starting, your focus should be on recognizing and saying each character rather than writing. A better use of your time than writing is learning to type hiragana. Once you can read hiragana, you should need just a day or two to feel comfortable typing the characters. All you need is to enable a Japanese keyboard on your phone or computer.

Note that hiragana is just for Japanese words. For loan words from other languages, you’ll need katakana. Familiarize yourself just with the words you’re likely to need.

Step 2: Work On Your Pronunciation

It’s important to ensure you are pronouncing hiragana correctly. Otherwise, people will struggle to understand you, and you’ll find it difficult to differentiate between similar words. Use videos made by native speakers and try to mimic the sounds. Learning how to form sounds with your mouth can also help.

Step 3: Learn Some Basic Kanji

The Japanese writing system uses Chinese characters called kanji to express some full words and phrases. Kanji is the most difficult aspect of learning Japanese. Unfortunately, it’s necessary to learn some kanji early — otherwise, you’ll struggle with everything from vocabulary to grammar later. To keep progressing, you may like to set targets to learn a certain number of kanji a week along with vocabulary that uses kanji.

Step 4: Study Grammar

Vocabulary is of no use if you’re unable to put together meaningful sentences — this requires grammar. Simply stringing words together using grammar rules from English (or another language you may speak) will result in nonsense. Purchase a grammar book for beginners to learn the basic rules. The most important things to cover at this stage are particles and sentence structure.

Most foreigners who took Japanese university courses in English speaking countries will be familiar with the Genki series. These tend to be a great starting point for getting a grasp of how the language is constructed and readers can enjoy the evolving saga of Mary and Takeshi.

Step 5: Memorize Useful Phrases

To start using your Japanese in real life, learn some simple phrases. It makes sense to learn these after you’ve studied some grammar, as this will help you understand why a phrase is structured the way it is. Some types of useful phrases to learn include greetings, introductions, and simple questions, along with possible responses.

Becoming fluent in Japanese takes years, but you can acquire the basics in a much shorter amount of time. Even these basics will be invaluable if you’re visiting or living in Japan. You have many resources at your disposal, including videos and articles by Japanese teachers, interactive activities from language-learning platforms, and flashcards. All this information may have seemed overwhelming before — but now you know exactly where to start.

Bonus: Great Materials

I am personally a fan of the Genki textooks for someone who is a total beginner (see the link above). The first two textbooks are a no-brainer for those who find the textbook format to be the most conducive for learning.

If you go beyond these, the Nihongo So-matome series can be a great next stop, though I personally liked the Shin Kanzen Master series more myself.

On YouTube, there is an excellent channel called Nihongo no Mori that also tends to set videos, etc. based on JLPT levels, though it has a large range of resources for all levels. If you nose around, other channels and content creators of varying levels will pop up as well, but this channel is an extensive resource.

For taking on the large number of kanji, apps that embrace spaced repetition are life savers. If you tried the flashcards link above and are looking for more, the AnkiApp is very straightfoward in this matter – Find a deck that matches your goal (there are decks that go from just learning hiragana all the way up to the dreaded JLPT N1), load it into the app and just start looking at the cards. AnkiApp (and others like it) embrace the spaced repetition methodology of filtering out cards you easily answer and bringing up the cards you more frequently struggle with. Give youself time in the morning and at night, stick to it, and you will marvel at how much your brain can actually absorb.

If you work best with a teacher actively leading you along, there are a variety of language schools that can teach Japanese. Companies like TCJ have been at this for decades and most certainly will give you your money’s worth.

At the end of the day, Japanese is an incredibly rewarding language to learn while living in Japan and is completely doable with the right attitude and study schedule. Ganbatte!

Exchanges Photos, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons