The Practical Guide to Learning Japanese for Anime and Game Fans

Having been asked by countless people, "What's the best way to learn Japanese?", this guide shares a practical and easy-to-follow method for tackling the language, especially for anime and game enthusiasts. This isn't a formal or academic approach, but rather a method that fits a specific learning style. This guide aims to provide a solid foundation for playing games, reading manga, and communicating online.

Background and Disclaimer

The language skills gained from this guide were enough to provide a huge head start and ability to read signs, make way around, understand a mix of English and Japanese at work and to pay bills/ rent own apartment.

This is simply one way to learn, and neither a formal, nor proper, nor the best way to learn Japanese. Learning this way may leave holes in your knowledge and be an unsteady foundation for further academic study. However, if you simply want to play games, read manga, read SNS and communicate with people online, you should develop more than enough skills (particularly in reading) to further improve and be able to do such things.

Preparation and Tools

This guide will cover reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The goal is to reach Japanese fluency as directly as possible. This method for learning Japanese starts at the very beginning. It assumes you have zero knowledge of the Japanese language and guides you through each step.

Anki: Your New Best Friend

Anki is a flashcard program that uses spaced repetition to help you memorize information efficiently. Download Anki and make an account. You can either upload your own decks or download others people have made online or through Anki’s library. Decks are made for specific purposes: vocabulary, kanji, medical terms, golf terms, you name it.

Read also: Your Guide to Nursing Internships

The short of how Anki works is:

You set how many new cards to learn a day in a deck
Each day, Anki gives you a mix of up to X new cards (based on your settings) to learn, and staggered old cards from past days.
You honestly answer whether the card was good, easy, hard or you don’t know it. Be honest! Don’t cheat yourself! The harder you say it is, the sooner it will return (i.e. tomorrow). If you do not know it, you are shown the answer and will repeat it today, this session until you know it.

You're about to get very intimate with Anki over the next year.

Mastering the Alphabets: Hiragana and Katakana

First and foremost, you need to learn Hiragana and Katakana. There’s no short or pretty way to do this, but you should find your own way to do this online. (You can also just find a deck for each on the Anki app I mentioned above) While this may take some time (a week or three), if you stick to it you can nail this very quickly and do not need to overthink it.

Most Japanese classrooms spend an entire month learning how to read and write hiragana. That's too long! Instead of writing out each hiragana character over and over to memorize them, use the guide below and you may be reading hiragana later tonight. It's important to note that this guide is going to teach you how to read hiragana and not how to write it. While it is important to learn how to hand write Japanese eventually, right now it will slow you down immensely with very little payoff. In order to complete this section and move on, you need to get to the point where you can read all of the hiragana. Even if you're slow, as long as you can recall each character, as well as the contractions, without cheating, that's enough. Good pronunciation starts with hiragana. While hiragana alone won't teach you everything, it is the key to understanding how and why Japanese words sound the way they do. It will also help you get the foundation you need for a native-sounding accent.

Katakana Considerations

Note: Katakana is hard! One of the reasons may be that a lot of letters look very similar, if your Katakana is poor or you miss a few or are slow at reading it, just move on! You’ll find out that even Japanese people have trouble reading long strings of Katakana, you’ll be just like them! Katakana tends to give learners more trouble than hiragana. This is because it seems to be used less than hiragana and kanji, especially at the beginning stages. Later on, katakana will appear more frequently, but for now simply being able to read katakana is enough. There will be plenty of opportunities to get better at it-just know that reading katakana may not come as quickly as it did with hiragana. And that's okay.

Conquering Kanji: A Marathon, Not a Sprint

Done with Hiragana & Katakana? Easy right? hah… This is where it gets painful. There’s no way to avoid learning Kanji, there’s no glorious, no smart or easier process, you just have to learn a LOT of Kanji. The main advice is to only take on the pain of grinding away at Kanji and make everything else around ‘what do I learn, how?” go away. You only need to stick to it and think nothing else.

For Kanji I recommend: Kanjidamage. Read Kanjidamage’s intro/how to use for an explanation which I won’t repeat here. However the critical point is: Kanjidamage is structured in a ‘building upon each kanji/radical’ order and therefore not in a useful kanji order, you will be missing simple Kanji if you give up before you have completed it. This is critical and shows that you must complete the whole Kanjidamage deck within the year, partial completion is useless.

Stroke Order and Kunyomi/Onyomi

Note: Do not learn stroke order. Yes this is bad advice, we will get to it later in the ‘Writing’ section.

Question: Do I learn kunyomi or onyomi, I’m confused!

Answer: Try your best to learn both, learn them as a pair. Don’t treat them as separate. It’s not always possible, but try both even at a vague level, memorize both mnemonics! It’s ok to forget a bunch! Do your best and be honest with Anki when you forget!

Setting Your Pace

Aim for 5-10 new cards per day in your Kanjidamage deck. Start with 5 and whenever you are going strong feel free to crank this up a touch.

Never do more than 10 new cards per day. I mean it. Repeat after me. I will never study more than 10 new kanjidamage cards per day. No matter how confident you are or how much free time you have, doing more than 10 cards in a day will come back to bite you and it will bite you HARD down the line, days later when you get mixed in with hard cards you can’t nail in one day.

Set your maximum reps to 100 per day. You shouldn’t revise more than 100 Kanjidamage cards per day. If you reach the 100 reps mark, set your new cards to 0 immediately until you are clear.

No mater come rain, come shine, come 20 reps, come 100 reps. DO YOUR ANKI REPS EVERY DAY. Even if it means laying in bed for 30 mins before sleeping, DO NOT MISS YOUR REPS. Your (Japanese) life depends on this. My advice is to try and do this when commuting, on transport, on the toilet, in random downtimes. When your Anki is at 0 reps, you are free for the day. If you study with other people at the same time or have friends trying to learn, make sure to nag them daily to “do your reps”. The target of 5-10 (with lulls of 0 when you get overloaded with reps) should keep you on track with this. If you complete Kanjidamage, you will be more than equipped to read or at least guess a tonne of Kanji and it will let you grasp writings, signs, concepts, game items and things you never even learnt vocabulary for. Physical copies are paid-for, the online version is free.

I recommend studying no less than a chapter every week, however you are free to pace this as you like, do not feel obliged to rush ahead and take this at your own pace.

Grammar: Building the Framework

Grammar can be a tricky one, but unlike the vast amount of kanji you need to simply memorize, you’ll pick up grammar a lot and strengthen it from reading later. As long as you grasp most of the basic rules, I wouldn’t advise perfecting grammar too much if your goal is mainly to read things.

Vocabulary: Expanding Your Arsenal

For vocabulary, I recommend using popular JLPT Vocabulary decks found on Anki’s deck library. A number of these exist, pick one that seems to be popular and looks good to you and learn this alongside Kanjidamage. I advise working through them starting at N5 and beginning the next once you have completed the previous and are confident with it. (Before giving up when you reach N1)

It will be difficult at first to get through vocabulary because you won’t know the specific kanji used in every word, but as long as you learn words ‘by general feel/memorization’, a lot will click over time as you either a) know the kanji within the word or b) know words with the kanji, when you reach the kanji in Kanjidamage.

Note: as mentioned, if you don’t know the specific kanji in a word, learning words can be HARD. Don’t get discouraged, a lot of common words you can learn by guessing what they mean by the ‘look’ of them even without understanding specific radicals or kanji within them. Should you completely fluff any early on, you will revisit them by how Anki works down the line once you have learnt the kanji in them independently.

This of course is less of a science and more of a ‘best effort’, but vocabulary is something that you will pick up over time and your knowledge of kanji will help you guess/pick up as you go.

Use similar rules to Kanjidamage to learn no more than 5-10 words per day and balance vocabulary alongside kanji. As kanji is your main focus, I would recommend studying less new vocabulary and focussing all of your efforts on Kanjidamage, vocabulary being a side-dish.

Handwriting: A Modern Consideration

As you may have guessed from the omission of this section from the outline… My recommendation is to not learn to hand-write Japanese. If you have an interest in handwriting, or calligraphy by all means please do! However hand-writing is not covered by this guide whatsoever. The justification for this is that in the modern day how many times do you need to hand-write even in English… Once, twice a year? The same logic applies to using Japanese online: reading and typing will get you 99.99% of the way. (In case you haven’t realized yet, Japanese is input on computers/phones either by picking kana (flick layout) or via qwerty > kana conversion, you will find.)

Of course should you follow this advice be aware you will struggle to fill out the occasional paper form once in a year and should you take any advanced classes your teacher will laugh at you for not even being able to write Hiragana but hey, you learnt Japanese in 1 year at the cost of this!

Bonus: Pronunciation Through Karaoke

While this guide doesn’t cover speaking in any way whatsover (as I did not learn speaking at a much later time), what I can thoroughly recommend is that you go to karaoke! Not any-odd western karaoke, but Japanese karaoke shops that exist on the occasion in the west. If you are like me or like at least some anime/j-pop, karaoke will dramatically improve both your pronunciation and speed-reading of hiragana (you need absolutely no knowledge of kanji).

It might be tough at first but karaoke is both fun and pays off long-term in your ability to read quickly and pronounce things correctly. Go with friends!

Mid-Point Check: Reaching Halfway Through Kanjidamage

What!? Why the sudden time-skip!? Surprise, turns out most of my advice (and most of learning Japanese) is just about learning kanji. You should do your reps NOW!

Once you’ve covered around half of Kanjidamage, you will likely be ready to start reading simple manga (I do not guarantee this, so feel free to start trying this earlier or later, half is simply a point to start considering).

There are many online blogs and resources recommending different manga, feel free to try reading something you have interest in (reading children’s books is often way too boring to really care to tackle, which many advise early on).

My golden recommendation is Yotsuba&! (よつばと！）The reasons for this being that, as a child, Yotsuba’s (the main character) speech will be simple and many more complex words will be questioned by her or explained to her. You’ll basically have a great experience being taught language and words as Yotsuba is (while actually enjoying a great healing manga).

A note when picking manga is that manga that contain furigana (hiragana readings alongside kanji) are not always simple or designed for readers with less vocabulary knowledge. Furigana is usually present based on the demographic of the manga and you may still have a hard time reading something with furigana. The rule of thumb is that if you can read 90% of something, you will enjoy reading it, any less and you will struggle and likely not enjoy the experience/give up quickly.

As you read manga, make sure to make a custom Anki deck and add words that you think are useful/interesting to you: their kanji, reading & meaning. Also look into using ATLAS with AGTH. Rather than simply machine-translating text in-game, you can configure it to give you reading and mouse-over definitions for words you don’t. Enable it to hover-over words you don’t know in web pages for readings/meanings. I can’t stress how fundamentally powerful it is. Install it immediately.

If so congratulations! If not, that’s fine! You may have a more thorough understanding of Kanji you’ve covered than ones I rushed through. Do not fret and stick to it at your own pace. As long as you are making progress through the deck you are learning, if you aren’t making progress, slow your new cards and keep at the reps, they will eventually stick. I Promise.

The Path to Fluency

At this point, you likely have a very strong fundamental understanding of a lot of kanji, grammar and vocabulary. If you followed this guide to a T, you likely have a lot of holes in your Japanese knowledge, ranging from vocabulary, all speaking, any writing, but that’s ok! This is your starting point for consuming media, trying to talk to people, reading Tweets, the world is your oyster!

The best way to continue learning is simply exposure, find some Visual novels you want to read and use the above tools I recommended, find manga you want to read and try reading it, read the tweets of people you never could before without the translation function.

Embracing the Journey

Learning Japanese is a process of gradual discovery. It is not something that you will suddenly understand because someone explained it to you. It is something that you will hear, read, touch, feel, and gradually get used to. Today, there are far more resources to get started than when I learned Japanese.

Tips for Continued Learning

Focus on Verbs: As in all languages, it helps to focus on verbs. It’s not a bad idea to review the most frequent words in Japanese and grow comfortable using them.
Embrace Patterns: I suggest that learners ignore complicated grammatical explanations, counters, and technical terms for different tenses or other aspects of Japanese. It is far more useful to focus on the patterns of the language and how certain concepts are expressed in Japanese. Through patterns, we build intuition.
Massive Reading: Massive amounts of reading is an essential activity for accumulating vocabulary. It’s the fundamental measure of language growth. Therefore, buckle down and learn the Kanji.

Wrapping Up

All in all, as I come to write a conclusion to what is one of my first ever long-form write-ups I realize that this guide is very haphazard and very basic in what to do, options and variants for how to tackle learning. I understand that not everyone learns the same way, or at the same pace but something that I struggled with in learning early on was simply the overwhelming amount of choice and resources out there.

If you are/were like me and just needed a method to try, I hope this guide helped or helps you get a foothold on one method to try learning the language and to have ‘what do I do’ solved for you. Grind away at the steps outlined here and whatever happens, you’ll gain some valuable knowledge even if you don’t complete it. Once you have a foothold on the language and know one way to go about learning it, you’ll likely have the capacity and willingness to explore more alter… However, this journey is going to take a lot of effort and hard work on your part. Anyone who tells you learning a language is going to be easy is either misinformed or trying to sell you something. And eventually, after the honeymoon phase of learning wears off, progress feels slower.

tags: #best #way #to #learn #japanese