How to Start Learning Japanese
Hello everyone! Thank you for 1000 followers. To celebrate, I have put together this post with various resources to start learning Japanese, or continue if you’re stuck! This is a long post, so hold on for the ride.
Step 1: Learning Hiragana and Katakana
You’ll never get anywhere with Japanese if you can’t read it. Reading sentences with romaji can be helpful at the very beginning, but the truth is Japanese is easier to read with kana, and the faster you learn your kana, the better.
Unfortunately, kana is all about rote practice and memorization. You should be learning kana while working on your most basic grammar skills, such as learning to introduce yourself and greetings.
Once you’ve got a little bit of practice in, it’s okay to reference your kana charts once in a while. Your memory will learn them as you use them. It took me a week to learn hiragana, and a month to learn katakana, but I still checked my hiragana sheet occasionally until around the time I finished Genki I, and I still check katakana charts sometimes, and I’ve been studying Japanese for two and a half years!
Here are some resources to get you started:
Hiragana and Katakana Printable Practice Sheets
This website supplies blank practice sheets, or sheets with stroke order information for of the kana. Writing is a great way to memorize new symbols, in general!
Hiragana and Katakana Drag n Drop Game
This game from the Genki self study room diversifies the way you’re studying your kana. It’s great to break up the monotonous aspect of learning to write in Japanese!
This website was the main one I used to learn to read in Japanese. You can select any group of kana, from either syllabary for each subject, in any combination, and it also has various fonts to help you recognize kana in different type faces.
I’ve ripped pdfs of some textbooks to give you access to them. Please let me know if these links go down!
Genki I + Workbook || Genki II + Workbook || Genki Answer Key
While I know not everyone likes Genki, I learned Japanese with Genki and I highly recommend it. Most of the vocabulary in the books is useful, and the grammar lessons provide a mix of casual and formal grammar, both of which you will use if you go to Japan.
An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese + Workbook
While not a direct continuation of Genki, this textbook is continued the spiritual successor of Genki.
Tobira: Gateway to Advanced Japanese
This textbook is targeted towards high-intermediate learners and has excellent reviews.
Step 3: Start Learning Kanji
Kanji may be daunting, but if you really want to learn Japanese you need to start learning Kanji as soon as you know your kana. Most textbooks for beginners offer a kanji section of each chapter, but here are resources to learn kanji.
Kanji Look and Learn + Workbook
This kanji textbook is a companion to Genki. Each chapter offers the same kanji that are given with the corresponding Genki I chapter, plus a few more. It also offers good reading exercises and lots of mnemonics.
The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course
I purchased this kanji textbook in print and try to work with it as much as I can. It is an excellent resource, giving mnemonic and historical information about a kanji to help you remember it. This course is specifically designed for second language Japanese learners in the order in which it introduces kanji. Unfortunately, you have to come up with the tools to learn this kanji yourself.
This website will identify the strokes of any kanji that you give to it. I find this stroke order information very useful because sometime stroke order information in textbooks is too small.
Step 4: Select a Dictionary
Most people probably consider jisho.org a classic. It is completely free and available online to anyone, as well as having lots of search tools to help you find what you’re looking for.
If you have an iOS device, I can’t put into words how highly I recommend downloading this app. Unfortunately, this dictionary is not available to Android users. I hope they do come out with an Android version in the future.
This app is absolutely free, and stores all of its information locally on your device. That means if you don’t have wifi or service, you can still use it! This app came in so convenient when I was in Japan, as I did not have a very good phone plan there.
On top of being a standard dictionary, this app also have a LOT of word lists, various kanji lists, and stroke order information for all Japanese characters. If you are learning Japanese and have an iOS device, Shirabe Jisho is a must have!
Now that you have your references and your curriculum, its time to learn, and learning requires practice. Everyone has different ways to study, but here are some ideas and resources.
Both of these websites let you make your own custom notecard decks with various ways to study them.
This website offers a curricula of kanji and vocabulary to practice. It uses leaderboards and statistics to gameify learning. While I don’t use it everyday, I do log in to practice once in awhile myself.
Duolingo uses various strategies to teach basic grammar and vocabulary that may be effective if you need a more guided approach.
Genki Conjugation Practice
This online resource from Genki grades your conjugations of various grammar forms in Genki I and II.
This website offers various resources to help study for the JLPT, a standardized test that evaluates Japanese proficiency.
This website offers various online tests (also aimed at JLPT preparation) to evaluate your Japanese.
Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese
While I don’t follow Tae Kim’s course, this website is an amazing resource, and is always useful for a second explanation for a grammar concept you may be struggling with.
From NHK, this website offers the news in simple Japanese, with a lot of tools to help you learn.
This section might be more aptly titled “Use Japanese”. Once you’ve learned grammar and vocabulary and all the rest, it’s time to start using it in novel sentences. Here are some ideas to help you do that.
HelloTalk (App Store, Google Play)
HelloTalk is a language exchange app that is very popular among Japanese people studying English. It offers voice messaging and recording within the app, and has many ways to connect you with different users. It’s not always easy to make friends there, but getting a reliable language partner is always worth the effort.
Lang-8 is a language exchange website centered around writing blog posts in your target language and correcting other user’s posts written in your native language. It’s a great way to get feedback on your written Japanese.
Visit Japanese cultural events in your city
If your city has a Japanese Association, they likely organize different cultural events throughout the year. Attend them! It’s a great way to meet other people who are interested in Japan, or Japanese people. Japanese people are very kind, and if you ask politely will likely speak Japanese with you, even a little bit.
Even if you’re both just beginners, having a friend who is also learning Japanese is super helpful, and there’s lots of people learning Japanese here on Tumblr, just to start! Likely you guys will be able to help each other cover your weaknesses. Even if you’re making mistakes with no one to correct you, just using what you learn helps your brain store information in long term memory and hold on to it.
I hope these. resources will help you get started if you want to learn Japanese, but are feeling daunted by it. So buckle up and strap in for the ride!
As always, if you have any additional questions, please feel free to message me!
