posh.wiki / blog
How I learned Japanese 2025-02-16
In 2020, I started learning Japanese casually. I didn't have any specific goals in mind, I just had a lot of free time (didn't we all in 2020?) and I thought it would be interesting.
For context here, it being 2020 and me being 16, I didn't have particularly many options for doing anything in person, so I started where most do: Online.
Most people online will try to sell you one overpriced textbook or another. I, a former broke teenager and currently slightly less broke young-ish adult, did spend a small amount of money in this endeavour, but I won't be recommending any pricey exercise books or courses.
My first stop was, of course, Duolingo. That quickly proved rather insufficient. I couldn't understand the kana they were teaching, let alone the kanji.
Vocab
My next stop was Drops. Drops is an app (and website) focused mostly on vocabulary. With the free version, you get a free 5 minutes per day (10 if you can time it right) to practice.
Drops has units to learn hiragana and katakana, as well as kanji radicals. Not only did I learn around 100 charters in just a couple of weeks, but drops' interface also has you draw out the characters, teaching the proper stroke order, which I hear is difficult to correct if you learn it wrongly. Many people don't seem to realise that Latin characters are also subject to rules regarding in which order a single glyph should be written.
With Drops, you pick the topics you want to learn about and are free to skip over themes or even individual words you don't care for. I appreciated the high customisability, especially the option to turn off English captions and communicate ideas in images only, which helps learners to avoid the practice of thinking first in a concept, then in English, and finally Japanese, instead going straight from idea to Japanese word.
The algorithm that throws up words seems to be influenced by some form of spaced repetition, and it worked great for me. Overall, the app strikes a great balance between trusting learners to choose their own curriculum and tweak their methods, while also guiding them based on data too complex for a human to calculate.
My single complaint about drops, which remains to this day, is one of its activities, in which a word or phrase is split into multiple parts, which must then be organised. The places in which the splits occur seem to be random, and are often highly illogical. Most kana repeesent a consonant-vowel pair, with 5 lone vowels, one lone consonant, and 3 transliterated using 3 Latin characters. The randomised splits often left the romaniaations of single kana broken, resulting in clusters that would be impossible on their own, like "ng" or "ich". I just found this to be quite disorienting.
Though it was logical to end my subscription after learning everything they had to offer (even though they add more very frequently!), Drops is one of the few services I've ever been happy to pay for, especially at its very reasonable price.
Grammar
After having learned how to write and some useful words, it was time to start putting some sentences together. I relied mostly on YouTube to teach me grammar. I especially liked the channel "Japanese ammo with Misa". I always found her videos to be at just the right pace and level for me.
If ever I particularly needed something written, I would consult Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese (which is a website, not a book).
Exposure
I'll admit it now: I'm not the biggest fan of anime. I've seen 2, maybe 3, over the course of my life, and have no particular intention to increase that number. Rather ironic for someone who has spent so long studying Japanese, but, I don't think anime has anything to offer me personally that other media doesn't, and I don't move in circles where the latest and greatest anime is a common topic of discussion. The same is true of manga, as I've never read so much as a page of it.
Instead, I exposed myself to Japanese through a few other means. Sometimes I would use Japanese dubs or subtitles when watching a show in English, if they were available. I changed the display language on my phone to Japanese, and went out of my way to bring Japanese language content into my feed on Twitter and YouTube. I brought the language into my life rather organically, becoming immersed and invested just as part of my day, rather than having to go out and look for Japanese.
I truly can't stress enough how important it is not just to memorise and learn a language, but rather to immerse yourself in it and acquire it in a more natural sense. It removes the layer of translation ("π" is a "book" and a "book" is a γζ¬γand γζ¬γsounds like γγ»γ) and instead trains you to think directly in the language (γπγγ―γζ¬οΌγ»γοΌγγ§γγ)
Practice
In the early days of learning, I journaled in Japanese. Every day, I would write at least a few sentences about what I had done, or what I was thinking about if it was an especially uneventful day. If I ran into the desire for a word I didn't know, I wouldn't write around it, but look it up, and write it large to denote its newness.
After about a year of learning, I joined a beginners' night class, but to my surprise was quickly told that I should move to the upper intermediate class, which I did. These night classes, once weekly, were where I would practice speaking, coming up with ways to describe new ideas on the fly. I remember well having to explain something along the lines of γγγγγ倧ε¦γ§εεΌ·γγΎγγγγ―γγγγγ§γγη§γ―ε¦ηγ§γγγ©β¦ε€§ε¦γ«θ‘γγΎγγγεε ζ³γ§γγγγγ
Further notes
I would highly recommend using the 12-key keyboard for mobile. It's generally faster, and knowing the layout can help in remembering the order of the alphabet. Also, it just feels cooler.
Honourable mentions
The language learning community will probably doxx me if I don't talk about Anki. I personally did not care for it. I could attribute it to the shabby UI, difficult syncing, or low customisability, but the truth is I just don't find flashcards to be an effective tool for me. I appreciate Anki's FOSSness and the science backing it, but it's just not for me.