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Monday 12 December 2016

8 tips for learning Japanese free by yourself outside Japan



First, a short rant:

Something that has been bothering me lately is people boasting “I passed JLPT N2/1 after only 1 (/2/3) years!” or “I could watch anime and understand nearly everything after 6 months!” especially on sites for beginner learners, as if to prove their method is somehow the best. I can only imagine the number of beginners who manage to study for a few months to a year, realise their level is far lower than this, and lose motivation to continue, thinking they are just not good enough to get anywhere.

This is not me giving a patronising “everyone learns at a different rate” platitude. I just want to point out how meaningless a length of time such as a year or 6 months is. Is that one year where you as a native Korean speaker were living in Japan and having 3-4 hours of Japanese class nearly every day? Or is it one year where you as a native French speaker were holding down a full-time job and studying by yourself at the weekends? Don't get me started on this "fluent in 3 months" scam. Yeah, if your definition of "fluent" is "can make someone understand you want to ask where the toilet is", then sure.

You may not be able to change your native language, the amount of study time you have available each week, or whether you can spend time in Japan. But you can consider your study habits. It took me a fair amount of trial-and-error to find the ways I consider most efficient for self-study without spending money on classes, and without it feeling like work. Anyway, on with the list!





1. Remember, you will not remember everything! It’s very frustrating when you keep looking things up in the dictionary and thinking “oh, yes, I learnt that…”

But unless you have a perfect memory, this will happen to you all the time. Especially at the beginning, when your brain hasn’t got used to the patterns of an unfamiliar language. So it’s better to accept it at the outset and plan regular reviews of kanji, vocab etc.


2. Watch some Japanese TV or films to practise listening. Even if you are a beginner, you can watch with subtitles.

It’s important to listen to Japanese and hear it used in everyday contexts. Certain people *ahem* insist that you should watch this stuff without subtitles to prevent you from just reading the subtitles. But I really think that attitude is counterproductive. If you’re a beginner, that’s only going to bore and frustrate you, unless you have superhuman patience for watching things you can’t understand. This will probably lead you to give up, thinking that understanding Japanese is an impossible goal. You might think it’s not helpful to watch something with subtitles, but this way you will quickly pick up the pronunciation, intonation and some common expressions. Seeing/hearing the words in context will really help, believe me.

Please note that in anime, dialogue is often strange or exaggerated (e.g. they might make a character speak in an unnaturally authoritative way to communicate their bossy character to the audience). For this reason it’s better to go for live drama, variety shows etc. if you are watching to learn Japanese. I will say, though, in anime they often speak more clearly…

You can find a lot of Japanese TV free with subtitles online, so there’s certain to be something you can enjoy. Find a drama site and browse.

I kept a notebook where I wrote down new words I learnt – not all the new words, but ones that were interesting and I was unlikely to come across in the textbook I had.


3. Talk to some Japanese people online, once you’ve got a basic grasp of the language. Some universities have a language exchange program you can sign up for. However, this is not usually efficient, because if you are only a beginner and your partner is great at English, you won’t get much practice. Also, I personally find it really hard to speak to a particular person in more than one language e.g. if I have always spoken to them in Italian, it’s weird for us to start talking in English and vice versa.

An alternative is to find an online penpal that you can chat to through messages. I have found this extremely helpful, especially talking to people who can’t speak English so well because then you can’t rely on it. You are far more likely to remember a new word or phrase if it is used in an actual conversation than in a textbook. And it feels much less strange to alternate between languages in text.

The website I used is called interpals.net, which I like because there are a lot of users and hence always someone to chat with. Of course, please exercise caution when talking with strangers on the internet and take care of your personal information.

interpals privacy settings
I also like that there are good privacy settings on this site

It is easy to type phonetically in Japanese on most computers and smartphones, so google instructions for your operating system.

The most widely used chat/voice call app in Japan is called LINE. It’s very similar to whatsapp. You can use it on your PC or tablet, but you need a smartphone to sign up for it in the first place.


4. If you have a smartphone, get an app so you can learn whenever you’re bored. You may think you have no time to study some days, but by utilising your free moments sitting on the bus or waiting in a queue you can create study time for yourself.

It’s generally not worth making your own flashcards, when there are already lots of apps and online games for learning characters and vocab. A flashcard app that I like is “JLPT words”, which is designed with the JLPT (most common Japanese exam) in mind. If you are just starting out, start with “JLPT N5”, the lowest level. You can set it to hiragana or kanji.

If you also want to learn to write kanji, “Kanji Senpai” is pretty good, although the writing part is not free.

Related post: How is the JLPT scaled?


5. Don’t just rely on Tae Kim for grammar and jisho.org for a dictionary. These are great references, but you may get a distorted view only using a couple of sites. Japanese is so popular there are hundreds of great sites you can use.

If you need to translate English->Japanese you may prefer the alc.co.jp dictionary, which includes a lot of idioms.

Tae Kim’s grammar guide doesn’t do much in the way of introduction to the writing system or exercises, but solely as a grammar reference this is one of the best free resources. However, do remember that he is not a native speaker and his word is not gospel. Nor does he cover every grammar point you will need even at an everyday conversation level. Although I have not found any out-and-out mistakes browsing his guide, I do disagree with him on the usage and nuances of some words and phrases (e.g. 俺), and some of his explanations are incomplete (e.g. the difference between は and が).

If you are studying at a university, check the library to see if there are Japanese books you can look at free. Even if you’re not at university, there’s a small chance your local library will have something useful. I have not yet found a general textbook that I’ve really liked – I’ve tried Genki 2, Minna no Nihongo II, and Intermediate Japanese but they all had very noticeable faults. Still, if you have access to a textbook in the library or can get one for a reasonable price, it does help to see more than one explanation for a type of grammar and to have some exercises to complete.


6. Make it a priority to learn the kanji. This is one area where it’s not a disadvantage to be studying by yourself, because to some extent these simply need to be drilled into your head. And it becomes much easier to read and learn new vocabulary once you know more kanji – indeed you can start to guess the meanings of words you’ve never seen before, a luxury many language-learners don’t have.

I had a lot of physics lectures this year that I had to attend but found utterly useless. I spent my time sitting at the back and copying out kanji / readings over and over. This is slightly better than staring into space for 2 hours. Because my knowledge was a bit patchwork, I simply got a list of the kanji for each school grade (the order in which Japanese children learn them) and went through nearly all the jouyou kanji. This is probably not the best way to go about it, but I wanted to be thorough and make sure I hadn’t missed out a fairly common character or got two similar-looking kanji mixed up.


kanji learning
I accept no responsibility for the effect this method may have on your grades


Some people like to “make up a story” for each character, but IMO remembering 2000 stories is harder than remembering 2000 characters. You can learn by radical, which is a slightly more sane option – in any case, you will at least need to be able to draw the radicals. There are lists of radicals available for download online.

I also learnt an English meaning with each kanji, which some people say is pointless (“you should learn whole words!”) but I say is definitely not. Why? Because you can try to come up with a fancy story for the shapes of the kanji 褒 or 調, but there is already a space in your memory devoted to the words “praise” and “investigate”. The whole point in mnemonics etc. is that you are connecting something hard to remember with something easy to remember. In this case, the word in your native language is the something easy. I connected these two things simply by copying out the kanji. For me, writing something out by hand has always been the best way to remember it.


7. Keep your motivation up. Probably one of the hardest parts of learning a language by yourself. The best way is if you see a tangible improvement or goal you want to achieve. This is partly why I kept track of the number of kanji I knew (even if it was never 100% accurate) and also physically wrote down new vocab in a notebook – because then I would come back to the list later and think “oh yes, I know most of these now”.

Keeping a diary or record of your progress and organising your study will help because you can see how far you’ve come. You can also see your future goals as achievable by breaking them up into steps.

Another way to stop your motivation fading is to make Japanese friends as I suggested in point 2. If you have fun chatting with people you won’t think of it as studying, and it will make you want to improve so you can have better conversations.


8. Don’t feel pressurised and give up. Probably the only reason I’ve got this far is because at the start I was just learning Japanese as a hobby, without any exams or any particular goal in mind. I suspect if I’d been taking a class, I would have given up pretty quickly. Japanese throws too many unfamiliar things at you at the start.

Although setting targets is good, you have to be realistic. Learning Japanese by yourself is hard, and even many people who’ve lived in Japan for years struggle to have a conversation. In the end, it doesn’t matter how long it took you to learn. The point is, you learnt. You learnt to process your thoughts and express yourself in a completely different way. And the first time you realise you’ve had an interesting conversation with someone you never would have been able to talk to otherwise, you will feel the power of that achievement.

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