How to Learn Japanese: Ultimate 3 Month Guide

"How to learn Japanese?" is really "how to build the right patterns and habits"

If you ask someone who's become fluent in the language, "how to learn Japanese," odds are the answer will be: "Just start."

The reason so many people get hung up at a beginner level in anything (not just learning Japanese!) is that motivation is finite. You start off excited, gung-ho, and ready to learn. You open a few tabs on your browser, read a handful of pages, and then... that's it. Heck, maybe you bought a course that you'll never progress past lesson 3, too.

It happens to the best of us.

This is why we made this guide. It's not about crushing it on day 1 — or even on day 10. It's about setting up a pattern and consistency in your study habits. It gives you some easy things to accomplish each week that will get you on your way to being a perapera nihongo speaker.

This guide is designed for anyone who is starting out studying Japanese

Why?

Because starting out is difficult – especially as an English speaker trying to pick up Japanese. 

This guide will help get you past the very beginning stages, and set you up with some of the tools, strategies, and resources that you should find most useful in your early months. Keep in mind 2 important things:

1. Learning Japanese (or anything, for that matter) is a marathon, not a sprint. You will acquire skills naturally over time with repeated exposure and effort.

2. All outcomes are predicated on your effort. Try a little, learn a little; try hard, and you will learn a lot!

For most people looking for a strategy about how to learn Japanese, it starts and ends quite quickly (numerous times).

Let’s not do that. This is your chance to build a real skill that can bring you real benefits in your life. I have broken the contents of this guide to studying Japanese for beginners into a 4 week process to make it easy to start learning Japanese as a beginner and to make real progress.

Writing Systems

Japanese has 3 alphabets, or writing systems (yes, actually). Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. The deeper into Japanese study you get, the more you will learn about these and what they are used for. For the time being, you'll have to accept the fact that to be able to study Japanese, you have a bit of a hurdle to overcome. You must fully memorize both hiragana and katakana. This can take you a weekend or a year depending how efficiently you memorize things, but for the purposes of this guide, assume about a week. There's a section dedicated to this below.

But first, let's learn a little bit about these writing systems.

Hiragana ひらがな

This is where everybody starts in typical Japanese for beginners courses. If you only know one writing system in Japanese, this is it. There are 46 characters in total, and over time you'll be so confident reading these that the number actually doesn't matter. 

Historically derived from freehand kanji writing (think cursive writing), hiragana flows nicely when handwritten. It can be used totally in place of kanji, but you'll see as you progress that Japanese written entirely in hiragana is quite difficult to read because there are no natural breaks.

Katakana カタカナ

Hiragana's more angular cousin, katakana is identical to hiragana in number of characters and pronunciation. It was used more widely for native Japanese words historically, but now effectively conveys "foreign" loan words and exclamations (eg. smash!). Nowadays, Katakana is particularly useful in restaurants, where words like cheese, wine, and steak are almost always written in katakana. You're not going to get away without learning it, so you might as well blast through it at the same time as hiragana.

Japanese Resources and Downloads

You may want to learn Japanese because you’d like to eventually work and live in Japan. Fantastic. I went that route, and it turned out just fine – but know that it can be a long path, if you’re living outside of Japan.

But that’s okay, because everyone who studies Japanese long enough has had those same experiences; we all remember trying to figure out the difference between 出逢うand 出会う. It just takes practice and exposure. There will be some major wins ahead of you though, if you stick with this. I promise.

Let’s get a few things ready for you to begin learning.

We can start off super basic – you don’t need to pick up Japanese novels or subscribe to TV Japan or anything (yet).

Lay the hiragana chart out on your desk.

Hiragana Voiced Consonants

Katakana Voiced Consonants

Your vocab list to learn

Take this list and make it your own. Write the words, try them out, get the hang of spacing your characters next to each other nicely. Above all, say the words out loud repeatedly as you read so you get used to speaking Japanese.

As a final bonus word, here’s one of the most useful: です (soft “su” so it sounds more like des). This means is, or am.

Turn these into flashcards, or make lists – whatever works best for you. These may be the first 35 words you learn this way, but you will be making many more lists like this in the future so get comfortable with a technique that you like!

So, how does grammar work in Japanese?

Japanese follows a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) form. So where we would say things in English like:

I eat bananas.

In Japanese this becomes:

わたしはバナナをたべる。

I (particle) banana(s) (particle) eat.

Sound confusing? Don’t worry, it’s not really. Let’s break this sentence down, because it will be the basis for most of your basic sentences at this stage.

So, as much as I hate to use roman alphabet to show pronunciation, we will do so here one time to show how this sounds:

Watashi wa banana o taberu.

I banana eat. (I eat banana(s))

Let’s see some others:

わたしはがくせいです。I am a student.
わたしはしごとにいく。I go to work.
わたしたちはともだちです。We are friends.

This is a very simple pattern that will cover a lot of what you learn to begin with.

A good structure to follow up with is the question particle か.

あなたはがくせいですか？ Are you a student?
あなたはしごとにいく？ Will you go to work?
わたしたちはともだちですか？ Are we friends?

For the sake of this short guide, we won’t go into too much detail here, but play around with some of the vocabulary you learned above. To help you make sentences, here are some very useful question words.

Try to break down some of the following sentences and understand the meaning. This isn’t a textbook – there is no test at the end. Use google translate when and where necessary to understand words you don’t recognize, and focus on learning the patterns. Some words will not have been covered in the 35 you already learned, but this is a good chance to pick up some new ones.

どうしてしごとにいく？

だれですか？

すみません、このでんしゃはどこにいく？

わたしはアメリカにいく。

あなたはりんごをたべる？

このくにがすきです。

いつにほんにきた？

らいしゅうしごとをやすむ。

がくせいはみんなかえる。

(Every time you find a word you don’t know and you look it up, add it to your list. These are your words now!)

15 kanji to start

Kanji readings

You may have heard something about "kanji readings" in your initial searches about kanji. This stems from the fact that as adopted Chinese characters, Japan had words for things long before the writing system came to be. These native Japanese pronunciations are called 訓読み kunyomi, while the Chinese-derived pronunciations are called 音読み onyomi.

In daily life the general rule is that a single kanji by itself will be pronounced with the kunyomi pronunciation, while compound words will use the onyomi pronunciation. As with all good things in life, though, the rules will be broken from time to time 😉

An example of the general rule of thumb would be like this:

水　みず mizu – water

塩水　えんすい ensui – salt water

You'll see the same character here, 水, but with two very different pronunciations based on the situation. Here's quick video explainer.

Basics of kanji: onyomi / kunyomi / stroke order

Your first kanji

To kick off this week, here is your list of vocal from before, but now with the most appropriate kanji instead of hiragana. Not every word should be turned into kanji, even when there is a kanji for that word! This is one of those understandings that comes from repeated exposure to the language, and is absolutely not intuitive, so don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense at first.

Right away, you’ll notice that these aren’t the “easiest” kanji you’ll learn, but that’s fine.

 We’ll follow up here with a list of some of those. However, be prepared to see these kanji a lot in actual Japanese text. They are not “uncommon” so you should just begin preparing yourself to recognize them.

The method behind progressing from beginner Japanese to intermediate Japanese

Congratulations! You’ve got a good foundation to start self-study in Japanese now, and if you’re consistent, you’ll do very well.

I will say right away that the best way to get good at Japanese quickly is to hop on a plane, land yourself some cheap accommodation in Tokyo or Osaka, and hit the streets. Surrounding yourself with the language you are trying to learn is hands-down the most effective way to force your brain to adapt and grow.

That being said, that’s probably not an option for those of us who are putting in a solid 9-5 or going to school. Make your environment more Japanese in as many ways as you can. I don’t mean you need to replace the spaghetti in your pantry with ramen, but  focus more on the things you already do everyday, and make them more Japanese.

Have a smartphone? Great, change it to Japanese. Your computer, too.

Like music? Sure you do. I like good old-school hip hop, so I found groups like Rhymester and Rip Slyme to be really easy to get into.

Do you make shopping lists and stick them to your fridge? Now do that in Japanese.

Essentially anything you can do that makes you interact with Japanese in a useful way is going to help improve your level.

Your Next Steps on How to Learn Japanese

I hope this guide has given you some useful insight into how to learn Japanese. It is not a quick process, nor will it always be a smooth increase. You will hit plateaus, no doubt, but always be looking ahead, and always be constant in your approach.

You will excel at all of this when you realize that it is a process and not a race. Utilize anything you can get your hands on.

While Japanese people are born into a world ideal for learning Japanese, you must create your own and then benefit from it in the way that is best for you as an individual. The learning process is relatively simple (hear, read, repeat), but the way this actually occurs will be unique to you.

Let this guide be the starting block for you to go begin studying Japanese, whatever your end goals may be.

As one life-long Japanese learner to another, 頑張って！ You’ve got this.