About
This guide is based on my personal experience, and is mostly a collection of advice I've given to hundreds of learners over the years. Take what you like and leave what you don't. There are as many ways to learn Japanese as there are stars, and not being compatible with this particular guide does not mean you can not learn.
Many people doubt their ability to learn Japanese at all, and as much as I would love to address each and every possible concern, let me just say this: Yes you can learn. Yes it's fun.
On Hiragana, Katakana, and Forgetting
No matter what guide you eventually end up following, the very first step in your Japanese journey should always be learning both Hiragana and Katakana. That's 92 characters and a couple of additional rules to modifiy them. That's a lot. Most learners end up drowing in the swamp of foreign characters. Others manage to wade their way through to the other side, a couple of characters a day, careful never to drop any of their precious cargo.
However, I would like you to try learning 46 a day. Or at least 23. Yes you will forget a bunch of them, but forgetting is a natural part of the learning process, and there's no reason not to get used to it right now. There's no need to strive for perfection, you're not getting graded on this.
Get used to forgetting things, and you will be surprised at how much progress you're making.
(P.S: Mnemonics are pretty helpful for Hiragana and Katakana)
On Grammar and Mastery
Grammar, too, is something you will forget a lot. And once again that is perfectly fine. Your goal when following a grammar guide should never be to master all the concepts presented. Your goal should be to understand them. Wrap your head around them once. Then let them go. Your work here is done, move on to the next grammar point and repeat the process.
The thing about grammar, especially at beginner levels, is that it is everywhere. Every sentence you read is to reinforce some grammar point. You won't be able to forget some points even if you tried. And for the ones you do forget? Just look them up when you run into them. They'll stick eventually, trust me.
Make peace with not mastering things while you're at it. Reading 100 explanations will never grant you mastery of a concept. What will eventually get you there is raw exposure. You will end up with some degree of mastery after seeing (and understanding) the same concept in 1000 different real world contexts, whether you like it or not.
Do not waste your time double dipping in resources, or trying to find the perfect one, all the popular choices are good enough. Pick one, stick with it (that's the hard part). I personally followed the "Genki 1 => Genki 2 => Tobira" path. https://sakubi.neocities.org/ is also a good pick if you don't like textbooks or have no money to spend.
Whatever you choose, make it your goal to get through it quickly, rather than with perfect marks. For reference: I did 1 chapter of Genki a day, and 1 chapter of Tobira every other day.
DO NOT USE DUOLINGO!Duolingo is much better at marketing than it is at teaching you Japanese. It is heavily incentivised to keep you on the treadmill for as long as possible. Do not trust the owl. In a similar vein a lot of grammar resources, especially ones like Bunpro that focus heavily on the JLPT levels, will inflate their lists. 左右する and 考えられない are not grammar points, and I'm more than willing to die on this hill. The only reason they are listed as ones are to increase profit. They also do a good job scaring beginners by pretending there's a thousand seperate grammar points they need to remember.
On Kanji, Words, and Cutting Corners
Okay you learned 46 Hiragana in a day, so you can just do the same thing with Kanji right? Wrong!
First of all you want to be learning words, not Kanji. What this means is that instead of learning 食 and 事 separately, you learn 食事 as one word. While some Kanji are words by themselves, this is not true for all, and you will not be able to build your own words by studying Kanji in isolation.
The same Kanji can be read different ways depending on the word it is used in, there's a lot more lookalikes, and you will be coming across each individual Kanji less than even the rarest Hiragana. This makes them a little harder to memorize. For the time being just learning the words as they come up in whatever grammar guide you picked should be enough.
Now I say this, but that's not how I went about it. I spent 3 months root memorizing all 2000 Jouyou Kanji (one english keyword, and one reading per Kanji) before moving on to grammar. Not exactly the best approach, but certainly solid proof that you will eventually reach your goal, even with suboptimal methods, and at the very least frontloading what many people consider to be the scary part is actually very effective in making the whole endeavour a lot less intimidating.
Even if I had to start over I would probably follow a similar approach. However, instead of all individual Jouyou Kanji, I'd focus on learning one word for each of the 1000 most common Kanji, and do this alongside following a grammar guide.
As tempting as it is to learn absolutely everything, you should make sure to prioritize what is actually useful to you. For example, weekdays may actually be a lot less useful to you than you may assume. Knowing the day of the week is an indispensable skill for anyone over the age of 5. But are you actually to get any use out of them in Japanese? Surprisingly, the answer may very well be "no". This may or may not be true for things such as places, names, foods, plants, and even colors.
For another quick example while there's no gendered nouns in Japanese, verbs come with the next worst thing: Ichidan and Godan. Also known as Ru-verbs and U-verbs. The type of the verb is to determine how it is conjugated. For example 切る is Godan, so it's past tense is 切った. If it were Ichidan it would instead be 切た. Does this mean you need to learn the type of every verb? Absolutely not. There will come a point where you have read or heard 切った so many times that 切た will immediately set of alarm bells.
Don't be ashamed of cutting the right corners.
On Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking
As learners of a spoken and written language we have 4 ways to interact with the language. These ways can be divided into "Input" (Reading, listening) and "Output" (Writing, Speaking). Any and all learning is done exclusively through input. As you can never intentionally express yourself beyond your own understanding, you must always focus on improving your understanding first. The ability to output will follow naturally as you increase your level of understanding. Practicing speaking or writing will help your output catch up faster, but you will not exceed your level of input.
This does not mean I am against output. Some people may claim that early output can do irreparable damange to your Japanese as you inevitably repeat the same mistakes, but as long as you keep an open mind, you will be perfectly fine. If you enjoy it, you should do it. You're gonna spend a lot of time on this anyways so you might as well have fun. Just don't neglect your input.
Reading
Ultimately this is to be most people's moneymaker. All you need to do is read, look up anything that's new to you, and have fun. What's not to love.
An unsurprisingly high amount of people try to learn just speaking and listening, probably because Kanji are scary, but you should not do that. First of all Kanji are not that scary. In fact many people find they're actually a quite fun part of the language once you get over the initial (mental) hurdle. I can't blame anyone for being scared of them though, considering the way that people who gave up after 1 week talk about them. More importantly though, you're not actually to save a lot of time, if any, by avoiding them, as you severely limit the resources you have access to. Just learn how to read.
Listening
Listening on the other hand, and this is certainly showing my personal bias, you can very much neglect, if you so please. While it's reasonable to assume that listening is something you only get better by listening, a lot of it actually boils down to pattern recognition, and a strong vocabulary. Both of these are also trained by reading. Anecdotally, I have no trouble watching just about anything I'm interested in, despite having done very little listening practice (unless you count listening to music on the side, but I'm not gonna open that can of worms).
That all being said, there are plenty of people who have been very successful by focusing mostly on listening. It's just that there is a power imbalance between reading and listening, due to Kanji existing.
Writing
A lot of people assume they have to learn how to handwrite. Fortunately, you do not. If the act of learning how to handwrite appeals to you, by all means go for it. For the rest of us: cut that corner. (Writing each new Kanji down one single time as you encounter it can be a quick and easy way to learn their structure though, so that's certainly something worth considering.)
Speaking
Speaking is definitely my weakest skill, as I have very little interest in it.
However, I would like to quickly mention pitch accent. If you are not familiar with pitch at all this video is a solid introduction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6AoilGEers.
There is (or at least there was when I wrote this) a lot of discourse around this, with some people claiming that it does not matter at all, and others claiming that natives will not be able to understand you without perfect pitch. The truth lies, as it often does, somewhere in the middle. Pitch is crucial if your goal is to sound like a native. However proper pronunciation and natural sentence structure are generally more important to being understandable than pitch.
Regardless of whether you actually want to sound like a native or not, it may be a good idea to spend some time on this test in order to train your ear to better pick up some accents naturally.
Immersion, Anki, and Fun
After you finish your grammar guide of choice it's time for you to begin immersion. You can also begin immersing while you work through the guide. It mostly comes down to how much effort you are willing to spend on 1 page of a manga for example. Immersion is just a fancy word for learning by using (inputting) the language, instead of relying on textbooks or guides. As I have mentioned in the previous section this will primarily be reading for most people.
Make no mistake though, the jump from study material to real media is always to be rough. Don't fall into the trap of postponing immersion until it's easy. It will never be easy. No matter how much you try to prepare. (I'd say absolutely avoid studying past Tobira/middle of N3 level. Diminishing returns start to set in fast at this point.)
This is however also the part where studying becomes incredibly fun, as long as you allow it to be. You do not need to read easy material. No newspaper, no children's books, no guided readers. Of course if you do enjoy any of these things you should use them. Just pick a manga, a novel, a show, or whatever you're interested in, and try to consume it. The worst that can happen is that it's too hard to enjoy, and you come back to it later. Make sure you give it a good effort, the beginning of each piece of media is especially difficult. Again, do not read something just because it's "at your level."
"Just read, and magic will take care of the rest" sounds a little too good to be true. Because it is. You will have to look up words and grammar you haven't encountered before (or have forgotten) in a dictionary.
As for how much to look up, that's entirely up to you. Some people keep it to only things that seem relevant to getting the gist of things, relying a lot on context and visual cues. Me personally, I looked up everything to an obsessive degree, and I would do it again, because it was fun to me, that's the important part.
Now what do you do after looking something up? You can either do nothing, and wait until you've looked it up enough times for it to stick naturally, or you can use Anki. Anki is a spaced repetition system. Think of it as digital flashcards.
There's a lot of opinions on the perfect way to use Anki. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't matter. You can just install the app, make a new deck, and add simple cards. Japanese in the front, the reading in hiragana and the meaning on the back (if the word has multiple meanings, just pick the one that you saw). That's more than enough. No need to get fancy with it. Most people start at 10 cards a day, and adjust up or down depending on how they're handling the amount of reviews. Personally I'd say starting at 20 or 30 is perfectly fine as well.
While Anki is very helpful, especially early on, don't be afraid of dropping it if you hate it.
IMPORTANT: Anki should NOT make up the majority of your study time.
On Community, Study Buddies, and Motivation
Sometimes you google and you google, but you just can't "solve" that one pesky sentence. Fortunately there's a simple solution: ask someone who can. There are plenty of communities built for the sole purpose of helping people learn Japanese.
You may be worried you're being a bother, if you have too many questions, but rest assured, asking questions will never bother anyone, no matter how many, or how "stupid" they may be. Don't forget, there's a reason they are volunteering their time: they enjoy helping. If anything holding back questions will deprive them of the joy of helping.
Many people join communities with the intent of finding a personal study buddy. A good idea in theory, but a waste of time in praxis. The vast majority of people end up quitting Japanese. And that's perfectly fine. Fun as it may be, it is a very time consuming task. That does mean, however, that your study buddy is probably going to quit on you. And even if both of you miraculously do stick with it, one of you is going to outgrow the other very quickly, shifting the nature of the relationship to something one of you may not be happy with.
Don't think you are alone though. After all, what is a community if not a large group of study buddies? I really can not recommend a community enough. Everything is more fun together.
I suppose it is mildly related, and it feels worth mentioning briefly, as learning Japanese may very well be the first time learning something on their own for a lot of people: Do not rely on motivation. Motivation, while certainly helpful, is fickle by nature. Dedication is your friend. Rely on dedication, and embrace motivation when it does strike. Just because you don't feel like doing a task right now, does not mean it won't be fun once you get started. Force yourself for 5 minutes, and before you know it 2 hours will have passed.
On Workload and Burnout
You may wonder how much you should study, and the answer may not surprise you at this point. You should study as much as you want. At some point you're gonna hit a point of diminishing returns, if you study for 140 hours a week, but you're unlikely to hit that point if you have anything else to do, like sleeping.
Let's focus on the minimum instead, as that is a lot more of a real concern. You are not going to make a lot of progress, if any at all really, by investing 15 minutes a day, despite what a certain green owl would like you to believe. I would recommend dedicating at least an hour every day to studying. Not including Anki, which you should be able to slot into small windows of downtime, if you can't dedicate a block of time to it. Ideally you will be able to spend even more time on Japanese once you begin immersion, as the balance starts shifting from pure study to a fun pasttime. (I have also seen people make decent progress with as little as 3 to 4 hours per week)
Another thing to consider is burnout. Many people will be more than happy to claim you are bound to crash and burn if you so much as think about doing 1 Anki card more than the accepted average. The reality is that only you can know your limit. And in order to reach that limit you will have to see when it starts hurting, and take it back a few steps. The last part is important. Without fail, every time I have experienced burnout there were clear signs that I chose to ignore.
I feel it's important to mention that some people, for whatever reason, will react negatively to anyone trying to "overachieve". It sucks. But the one thing you absolutely cannot let them do is make you stubborn. Do not try to push through the signs to prove them wrong.
At the end of the day, whether you end up falling above or below the curve, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you make it. And once you do, you owe it to yourself to be proud of yourself, regardless of how long it took you.
Miscellaneous
JLPT
While the concreteness of it can be appealing, do not in any way structure your study around the levels of this test. A word or a grammatical concept are not an N1 word, or an N3 grammar point. They are just words and grammar. Nothing more, nothing less. Focus on acquiring the language, and you will be able to pass the test without a problem. But tunnel vision on the test, and you may find yourself having learned how to pass a test, instead of having learned a language.
You also should never postpone learning anything because it's "above your level". If you ran into it naturally, it is useful to you, and you should learn it. The inverse is also true.
Scare Tactics
When studying Japanese, you are bound to run into someone who says something that might discourage you. They may be eager to tell you about how difficult Kanji are, or about how they've been studying for 3 years already, yet still can't read even a children's book, and the same must be true for everyone except a lucky few. In reality this usually means they learned their first hiragana 3 years ago, and have since then invested an average of 4 minutes a week. I don't think they are trying to be malicious, but it still results in a very toxic environment for beginners.
Don't let other people discourage you. And if you see anyone do this to someone else, feel free to tell them it's not a good look. That's the one favor I'd like to ask of you.
J-J dictionaries
Many people think they need switch to a monolingual dictionary at some point. You don't. While they are fun (especially if you ever end up reading 舟を編む), and can help you pick up on some minute nuance once you are more advanced, they are never necessary, and you should not force yourself to use them before you can easily understand them.
Japanese UI
Another popular idea is to set your phone's UI to Japanese. This is largely a waste of time. Odds are you already know your phone inside and out, relying mostly on muscle memory. But even if you don't rely on muscle memory, you really don't have a reason to learn these specific words. This is the opposite of cutting corners. You might as well start out by learning all the prefecture names at that point.
Difficulty rankings
There's a couple of websites that attempt to rate various media by their difficulty. Stay clear of these. First of all, as I said earlier, you really shouldn't be focusing on difficulty, but on what's fun. You're better off struggling through something you like for 2 hours, than getting bored of Peppa Pig after 30 minutes. But more importantly, they are never accurate. No exceptions.
Sites that use an algorithm to determine the supposed difficulty are not accurate, as there are simply no reliable metrics to base it off.
Sites that are based on user reviews are also inherently flawed, as they are based on perceived difficulty. Suppose you have 2 books, that are exactly the same "objective difficulty". Whichever one you read second is going to feel easier. Combine this with a massive amount of media, and a rather small amount of users, and you're going to end up with a rating system where anything that's not a massive level gap is meaningless.
Closing thoughts
Learning Japanese has been one of my the most fulfilling, and enjoyable experiences, and I sincerely hope you will enjoy your journey as much as I did mine.
Finally, if one day, you achieve some kind of personal milestone, like reading your first novel Japanese, or finishing some 100 hour Visual novel, or even pass some kind of exam, and you look back, and feel like this guide has helped you, feel free to let me know! It would make me very happy!
Thank you for reading!
The Forbidden Arts
Let me preface this by saying mentioning most of these in any community I'm aware of will get you shot in the back of the head. However, I, as well as a couple other people whom I respect greatly, have gotten at least some use out of these, but you've got to be careful. I was hesitant about even mentioning them, but I believe people should be allowed to make an informed decision on whether to rely on these tools themselves.
You should only ever consider using any of these if you are absolutely adamant about having 100% understanding of everything you read, as I was. If you are fine with skipping over sentences every now and then, there's no need for these tools.
With that out of the way let's talk about the forbidden arts: Machine translation (Google translate, DeepL), ChatGPT, and (fan-)translations.
These tools don't come without risk, but I believe many people don't understand the true risk of them. You may often hear is that learning from the mistranslations these tools provide will cause irreparable damage to your Japanese. Again, in my opinion, as long as you keep an open mind, it's nigh impossible to cause any meaningful damage, no matter what you do. This does not mean that these tools should be considered accurate, I just believe that being fed a little bit off misinformation is not that big of a deal, certainly it was not for me.
The real problem is the convenience. These tools should always be your absolute last resort. The number one thing you want to avoid is becoming overreliant on them, and not learning how to figure out sentences on your own, because that's ultimately how you get better. Do not touch them if you aren't at least 5 pages of Google results deep.
Machine Translation
While reading botched translations isn't going to do any permanent damage, we also aren't going to gain anything from them. So instead of putting any amount of trust into the likely flawed translation, we are instead going to use this as a fresh perspective. Sometimes you misdiagnose which part of a sentence doesn't make sense, and sometimes seeing another perspective, even if it turns out to be incorrect, can help you open your eyes to other possibilities. Most times however you are not going to get anything from this, and that's perfectly fine. I have lost count of the amount of times I have misread a Kanji 100 times in a row, only to notice it once Google Translate gave a completely unexpected translation.
Translations by Humans
For reasons far beyond me, this is a common misconception in some circles, so let me clear this up: Fan translations are not better than official ones. In fact, the vast majority of fan translations are absolutely riddled with mistakes. As such they are a lot less reliable, and you may want to stick to using them more or less in the same way as machine translations. Official translations on the other hand, save for a couple exceptions, are a lot more reliable.
Odds are the translation has changed the wording to sound more natural in English, and possibly even changed the order of some of the text to flow better, but the core of the sentence should still be in there, and this core may allow you to reverse engineer the original sentence. It's important that you use the translation as a tool to help you understand the sentence yourself. Don't just read it without thinking about why it means what it means.
Also while it's really tempting to double check everything you read against a translation, you shouldn't do that. You really should trust yourself to understand the text, and even if you made a mistake, it doesn't matter. I'm sure I've misunderstood hundreds, if not thousands, of sentences, and I turned out perfectly fine.
ChatGPT
I never had a chance to use this one, as it didn't exist when I could have gotten any use out of it, but I'm sure I would have used it, at least a little.
Of course you can use this in the same way as Machine translations. But one use case unique to ChatGPT is sentence breakdowns. When you ask it to break down a sentence for you it is likely going to reply with a list of grammar points, and words, and an explanation on them. Immediately discard the explanations from your mind. Always operate under the assumption that ChatGPT is wrong, no matter how convincing it sounds. Sounding convincing is it's job.
Do your due diligence and look up all the grammar and words it spit out, then try to understand the sentence yourself using what you found. Do not think about ChatGPTs interpretation. Sometimes sentences have grammar points that you don't even recognize as such. ChatGPT may be able to spot these points, but nothing more than that.
Also absolutely never use ChatGPT, or any kind of machine translation, to check whether a sentence you wrote yourself is correct. They are literally built to spit out normal sentences, regardless of what gibberish you may feed them.