Learn Japanese on your own

Three scripts and what each is for#

A single Japanese sentence usually mixes:

• hiragana — a syllabary for grammatical endings, particles and words without a kanji;
• katakana — a syllabary for loanwords and foreign names: コーヒー "coffee", アメリカ "America";
• kanji — characters that came from China, used for word roots.

Each syllabary has 46 basic characters. You can realistically learn them in three to four weeks: five to ten characters a day, writing by hand and reading the simplest words. After that drop romaji — Latin-letter spelling — from your textbooks and flashcards: as long as it is at hand, your eye will not get used to kana, and you will keep reading Japanese with English sound habits.

Katakana is a hidden bonus for English speakers: a large share of modern Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from English. Once you can read テレビ (terebi, TV) or コンピューター (konpyūtā, computer), hundreds of words become guessable.

Kanji are a multi-year marathon#

The official list of characters for everyday use (joyo kanji) has 2,136 characters. Most have several readings: the Chinese-derived on'yomi, usually used in compound words, and the native kun'yomi for a standalone word. 山 is read yama as the word "mountain" and san in 富士山, Mount Fuji.

How not to drown:

1. Learn kanji inside words, not from tables of readings.
2. Start with the frequent characters from your textbook, not in order of stroke count.
3. Break each character into components and invent a short story for it.
4. Write the first few hundred by hand; after that recognition and typing are enough.

Five new kanji a day with reviews is a manageable pace for years ahead.

Grammar: particles and the verb at the end#

The word order is subject, object, verb. A particle after each word shows its role, the job English does with word order and prepositions: は marks the topic, が the subject, を the direct object, に direction, time or recipient, で the place of action or the means. 私は本を読みます — "I read a book", literally "I (topic) book (object) read".

Verbs do not change for person — no "I read / she reads" — but they change for politeness, tense and negation. For the first months work with the polite -ます form and the copula です: it is appropriate with people you do not know. Then move on to the dictionary form and the te-form, which carries a large part of the grammar: requests, sequences of actions, ongoing actions.

Japanese verbs fall into three groups: godan (u-verbs), ichidan (ru-verbs) and two irregular ones — する and 来る. With so few irregular verbs, conjugation is mastered faster than in English or any European language.

Also be ready for what Japanese leaves out: the subject is dropped whenever it is clear from context, and there are no articles or plurals. "Book read" can be a full and natural sentence.

Pronunciation#

Japanese has fewer sounds than English, and its five vowels are short and pure. The traps for English speakers are different. Long vowels and double consonants change meaning: おばさん "aunt" — おばあさん "grandmother"; English speakers tend to ignore length. Vowels are never reduced to "uh", even in unstressed syllables. And there is pitch accent: pitch on syllables distinguishes some words, such as 箸 "chopsticks" and 橋 "bridge". You do not need perfect pitch accent at the start, but listen for it from the first weeks.

How to keep notes#

For words, four fields: the kanji spelling, the reading in kana, the translation, an example. Separate kanji cards are not needed if words with them are already in your deck. A sheet of particles with pairs of similar sentences (は vs が) that you extend as you read. For politeness levels, a table of one verb in all its forms. Review everything with spaced repetition.

Checking yourself and benchmarks#

The JLPT scale runs from N5 (beginner) to N1. Sample questions are available for every level, and unofficial word and kanji lists help you track progress. Japanese is in the hardest category for English speakers in the US Foreign Service Institute ranking. With daily study many people reach N5 in a few months and N4 in about a year, but these are averages. For daily practice, news in simplified Japanese with furigana works well.

Step-by-step plan

1. Weeks 1–4 — hiragana and katakana5–10 characters a day, writing and reading words, dropping romaji.
2. Months 2–3 — particles and polite speechは, が, を, に, で; the -ます forms and です; the first kanji inside words.
3. Months 4–5 — dictionary form and te-formThe three verb groups, requests, ongoing actions; five kanji a day.
4. Month 6 — reading and an N5 sampleSimplified news with furigana, a JLPT N5 sample paper.

Check yourself

Sources

• JishoFree Japanese–English dictionary with kanji breakdowns
  free
• JLPTOfficial exam site: levels and sample questions
  free
• NEWS WEB EASYNHK news in simplified Japanese with furigana
  free

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