Welcome back to the blog. Today, I, Seolhwa will show you how I started learning Japanese and how I am currently studying.

It’s been already 3 months since I started learning the language. At first, I was just looking for another language to start (you know what polyglots say: once you learn a language you gonna learn them all) and the most interesting language for me was Japanese. The grammar was similar to Korean and I was also very interested in Japanese literature lately, so it was just the most logical thing to do.

I decided from the beginning that I will take a different approach than when I was learning Korean as I wanted to be able to speak the language faster. It took me around 3 years to have the courage to speak Korean with a native speaker and I didn’t want it to happen again for my next language. So, for the first month, I learnt hiragana and katakana and started learning kanji too.

I tried different resources for learning kanji and for me, at least in the beginning, Wanikani was the best resource. It teaches you radicals and words in a fun way with mnemonics in order for you to remember the words and uses a SRS (spaced-repetition system) which made forgetting words really hard.

I learned some basic expressions and phrases using the Genki textbook and other videos I found on Youtube. For learning grammar, I recommend the channel Game Gengo that teaches you grammar, kanji and even vocabulary through game video examples.

I also started using a lot of input such as anime with Japanese subtitles (I used the Animelon website for that), Japanese dramas on Netflix (I used the web extension Language Reactor for subtitles) and a very useful and easy to follow podcast on Youtube called Nihongo con Tepei.

Around the second month, I started taking classes online on Preply. I chose a teacher that is very nice and patient and we usually have just free conversations about daily topics once a week. Speaking this early might seem a bit hard, but taking your time, using the simple words and grammar structures you know is key. If you don’t know how to say something, try to reformulate it in the few words you know, or ask in English “How do you say X in Japanese?”. This way I also learn grammar. I decided to learn only the grammar I strictly need and that I will use in real conversations, so whenever there is a piece of grammar that I seem to want to use a lot, but I don’t know it, I just ask my teacher to translate from English a sentence that has that grammar structure and then I ask her for more example sentences. I, then, make sure to use trying the grammar structure myself during my next classes.

Another form of input that really helped me is playing games in Japanese. There are a lot of games that have audio and/ or subtitles in Japanese. To find them, you can just go on steam and look for the languages a game has available (it will tell you if it has audio and subtitles in your target language). I chose Persona 5 Royal for my first game in Japanese. I played it once with Japanese audio and English subtitles and now that I know the plot, I started replaying it in 100% Japanese.

After 3 months of learning Japanese, I tried doing a sample JLPT N5 test to see my level and I am really proud to say that I did it perfectly. One level might not seem like a lot of progress in 3 months, but being able to read quite easily(if it’s in hiragana and katakana + the kanji I learnt) and being able to communicate with my teacher, even at a basic level, feels like a bit accomplishment.

I intend to continue studying in the same way, with a lot of input from games, dramas and podcasts and with weekly conversations. What I will change is that I will quit Wanikani and replace it with the KanjiDamage website. I got to around level 12 in Wanikani, but the reason I am quitting is because after a while the reviews get colossal (I even got to 400 reviews a day) and there is a lot of time wasted just reviewing all the words. Therefore, I decided to study kanji at my own pace using KanjiDamage.

I will keep you updated on my Japanese language learning journey. Until then, I hope some of the techniques I use will be helpful for you too. See you in the next post and good luck with your language studies! 🙂