welcome to nadia nova how to get started learning japanese guide
preface:
first of all. im literally a nobody. this isnt some definite way to learn. professaniolism is out of the window before this article even started. you know me. come on im not even capitalizing my sentences. its just what worked for me to get my foot in, commit, and be able to reach my goals of reading untranslated material and im happy for that. and since i have friends who have thanked me for my "go immerse already" type advice/approach and how they now too can read the stories they want, i think im on the right path
so yeah. have a goal for yourself, for me its the reward of getting access to something i couldnt otherwise, all while learning new shit. its fun. it makes your brain feel good. it feels so damn 気もしいいいい when you realise you just comprehended something you didnt before.
theres an infinite amount of things to read and watch and listen in the world but if you by any chance have spent all your life staring at vns and manga and anime its like well heres a new hobby you could learn japanese to be able to interact with even more of that shit. and maybe even smash through the language barrier and reach a new side of the internet while youre at it. its awesome.
learning a new language might seem daunting but i would be bold and say its not hard. it just takes time. especially when there exists so many tools that can help you. you can just have a dictionary pop up when you coursor over a japanese word. that makes your life so easy. ultimately, the thing is that when you turn the abstract task of "learn a language" into "spending 30 mins each day doing something japanese related" the whole thing becaomes a lot more doable. besides, if life gets in the way or you get bored of studying and forget about it for half a year you can still get inspired and come back to it later and keep going. thats what i do
i spent a billion hours playing runescape. i love my total level going up and learning japanese is the exact same thing. but theres no monthly fee and your wrist doest hurt from construction grind tick manip strats. and instead of video game, im grinding KNOWLEDGE.
i tried to read Study Books and it bored the shit out of me so learning that there exists an immersion first approach saved me. it scares me that there are people studying entire years of language in school without ever actually trying to use it in practice. a lot of the things i say here come from various learning discords and themoeway guide. but i never followed that directly either, it simply existed as a reference for me to try stuff out until i found what worked for me. and now couple years later since i started, the purpose of my guide is to just be a gathering of what i tell people in discord when they ask me how to learn japanese https://learnjapanese.moe/routine/
cool untranslated shit i love
- extravaganza https://vndb.org/v324 eroguro bugrape masterpiece
seeing this screenshot alone convinced me to learn japanese and eventually spend 100 hours playing extravaganza. it was the first big untranslated vn i read
- biman 4 https://vndb.org/v19182
straight toxic yuri
game starts with the protag dressing up as his sister and jerking off in front of hte mirror. only good things come from this. its my #1 favority visual novel
- maid in japan. its my #1 favorite gender bender battlemaid manga. what is there not to love
- futanari kanon https://vndb.org/v2407
literally just a story about a girl with a cock and all the normal shit that proceeds. you know how it is. futanarikanon gets special points for being relatively accessible reading and its one of the first vns i read
just for completing even a single one of these stories i feel like all the time spent studying was 100% worth it,
and thats not even mentioning being able to even read untranslated doujins and jerk off. life is good
its out of the scope of this guide to tell you how to find this untranslated media, but its out there and you can buy it or torrent it or whatever feels right to you. anime is everywhere and you too can access it because internet is beautiful
how to start:
1) start learning hiragana and katakana
theyre the main characters of the story. honestly shouldnt take too long all things considered. consider it an appetizer.
2) set up a srs(spaced repetition system) deck
you dont need to wait to learn hiragana "first" just start doing jpdb(or anki) with the kaisha deck. if its hard, only learn a few new words a day or wahtever you can handle
3) start watching cure dolly on your own pace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSvH9vH60Ig&list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj
the first 15 or so videos are highly important and as the playlist goes on things get more and more specific over time so basically if you feel like your out of your depth just go back to the start and watch those again instead
4) IMMERSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
after you know like a hundred words or something find something easy to read or watch. read themoeway guido to comprehend why youre doing these things
https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/
i try and keep things simple and generalized here. the more information there is. the more overwhelming it gets for me. splitting big tasks into smaller more achievamble tasks is the way to get shit done.
so what im asking you here is to spend 10-30 mins of your day studying to get started with the goal of approaching immersion.
1) kana
(direcly from https://learnjapanese.moe/routine/)
> Now, go on this website. https://gohoneko.neocities.org/learn/kana.html
> Click "show/hide options"
> Click "check all" for the categories (Hiragana, Hiragana combinations, Katakana, Katakana combinations). Don't worry about the fonts.
> Type the correct romaji in the text box. This is how you'll practice your kana.
> Do this for 10 minutes.
> You can use this timer here: https://www.online-stopwatch.com/timer/10minutes/
if you find this challenging after doing it for a week or so, if you want you can do hiragana only, but you do gotta learn both eventually. perhaprs a controversial thing to say but even if katakana is important, its also dumb and not nearly as important as hiragana.
i dont think you need to aim for 100% proficiency here, its fine and normal to have few chars that you find hard to remember.
the issue here is just that i think not touching real vocab and kanji at all until you have perfect comprehension of both would have bored me to death and trying to separate shit like ツシンノ is what probably put me off from learning when i originally tried to learn japanese when i was a teen. grinding simply abstract characters is meh, i shouldve been learning words instead. when i started studying again couple years back, once i was at 90% i just moved on and ive picked the rest up over time simply by learning other stuff
still, you can gamify this a bit by noting down how many words you got correct at the end of each day, seeing number go up is motivating
2) vocab
- scroll down to download this https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1196762551
- https://jpdb.io/ make a jpdb account and import the deck
- https://jpdb.io/settings TICK "All decks simultaneously, by frequency across our whole corpus" & UNTICK "enable kanji cards"
do these things. ensure you are learning words sorted by frequency. that way you learn the most common words first. learning 100 most common words will take you so far, as those are the words you see the most. its awesome. unticking the other one is so you arent learning mere components and are simply learning vocab as a whole.
remember, dont stress about "learning kanji". you arent simply memorising abstract characters and symbols. you are learning words. thats how you want to approach it. onyomi?kunyomi? i dont care. irrelevant. im not going to spend forever trying to memorise those things. i take things as they come and when i dont understand something i look it up. thats how i learned english too.
review 10-20 new cards each day, whatever is doable to you. it can be anki or jpdb, i use jpdb and like it more so thats why im describing that instead. you can find the anki guide here https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/#quick-anki-setup
3) grammar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSvH9vH60Ig&list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj cure dolly is just my recommendation, if you dont like her cool android vibes you can find a differetn youtuber. still, she is recommended ofter for a good reason.
especialyl at the start, id say to not worry about grammar at all for a while and just try and absorb like 100-200 most common vocab. properly getting into grammar is better timed when you already have kana and common vocab under your grasp.
obviously you cant ignore grammar, but i think its value grows over time as you get more involved in immersion. there exists a world where you can simply see a sentence, understand each word on its own and despite not knowing the intricacies of grammar, you can /probably/ understand what is being said. and thats close enough for me.
i think its better to move forward than to get stuck on every little grammar point forever. because i know that when i run into this same sentence structure in the future, my knowledge has grown and maybe that time i will now understand what it all means for realsies. its awesome.
https://yoku.bi/ here is the basics of grammar in text form. start reading from the very beginning and dont skip anything. your goal isnt to memorize these things, your goal is to familiarize yourself with these concepcts so throught immersion and repetition you can learn these over time. its important to know these things exist and only after that you can actually start to acquire intuitive knowledge
4) mentality
your goal is to start immersing as soon as possible. like you dont want to spend months trying to practice vocab and grammar and all this shit without ever actually interacting with the language itself. cant learn to swim just from theory etc etc. once you reach the point where you can immerse, no matter how slow or tedious, i think its ideal to spend more time doing immersion as opposed to griding studies. but thats a goal for future, just an important thing to keep in mind.
still, you dont want to be immersing with media that is too difficult. if you hate it, whats the point. read simple and short stories, read a futanari doujin, whatever works for you. you want to find a sweet spot, slice of life like onimai is going to be a lot easier than some scifi fantasy magic thing. but you should be following your interests, thats why youre doing this in the first place.
i think its more important to do 5 mins each day thats "too little" than to try and keep up with a massive workload and risk burnout. its easy to feel like you HAVE to do it all. like for example if i get stuck on a vocab and see it like a week in a row and itsj ust not sticking and i hate it. i just blacklist it and ignore it and instead spend that time learning other cards that i have easier time absorbing and comprehending
so for daily studies, i recommend doin 10 mins of kana training and 10-30 minutes of jpdb review.
when it comes to srs, i think in the beginning you can do any amount until you get bored but i think especially after the first weeks pass you dont really want to be spending hours and hours each dya doing it because over time you will get swamped and burned out from teh amount of cards. it easier if its just like a 15 min thing each day.
in the beginning id easily do like 2 hours of reviews just cuase it was fun and novel but month later i often used to stop doing my review after 30 mins even if i had reviews left and hadnt completed everything. you can do this esp since the review system gives hte most important cards to review first anyway
https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/
and yeah, when you feel like it, i recommend reading this page in its entirety and read it again in couple months to make sure youre still on teh right path mentally. its good motivation, mentions a lot of things in good detail and tries to convince you on the right path, all while being a place you can return to when you need to see something again
5) dictionary plugin for your browser.
yeah, a secret 5th task: you want a dictionary at your hands. incredibly powerful https://learnjapanese.moe/yomichan/
theres a list of other tools i use but these things are way less important at the start. just something to consider that also exists. you dont need to worry about this section, im just showing them as examples. theyre awesome
for reading manga, https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro
for ocr, https://github.com/matt-m-o/YomiNinja
for reading vns, https://docs.lunatranslator.org/en/
yomitan alternative to combine with your jpdb reviews, https://github.com/max-kamps/jpd-breader
and many more.
closing notes
well. good job. you read this.
now get started. thats the hardest part, you know? to actually start. you probs spent 10 minutes reading this page, now go and spend another 10 minutes on the first step of reviewing katakana and you get a gold star sticker from me. or maybe it has a heart. or a puppy. anything to get you going. do it.
thank you for reading. internet maid out. godspeed