One of the most important parts of studying Japanese, or any language or subject, really, is to build your study habits. Bad and inconsistent study habits are the downfall of so many learners who try and try to study Japanese, but just can’t ever seem to make any progress. It isn’t an intelligence problem, and it also isn’t really a discipline or drive problem - it’s usually just a habits problem.
And so I've started this new 4-part series, How to Build Effective Japanese Study Habits, to help give you the tools and information you need to create a Japanese study routine that feels natural, easy, and effortless. This is Part One (1).
Here’s the thing: building habits isn’t really about discipline or motivation. Discipline and motivation can certainly help. But building a habit is, at its core, a game of training (and sometimes tricking) your brain. The approach to habit building matters a lot more than your personal character.
In my first post on habit building, I touched on habit-stacking, a trick to make habits happen automatically, that I learned about from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. But habit-stacking is just the beginning when it comes to study habit building. Let’s dive in deeper together!
The Keys to Building Long-Lasting Japanese Study Habits
I’ve spent some time thinking about how I went from someone who had never really self-studied anything, to someone who studies Japanese by myself every single day. As I said above, it isn't because of anything like superior motivation or discipline. In fact, there are a lot of study methods I've wanted to do but dropped in the end. They either weren't right for me, or I didn't go about implementing them in a way I could be successful.
But, there are a handful of methods I've been able to do consistently for long periods of time, some for even two or three years now! By analyzing these methods and why I'm able to continue to use them consistently, I came up with four common key factors they possess.
If you too want to get yourself studying Japanese every single day, then your study methods should be these four things:
Fun
Easy
Automatic
Social
This list isn’t comprehensive, but both as an English teacher and a Japanese learner, I’ve noticed that these characteristics really help with language study. Each of your study methods doesn’t need to be all of these things, but the more boxes you can check, the easier it is to keep up with. And don’t necessarily need to worry about finding new method with all of these characteristics - you can make almost any method fit these rules in some way, with a bit of tinkering and creativity.
I’ll discuss each factor individually, and talk about how you as a learner can use these ideas in a practical way. The way you implement these ideas is ultimately up to you, but I'll try to give as many suggestions as possible.
I will post this as a four part series separately addressing each factor. This way, you have time to digest each component and look for ways to change your study methods over time. We'll start with the first one here - fun!
How to Build Fun Japanese Study Habits
If you want to build a new habit, it helps a lot if your brain thinks it’s enjoyable. You can, of course, force yourself to do things through willpower alone, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier if your brain doesn’t think that the task is awful. In fact, with language, the more fun you're having, the more you can unconsciously acquire the language.
“Compelling input appears to eliminate the need for motivation, a conscious desire to improve. When you get compelling input, you acquire whether you are interested in improving or not.” – Stephen Krashen, renowned linguist
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that links your senses of enjoyment, desire, and motivation. When we perform an action or activity and have a great time, the dopamine pathways in our brains remember that, and we have a high motivation to repeat the activity again. If your memory of an activity is that it was really boring and unsatisfying, however, there is going to be low motivation to repeat the activity. You're then working against your brain, instead of with it.
So, as much as possible, your studying should be fun and interesting, especially in the beginning when you're trying to build a new habit.
So, what does fun look like in language learning?
Gamified Japanese Learning
To me, self-studying from a textbook is pretty much never fun. I enjoy practice problems a lot, but getting through the explanation part to get to the problems feels hellish to me. So I prefer to mainly use applications and websites that gamify learning and teach directly through example and practice rather than explanation. To me, this is infinitely more fun, and therefore easier to do, over and over and over again.
When I teach English, I like to use quiz websites like Blooket, where students can play through practice questions in a variety of awesome game modes, competing against their classmates. This hooks even the least motivated students — they keep playing through the English because the game is fun, and you have to do the practice to play.
My recommendations for gamified Japanese learning are Duolingo and Wanikani, just because they're what I've used personally, but pretty much all the language learning applications are shooting for the same light, game-like feel. It's because they also know that it's habit building! Even Quizlet has timed game modes for vocab and kanji studies. So if another app or website speaks to you, go for it!
(Disclaimer that WaniKani isn't actually all that game-like, and probably fits more into the easy and automatic sections, but I personally enjoy progressing through the levels a lot, so I've included it here in the fun part, too).
Content-based Japanese Learning
Another way to incorporate fun into your Japanese routine (and make it part of your every day life) is to use content that you genuinely enjoy for learning. I highly recommend anything that makes learning feel more lively than ink on paper. It was when I started adding content to my study routine that I found my solo study times skyrocketing to multiple hours a day without any friction on my part.
Just remember, level appropriate is also important for learning! The language learning ideal is an understanding of about 80%. When I was a beginner/intermediate learner, I loved learning through study podcasts and children's books, not only because they're fun and easy to pay attention to, but also because it's easy to find content that levels up with you as you improve. Check out Tadoku for free graded Japanese readers! These days I love practicing in a more immersion style with music, anime, light novels, and other content made for native speakers.
That being said about 80% understanding, it can be beneficial at any level to add more hours of exposure to the language to your day, even if the content is too high level to understand that much. Keep in mind that you're still learning and digesting patterns, just not at the ideal pace. When I was a beginner, I do feel like I passively learned a lot from watching anime with English subtitles and listening carefully, sometimes repeating. This was just my hobby, not something I considered studying, but I think it ended up being pretty educational in the end. So if you enjoy Japanese content, by all means keep having fun in this language at any level.
Learning through content is great because it's so fun and interesting that you can forget you’re practicing! At the end of the day, it is way easier to form a habit of listening to an interesting podcast while commuting to and from work than it is to form a habit of opening a textbook when you get home from a 9-5 job. I encourage you to experiment and see what kind of content you can both enjoy and roughly understand, and try adding it to your daily routine. If you have trouble with remembering, try habit stacking, so that you're always doing it at the same time every day.
Don't Give Yourself Study Rewards
While we’re here in the fun section. I do also want to give a word of caution. When I say fun, I mean that the method itself is fun and enjoyable. I don't mean ‘fun’ as in giving yourself rewards afterwards for doing boring studying. For example, “if I study from Genki II for thirty minutes, I can order a pizza.” According to Andrew Huberman, a dopamine scientist at Stanford, doing something only for the reward that comes at the end can, over time, actually decrease how enjoyable the activity itself feels. This means that studying starts to feel like more of a pain than it originally did. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot for building long-term, fulfilling study habits.
Instead, he recommends taking advantage of your neurobiology, and when things start to get boring or hard, reminding yourself that you’re doing this because you choose to do it and because you like it. (If you’re interested in learning scientifically why this type of motivational self-talk works, you can listen to his podcast episode here.) This practice will, over time, help you become a person who enjoys the effort, challenge, and process of learning Japanese, as opposed to someone who craves being on the other side of 2000+ kanji.
This is where the magic happens, because when you start really enjoying the studying itself, then your methods will fall into the ‘fun’ category no matter what! Inherently fun activities are most important at first, when forming a daily study habit, but if you can train your brain to love the process, it'll be smooth sailing no matter what you do.
Should I throw out my textbooks?
Just because apps and videos and podcasts are an easy way to make learning feel like entertainment, it doesn’t mean you can never learn from textbooks or other traditional study methods! I don’t mean to sound like these methods don’t have their place, aren’t useful, or even that I never used them myself. I did a long series of workbook pages when I was first starting out that really helped me learn the fundamental grammar of Japanese, and I completed the N3 level of the Nihongo Sou-Matome Grammar series. I was able to do these things because they were part of a class, so there were social and automatic elements to the task.
In the case that you'd prefer to form habits around a learning method that isn't as inherently dopamine-releasing, you’ll just want to focus on one of the other areas for habit-building that I’ll address in the next posts — easy, social, and/or automatic. (Unless you find a really fun textbook, I guess.) Be sure to stay tuned in the next few weeks to learn about the other three habit builders and how to incorporate them into your studies!
More Resources on Japanese Study Habit-Building
Although I formed most of my Japanese study habits through trial and error, I later learned a lot about why things worked and didn't work for me from the book I mentioned previously, Atomic Habits by James Clear. Additionally, the Huberman Lab podcast is a wonderful resource for learning about a variety of related topics, including habit building, motivation, and more. Both are highly recommended if this series of post has left you craving more information.
Conclusion
Whether you believe it or not, you've probably been told all your life that good students are filled to the brim with natural motivation, and bad students are just lazy. But the fact is, this isn't true at all. Effective study and real learning comes from having good, solid, and long-lasting study habits - something that school does very little to help us create. So, your homework this week is to find a way to have some fun while also genuinely practicing your Japanese - good luck!
Be sure to let me know your thoughts, questions, requests, or opinions below in the comments! I'd love to hear about your experience!
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