Konnichiyall, everyone! Welcome back to my Japanese Study Habit Building Series. This series aims to help you create long lasting Japanese language study habits that work for you and your lifestyle. Let’s take studying Japanese from a chore to something that you do every day without really thinking about it!
If you missed it, you can access the first post here. And if you’ve already read it, I hope that you were able to implement some of the ideas to add a bit of fun to your study routine. Let’s go ahead and dive into week two!
4 Principles for Japanese-Study Habit Formation
As a reminder from last time, in this series I’m talking about four characteristics of my study habits that have allowed me to keep my Japanese learning going daily. Those characteristics are:
Fun
Easy
Automatic
Social
Every single one of your study methods doesn't need to be all of these things, but the more boxes it checks, the easier it'll be to form a study habit. Today I’ll be talking about number 2, easy. At the end of the post I’ll add a list of study methods that I find truly encompass the ‘easy’ characteristic.
How to Make Studying Japanese Easier
The second characteristic to look for in a study method is ease. Ease is essential for forming study habits.
However, Ease, in this context, does not refer to the content itself — here, 'ease' refers to how easy it is to do (and to get yourself to do) the activity. The way I see it, there are several different methods to make it easier to study Japanese.
The first is lowering the activation energy, or the energy required to begin a study session. The next is increasing the portability of your studies, so you can study in more than one location. Finally, managing the duration of your Japanese studies can make things feel lighter, and therefore, easier. We'll discuss each of these adjustments separately.
And then you can apply them for yourself and see how much more consistently you can get yourself to practice Japanese!
Lowering Activation Energy for Studying Japanese
Activation Energy is the energy you have to put in to start studying. Things like: How much do you have to physically move? How many materials do you have to locate or take out? How long do they take to set up? These things may sound trivial, but they can make or break whether or not you end up studying on any given day.
I love Duolingo because this energy is almost zero - I am currently lying on the couch in my living room. If I choose to, I can be studying Japanese 10 seconds from now without sitting up, without finding a pencil, without remembering any page numbers, and without thinking about where to start. Duolingo is easy to access.
Honestly, it would be hard to beat Duo and other phone applications on this front — almost everyone has their phone close to their person at all times. Anything you can do without having to move, write, or even switch between apps to search things, is inherently easy. So my first recommendation here is to use some sort of application or technology as a main study method, especially when building a daily study habit from scratch.
But this post isn’t just about my personal study method recommendations. I also want to teach you how to take any method and make it easy. Just because Duolingo is inherently easy doesn’t mean traditional study methods can’t be made easier to access, for anyone who chooses to do so.
If you want to study from a book, it will be more effort than using an app. At the very least, you will likely need to assume a seated position. But, we can avoid a lot of the effort of getting started by having a Japanese study station set up with all of your materials ready and your book opened to the page you need. If your books and pencils live in one location (the one you’ll be studying Japanese at), then the only energy required to start studying is moving into the chair at that location.
Keeping your Japanese textbook open is also key. Eliminate that step of having to open it yourself, no matter how small it seems. Plus, leaving it open will trigger your inner curiosity about what's on the page.
“You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”
- James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones
Think about the way that you want to study Japanese, and think hard about how difficult you’re making it for yourself to do it. What steps can be eliminated to lower the activation energy of studying? What changes can you implement in your environment to make it easier? Simple things can make a world of difference with study habit building.
Making Your Japanese Studies More Portable
Maybe you’re saying “well, this Japanese study station is great in theory, but I like to study at more than one location,” which is a very valid point! I study at work, at home, on the train, anywhere I can.
But, if you’re carrying the same physical book between work and home, chances are that it’s living in your backpack more than you’d like. At least, that’s what happens to me. It stays in my bag, so I forget it exists. But if your book lives on your desk, you see it more often, remember it more often, and the energy to start studying is reduced by it already being in the study location.
We can solve this dilemma in several ways. The easiest might be switching to electronic versions of textbooks — be sure to put the reading app somewhere super visible, so it’s always there, in your immediate environment! Depending on if you have the capability to write on your phone or tablet, electronic textbooks could even be a way to turn textbooks into something you can do without even sitting at a desk, lowering the activation energy. Other features like automatic page bookmarking also help reduce the burden on the learner.
However, there’s also a lot of benefit to having an arsenal of study methods that you use in different locations — sticking with the book theme, try having one book you study at home (say, grammar) and one that you study in your second study location (kanji or vocab). Not only does this solve the issues associated with making the habit easy and visible, but it also adds elements of characteristic number three, automatic. Your brain quickly learns that one location means grammar, and the other means kanji, and it reduces the “What do I study?” question that can add to the difficulty of starting.
Also, this location-basing trick isn't limited to books. I study kanji through an awesome website called WaniKani. It's a website, so I can use it anywhere, but I sort of accidentally formed a habit of doing it at work (because I have a laptop and long stretches of free time to finish all my reviews and lessons each day.) Now when I don’t have class to teach I automatically start doing my kanji!
If you’re thinking that this is starting to sound more like category #3, automatic, then you’re right! Automatically knowing what to study makes it easier to get started. And that’s kind of the point here — make it so easy to study that over time it just becomes automatic, and you hardly think about it at all. Remember, this series is about building habits. Once they’re built, then you’re a person who studies Japanese every day, and you won’t need to worry about these things as much, unless you decide to drastically change study methods or environment.
Now, let’s move onto the last component of making studying Japanese easy, because it isn’t all about the environment.
Decrease the Duration of your Japanese Studying
Studying, and getting yourself to study, is a mind game. In my Japanese Beginner’s Habit Building post, I talked about the sort of mentality with which to approach Japanese studies and study habit building. Building consistency and not overwhelming yourself are very important for long-lasting Japanese study, especially right at the beginning phase.
Therefore, the duration with which you can complete a “chunk” of studies is crucial for habit building. Studying should be so easy that it takes more effort to have the mental argument with yourself of whether to do the studying today or tomorrow, than it does to just do the studying. This means that there should be a cut off point within a few minutes (ideally 5 minutes maximum) at which you can see that you’ve made real progress through the study method. And by see, I mean literally - a visual marker of progress.
In Duolingo, this is completing one lesson and watching the wheel move. In WaniKani, it’s lowering the number of reviews or lessons in the queue, even by 5 or 10. It’s checking off one article on NHK News Easy (when read NHK News Easy via Manabi reader, it will literally check the article off). If you’re using a book or workbook, maybe it’s a single section of a page. You get the idea.
Duration is important because it helps us to win when our mind says “Nooo, I don’t want to today!” If it’s easy, so easy you can be done in three or four minutes, at some point it’s easier to just start than it is to debate with yourself.
The idea, of course, isn’t to only study for five minutes a day — the idea is to convince yourself to start studying every day. Your brain isn’t going to want to do that if you’re telling it that it isn’t doing a good job if it studies for less than an hour. Of course it isn't. That’s miserable.
When we’re talking about life-long habits, life-long skills, the three minute days are just as important as the three hour days. Long-term habits aren’t built by amazing motivation or drive — they’re made by finding a way to stick through and show up in even tiny — but not zero — ways, every day.
That is the sweet spot, because a lot of the time if you just start, you’ll find you actually end up with a lot more motivation than you thought you had. The idea that studying comes from motivation is a lie -- often, motivation comes from studying. So, as much as possible, find a way to convince yourself to start. Sometimes you end up in the zone and you do study for an hour, and sometimes you really do only push through one lesson. But it isn’t zero.
How I Made Studying Japanese Easier
Now for my own personal recommendations! I feel like I’m always recommending the same few things on Konnichiyall, but in the end I really only use a handful of resources. I think the fact that I’ve stuck with all of them for so long says something about how habit-forming they all are! Anyways, here are the resources I use that really encompass making studying easy:
Duolingo
As mentioned above, Duolingo is the champ at making studying easy and breezy. You can do it almost anywhere, at almost anytime. It's a great study method to use if you want to get yourself practicing Japanese every day. Check out my detailed post on Duo to learn more about why it's so great for Japanese study habit building.
WaniKani
WaniKani (a kanji study program that uses a spaced repetition system) is another great study method for making Japanese easy. WaniKani has it all - a low activation energy and high portability (the phone web browser version works very well) and the possibility of a low duration. They have a "wrap up" button that lets you finish a session after finishing 10 more reviews. 10 reviews takes approximately 1-2 minutes. I often will start a session and immediately press this button to do just a tiny bit of kanji practice if I have a minute free! Additionally, the spaced repetition system means you never have to think about what to review or study, which makes the whole process of learning kanji so much easier. Learn more about WaniKani with my full review here.
Podcasts
Podcasts make learning Japanese so so SO easy. Just pop in your headphones and start playing a podcast episode for quick and easy access to tons of listening practice. If you're a beginner or intermediate level learner, using Japanese learner podcasts is an easy and awesome way to get more comprehensible input as opposed to difficult media made for native speakers. Additionally, using podcasts as a study method can skyrocket your study/language exposure time. I think they are the easiest way to get on the fast track towards fulfilling your language goals.
Online Readers
When you're studying Japanese, reading actual stories and articles (as opposed to just reading example sentences) is so important. But sometimes, we just can't seem to make a habit of picking up physical books. That's where online readers that you can use on your phone come in.
First, I want to introduce Manabi Reader. I haven’t talked about Manabi Reader on Konnichiyall yet, so I'll take the opportunity to explain it now. When I was starting to practice reading in Japanese, I found this Japanese reader app. And to be honest, the free version was really buggy, but I liked the idea of it, so I tried the year subscription ($18 a year) and it works great!
This app gives you access to lots of articles from a ton of different sources. To be honest, I really haven’t taken advantage of or explored much of it at all — I always went straight to the NHK News Easy (in the beginners tab). NHK News Easy is a great resource for reading simple, relevant Japanese about current events. You can also access it via their website, but I enjoyed the extra features of the Manabi Reader app (discussed below). When I was at the intermediate level, I tried to read one NHK News Easy article every day, which was both great practice and a nice way to keep up with news. I still use it just for learning about current events sometimes! Regular NHK News is also available for advanced learners.
What I like about Manabi Reader is that you can click any word for reading, pronunciation, and English translation, which makes the app very easy to use! No navigating other tabs and getting distracted while looking up definitions. You can also check off full articles and individual paragraphs after reading them, so you can visibly mark your progress.
I also used to use the linked Manabi flash card app for taking unknown words from articles and reviewing them later (use this feature by clicking the 'I want to learn this' button). Lastly, there is also a feature in the app to mark known and unknown kanji (both manually and via kanji you've encountered in articles) and track your way through the JLPT levels, but I never used it seriously, since I study kanji via WaniKani. But it could be a nice way to track kanji progress, too!
So, if you’re looking to start reading real things in Japanese, I definitely suggest getting a Japanese reader app like Manabi Reader, and also using NHK News Easy, as the articles are short (about three paragraphs) and easy to understand.
My next online reading suggestion is Tadoku, an online library with many free Japanese graded readers (i.e. beginner and intermediate learner friendly) in Japanese. These stories are downloadable and easy to read on your phone, and often come with furigana over the Kanji for the smooth reading experience. Tadoku literally means "read a lot" and their mission is to help learners improve their Japanese naturally through level-appropriate context-based learning.
To be honest, I don't use these methods very often anymore because now I read light novels on my Kindle app. (Make an Amazon Japan account to do this from anywhere.) Tadoku and NHK News Easy are wonderful and easy-to-use materials for beginners and intermediate students. I like to call them "bridge" materials because they give you a way to cross over from textbook/Duolingo example sentences to real, natural material that still feels understandable and accessible. I used these methods so much over the first two years of my study that I was able to cross the bridge, and now I can read things made for native speakers. If you start reading a lot, you'll get there faster than you think! So don't let the inaccessibility of physical books hold you back - there are plenty of online resources for Japanese Reading Practice out there!
And if you don't know where to start, Konnichiyall also has a Japanese Reading Practice series with short and easy passages for Japanese learners of all levels 😉
Conclusion
Making your desired Japanese study habits more easy and accessible will change the game for you in regards to consistency. Remember, good habits aren't proof of strong motivation and commitment - you can trick your brain into building the study habits you want to have, and my goal here is to teach you exactly how you can do it.
That's all for the "Easy" category of the Japanese Study Habit Building Series! Your homework this week is to find a way to make your current study routine easier. Good luck! And be sure to check out the next post in the series to learn more about taking your Japanese study habits from a dream to something you don't even need to think about!
Let me below know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions of your own!
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