Are you looking to build better study habits for your Japanese Language Study?
Then look no further than my new series: Building Japanese Study Habits! Welcome to the first post!
So you’ve decided to learn Japanese. Maybe you grew up watching anime, love J-pop music, or were super into samurai as a kid. Perhaps you love traveling in Japan, meeting people and eating the delicious food, and want a deeper experience of the culture. Maybe you just want to study a new language, and you find Japanese calling to you. You might even want to live here, or maybe you already do!
No matter what the reason, something has brought you face-to-face with Japanese - the language of kanji, unstated subjects, and onomatopoeias. That’s so exciting! Learning a new language can be such a fun and rewarding experience, and there are a lot of brain benefits from studying languages as well, such as increased focus and enhanced information processing.
But also, studying Japanese can be really daunting! For a native speaker of English, it’s ranked as one of the hardest languages to learn, requiring 2200+ hours of study to fluency versus a more familiar language like Spanish, which is estimated to take about 600 hours. It’s all that damn kanji.
So, this leads to the question:
Where to Start When Learning Japanese?
How do I even begin to make a dent in 2200 hours?!
Well, if you’re lucky enough to have a teacher, then they can handle that part for you. Honestly, that’s one of the biggest benefits of teachers and paid programs: they handle the scheduling and pacing for you, so you can just focus on the language content.
But if you’re self-studying, rest assured that it is possible to get a grasp on this language, and thanks to modern technology, it’s a lot easier than it used to be! Many have come before you and reached fluency without the help of any green owls or hybrid crab-alligators. You can do it, too. It may take some trial and error, and sometimes it might feel rough, but you can definitely get there.
But first, we need to start by building the right Japanese study habits.
Let’s talk about how to approach Japanese studies from day one. There are many guides online that will tell you "learn the character/sound systems, start studying grammar, start building your vocabulary". I'm going to assume you know this much already, but if you don't, here's a helpful guide.
This post is about how to start becoming the type of person who is good at studying Japanese.
1. Consistency over speed
We want to get started on building solid, long-term Japanese study habits right away. This is much, much more important than shoving in tons of material from the get go. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither are second language skills.
So, the very first thing we want to do is find some kind of study method we can do EVERY DAY.
Just one method is enough. The secret to long-term study success is focusing on CONSISTENCY over volume and speed.
You’ll want your chosen Japanese learning method to be:
Easy. Not content wise. I’m talking about easy-access. It should require almost zero activation energy to start — as in, your study materials are in plain sight, you don’t need to hunt around your house for a pencil, you don’t need to remember what page of a book you’re on, etc. Make it hard to make an excuse to procrastinate.
Quick. Your method should be able to have a clear stopping point within 10 minutes or less. Choose a method that’s so quick that you can still convince yourself to do it on your WORST days.
General. It is ideal if your study method covers not JUST grammar, kanji, or vocabulary, but all three. Choose something that even if you have a string of bad days, you’re still holding down the fort with your general studies. Not advancing, maybe, but not regressing in any areas, either. Keep the fire lit even if it’s just a tiny flame.
Beginner-level. I know a lot of people claim to learn Japanese from anime or music right from the start, but you’re really going to maximize growth per time input by going with something that is the appropriate level. Walk before you run. If you want to tackle lyric translation in your spare time then that’ll be really fun and helpful on the side, but your main study method being structured and beginner friendly will help you grow as fast as possible.
So, what should you use? As you may already know, I chose Duolingo as my method. The initial reason was that my previous boss recommended it to me when I moved to Japan. She was an American who had learned Japanese to fluency over 30 years ago when Google Translate wasn’t a thing, so I trusted her with my language learning life. But the reason that I recommend Duolingo to beginners now is that it’s so good for habit-forming. Additionally, Duolingo starts from the basics of hiragana and sounds, covers a wide variety of material, and has built-in review as you progress, so you don’t have to figure out how to budget your time. For me that was really helpful (and still is).
To be honest, I had a period of about six months at the start where I wasn’t really trying all that hard with Japanese. There were a lot of days when all I did was a single Duolingo lesson. Still, that knowledge was stacking up slowly but surely, and when I was ready to really commit to Japanese I didn’t have to go back and review or figure out where I’d left off with anything. Despite the harassment of the owl, I genuinely find that Duo is pretty good at meeting you where you are with your studies and helping you maintain both the habit and your knowledge even when you’re not feeling 100%.
But it doesn’t have to be Duolingo. The important thing here is just to be honest with yourself. If you’re trying to study from a textbook and it’s working, awesome!! I now use the Nihongo Sou-Matome series to study for the JLPT. They’re broken down into 2 pages/day, which only take about ten minutes to complete. Even though it’s a physical book, it helps me overcome some of the scheduling hurdles I encounter with traditional books. If you’re starting out with book study, be sure to place it somewhere easy to see and use, and together with all the writing materials you need.
But if book study isn’t working, just move onto another method, rather than trying to force yourself to become a textbook person. You can try workbooks, smartphone applications, online language programs, Anki, YouTube — anything! What we’re looking for here is a baseline — the absolute easiest thing you can do for studying every single day.
I’m not saying you can never use textbooks or do more difficult and challenging things. My best Japanese studying days look like: Duolingo, kanji studies with WaniKani, a textbook page or some reading practice, and maybe some listening practice with a podcast or some anime.
But my absolute worst studying days don’t look like zero. They look like 15 XP on Duolingo. Do I make huge strides on these days? No. But I keep the habit.
Try to find this kind of Japanese home base to return to so that you’re studying every day no matter what. Build on it when you’re feeling motivated, fall back on it when you’re not. This is your bread and butter of Japanese study.
2. Don't bite off more than you can chew
This is the most common piece of advice given to people pursuing fitness for the first time, but it applies to studying Japanese too.
It sounds so simple, but let’s put ourselves in the shoes of someone who has just decided to study Japanese. Maybe they’ve just moved to Japan and they’re so excited to start learning! So they buy a textbook and they spend three hours one evening teaching themselves hiragana. The next day they teach themselves about ‘desu/masu’ for two hours, and learn 20 vocabulary words in a day.
This is all great, but most of us can’t rely on that first day level of motivation forever. Some people genuinely get so excited about learning Japanese that they teach it to themselves at the speed of light without ever having any slip ups, but that is not the story for the majority of us. It wasn’t mine, and I’m gonna go ahead and assume that if you ended up on this post, it may not be your story either. (And that’s okay.)
Our example learner feels tired the next day from all that studying, so they skip a day. Maybe they do two hours the following day to make up for it, but skip the next three days because things got harder. They almost practiced on day four, but then they got overwhelmed because they didn’t know if they should cover new content or review since they had missed a few days. Rinse and repeat.
This might be slightly exaggerated, but you get the idea. Most foreigners who I know in Japan who can’t speak Japanese after a long time living here are still stuck somewhere in this madness, but it only gets more frustrating as they pick up and put down studying Japanese multiple times. This leads to even longer periods without studying, and it makes for a vicious cycle of growing resentment.
Usually, being stuck in this cycle isn’t a question of drive or motivation. It’s usually just a habits issue. People tend to think that because they finally got out the book they should commit an hour or two or even three. This is why people burn out. Of course you can (and should!) study this way when you’re feeling motivated, but give yourself permission not to do this every time, or it will lead to skipping entirely when you don’t really feel like going all out.
Allow yourself to give the textbook just 5 minutes, or one item/activity on a page, and then put it away. Review words or characters for 2 minutes on your worst days. It is absolutely worth this two minute effort. Keeping the habit up is so much more important than ingesting a ton of content every time. Don't guilt yourself for being human.
3. Have a selection of study options rather than a strict study plan.
I hate study plans. I feel like study plans are sent from hell to make people feel guilty and bad about themselves. When we make study plans, we really like to say ‘well this would be an ideal way to reach my goals, so let’s do it! All of it, every day!’. But usually motivation is highest when we’re trying to make this study plan. As it naturally ebbs and flows and we don’t accomplish as much, we just feel bad, never complete all the items on the list, and start to resent studying. None of us are ideal, so let’s stop planning to be.
Rather than developing a strict plan for yourself, I think it’s best to have a selection of methods or resources that address whatever areas you want to build. In addition to my home base of Duolingo, I have other resources I use for learning kanji, practicing reading, JLPT studies, and honing my listening skills. When you complete your baseline and have extra time and motivation, great - work on another method. Vary them by day so you don’t get bored or neglect certain areas of learning. When you don’t have that extra time and motivation, you still complete your baseline (because you do that every day!). This way, you can stick with it and progress naturally without all that guilt.
Recently I saw an Instagram post that talked about the importance of establishing rhythms around habits, rather than hard rules. In this context, rather than striving to be a person who completes a rigid study plan every day, get into the rhythm of doing a little here, a little there, a little something extra when you have a spare moment. If you worry about spending a certain amount of time on each thing every day and ticking all the boxes of an ideal study plan, studying is going to become not fun very quickly. If you think of studying as a game of filling stolen moments with a quick bite of Japanese, it stays fun, light, and exciting!
4. Stack your Habits
My next piece of advice comes from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. The technique is called habit stacking, in which we sandwich a habit that we want to have between some other habits that we already have. If you have trouble building a daily study habit, this may help you reduce some of that friction.
The idea here is to make studying Japanese as automatic as possible, something that happens the same way at the same time every day, just like walking outside in the morning is always automatically followed by locking your door, or something like that. We can do this by setting some sort of trigger at which to always start studying. For example, getting on the train or bus to go to or from work, sitting down at your desk after lunch, drinking your morning coffee. This is the real reason people say it’s best to study or exercise or anything at the same time every day. At first it will take conscious effort and discipline to stack the habit in your routine, but once your brain learns that coffee means Japanese, it’ll become a lot easier to study!
Try to choose some sort of trigger that is inevitable, rather than dependent on certain conditions to maximize your success with habit stacking. For example, the first thing I do at work in the morning when I sit down is my kanji reviews on WaniKani. This makes for a very productive work week in terms of studying, but means I often forget on the weekends, so be careful!
5. Don’t worry about whether your study methods are perfect or not
Beginner Japanese learners often spend a lot of time worrying about how to study Japanese. Don’t waste precious time doing this! There are a million and one methods out there for studying. Rather than researching which one has zero flaws and a 100% effectiveness rate, just dive in. Rather than spending two hours mapping out how you’ll spend every minute of every day to make sure you study two hours daily, just dive in! Imperfect real study is a million times better than perfect theoretical study!
You won’t start learning Japanese until you put down the product review pages and start. Just do a little something every day, and no matter what you’re using, I promise you you’re going to improve.
That's all for this one - if you made it this far, thanks so much for reading! Let me know what you think of these study-habit building tips in the comments! I hope they can help you create a Japanese study routine that feels easy, fun, and natural for you! Or, if you’re someone who self-studies Japanese in a more structured way and finds it easier than my go-with-the-flow approach, I’d really love to hear your thoughts and methods as well!
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Want to see more on Japanese study habit building? Check out some of my in-depth recommendations here:
How to Build Effective Japanese Self-Study Habits, Part 1: Fun, Fun, Fun!
How to Build Effective Japanese Self-Study Habits, Part 2: Easy
How to Build Effective Japanese Self-Study Habits, Part 3: Automatic
Can I Learn Japanese Without Studying? Comprehensible Input and Context-Based Language Learning
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