Anyone who has an interest in Japanese culture or who dreams of one day walking across the crowded Shibuya intersection is going to want to pick at least a few conversational phrases in Japanese. Although Japan has been changing and has plenty of English to go around, speaking the language, mastering it, and truly communicating with the Japanese is an indescribable feeling.

As someone who has not only lived in Japan for 8 years on and off but also studying and mastering Japanese for over 10 years, I know you too can learn Japanese. I’m going to give you tips and tricks, as well as honest advice, for gaining fluency in Japanese.

My Experiences Learning Japanese

So, who am I and why am I talking about learning Japanese? As I mentioned above, I’ve been living in Japan on and off for over 8 years now, passed the JLPT N2 a few years ago, studied at a Japanese Language School and a university, and even worked with multiple corporations, translating their websites and teaching their employees to speak English. However, I would have never gotten to a point of fluency if I wasn’t 100% invested in learning the language and immersing myself in it as much as humanly possible.

I started studying in high school. My friends and I had an interest in Japanese anime, so we naturally began picking up vocabulary words.

Studying in Japan

When I graduated high school, I spent a year in college, studying Japanese with Rosetta Stone, before I signed up for an immersive course in Tokyo that would be 3 months long with class 6 days a week, 5-8 hours a day. The first round, I tested into Level 2, but it became clear that Rosetta Stone had failed with teaching me some cornerstone pieces of the language, like adjectives, and some verb tenses, so I discussed with my sensei that I wanted to move down to Level 1.

Within the first 3 months, I studied well over 600 hours and was able to carry a short conversation in Japanese with my international classmates. After a short break, I returned to the same school for a full year of study. I ended up skipping Level 2, because I had studied nonstop with the textbooks during my brief return to the States and tested into Level 3. From there, every 3 months I advanced to the upper echelons of the school, learning basic conversation, business conversation, and even keigo.

When I came back to America to get a degree, I took a Japanese course at the university. Much to my surprise, and the instructors, I tested out of the highest level offered at the university but was allowed to take the course for credit nonetheless.

Living and Working in Japan

In 2015, I headed back to Japan, got a job that required me to speak business-level Japanese and do interviews using keigo.

Chronologically speaking, my intense studies ranged from 2010 to 2012, followed by general life in Japan up to 2018. Within those two years at the language school, I learned more than enough to survive and could read and write advanced kanji.

Obviously, you might not have the same chance I did to just drop everything and go over to Japan to study the language nonstop. So what do you do? How many hours does it take to learn Japanese if you cannot immerse yourself in it every single day? Don’t worry. It’s doable.

How Long Does It Take To Learn Japanese At a Basic Level?

As with any kind of skill, the more you practice, the faster you will gain knowledge and command of Japanese. Many people find that speaking Japanese is easier than reading and writing Japanese, especially if English is your first language. In fact, Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn for a native English speaker.

If you want to speak enough Japanese to make friends in Japan and carry on simple conversations, you can master casual Japanese in under a year, especially if you are skipping over hiragana and katakana.

Of course, you should never scoff at hiragana. Japanese people use text messages ruthlessly, so you should at least learn to read hiragana. Plus, you get pronunciation practice.

Hiragana, if you are willing to practice quite a bit, can be mastered in 1-2 days. The same is true for katakana. Since a lot of katakana is connected to English words that have been assimilated into Japanese language, you will be able to double pronunciation practice along with learning foundation words.

That means you pick up words you already inherently know and two writing styles in under 2 weeks. The best part? You’re learning basic conversation at the same time.

But here is where the issue begins: grammar. About the time you are confident enough to pick up grammar and start making your own sentences based off of what you know, it will be anywhere between 2-4 months.

Everyone is different, though, so if you are motivated and are diligently studying, you could speed up this entire process by leaps and bounds.

Hours Required For JLPT Levels

There are unfortunately no concrete standard for the amount of time required to pass each JLPT assessment. It also depends on your comfort level with taking exams.

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test Association has laid out some numbers that serve as a general guidelines—but are by no means exact. For example, the association says you need 900 hours of study to pass the N1. The U.S. government, on the other hand, states you need 2,200 hours of consecutive study to pass. This includes the U.S. Foreign Service Institute estimate, since they have put Japanese in Language Group V (exceptionally difficult for native English speakers). If you have no prior background of kanji, then passing the JLPT N1 might take about 3,000-4,800 hours to pass.

Now, the language school I went to created class content based on what was on the JLPT N5-N1. So, even with 3 months of study, I might have been able to pass the N5. Most students that studied at the language school for 1-2 years could eventually pass the N2 or N1 with flying colors. But that was with 8 hours of study every single day of the week for those 1-2 years.

Your Time Commitment Will Determine How Fast You Progress

Depending on your goals, the amount of time you dedicate to Japanese is going to play a major role in how quickly to reach the level of comprehension you want.

For hypothetical purposes, let’s say you want to reach an intermediate level for doing business in Japan. I can immediately come up with four scenarios for studying: taking a Japanese course at a local educational institution, one year at a Japanese language school, total immersion (school, work, and living in Japan), or dedicated self-study.

Let’s have a look at the time breakdown:

1. Japanese course

This could be a 90-120 minute class several times a week, with homework, independent practice, and other supplemental materials. If you do 2-3 courses a year, it will take around 8-10 years to reach intermediate level. Why? Most of the time, you are not immersed and are instead using rote memorization, English translations, and still speaking in English to your classmates.

2. Japanese language school

You might have 4-8 hours per day in class, 5-6 days a week. You also have homework, presentations, projects, clubs, and activities that will add additional study time. It could take 4-7 years, depending on your starting point.

3. Total immersion in Japan

You are in Japan, working at a convenience store, and also studying at a Japanese language school. This will take about 3 months to 1 year to get to intermediate level, because every single day is going to give you experience and requires you to immediately memorize what is happening.

4. Independent study

Depending the length of your study time every day and how often you can practice alone, such as having speaking practice over Skype, listening to podcasts like JapanesePod101, reading and writing the writing systems, and actively trying to utilize kanji, you can learn intermediate level Japanese within 1-3 years.

As you can see, time plays an important role. Languages that are different from English will tend to take longer than those with similar grammatical patterns or roots. Although there are some loan words, you will need to grasp the foundations before advancing, and that can take a while, even with hours of study.

Recommended Study Plan For Japanese

There are multiple routes for studying Japanese. Depending on your goals, some routes are going to be more suitable than others.

First, be real with yourself. Answer these questions:

• Are you a total beginner? Or do you have some prior knowledge of the language?
• How much hiragana and kanji do you know?
• How much time do you have throughout the week to study?
• What is your learning style?
• Do you plan on just traveling to Japan? Or do you plan on doing business?
• Do you dream of moving to Japan?
• Would you prefer to learn alone or with someone else?
• Do you want to pass the JLPT N2 or N1 in the future?

Your answers will shape your choices.

Those who want to level up as fast as possible should go to a Japanese language school that provides total immersion. This is the fastest way to get comfortable with speaking, reading, and writing Japanese.

Since there is more structure in courses and immersive experiences, I’m going to outline an independent study plan instead that starts from zero.

Beginning Your Japanese Study

• Every day, select periods where you have 1-3 hours to study. This can be 1 hour in the morning during your commute to listen to a Japanese podcast. Then, you could do 2 hours with a textbook or a language tutor in the evening.
• Start with hiragana, working on one series at a time. For example, work on recalling ra-ri-ru-re-ro first then move onto sa-shi-su-se-so and so on.
• Next, move onto katakana. Follow the same outline for hiragana.
• After you can consistently work with hiragana and katakana, choose 20-50 beginning kanji for simple words, like “Japanese,” “people,” and “tree,” to give you a foundation.
• Use a language app, like Duolingo Japanese or JapanesePod101 to supplement your study.

Furthering Your Japanese Study

• Once you can read and write hiragana and katakana and have about 30 kanji memorized, you can then pick up a Japanese language textbook. Many courses use Genki I & II, but I personally prefer Minna no Nihongo I & II, Sou Matome JLPT books, and those books that help you learn with manga.
• Start with beginner grammar patterns. Work on this at your own pace.
• Progress through the beginner level books and apps or podcast lessons, filling out the exercises in the textbooks. Since most textbooks come with CDs for audio practice, you should be listening to those as well. This repeats for intermediate and advanced level.
• Choose fun content—music, manga, anime, J-drama—that you can watch with and without subtitles or listen to at native speed. See how much you can pick out over time. Write down words in hiragana that you don’t understand then look them up to add to your vocabulary. Even if this is only 30 minutes, 5 days a week before bed, it will help.
• Repeat for every single JLPT level, until you can get to the level you have aspired to reach.
• You might want to try Rosetta Stone for speaking practice, iTalki or Skype for conversations, NHK for listening practice, and buying Japanese manga and children books for learning how to read complete sentences.

Since you are working at your own pace, this is all based on how much time you can allot to your study period. However, if you enjoy the language and are having fun learning, you can pick up a lot of Japanese rather quickly.

Overtime, your understanding will improve. To become a native level speaker, however, you will need someone who is a native Japanese language speaker who can converse with you in Japanese to get you thinking in Japanese.

Once you can do that, you will feel a sense of understanding and, later on, mastery.

So, How Long Does It Take To Learn Japanese? How Many Hours?

In the end, most people agree that mastering Japanese at the native level can take anywhere between 2,200-4,800 hours of intense studying. Yet, that does not always have to apply to you. If you are motivated to learn and are using the resources available to you, listening, talking, and writing, then you can minimize the length of time it takes to learn Japanese. Don’t give up and have fun with the journey! It is worth every step.

If you liked this article, you might also be interested to read Michael and Rohan’s experience learning Japanese.

Valerie

Valerie has lived in Japan on and off for over 8 years while working, studying, and dancing. She is interested in language acquisition, psychology, dance, and Japanese culture, and she devotes most of her time traveling around Japan and the rest of the world, teaching dance and yoga, and working as a freelance writer and graphic designer.

I have a confession to make…

I love reddit. For all its flaws, it’s still probably one of my favorite sites. I’ve probably spent at minimum 10 minutes on the site every single day for the last 5 years. And some days I fall down a reddit rabbit hole that takes me hours to get out of.

The beauty of reddit is that it uses the wisdom of the crowd to separate the good advice from the bad. That’s why when I’m looking for advice on something (especially things I’m too embarrassed to ask about!) I usually go to reddit to search for the answer.

Reddit Teaches You How To Learn Japanese

Today, I wanted to answer the age old question: What is the best way to study Japanese? So I turned to reddit to see what advice I could find.

Browsing through some of the all time top voted posts in r/learnjapanese, r/languagelearning, and r/japaneseresources, I skipped past the memes and funny posts to pick out some of the most recommended resources.

Here are a few of the most useful reddit posts I came across for learning Japanese:

The r/learnjapanese Start Here Guide

Level: Absolute Beginner to Low Intermediate

This ‘Start Here’ guide is pretty solid, if a little dry.

It walks you through the very basics of the Japanese alphabet, textbooks, tests (JLPT), and links to some really great resources like the Kana study sheets.

I also agree with their Japanese textbook recommendations — Genki 1 and 2 — although it seems they recommend Pimsleur over JapanesePod101, which is good but I still feel JapanesePod101 is much better (I suppose it was included because Pimsleur is less expensive). PS: If you’re looking for JapanesePod101 Coupon Codes, here you are.

I also think they should have mentioned Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji, as that’s probably the best way to learn Kanji from scratch.

All in all, this is a great place to start in terms of a resource list for starting Japanese.

I Made a Master List of All Free Japanese Resources Online

I made a master list of all free Japanese resources online from LearnJapanese

Japanese Level: All Levels

Reddit user SusieFougerousse created a VERY comprehensive list of free online resources for learning Japanese.

Actually the whole site is a pretty cool idea (that I wish I’d thought of) — collecting all the free online resources for a variety of topics (including language learning).

Even an intermediate student will likely find something here to help their study.

Here’s the Free Japanese Resource page, organized into sections (Apps, Video Lessons, Audio Lessons, Online Courses, Practice with Native Speakers, etc.)

A Year To Learn Japanese

A year to learn Japanese from languagelearning

While it’s maybe not a reasonable goal for most people to learn Japanese in just a year, sometimes overly ambitious goals are the ones that move the needle the most. Reddit user Storm94 posted asking for advice to help him reach a decent understanding before his vacation to Japan — in just a year’s time.

SuikaCider came to the rescue in the top comment with a comprehensive gameplan for reaching a decent level of Japanese in just a year. Here’s a sampling of his strategy:

His whole comment thread is worth a read for anyone planning out their Japanese acquisition strategy.

It’s rare that I agree this much with someone’s language learning strategy (it can be a very personal thing), but I agree with probably 90% of his suggestions: Genki 1 and 2 (plus workbooks), Heisig, Anki sentence decks…

The only things I disagree with are his anime recommendations

Side Note: You Should Be Watching Terrace House To Improve Your Japanese

Speaking of Japanese watching material, I have to interject here with my own important advice:

If your end goal is to be able to speak natural Japanese and you’re not watching Terrace House regularly, you’re doing yourself a HUGE disservice.

Terrace House is a goldmine of real, natural, conversational Japanese language in daily use, as well as showing you important cultural context that you might not get from watching Anime.

Here’s an excellent video from MattVsJapan that talks about Terrace House and ‘reading the air’

Now that we’ve got that little rant out of the way… On to our next reddit post.

All of Japanese Grammar in a One Hour Video

This video is a gold mine… All of Japanese grammar in an hour from LearnJapanese

Level: Beginner to Low Intermediate

If you’re just starting with Japanese or know just a little, this video and the cheat sheet might help give you a better overview of how Japanese grammar works.

Reddit user Metatart even went through the trouble of typing up the charts from the video in hiragana. Here’s the download link.

I Summarized Genki 1 & Genki 2 in Poster Form

Japanese Level: Beginner to Low Intermediate

This one is pretty cool. Reddit user Zwergkrug created some really beautiful PDF posters with tables that summarize all the grammar points in the Genki textbooks (verbs, adjectives, etc). This is a good one to print out and keep laminated as a reference.

Download the Genki summary Posters

Found This on Tumblr, This the Best Explanation I’ve Seen for Reading Kanji

Level: Beginner to Intermediate

A cool image found on Tumblr by user Shirookami99 that shows how to know when to read a kanji as On yomi vs Kun yomi. The image is originally from the book “kanji from zero”

Honorable Mentions, and Other Cool Japanese Language Stuff I Found on Reddit

Read Your Level – a list of popular Japanese kindle books with “easiness” scores

This is a VERY cool project — another one I wish I’d thought of. James Knelson has compiled a site that organizes Japanese books by reading level. They even take a sampling of 5000 characters to see how difficult the kanji is.

James’ site is highly recommended for finding reading material that will help you with the difficult jump from Intermediate to Advanced.

PODCAST for Intermediate Level Japanese

PODCAST for Intermediate Level Japn from japaneseresources

A good podcast find for intermediate.

Related: Check out our list of best podcasts for learning Japanese. 

Bob Ross-esque painting tutorials in Japanese, great for listening practice as well as for learning to paint!

This one is great for more intermediate to advanced students looking to improve their listening skills. If you like Bob Ross, you’ll probably like this.

Finally, if you’re looking to add a little “spice” to your Japanese learning (And your sex life), you might want to check out the List of sexual terms and fetishes   (WARNING: This list in NSFW!)

Any good reddit posts about learning Japanese we missed?  Let us know in the comments!

Michael

Michael has lived in Japan on and off for almost 10 years. He loves studying Japanese, and is currently working on going from N2 to N1 on the JLPT.

What is intermediate fatigue? 

Intermediate fatigue is where you start to feel discouraged with your rate of progress in the language you are learning. You might even lose motivation too. I’ll lay out the possible symptoms before suggesting how to get through it.

1. You are at the stage where you no longer need textbooks.
2. You’re definitely not a beginner, but not yet advanced.
3. You study online with the help of some amazing language extensions (shameless plug :)), reading material intended for native speakers
4. You listen to podcasts in your target language but get frustrated you can’t fully follow what is going on.
5. You can slowly read books in the language but you struggle without a dictionary.
6. You are frustrated that you still fumble for words when speaking to native speakers.
7. You haven’t finished Heisig yet (that’s an in-joke for Japanese learners)
8. You are constantly berating yourself with variations of “I should be better by now!”
9. You have moved onto reading literature but still get stumped by questions from the restaurant waitress.
10. You have no problem talking to your native speaker friend but get lost in group situations when he brings his friends along.
11. You can follow the whole dialogue of comedy sketches but don’t get the punchline.
12. You receive constant praise for your linguistic ability, but the taxi drivers don’t understand you. And so on…

Once intermediate fatigue sets in, all the gains you make in the language feel much smaller than before. Sometimes they will even seem nonexistent. But the important thing to remember is that you are progressing. All the time you spend picking up vocabulary and exposing yourself to new content in the language builds up into something much greater. Even if you don’t feel that you are improving, you need to suspend disbelief. Just when the fatigue seems to be at its heaviest, you are about to step up to the next level.

It all adds up! 

Always remember the snowball effect. As the renowned polyglot Alexander Arguelles reminds us, 15 minutes of study every day adds up to over 90 hours in one year. 30 minutes a day is over 180 hours! These are amazing numbers. Just imagine what is possible with just 45 or 60 minutes per day. In fact, Arguelles used this fact to study multiple languages at the same time, dedicating hours per day to keep them up. You don’t need to become a language monk like Arguelles, but a steady time commitment each day will build into a sizable snowball over time. It all adds up!

When I can, I like to sit down with my books for extended periods, but it’s tough to find the time. Life gets in the way. Being a true Tokyoite, I can be on-the-go for several days at a time. This makes it challenging to keep up my study regime. Sometimes it even gets discouraging but but there is no need to despair! All the time you invest will pay off. Language is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to remind yourself that it all adds up.

The little moments

Barry Farber is a talk show legend with a knowledge of more than 25 languages. He brilliantly describes in his book How To Learn Any Language about making the little moments count. What do you usually do when you are on the train or waiting in line? These periods are fantastic opportunities for learning.

Micro-study

I would estimate that over 50% of my language knowledge comes from micro-study during those little moments. Minutes spent on the bus and waiting for traffic lights to change add up to hours over time. Use them! Not only does it all add up but it also makes those moments more pleasant. As well as learning a language, you are improving your daily quality of life! Not a bad deal if you ask me. And guess what? It all adds up.

Farber is old school. He prefers to use index cards for his mobile learning (iPhones didn’t exist when he was learning the ropes) but I think that he would approve of helpful flashcard apps like i-Sokki and Anki. In any event, it’s much better than wasting your commute tweeting and looking at wedding photos on Facebook!

One more tip.

Still not feeling it? If you are lacking motivation, one good tactic is to look at old emails or letters you have written in the foreign language. It’s like looking at homework you did when you were a kid. You will laugh at your mistakes and wonder how you used to write so badly.

Reading old examples of your writing is a great way to show yourself how much you have improved. It reminds you that all the time you put in was worth it and motivates you to battle on. One glance at my gmail account is undeniable proof of my progress in Japanese. Give it a try! And remember, it all adds up!

I hope this post was helpful. Do you have any other tactics for beating intermediate fatigue? Let us know in the comments below!

For those of you who are interested in a wider discussion of mastering a skill (such as learning languages), I recommend reading Robert Greene’s latest work on mastery. It’s a very enlightening read.

Rohan

Rohan has spent years studying Japanese, Chinese and Korean, and currently lives in Japan. He created the perapera pop-up dictionary plugins to help other learners of Chinese and Japanese.