Japanese Is Actually Easy: Journey To JLPT N1

It’s finally past March, so the official JLPT exam results certificates have been mailed out. While I mainly intend to focus this website on travel within Japan, I thought this would be a great opportunity to stray off the path a little to share some tips for learning Japanese, as it can greatly enhance your experience while exploring the country. Hope you enjoy it!

Japanese Is Actually Easy: Journey to JLPT N1

Background

It’s the end of 2018, and most anime of the season have already finished airing. While I had seen a fair amount of anime by then, one particular anime about adolescence and quantum physics (if you know, you know) really stood out and touched my heart. With such strong emotions, I just absolutely had to get my hands on the original works and find out how the story continued. Except there was one problem, there was not a single English version of the story available. This was the defining moment that ignited my journey to start learning Japanese.

Although nearly six years have passed since then, I spent four of those years studying seriously before passing the JLPT N1. It wasn’t the fastest time to go from zero to N1, and my results are far from the best (I only passed by two marks), but a pass is a pass!

With that said, I’d like to share my study methods and reflect on what I might have done differently to improve even faster.

(My) Methodology

Learn The Alphabet (Kanas)

Japanese is renowned for having 3 writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Two of these three (Hiragana and Katakana) are actually an alphabet system which guides pronunciation. Like with learning most other languages, the alphabets are the most common starting point as they lay the foundation of the language. Thus you’d probably want to start with Hiragana and Katakana.

While it’s definitely possible to grind it out within a few days, don’t feel any pressure to rush through it. When I first started learning Japanese, I spent about 20 minutes per day remembering each consonant group of Hiragana through writing exercises. With this pacing, it took about 3 weeks to learn both Hiragana and Katakana. If I had to re-learn them but with emphasis on speed, I’d put more focus on recognition rather than recall (ie. understanding when seen, but not necessarily able to write) using flashcard apps such as Anki. Output becomes a bit easier once you nail the recognition part down, so it’s fine to put off writing until after you’ve mastered recognizing the Kana.

“What about Kanji?” you might be wondering. Lucky for us, every Kanji character is associated with a pronunciation that can be read using the learned Kana! As for learning their meanings and memorizing their forms, we can gradually pick them up. Otherwise, it would take forever to start learning Japanese to form sentences.

Learn From Textbooks

While many like to dismiss textbooks for teaching “unnatural” Japanese, I’ve found them to be an invaluable way to learn the language. One key reason is that Japanese has very little in common with English compared to French or Spanish. This can make learning Japanese through immersion more challenging as grammar doesn’t correspond 1-to-1. Textbooks serve as valuable guides for bridging this gap.

Another reason I really like textbooks is that they provide structure. Of course learning freely can be fun in its own right, but a structured approach can help provide a clear goal for those who prefer to have a clear path of their learning.

The biggest reason to use a textbook, however, is that it’s a sentence mining (using sentences to learn words and grammar in context) goldmine. Not only are there many example sentences to reference, but the difficulty is often scaled perfectly to the appropriate level so that you can focus on understanding the concepts introduced in a lesson. With that said, it’s important to focus on understanding the sentences and concepts as-is rather than to translate them into your mother language. Be sure to build this habit early, otherwise it can get difficult as your vocabulary and understanding of the language grows. My tip for this is to understand the concepts/sentences through visualization so that I can “see an image” the next time I encounter the words in a different scenario.

The most popular textbooks to start with are the Genki I and II which are supposed to cover N5 and N4 respectively. I can easily recommend these textbooks as they do a great job at introducing: vocabulary, grammar, Kanji, and listening practices. My only gripe was that some of the exercises were designed with a classroom setting in mind, but it honestly had little impact on my long-term success of learning Japanese. For those looking to start with less financial commitment, you can check out “Tae Kim’s Guide To Learning Japanese”

For intermediate level studies, Quartet seems like a good follow up after completing the Genki series as they are from the same publishing company. When I was at this stage, Quartet had only just released so I had actually gone with Tobira: A Gateway to Advanced Japanese as it was tried and true. However, there is definitely a knowledge gap when transitioning from Genki to Tobira that can take a while to fill. Tobira was basically 99% Japanese while being extremely dense in information. With the right amount of patience and persistence, I found that it had improved my reading quite astronomically as it basically forces you to completely immerse yourself in Japanese. Looking at the sample pages for Quartet, it definitely looks like a strong contender to Tobira. Either one here should definitely suffice, so pick whichever one fits your use case better (whether it be price or the written structure).

By the time you’ve finished the above textbooks, you should be around the N3 level. At this point, immersion is a lot more accessible. If you haven’t started already, it’s time to start immersing in native content.

Immersion

Although I’ve written this following the textbooks section, they are in no way a prerequisite to immersion. In fact, I’d even encourage you to start immersing yourself in Japanese from the start of your studies. Yes, I know I wrote above that immersion is hard at the beginning because the languages are so different, but once we break down immersion into 2 parts, we’ll see why I encourage starting early despite the difficulty.

Passive Immersion (Start of Studies)

With passive immersion, we want to learn Japanese without actively studying. There’s 2 goals with this:

1. We want learning to be fun and non-exhausting. Having fun makes the entire learning process much easier and more bearable
2. We want to be able to process Japanese passively, without having to translate it back to our native language.

But what does this entail? We want to squeeze in Japanese immersion during “mindless” tasks to turn it into multi-tasking. For example, we can put on a podcast while doing laundry or cleaning. Doing so, we’ll be picking up on how the language sounds without even realizing it. This will lay the foundation for when we start doing active immersion, as well as developing your “inner voice” to sound more native once we begin speaking. With that said, my favourite way for passive immersion is watching anime (with subtitles): it’s fun, we get to listen passively, and it’s possible to pick up a couple words here and there using the subtitles. Just be sure you don’t tune out while reading!

Active Immersion (Most Accessible After Textbooks)

By this point, we’ll want to start introducing active immersion, where we will start giving Japanese our undivided attention. The transition between textbooks and native content can be quite massive, so I’d recommend starting with easy reading content. The reading part here is the most important as we want to be able to make vocabulary lookups quick and easy. For example, Yomitan is a browser extension that helps you perform these lookups by simply hovering over the word! Otherwise you can add an English-Japanese dictionary to your reading device (I use a Kobo). As for finding resources to immerse with, LearnNatively has been very helpful in finding level-appropriate content.

As for how I progressed:

• Yotsuba&!: A manga that’s often recommended at the beginner level, but I surprisingly struggled quite a bit when I was around N4-N3. It’s a good way to learn stylistic writing within a Manga while forcing you to accept ambiguity
• NHK Easier: NHK Easy, news articles written with Japanese learners and children in mind, with a built-in hover dictionary. With this alone (and the textbooks) I was able to pass N3.
• Hololive: I ended up falling into the Vtuber rabbit hole and spent a lot of time doing both passive and active immersion by consuming this type of content. There’s often no subtitles to work with, so it can be quite difficult to follow along when compared to reading. However, this type of content can easily skyrocket your listening skills. This content alone basically carried my listening portions for both the N2 and N1 exams.
• Shin-Kanzen Master N2/N1 Preparation Textbooks: Highly recommended for exam takers, but only for the grammar and reading comprehension textbooks. The grammar book is great for quickly introducing many grammar points along with some example sentences (great for sentence mining). The reading comprehension book contains many passages from essays and news articles making for great immersion. For Kanji and vocabulary, they can be a good way for exam preparation, but I had better results with native reading content. No comment on listening comprehension as I have never even used it (despite purchasing it)
• Convenient Store Woman: A good introduction for starting novels. It’s a good practice for post-N2/pre-N1 levels. -NHK News: news articles tailored towards adults. A great way to practice both listening and reading for post-N2/pre-N1 levels

Of course, what worked for me won’t necessarily work for everybody. That’s why it’s best to find whatever piques your interest while challenging you just the right amount.

Speaking (and Writing)

Pronunciation

If you managed to reach this far in your studies, you’ve hopefully developed an inner Japanese voice based on your listening practice. This will be helpful when it comes to speaking with the correct pitch accent (high-low voice) and overall pronunciation. Using your inner voice, you’ll want to notice and correct pronunciation discrepancies when speaking.

With that said, you can further improve pronunciation through shadowing native Japanese speakers (listening to Japanese speech and immediately repeating what they said, being conscious of both pitch accent and pronunciation).

Free-Flow Conversations

Up until now, most of our studies were focused on input (reading and listening) rather than output (writing and speaking). As a result, it’s completely natural to struggle with writing or speaking at this point. But worry not, as the intensive input-study we’ve been doing thus far will help us greatly accelerate our ability to output.

In order to efficiently begin speaking, we’ll actually want to start with writing. This is because writing is similar to speaking in that they both rely on your ability to output. The difference however, is that writing often has little to no time pressure. With speaking on the other hand, not only are you expected to respond quickly, you’re also required to handle the spontaneity of a conversation. Writing also has the added benefit of solidifying your output into physical form, allowing us to use our input-comprehension to judge the quality and validity of our writing. If you haven’t done any of the writing exercises in your workbooks, consider starting now! Otherwise, try to connect with Japanese speakers and practice emailing or messaging in Japanese.

Initially, writing in Japanese might take a while since it requires a decent amount of thinking and recollection of words. As you practice, you’ll slowly get used to it and will notice that you can write faster than before. Eventually you’ll reach a point where writing comes to you immediately. It’s at this point when you should be able to speak freely - you’ve done shadowing, so pronunciation should be no issue, and you’ve done a bunch of writing, so words and sentences should also come to you pretty naturally. Now is the time to go out there and start finding opportunities to speak! If you need an idea, consider taking a conversation class or going to a language exchange meetup.

As for me, I’m only able to speak of this in hindsight and realized the importance of writing much later than I would’ve preferred. I knew of my tendency to become a nervous wreck when trying to speak Japanese, so I started quite early, around the N3 level, by taking an online non-credit conversation course run by a University. Doing so, I was able to practice speaking to improve my pronunciation, overcome my fear of speaking, and made connections that I could write to in Japanese.

Reflection

Kanji

It’s finally time to address the elephant in the room: Kanji. Unlike Hiragana and Katakana, it’s not really possible to cram out a bunch of Kanji in 2 weeks. With that said, there are definitely efficient and inefficient ways to study this, which I wish I knew when I first started.

• do NOT learn Kanji individually: With the exception of the Kanji that often get used on their own, Kanji are often in pairs or groups to form some meaning.
  • Many Kanji hold multiple meanings which are often differentiated when in Kanji pairs or groups.
    • Example: 風呂 (furo) - “Bath” vs 風景 (fuukei) - “Scenery”
  • Many Kanji have multiple readings - it’s almost meaningless to learn these readings individually as they can change depending on the surrounding words or the context of the sentence.
    • Example: 生きる (ikiru) - “To live” vs 生活 (seikatsu) - “Living”
    • Example 2: 市場 (ichiba) - “(Physical) market” vs 市場 (shijou) - “(Financial) market”
  • do NOT spend too much time trying to learn how to write: unless your job, hobby, or living circumstances requires you to write Kanji
    • Recognition is easier than recall - it’s much easier to see a Kanji and remember the meaning rather than to have to remember how a Kanji is written
      • DO use flashcards - see Anki

Anki

While it can be very boring and tedious, flashcards are an extremely efficient way to learn a language

• DO use flashcards to build recognition memory of Kanji
• DO practice flashcards consistently (ideally everyday)
  • 5 new cards per day is probably the sweet spot, the default of 20 can be way to cumbersome
• DO sentence mine to learn words in context
• do NOT record every word you don’t know - DO record a word if you see it multiple times and struggle to remember the meaning
  • I have a whole deck containing many words that I don’t know nor encounter frequently. It’s a waste of my device space and study time

Japanese Is Easy?!

You might be thinking: “It took this person 4 years of intense study and over 2000 words to explain how to study the language. Not to mention the Foreign Service Institute which rates Japanese at 2200 hours of class study. How on Earth is Japanese easy?!”

While I absolutely agree that the language is extremely time intensive, I don’t think this alone makes the language any “harder” or “easier”. Yes, there’s many Kanji to remember. Yes, the grammar is completely different and there’s many nuances. BUT, what use is it to study an “easier” Language like French but not remember anything? If you can’t remember or use the language, then is it really “easier”?

I took Mandarin classes from Grade 1 to Grade 9 and remember almost nothing at all - it was a hard language because I subconsciously rejected the language. I also took French classes from Grade 4 to Grade 9, but only managed to learn anything when I was under the same conditions as learning Japanese. The reality is that any language can be easy, but it’s completely reliant on your mindset. Let’s now take a look at the conditions that allowed me to learn Japanese (and for a short while, French) with relative ease.

• The ABSOLUTE most important factor is to enjoy the process and have fun
  • If you absolutely dread doing something, you will likely reject a considerable amount of information you try to process. This is why it’s important to prioritize having fun over anything else. If you find that a certain method of studying doesn’t appeal to you, feel free to try something different. There’s so many different ways and mediums to expose yourself to the language
• Consistency: expose yourself to the language everyday
  • It shouldn’t be a surprise that if you interact with Japanese everyday that you’ll learn more than if you were to once a week
    • Doing so will help strengthen your memory of the language as you’ll need to recognize foundational words and grammar frequently
    • There’s also the aspect of exposure: you’ll be encountering many new words and grammar which will help expand your knowledge of the language
  • Try to squeeze in study during “down periods”
    • If you need to use the washroom, try to do some flashcards to pass the time
    • If you workout, consider squeezing some flashcards in between reps
    • There’s many opportunities to study, even if only for a short duration. Anytime you open a social media app, consider opting for a few minutes of study instead.
  • It might be a bit hard at first, but eventually you’ll build a habit to study
• Persistence (Desire): have a reason to keep on studying
  • I don’t like to rely on “passion” as it can go as easily as it comes. In fact, my “passion” for Japanese ended about 1 year into my studies
  • Having a good reason to keep you engaged can help with both the fun aspect and consistency
  • For me, having the desire to be able to read my favorite series in its original form had provided the drive I needed to study for so long

This doesn’t only apply to Japanese though! We can apply the above logic to any skill we want to improve and we’ll eventually see results. It’s also how I managed to study programming!

Summary

1. Learn Hiragana and Katakana
2. Use textbooks to skyrocket your learning in the beginning
3. Immerse passively in order to learn the sounds of the language
4. Immerse actively to quickly learn grammar and vocabulary
5. Practice speaking once you’ve immersed a substantial amount
6. Anki is a great app to efficiently learn Kanji and words from sentence mining
7. Have fun!
8. Be consistent
9. Have a strong purpose to keep you engaged in studying