learning Japanese fast is a lot simpler than you think and in this video I'm going to show you step by step exactly how I would learn Japanese if I could start over again hi my name is Zeke I speak French and Spanish and I've been learning Japanese by myself self-study for the past 3 years and now I've reached about N2 ent3 level which is the equivalent of basic fluency you know what let me just show you so after learning three languages over the course of three years I've refined my method for learning languages so much
and with all the mistakes I made in my journey of learning Japanese I know now I could do it in half the time that took me originally so let me share with you my experience and my advice to save you all of that time now becoming fluent in Japanese is hard but it's not complicated so I'm going to break this video into seven stages number one being your reason for learning in Japanese number two hiragana Katakana and kanji number three vocab number four the basics number five Foundation number six speaking and number seven just some
general tips on how I think you should learn Japanese so starting off with your reason for learning I think a lot of people put a lot of emphasis on this but for me it wasn't really a huge factor I literally just wanted to learn Japanese one of my friends spoke Japanese I thought it was cool I liked anime I like Japan but I do agree that having a reason can be is super huge motivator and can keep you disciplined when things get tough so if you like anime if you like manga if you want to
watch anime without subtitles then absolutely go ahead learn Japanese no matter what your reason is learning Japanese is going to benefit you in so many different ways whether you want to learn Japanese to watch anime without subtitles whether you want to Read Manga whether you just want to go travel to Japan or live in Japan this video is for you and I know that there is a lot of kind of daunting Parts about learning Japanese whether it's kanji the alphabet all the like thousands of Chinese characters it does look really really difficult and it can
be very intimidating but once you actually get started and you understand what it's for what purpose it serves I promise you it seems a lot more reasonable and it's not as scary as you think so what can I expect when I start learning Japanese first thing I want to say is don't compare yourself to anyone else's Journey everybody's journey is different but generally it takes about a couple years to reach fluency getting fluent in Japan is very hard if we're just talking about conversational fluency being able to have a ation kind of just hold your
own in front of a real Japanese person and just have a normal conversation I'd probably say you could achieve this in about a year now this obviously depends on what your native language is so for me speaking English learning Japanese is going to take me a lot longer but if you speak to gallog or something like that then you'll definitely be able to pick up Japanese quicker now after 3 years of following this method that I'm going to show you in this video I can now speak Japanese with no problems I can have conversations I
actually went to Japan this year and I got to put my Japanese into practice and everything went super well and it was a great experience so in terms of timings what can you expect honestly I would be lying if I gave you a straight figure but all I can tell you is that the more effort you put in the quicker the results will be if you put in an hour a day you can probably expect becoming fluent in about over 3 years if you put in like 3 hours a day you can you can get
fluent in as quick as like a year and a half like I I know that I had periods where I wasn't studying J studying Japanese for like a week or two and sometimes I'd only study like less than an hour a day so it really depends on you how much you're willing to put in but either way I can guarantee results with this method and you will see huge progress really really quickly and according to multiple resources the general kind of consensus of how long it takes to reach a conversational level in Japanese is about
2,000 hours also do not be discouraged by those people who are showing you there those their crazy progressions or Transformations learning Japanese some people really can achieve it that quickly I know I definitely couldn't but everybody's journey is different don't compare yourself to others as long as you're better than you were yesterday you're doing amazing okay now next step you need to learn the alphabet so this includes hirana Katakana and kanji kanji for now we'll leave that alone I'll Circle back to that in a second hiana kak 92 characters in total 46 in each and
this is the phonetic alphabet that makes up all of the Sounds in the Japanese language you might be wondering why do I need to learn them can't I just use use the English alphabet version of it and the answer is no because the truth is the English alphabet cannot express all of the sounds that are possible in Japanese which means if you are trying to read Japanese using English letters you are going to be pronouncing things wrong and that is really going to hinder your communication so learn the alphabet if you just put in a
couple hours you can definitely memorize the alphabet in about one day 2 days and then it'll take you a couple weeks to kind of get used to it and just kind of read it without having to go letter by letter are the Chinese letters that were taken from China I don't know how long ago and were implemented in the Japanese language there's over 2,000 of them and you need to learn about 2,200 if you want to be able to read Japanese and write Japanese these are called the joyo kanji and these are the kanji that
you will see in daily life Japan but it's not limited to this so I know Ki seems scary and I know that the fact that there's 2,000 of them is super intimidating but the trick is to just take it step at a time because it even takes Japanese people years of schooling to actually learn to write Japanese so how can you learn all of these I would recommend learning hiana and Katakana on the first day of learning Japanese as soon as possible and learning them as a pair each hiana character has a corresponding Katakana character
so learning them in pairs will help you understand which ones have the same pronunciation now the way I prefer to learn hiana or Katakana is I'll actually show you so this is exactly what I've did and I've even got the piece of paper here to show you I would have a chart so you can just get one of these online I've got one of these printed out I will like to have a video on YouTube playing the pronunciation of each letter that I'm learning so that I make sure that I've got the pronunciation down as
well you got two A's this is the pair you don't have to write them out but writing out makes it easier and then I want you to try and memorize every single one of these okay just focus on these five for now will go like five at a time I want you to cover up the reading and then I want you to see if you can remember exactly how to read every single one of these so a e u a o a e a o okay and then you take it off and then if you
got it right you can move on to the next one and you learn it and then you do that for the whole alphabet should take you about maybe 2 to 4 hours in total to memorize so if you spend two hours over 2 days you can memorize this whole alphabet and then in a couple weeks you should just be able to read it like that and then when it comes to learning how to write kanji I'll cover that in the next step when we talk about vocabulary so vocabulary how do we learn vocabulary my favorite
way to learn vocabulary and I really recommend you do this the same way is you use application called Anki now Anki is free on desktop you can download the app on desktop and then you can pair it to your phone using the website or you can buy the app but it's say £25 on iOS so it's up to you if you want to do that anyways every morning I would use Anki to learn vocabulary I'd learn about 20 to 40 words depending on how ambitious I was feeling and I would do this every day and
just by learning say say for example you did you learned 33 words every day with an in just one month you would learn about 1,000 words and now just to put into perspective how crazy this is they say that about 80 to 90% of our daily language is made up of 2,000 Words which means that in 2 months you could learn 90% of Daily Language that is used the words that are the most common in the language and you'd be able to understand 90% of what people are saying trust me this is so so powerful
if you're learning Vo vocabulary this is the best way to go about it and the thing is vocabulary will boost your comprehension so much and so quickly because the more words you know the more kind of stuff you can pick up the more context you've got and trust me is just so good if you're not sure how to use anky there's loads of really really good tutorials on YouTube it's really not complicated and I'll put the anky deck that I use in the description but I know that it is somewhat outdated so if you look
up some videos on YouTube on what's the best anky deck to learn Japanese and 2025 you might find a more in date one but either way I'll put the one I use in the description and feel free to use that one so how is this going to help you learn kanji so the way I recommend that you learn kanji and this is the same way that I did it is through watching those videos and you have the subtitles in Japanese going along the bottom you'll be able to read those and kind of pick up the
readings from there but the second way which is a way you're going to learn the majority of your kji is through anky and so let me just quickly show you what this kind of looks like you'll be doing a deck like this for example you want to make sure that whatever deck you get this is the one I've got linked in the in the description you want to make sure that it's got the kji okay and then when you press show answer it put put the on top so that you can read the kanji using
the Japanese letters so when you're doing this you press show on the deck it will show you the reading it will play the audio for you you have the reading here which says cure and then you you got a sentence here and then this is how you learn the kji so now you know that these two Ki together are pronounced cure so this is the way that you learn kanji in context with words okay so now that you're growing your vocabulary with Anki the same time we need to get the basics down in the language
like the sentence structure the kind of super basic grammar to kind of form those sentences and just the kind of real fundamental pieces of the language so the best way that I recommend that we do this is we use audio courses like Japanese pod 101 now they got website called japanesepod101.com and you can also use their app on the IOS app store called Innovative language learning now I want to say that you have to pay like $1 for like a premium subscription I think they give you that's kind of like the version of a free
Tri but is $1 and you get that for about 7 days I think this is really good to kind of see if this works for you I really recommend it this is what I did I think I paid for extra subscription just so I had it for a month because I think it's really useful just in those be beginner stages I wouldn't use it for huge time after that but when you're starting Japanese pod 101 is super useful I think a lot of you've probably seen their their Channel on YouTube which is also really good
but their audio courses are my favorite to just get a foundation in the language so I would do about 20 minutes on that every day and then if you ever feel a little bit confused on grammar topics or anything like that I recommend you briefly look up a video on YouTube I wouldn't go into huge depth on grammar because I don't think it's super important in the beginning if you kind of just enjoy doing grammar the best best thing I can recommend you do is watching channels like Japanese Amo with Misa cuz she just goes
over the topics really well she's a really good teacher and I remember I used a channel a lot to kind of go over any concepts that weren't just making sense in my head there's plenty of teachers on YouTube so if you want to learn some more grammar then just hop on YouTube and watch some videos on there and then obviously Japanese pod 101 is going to teach you some of that grammar and the kind of cultural expectations of Japan now when it comes to grammar again you don't have to understand all the rules perfectly if
you really can't write your head around one of the rules it just means you're not ready to understand it yet maybe your vocabulary hasn't reached that level yet your vocabulary might be limiting you and just your understanding of the language might not be broad enough to kind of get your head around this concept and there's nothing wrong with that at the beginning of a language you're going to understand so little that anything that you can understand you should take that as a huge win because that's already huge progress so when we're going over gramar go
over go over it briefly as long as you've kind of got the general concept and you understand in some sort of way what this grammar structure is meant to do then that's fine because you'll pick this up in the future as you learn the language and everything will come with time you just have to trust the process and you going to be okay with not understanding everything because that is something that you'll experience a lot when you're learning a new language now if you're planning on going to Japan or if you want to take tests
like the N jpt test I do recommend that after maybe a couple months maybe buying a textbook could be a good idea for you and just ironing down those drills that's something that was never necessary for me because that's not really my goal I just want to be able to speak Japanese and understand Japanese but getting a textbook might be a good idea for those of you who really want to take the test it's not necessary I could easily pass J jpt N3 never having studied any kind of grammar rule in a textbook or anything
in fact I bought geni which I think a lot of you have heard and I just never used it because I tried it and it just doesn't work for me and I just realized it wasn't necessary okay now moving on this step is the most most crucial part to developing actual fluency in Japanese and this is exactly how you need to spend the majority of your time learning Japanese what I'm talking about is the immersion method now the immersion method is basically just immersing yourself in the language and in the culture as much as possible
so that you're just in an environment where you're constantly listening to Japanese now the reason why this is so effective is because it mimics the exact same way that we learn languages when we're children when you're baby and you're growing up your parents are always speaking the language to you even if you don't understand it everybody around you is speaking the language you go to school in the language everything is in that language so this is exactly what we want to do with Japanese and this will allow you to learn it in such a natural
and effective almost effortless way that you'll kind of just be blown away by the stuff that you're saying after a couple months of studying this way at some point you'll kind of realize that you just got words floating around your head sentences that you've never had before and everything just comes to you so much more naturally the way that we are going to do this is by doing what most of you already have been and this is consuming Japanese content so if you like anime this is a great way to EMASS yourself any music counters
immersion reading couns immersion as long as everything is in Japanese however when you are beginning there is a concept that you really need to pay attention to which is called comprehensible input now comprehensible input basically just means that the content that you are listening to or watching is not too complicated and too advanced to the fact that you can't understand anything you don't know what's going on but it's not too easy where you're not learning any new words now at the beginning you definitely want to be closer to being too easy than too challenging otherwise
you'll feel very demotivated so you want to find that sweet spot right in the middle where the content that you're listening and watching is challenging but not too challenging so that you're able to pick up new words through the context and the process is really smooth and easy so make sure that your content is challenging but not impossible okay challenging but not too easy so as a beginner the best content to Emar yourself with is cartoons YouTube videos that are targeted for Japanese Learners a lot of them will have like comprehensible input in the title
or they will have the level that is aimed for in the title and podcasts that are also aimed for beginners so whilst you're watching cartoons or watching any kind of YouTube video in Japanese I recommend that you have the subtitles in Japanese now there's a couple ways that you can make this super effective I recommend that you use fluent U it's hands down one of the best tools for learning Japanese what makes fluent you so useful is it's interactive subtitles which means with Netflix and YouTube with just one click you'll get a detailed definition and
example of what the word means and tips curated by their team they even have their own course content which is perfect for beginners and this just lows the barrier to entry so much because let's be honest typing Japanese by yourself can be very timec consuming and intimidating so this is is really going to help you out flu you just makes everything so much easier and enjoyable there are other tools out there but they tend to have limited videos information or review tools fluent you on the other hand offers a much deeper experience with curated courses
detailed learning support and robust review methods you can even import YouTube videos into your account by pasting the URL into your my library section it's designed to make language learning not just effective but fun and enjoyable fluentu is super accessible with both a mobile app and a website meaning you can use it whenever you want wherever you want so if you're serious about getting fluent in Japanese fluent you is definitely worth checking out plus there's a huge discount for those of you watching this video so make sure to check the link in the description if
that does interest you if you want a completely free option to look up those subtitles that are at the bottom I recommend that you download a dictionary any dictionary on your phone so I got the app open here all you want to do is hold tap on the search bar click autofill go to scan text and then literally just put your phone up to the text wherever the subtitles are and it will scan it for you you press insert and then there you have it so if you're watching a YouTube video The subtitles are usually
autogenerated so just be careful for that it's not going to be 100% accurate but your aim when you are watching these videos when you're listening to these podcasts and when you are watching cartoons is you want to just especially at the beginning you're just trying to pick up any kind of words that you know especially those words you're learning from anky if you can pick up just one or two words per sentence that is fine you're doing really good and especially if it's comprehensible input it should be easier enough for you to understand at least
what is actually going on if you can't you're probably watching something that's too difficult for you I think you should aim for at least 30% comprehension anything lower than that you're just going to have a really bad time you won't make a huge amount of progress and it will be kind of boring but either way there's going to be stuff you don't understand you're going to struggle but that's something that we have to get used to you kind of just have to get used to that chaos of not understanding everything and you just got to
be comfortable with the fact that you're not going to be perfect and and that we are going to make mistakes and then when it comes to listening to podcasts one quick tip that I've got if you hit a word you don't know is go on to Google Translate using the voice feature and trying to repeat what you heard into Google translate and then hopefully if you pronounce it correctly it will come out with the translation or will at least write it down for you so that you can copy it into a dictionary and get a
better translation I'll put some recommendations here with the resources that I recommend that you use so make sure to check them out in short just make sure that you're looking up words that you don't know especially the ones that you see coming up very frequently as these are the words that are going to be most useful for you to learn now moving on to speaking pronunciation is a huge deal for me I always want to make sure that my pronunciation is as close to a native speaker as possible and thanks to that now I do
get a lot of Japanese people commenting on the fact that my accent is basically native and sometimes I even get mistaken for a native [Music] [Music] and then so when it comes to pronunciation I recommend that when you are mercing yourself and watching things or consuming content practice shadowing so this just means briefly when you hear a sentence that you can understand and you picked up everything in that sentence try repeating it as accurately as possible with as good pronunciation as you can now this will allow you to literally just develop a perfect perfect accent
because you are just copying exactly what the native speakers said and the great thing about a Marin is the fact that your brain will get so used to the sounds of the language and you are getting so much input your brain is hearing the sounds of this language so often that there's just it just doesn't make sense that you wouldn't be able to Output it in at least a similar way with somewhat accurate pronunciation and then if you supplement this with shadowing I promise you your pronunciation will be so good now don't worry about this
at at the start obviously give it your best go but if your pronunciation bad at the start that is very normal and give it some time and over the course of your journey your pronunciation will improve so much if you do this another great way to quickly boost your speaking is writing down phrases that you say a lot in your native language and translating them into Japanese if you always say by the way in English maybe looking up how to say in Japanese and seeing Oh is to there so now oh I know how to
say by the way I'm going to be a lot more fluent when I'm talking cuzz I'm not hesitating cuz I don't have the word for by the way again when it comes to pronunciation I recommend you practice it from the start cuz this will save you a lot of work later down the line in my journey of learning French in the past 4 months I've made sure that my pronunciation is Good from the start but there's one word in particular that I never got right which was G and I'm struggling so much to correct it
now so trust me you will save yourself a lot of time and effort by doing it now there's loads of good resources on on YouTube or online to find out kind of tips and tricks on pronunciation so I recommend that you just watch those if you've got the time they can be super useful and the thing is pronunciation will make your perceived proficiency seem so much higher like if you have good pronunciation the people who you talk to will think that you are a way higher level than you actually are and you impress people so
much just by having good pronunciation there's no negatives and then if you want to practice your speaking there's loads of ways you can do this now there's apps like hello talk tandem you can go on games like vat you can go on om TV literally there's an infinite amount of choices to practice your speaking so whichever one makes you feel the most comfortable and you feel the most confident speaking on choose that one so now moving on to my best tips first thing that I recommend you do is join a language learning community I'm making
my own one right now and I'll just go through this whole process with you iron out any misconceptions and just make the process as effective as possible so if that interests you definitely check that out I'll put the link in the description and in my bio one thing that has saved me a huge amount of time when I'm looking up words is again using a dictionary on your phone using a feature where you can write down the Ki that you see so if you've got this little tab right here it reminds me kind of like
a t touchpad on a laptop you can write down exactly what you see and it'll give you the reading for the Ki the definition and everything so if you're reading a book this can be super useful if you see something in the subtitles and you can't scan it with your phone it's not picking up correctly like I showed you ear earlier then writing it down can be super super useful as well now at the beginning I don't recommend that you focus too much on grammar or writing because in the beginning this is just not something
that you need to be concerned about it's something that you can go back to later on if there's anything you kind of need to iron out and with writing this might not even be something that you want to ever do for me I tried learning how to write but then I realized like the life that I would want to live in Japan I just wouldn't really need to know how to write Japanese so I was spending so much time for something that I wouldn't really use so just kind of reflect on whether learning how to
write Japanese would actually be useful for you because I know a lot of us in our native language we don't even write hand write much stuff anymore so also I would just like to mention that reading at the start of your journey in Japanese can also be quite dangerous because it can hinder your pronunciation and the development of your accent because at the beginning you don't know exactly how words are pronounced and the kind of intonation with words so when you are reading something you're going to be kind of making up your own pronunciation for
these words and that is going to stick with you for a while and like I said before if you're developing these habits earlier it's going to be harder for you to fix later so staying away from Reading towards the beginning will allow you to develop a proper accent for then when you're reading later you're reading everything correctly and then just a quick reminder everybody's journey is different everybody will learn at different speeds and again it depends on how much effort you're willing to put in and how consistent that you are able to be everybody can
get really good results with this and if you stay consistent throughout 2025 I promise you that at the end of the year you will be able to speak a decent level of Japanese and maybe you'll be able to understand like 50% of an anime without subtitles so just keep going don't give up and I can't wait to see what you can do at the end of 20125 now if you want courses on how to learn any language and you want help building a personalized self-study routine to learn any language whether it's Japanese French or Spanish
click the link in my bio to join the community of language Learners where I'll be on there helping you as much as I can throughout your journey hop on the wait list and I can't wait to see you in there if you're dedicated enough to watch the end make sure to comment Japan 2025 and any questions you have cuz I'll try my best to reply to all of them and good luck learning Japanese
