6 months later: Learning Japanese

I’ve been consistently working away at learning Japanese over the past 6 months. For how to get started yourself, see my full post about learning Japanese as a beginner.

Some stats

In total I’ve spent about 55 hours learning Japanese over the last 6 months. I have a study streak of about 140 days going. This breaks down into roughly 25 minutes a day on learning kanji and vocab on WaniKani/Anki and 10 minutes learning grammar on Bunpro. In total I’ve learnt 200 radicals, 230 kanji, about 500 vocabulary words and up to N5 grammar (about 130 grammar points). I’ve answered just under 20,000 questions, or roughly 130 each day. 

I’d say that I’m at a pretty competent beginner level, maybe around N5ish. The lessons I started having with a teacher at around the start of my 5th month were really helpful for speaking practice and sentence structure, though I was pleased I’d already learnt a fair amount of vocab and grammar, as I feel this gave me a good platform to build off.

My top tips

Japanese is a really fun language to learn! It has quite a high barrier to entry, because of the three different ‘alphabets’ (hiragana, katakana and kanji), but once you get going it’s really satisfying.

Slightly annoyingly (at least for the purist learner), though perhaps not surprisingly, the most useful thing I did was rote learn a series of useful phrases (like “to take away, please” or “no thank you, I don’t need a receipt”). They are in an Anki deck I’ve made, available here (suspend anything you don’t think will be useful). 

I found that a combination of Wanikani (radicals, kanji and vocab), Bunpro (grammar) and Anki (sentences, link here) was the best for keeping me progressing in different ways, and by the end of my 6 months I’m pretty happy with how well I can understand things, and how I can make myself understood (in a very basic way). 

I had to manage how much new material I was learning as it quite easily became overwhelming (and I also didn’t want to spend every evening learning Japanese in my room, when I could have been out and about seeing Japan for real!) The amount I did was at the top end of what I think you’d want to do if you were spending 6 months working an office job in Japan.