This page is intended for people who are just starting or thinking about starting Japanese.

I recently took the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, and I've been studying Japanese on and off for five years. I meet a lot of people who are thinking about getting started in Japanese who are seeking advice. I've collected the best nuggets of wisdom I've found in my pursuit of Japanese, and I'll share them with you here.

Point 0: Have a Clear Goal

A lot of people want to "learn Japanese." But the first step to learning Japanese is to decide for yourself what "learning Japanese" means. Does it mean watching anime without subtitles (if so, you're at the wrong site, by the way)? Does it mean picking up girls (also, you're at the wrong site, but here's a free tip: the Japanese girls who will be interested in you can all basically speak some level of English anyway, so there's no real reason for you to study Japanese)? Does it mean reading graduate level texts for research (welcome home)? Or becoming fluent enough to work doing a job other than teaching English in Japan?

Unfortunately, a lot of people who want to learn Japanese don't know any foreign languages. This is unfortunate because if you haven't learned a foreign language, you don't really have an idea of the difficulty and the problems encountered in actually learning a foreign language. And, for various reasons, Japanese is more difficult than a fair number of other languages.

What does this mean for you? It means that if you want to succeed in mastering Japanese to some level, it will help a lot in advance if you know what that level is, so that you can take steps toward it. Saying "I want to know everything" is not very helpful; it's much better to say "I want to read the Tale of Genji in its original form; I want to understand the speeches of politicians when I'm not even paying close attention; and I want to be able to write novels on my own." If you set specific goals, no matter how lofty, it will be easier to measure your progress, and that-- measuring your progress-- will probably become one of the greatest motivators for you.

The road to fluency is long and has many pitfalls. Many start but few succeed. A lot of people are intrigued by this difficulty, and I must admit not so long ago so was I. But, if you do in fact want to succeed, a little planning will go a long way toward your future success.

Also, it's important to understand at the outset that, for various reasons that will become apparent as you learn Japanese, the spoken and written language are quite different, and at the higher levels somewhat independent of each other. In other words, you may be able to understand everything in a college textbook but not what kids say, or the reverse. So, if you have your goals clear at the outset, you can make sure you end up with the abilities you want.

Point 1: Take a Class to Start

A lot of people want to learn Japanese through self study. That's great! I did all of my preparation for the Japanese Language Proficiency Tests (hereafter, "JLPT") on my own. However, self study is no way to begin learning a language.

Language is, at its heart, a way of communication. You can't learn to speak by talking only to yourself. Starting from tapes is lonely and frustrating. As long as you're at least a high school student, with some luck you should be able to find some language class somewhere nearby where you live. In those cases where you can't, I think distance learning is a much better option than doing it all alone.

Japanese can get particularly hairy for native speakers of English. Having a teacher to guide you through the first steps and give you a strong foundation in the basic grammar and structure of the language will insure that when you do self study later, you will be moving in the right direction and spend your time studying in an effective way.

If you insist on doing everything yourself, I wish you the best of luck, but I have yet to meet someone who went from zero to fluent without taking a significant number of classes.

Point 2: Avoid Romaji

Avoid romaji (Japanese written in the Roman alphabet). Learn how to use it so that you can correctly understand the occasional store sign written only in romaji, and then promptly move on to the real Japanese writing system. Japanese people use romaji to write their names, strange advertisements, and little else. For everything else they use the Japanese writing system, and if you want to learn Japanese, you should do. Do as the Romans in Rome, but as the Japanese in Japan.

Point 3: Avoid Over-translating

Japanese and English grew up on opposite sides of the world. For that reason, a lot of even very basic expressions don't literally translate in a sensible fashion. Trying to translate everything you learn in Japanese to English will only be possible for the first few months of study anyway, so it's a habit you should rid yourself of as fast as you can. Most of the foreigners I know who sound like idiots in Japanese sound that way because they constantly literally translate English expressions directly into Japanese, which will make no sense to your average Japanese speaker.

Instead, learn the gist of what the expression means, how to pronounce it correctly, and on what kinds of occasions people use it. But don't spend a lot of time translating back and forth between Japanese and English.

Point 4: Learn the Correct Stroke Order for the Kanji

I don't recommend rushing to learn the kanji. However, when you do learn the kanji, it's very important to learn the correct stroke order. Anyway, think of it this way: if you're going to spend hundreds of hours to learn to write a few thousand characters, you might as well spend the time to learn to do it correctly.

To learn the stroke order, you can either get a book that teaches it or, better, learn the priniciples from a Japanese teacher and just consult a book when you find the occasional very strangely shaped kanji. Most of the kanji are made out of simple parts, called radicals, so really you only need to learn how to make about 200 characters and you can write most of the rest correctly after that.

There are three big advantages of learning the correct stroke order: your kanji will still look relatively good when you write them quickly; people will be impressed; and you can use the stroke order rules to easily look up unknown kanji in a dictionary. The last point is by far the most important.

Point 5: Take It Slow and Have Fun

I read a lot on the Internet at self study sites (not unlike this one) that talk about finding "the fastest way" and "the most efficient method." While you will find plenty of that kind of discussion even at this site, I think it's important to remember that language is communication. It is not, in the end, learning thousands of new words and rules of grammar; it is being able to share your ideas with people, and learning new things expressed in ways you might not have thought of before.

So take it slow, and have fun. Of course, you should study in an efficient fashion. But don't obsess about efficiency. Even if you study for several hours a day, it will take you a few years or more to reach practical fluency, and even more to eliminate the mistakes that come from being a non-native speaker. If you think about that from the beginning, you'll just get depressed, and not want to study Japanese. But unless you're studying Japanese for some frivolous reason, you should be able to enjoy the long journey toward fluency.

There is, of course, another concern here; most of the passionate beginners burn out in Japanese. They are inspired by the difficulty, but in the end the difficulty of Japanese is not that it requires tremendous intelligence to speak, but rather that it requires tremendous (and sometimes tedious) time spent in study to master. When people find out that Japanese is just another human language spoken by human beings, the banality of it all drives them away. So it's better to rid your head of such delusions before you start.

That said, I wish you the best of luck! Check out a few more tips for beginners, and feel free to ask questions in the forums.