Learning Japanese

A curriculum for learning Japanese. Sifting through the big ol internet for the best resources over a few months, changing my plan many times, this is eventually what I settled on.

Learn Kana

This is the first thing to do. Play this quiz game until you know all the kana. Start the quiz by selecting only one category (あ) and when you have those 5 learned, add the second one (あ + か).

Once you know the kana — it took me less than a week — everything will be so much easier.

Genki 1 & 2

Learn the basics with Genki. Work through all the exercises. It took me about 3-4 months to do Genki 1.

I bought the physical textbooks and workbooks because I like to write, but here are the PDFs.

Pimsleur Japanese

Pimsleur won't get you very far, but it helps a lot with pronunciation because the lessons are entirely audio-based. With every language I've learned, I use Pimsleur at the beginning for a little while until the pronunciation is automatic.

And although it won't get you very far, it will definitely teach you all the "tourist basics" — you'll be able to order in a restaurant, get directions, etc.

There's an app that costs $20/month or something, don't pay hundreds for the individual course. The MP3s can also be found for free in certain shady corners of the internet.

Other Apps

Jisho is my favorite dictionary, they also have a nice iPhone app.

Tae Kim is an excellent grammar guide, a must read from top to bottom. His app Sensei is the iPhone version of his guide.

Anki

Highly recommend using Anki, a spaced-repetition flash card app. Spaced repetition means it schedules your repetitions for you, at increasing intervals, so you gradually commit things to long term memory, and only review cards when you are about to forget them.

The app is $25 for iPhone, but free for Windows, Android, Mac.

The app is useful to have if you want to review cards offline, but you can also use the browser version of the app on iPhone, and just add a shortcut to your home screen.

I tried a BUNCH of Anki decks. It's easy to go crazy trying a bunch of different flash card decks, but it gets overwhelming if you have too many reviews, so try to keep it small.

The ones I settled on were:

Jlab. Each card is a line from an anime. Here's a video that explains how it works. This is the best deck for learning any language I've ever seen. Read through the website, and make sure you have the deck set up correctly (I set mine up to use kana instead of romanji).

WankiKani is a really nice paid service for learning kanji. There are also Anki versions of it floating around different places, although it takes a little bit of Anki hacking to get the decks to work properly.

Genki I and Genki II vocabulary. Useful for memorizing vocabulary for whatever chapter of Genki you're working through.

YouTube