日本語 — Japan & Japanese

Home of everything Japanese on my site.

Personal highlights

• JLPT N3 -- Dec 2025
• Studying since ~2022
• 2025 Japan trip, see photos: here

What makes Japanese difficult

• It uses different character sets to the Latin one that you may be used to, and on top of that there are 3 of them (Hiragana ひら, Katakana カタ, and Kanji 漢字)
• Lots of particles and structure centrism: Particles are used as grammatical markers indicating the relative role of a word in each sentence; and without an understanding of their individual nuances the meaning can change significantly.
• Level of formality matters. Dependent on who you are speaking with you have to employ 丁寧語 (teineigo; meaning honorifics) to avoid imposing social disrespect by mistake. Teineigo involves changing the conjugation of verbs and using different vocabulary if the person is seen in higher social standing than you therefore the learning curve in terms of breadth of cultural knowledge and size of vocabulary is higher than other languages.

I want it to be clear that I don't want to disparage anyone but knowing you're about to climb everest (or Mt Fuji rather) probably encourages you to prepare. If it was up to me everyone would learn another language, it has to be one of the most fulfilling and most useful mental efforts you can make.

How on earth do you approach it then!?

I'm a strong believer in continued repeated effort, at the end of the day a large amount of learning will be a slog so . That does not mean that it cannot be interesting and for that reason I won't give you a regimine, as the best regime is the one that you follow. You must place a focus on input based activities, be it natural conversations such as language exchange, reading or videos. The internet is an unrivalled source of information and resources

Reccomended Resources

• Cure Dolly - A storytelling based approach to learning Grammar from first principles. If you follow through all her grammar videos and exercises you will have a practiced understanding of not just the grammar but why the grammar works that way. Almost invaluable to spoken Japanese.
• Tobira by Kurosio Publishers - A beginners course in japanese over two textbooks, teaching almost all of the basics from scripts to grammar structures with worked examples and accompanying workbook of exercises for each book.
• See my blog posts tagged Japanese: /blog/?tags=Japanese
• Anki - The gold standard in spaced repetition software aka flashcards. It is truly mans best friend in memorising vocab and well loved in language learning communities. These are communities who have made up many freely available 'decks' and addons.
• The news - Perhaps not the most interesting method but great for getting daily practice of listening/reading. Many channels such as TBS stream their news broadcasts round the clock on youtube!