When you are just starting out with learning Japanese through self-study, you can easily feel directionless. Questions like “Where and how do I start? Kana? Grammar? Or perhaps, Kanji?” might pop up in your mind.
You might also think “Is learning a language like Japanese through self-study alone even possible?”. The answer is, yes, it is definitely possible. You just need to follow this step-by-step learning order:
This article will help you set your learning course right so that you can learn Japanese as efficiently as possible and pass the JLP5 N5 through self-study alone.
I will explain step-by-step to you as to how you should proceed. So, are you ready? Let’s begin with it!
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Self-learning JLPT N5 Japanese: A step-by-step guide
You might already know about the main components of Japanese that you have to focus on. Kana (Hiragana + Katakana), kanji, grammar and vocabulary.
Let me tell you one thing right away: The best approach to learning Japanese is immersion. It is extremely important that you start immersing yourself as soon as possible.
Why is immersion so good? Well, if you think about it, children learn their language through immersion only. Of course, as you grow older, you can’t just easily pick up a language through immersion alone.
But that doesn’t mean it becomes useless. It’s still a very good and effective method to pick the language up, you will just need to do some studies on the side.
Shows, anime, manga, novels, visual novels, drama CDs, movies, and podcasts, are some of the best ways to immerse yourself into the language.
Anime and other “otaku” mediums have a bad reputation in the traditional learning community as people speak in weird ways in anime. While that is true, they are a very good source for acquiring vocabulary nonetheless. Along with them, just keep listening to some podcasts by actual Japanese people so that you get an idea of how real people speak.
Actually visiting Japan for a few days or weeks is definitely the ultimate way to immerse yourself. It is not feasible for everyone though, but if you have the opportunity, absolutely go for it.
Kana part 1 – Hiragana
It’s kinda obvious that to start out with a language, you first need to understand the script. The Japanese language has no “alphabet”, so as to say. There are two syllabaries in its place, Hiragana and Katakana.
Out of the three writing systems, Hiragana is the best place to start out with.
Now, you have two options for proceeding with Hiragana, the first is to learn how to handwrite Hiragana and remember it this way, while the second is to directly remember the characters and possibly never learn how to handwrite it.
Both options have their merits and it really depends on what your goal with the language is. For passing the JLPT tests, you do not need to know how to handwrite the language.
Nowadays, handwriting is getting increasingly obscure as computers are replacing it. If you think you won’t actually need to handwrite the language ever, there is no shame in just skipping handwriting entirely.
The reason for me recommending so is that handwriting takes way more time than just memorizing how to read all the characters.
This is not to say that learning handwriting is bad. Rather, it’s a nice thing to learn, it’s just that it’s of little practical use to most learners.
One question might have come to your mind, “How much time does it take to learn Hiragana?”. This is all subjective and there is no definite answer to this.
Some people take a couple of days to memorize them, others take about a week or so. Never try to rush it, though. It’s important that you truly memorize all the characters correctly.
Oh, do you know how much time traditional learning classes spend on this? A few months, usually. Yes, it’s kinda absurd. However, when self-learning, you have an advantage here: You can move at your own pace.
So, let’s tackle the main problem, “What’s the best way to learn Hiragana?”. There are a few different ways to learn Hiragana. However, in my opinion, the best way is the mnemonics method.
What’s the mnemonics method? Basically, in this learning method you create “mnemonics” or “stories” for each character. For example, と (“to”) can be thought of as a “toe” with a pin pricking it.
Another popular learning method is the spaced repetition method. In this method, you are repeatedly shown flashcards with the characters on it. New cards or cards you find hard are shown more frequently while easier ones decrease in frequency.
Some resources to learn Hiragana:
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ is a good guide for learning Hiragana through mnemonics.
For learning through spaced repetition, https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/722065315 is a good option. You will need to set up anki first, which is software for spaced repetition learning. Download it from here: https://apps.ankiweb.net/
Kana part 2 – Katakana
Katana is the other syllabary that Japanese has. You might have realized that Katakana characters seem to be read the same as Hiragana characters.
If you are wondering stuff like “aren’t they redundant then?”, know that Katakana fulfills some special purposes that are different from those of Hiragana.
One major use of Katakana is writing loan or foreign words. These words are written in Katakana to indicate the exotic nature of these words. Think of it kinda similar to how italics are used in English literature to write foreign words that the reader wouldn’t be familiar with.
Some other uses of Katakana are:
- Sometimes, words that are normally written in Hiragana might be written in Katakana to put emphasis.
- Like foreign vocabulary, foreign names are also written in Katakana.
- Katakana is also used for stylistic writing purposes.
- Scientific and technical terms are also usually written in Katakana.
So, as you can see Katakana definitely has its own place in the Japanese language.
Learning Katakana is no different than learning Hiragana, you can use the same methods for those just fine.
Again, for handwriting, you can skip it entirely if you skipped learning handwriting for Hiragana already.
Some resources for learning Katakana:
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/ is a good place for learning Katakana with the mnemonics method.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1678048485 is a good anki deck for learning Katakana through the spaced repetition method.
At this point in the guide, you should have learnt the kana and thus now you are equipped to learn kanji, grammar and vocabulary
I would recommend learning all of these side by side for maximum efficiency.
Tackling the kanji
Before I give you guidelines for learning kanji, it’s best that you know a brief description of kanji first.
Kanji characters were adopted from Chinese characters (“Hanzi”). It is the third writing system in the Japanese language and contains more than fifty thousand characters.
Took a double take there, didn’t you? No, it’s not an error. There are actually that many characters. However, barely anyone actually knows all the characters. For JLPT N5, you only need to learn about a hundred characters or so.
Here is how do kanji characters work:
The basic concept of a kanji is that each character has a meaning assigned to it, along with a few ways to read it. There are majorly two readings for every kanji, the Japanese reading (訓読み, “kunyomi”) and the Chinese reading (音読み, “onyomi”), but there are some more readings used for writing specific words.
Students often wonder “What’s the point of the kanji writing system? Just write everything in kana alone”. But, kanji is actually very important and without it, the Japanese written language would have never worked.
Japanese is a very homophonous language, meaning many words have the same reading. While writing words, it then becomes difficult to tell what word the reading is referring to.
Kanji comes in here to save the day, words with the same readings have different kanji attached to them so there is no chance of confusion.
Another major reason is that the Japanese language contains no spaces. If sentences were to be written in kana alone then it would be quite difficult to read them as they would essentially be long strings of kana with no indication as to where a word starts and where another ends.
Kanji characters fix this problem as they act like an indicator for what word is what and all confusion about it is eliminated.
Kanji is also a massive boon to learners since it makes acquiring words easier.
If you are into literature, you will be able to appreciate all the creative uses of kanji that result in some beautiful writing.
Alright, let’s see how you can learn kanji now. There are several methods to learn kanji.
On paper, some are more effective than the others but ultimately some methods might just work better for you while other, more effective methods may not.
To start with, you have two options: Isolated kanji vs acquiring kanji from vocabulary.
If you study isolated kanji (that is, the individual characters), you will have a much easier time learning kanji recognition (meaning that you will be able to distinguish between the similar looking characters easily) and you will go on to learn vocabulary much faster.
On the other hand, if you learn vocabulary directly, it will take quite some time for you to figure out what the individual characters mean and to develop kanji recognition, However, while doing this method you will feel a bit more sense of accomplishment since you are learning more practical things here.
You should go with whichever works for you. Remember, the most important thing while learning is to stay motivated enough to continue learning. If your motivation drops, you will naturally stop being consistent enough.
I would say overall the isolated kanji method is more efficient but again, if it doesn’t seem to work for you, just drop it and try vocabulary.
Some resources for learning kanji:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/1svvsr7f9cnpwka/Recognition_RTK.apkg/file is a great anki deck for learning kanji. It includes 1000 most common kanji and even though N5 only requires 100, I would say it’s worth going through the deck since it will pay-off in the future.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/523650169 is a good deck for learning N5 level vocabulary (which will teach you all the N5 level kanji as well, naturally).
Grammar and vocabulary
Japanese grammar is just like any other language, in the sense that the rules shouldn’t be taken as hundred percent applicable in every situation. Exceptions exist, just like any other language.
Grammar guides will teach you all the basic rules, after which you will be able to pick up all the exceptions while immersing yourself. Also, it’s fine if you find it hard to understand some of the rules, you will understand them in due time once you begin with immersion.
Remember, people don’t actually “learn” the rules of a language, they just develop intuition. It is this intuition you have to develop and it’s only possible after tons of immersion.
About vocabulary, there are several ways to pick it up, immersion plus using spaced repetition is the most efficient way, in my opinion.
I recommend that you learn vocabulary side by side with grammar for the most efficient path. You can also learn vocabulary first and then grammar, it’s fine. Just do whatever sounds better to you.
Some grammar resources: https://sakubi.neocities.org/ and https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/grammar/taekim.html are the two best guides for learning grammar. Sakubi is shorter and gets you to immersion faster while Tae Kim has more content. Read a bit of both and see which one seems better to you.
Vocabulary resources: See the N5 deck in the kanji section.
I will recommend that you move away from premade vocabulary decks at some point and start making your own. One good approach is to make sentence decks.
Basically, just make flashcards with sentences that you encounter while immersing yourself, rather than one single word.
Make sure that you already know all except one word in the sentences you are using. This will help you learn that one word with ease since you have the surrounding context to figure it out, that’s why I feel like they work better than vocabulary decks that feature cards with just the word on them.
How to begin learning Japanese through self-study?
To actually begin learning, you need to have the correct mindset. Here are some popular questions that people ask me:
Is learning Japanese easy?
“Easy” is a subjective term, I would say the language itself isn’t that hard but people make it hard for themselves.
How do people make Japanese hard for themselves?
They do so by setting preconceived notions in their minds like “Kanji is super duper hard!”, which is untrue. It’s best if you throw all notions like these out of your mind before you begin.
How did the notion that “Kanji is incredibly tough” even begin?
The answer is simple, kanji are huge in number and many people don’t want to put in that much effort. Once they realize they aren’t able to make acceptable amounts of progress, they just blame it on kanji itself and spread around the word that kanji is hard.
Okay, how much effort would I need to put in?
You would be surprised, if you study only an hour a day, then it’s more than enough for N5!
What’s the catch here?
Well, while that sounds like a small amount of time, you need to remember that you have to be consistent with learning Japanese. This is where many people fail.
What happens is that laziness takes over and they decide to skip a few days. Once they return to learning, they find that they have forgotten some things and so it becomes harder to make progress.
This keeps going on and on and in the end, they might even just drop the language altogether.
So, how do I begin with learning?
Good thing that you are here reading this article, I will guide you step by step on this in the next section.
Now that you have gone through these questions, you must have achieved the right mindset for learning Japanese. So without any further delays, let’s jump right into it.
A note about traditional books
The reason I haven’t recommended conventional books here is that they focus mainly on teaching you how to say English phrases in Japanese. As you know, these are two very different languages so that just doesn’t work out that good.
For this reason, most of the conventional books are just bad, honestly. Nonetheless, if you want to, there are some traditional books worth checking out. The Genki textbook series can be nice so I would recommend going for them if you want to learn a bit more “traditionally”.
Conclusion
Did you notice how much emphasis I put on immersion throughout the article? Immersion is truly the ultimate learning method, so I hope you will keep that in mind and focus on immersing yourself as much as possible.
If you follow what I have told you, JLPT N5 should be easy to pass in a month’s (or two months’) worth of time, just try to remain motivated, be consistent with your studies and you will definitely achieve your goal.
