Study

I've been studying Japanese on and off for half my life. I'm far from where I want to be, but can make some recommendations on what has worked well for me nonetheless.

Grammar

I started out with a few books:

• Japanese for Busy People

  Pretty good at making you functional in a short amount of time. A bit more than just a phrasebook.

• Genki

  Gives some good all-round foundations.

• All About Particles

  Fantastic reference on both common and obscure particles. Your best hope for learning the difference between は and が!

But the one that really helped me grow was Tae Kim's Grammar Guide ^{[html] [pdf]} . It teaches you to speak Japanese from the Japanese point of view, that is to say:

1. it teaches you to parse sentences in your head in Japanese word order, rather than waiting for the whole sentence to arrive to map it onto to a known English pattern.
2. it focuses on casual speech rather than polite speech, because casual speech uses the dictionary form. So whenever you need to conjugate verbs in your head, your mental model already revolves around the ideal form.

Tae Kim's Grammar Guide gave me enough grounding to be broadly functional whilst living in Japan, but there's still a lot more grammar to go after completing it. Beyond it, I can highly recommend Shin Kanzen Masuta, which is a series of JLPT practice books written in simple Japanese. It's very good on nuance, like asking the difference between words that natives would often use interchangeably.

Speaking

My recommendation is to get out of the classroom and into environments where you can be engage in Japanese conversation close to your own level with native speakers. Language exchanges are better than nothing, but do have the downside of anti-immersion as other learners slip back into non-Japanese speech to ask questions, or expose you to bad habits. Ideally you want to be surrounded by natives, talking about something fulfilling and exciting to you all, but there is often a big trench before you can reach that stage.

If you have no access to such an environment, don't worry. When preparing to move to Japan and wanting to improve as much as possible despite lack of access, I made a surprising discovery: You can get better at conversation just by listening. Listen intently to audiobooks for hours on end and it will seep into you on some level. You may not magically get better at analytical things like grammar, but you should pick up some words, and in particular your pronunciation should subconsciously get better from all the exposure.

Listening

I don't think you can get very far with classroom methods here, as the amount of exposure is far too short. I also don't think watching TV shows is effective – having watched hundreds of anime series myself, I can't credit it greatly for improvements in listening, beyond equipping me with a few stock phrases and filler words. It's because watching TV is a passive activity where you're not tested on your understanding, nor enticed to respond. The people who really learn from TV are the ones who sit down with a pen and paper. Personally, that's too fiddly for me.

What I can recommend here is: audiobooks, audiobooks, audiobooks. Find a narrator you get on with, and a story you're interested in, and try to clock up hundreds of hours of exposure. You will get better!

Writing

I'm no great shakes at writing and don't do anything special for it. I only really write with pen and paper when filling in forms, so am quite happy with relying on a keyboard most of the time. Nowadays we have ChatGPT, so it's a good option for proof-reading.

But one resource I do make a lot of use of is Weblio's English-Japanese example sentences search engine. I'm not too satisfied with it (the signal to noise ratio is poor), but it does sometimes sort me out when I'm trying to determine how to express something.

Vocabulary

This one is never-ending. The only thing I can recommend here is reading books, and lots of them. Not manga – books. Books have to put into words everything that a manga just draws. Books have far more words per page, and those words are usually far easier to look up in a dictionary (because they're not embedded in an image and non-selectable). And books expose you to way more useful grammatical constructs.

But how do you move from textbooks to native materials like books? For me, I didn't get far with physical books. Too many unknown words that were a pain to look up. So I switched to reading on Kindle, which enabled me to look up words by highlighting them.

But even then, things went to slow. I'd spend my whole evening just to read a page or two, having to stop to look up every last word. What finally turned things around for me was a tip I got from a professional translator: read the book whilst listening to its corresponding audiobook. Now I could solve the pronunciation just by listening, and I had an unstoppable husky pulling my sled at breakneck speed through the book. Sure, I'd be looking up words non-stop as the story was being read out, but I generally didn't have to pause all that often to catch up.

Pretty soon, I got to a point where if the audiobook was eight hours long, I could expect to complete the book in that advertised time. And by allotting an hour each day, plus sometimes two hours on weekend days, I could reliably get through a light novel each week. By sticking to the same series, it would get easier and easier to follow the content of the book as I'd get more familiar with the author's habits in word choice.

Pronunciation

I built up bad habits for many years without realising. Heck, I'd studied Japanese for a decade without even realising it was a tonal language (most textbooks skip over that fact, and most teachers are not versed in it at all). I turned that around by studying Dogen's phonetics course, drilling the community-made flashcard decks for two months until I finally felt I had an ear for it. By getting exposure to native pronunciation through audiobooks and using a custom Kindle dictionary that included pitch accent notation, I've been able to correct old bad habits and minimise any interference from my native language when picking up new vocabulary.

Kanji

I used to learn kanji individually via their etymologies, using two editions of this same brilliant book:

• A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters (1988)

  This edition evocatively told the etymologies of each character, whilst also creating suggested mnemonics for each one.

• The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji (2016)

  This edition did away with the mnemonics and put more emphasis on the etymologies, becoming a bit less fun and a bit more scholarly.

I did this for 1,000 characters, but forgot much of it over time. It was fascinating and fun, and enough to get a decent grounding in etymology, but not so effective as a learning method. Eventually I stopped looking up individual characters altogether and just trusted on repeated exposures to characters in new contexts to build up a good neural model in my head about the meaning and pronunciation of each constituent character. I must concede the new way has proved more productive. But I'd like to revisit this, if only for the fun of it!

Many swear by Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, but it saddens me that it has no basis in etymology (beyond the intuitive cases like the pictographic characters). If you're going to learn kanji through mnemonics, I think you might as well learn the etymologies while you're at it.

Flashcard learning

All of the above can be studied in some way through flashcard learning. Some of the best Japanese speakers I know learned from flashcards. I've tried it myself many times (indeed, as mentioned, it was instrumental in helping me master pitch accent), but when it comes to using it to learn domains with very large decks, I always end up overwhelmed with the number of reviews to attend to. I just don't like the default Anki SM-2 algorithm (though it sounds like it changed recently to FSRS, so I should give it another chance). Either way, I always felt it a lot more fulfilling to grind through novels, where vocabulary would be reinforced simply by the word coming up again in the book.