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Japanese Learning Guide

Hiragana and Katakana

If you are just starting to learn Japanese you will have to start off with learning Hiragana and Katakana. These are 2 of the 3 writing scripts in Japanese. It is also the easiest part about learning Japanese and should take you up to 2 weeks or less.

What I found most helpful was going through Tofugo’s Hiragana guide. Their approach using Mnemonics is best way to learn Hiragana and Katakana. After that do Tofugo’s Katakana guide. All the pronunciation are the same as Hiragana, it is just a different script. Once you have become comfortable with Hiragana and Katakana you can move on. You don’t have to be perfect with these, since you will have plenty of time of practice as you study Japanese further.

What to do next?

Once you have become familiar with Hiragana and Katakana the paths to learn Japanese branches out into many paths. For absolute beginners, I would recommend starting with a textbook to give you some foundation in the language. Though some also prefer going through a grammar guide such as Tae Kim’s Japanese Grammar Guide. Once you have gotten a good foundation on the language you’re free to explore how you want to further study the language. Remember the golden rule: The right way to learn is one that you enjoy and would stick to. Nevertheless, below are some of the things you might want to consider for how you want to pursue Japanese further.

At the very foundation of your Japanese language learning are grammar and vocabulary. You will improve these through immersive inputs such as reading and listening to Japanese material. So I would suggest to read and listen to as much native materials as possible. Preferably ones that you enjoy. This way you will get a sense of how the language is used by a native speaker. And once you have a good amount of grammar and vocabulary (note that this might take years) you can then start focusing on speaking and writing. These are not hard set rules so you can start with trying to speak very soon, but it will likely be very awkward since you don’t have enough knowledge on how things are expressed in the language.

The rest of the guide I will list some resources that I have found useful, and it is up to you to find what works for you. Of course, you can also find other resources not listed here. There’s plenty of resources out there in the internet.

Resources