AN OVERVIEW OF LEARNING JAPANESE
- Japanese has a written language system with two syllabaries of 46 and 48 base characters each and one ideographic character set with over 2000 unique characters to learn
- Required study time until proficient: 2,200+ hours
- www.jisho.org is a key resource
- Hard work and consistency are a must!
THE BASICS (PRE-N5 LEVEL)
- Learning Hiragana
- Learning Katakana
- Learning basic Kanji (up to advanced)
- Recommended textbooks for beginners
- Recommended apps
- Memrise (for gamified memorisation of vocabulary)
- Anki (for flashcard-based learning)
- Human Japanese I
- Lang-8 is a good resource for learning to write and getting feedback from native speakers (for all levels)
PRE-INTERMEDIATE (N4)
- Recommended textbooks
- Recommended apps
- Kanji
- https://hochanh.github.io/rtk/rtk1-v6/ (List of all the jōyō kanji with animated stroke order)
INTERMEDIATE (N3)
- Recommended textbooks
- Recommended apps
- Tangorin
- Recommended websites
- https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/
- https://matcha-jp.com/easy
- https://tangorin.com/ (lightweight Japanese dictionary with example sentences)
- https://www.satorireader.com/ (graded reading materials for your particular reading level)
- https://www.youtube.com/user/freejapaneselessons3/playlists (video lessons for N3 – N1)
PRE-ADVANCED (N2+)
- Recommended textbooks
- Recommended apps
- Recommended sites
- https://www.kitsunekko.net (anime subtitles in Japanese)
- https://www.italki.com/ (learn languages via Skype. Great for speaking practice)
ADVANCED (N1+)
- Recommended textbooks
- Recommended apps
- Podcasts, sites etc
- https://www.bloomberg.co.jp/
- https://news.yahoo.co.jp/
- https://matcha-jp.com/jp
- http://syosetu.com/ (read novels published by other users for free)
Our Partners
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