Building a good study plan

Japanese
#1

I recently asked for advice on building an exercise plan and I was called out for over-thinking and over-complicating the whole thing. Well, I know that’s true and I know I’m doing it with my Japanese studies as well, and it makes it difficult for me to execute (follow through on a consistent, preferably daily basis) and severely hinders my progress.

I recently graduated college and passed the N3 shortly after that. However, since then (December 2025) I have had an awful time prioritizing. I think I got used to having a teacher tell me exactly what to do and when to do it, and although I don’t necessarily think that was always leading to optimal learning (I know I know, I’m not necessarily looking for optimization, just progress) it definitely wasn’t worse than what I’m doing now, which is floundering.

I saw another post on here today about neurodivergent people and learning, and I definitely have at least ADHD and anxiety (wasn’t diagnosed until I turned 30, six years ago) so all of that plays into all of this, so please be kind if you are going to comment.

To get to it, I’m wondering what other people’s study plans might look like because currently this is the process I go through. I am using wanikani and bunpro. I use bunpro exclusively for grammar because I prefer wanikani’s for vocabulary. I am sitting at around ~150 vocabulary/kanji reviews per day if I stay consistent, which is harder and harder to do, and that alone can take me upwards of an hour, especially when there are new words/kanji in there. Occasionally my reviews exceed 200, and if I miss a day, it spirals and I might come back to see 300+ reviews. All of that gets overwhelming. If I finish them, I don’t feel like jumping over to bunpro, but if I don’t finish them, I feel guilty and obsess over the fact that there will be an excessive amount of reviews the next day. And so I get stuck in this rut of studying solely vocabulary, rarely grammar, and never immersing myself in the language. I mean, I used to play games in Japanese at least, but for some reason, I haven’t been doing that lately… Anyway, I’m really just wondering what kind of study schedule has worked for other people, even if their progress has been slow. I have books/manga I would like to read but I get hung up when I don’t know things or when I feel like I don’t understand so I spiral and look up everything in a sentence trying to make sense of it until I’ve spent my entire study time trying to figure out one little nuance, only to realize I’ve forgotten something basic…

TLDR; Especially for those who have struggled with learning Japanese (or anything in general) what does your daily/weekly study routine look like? I often get hung up on doing only vocabulary reviews because they seem to pile up, and I seem to be very slow at them (?) with roughly ~150 reviews per day taking anywhere between 40-60 mins. I don’t want to obsess over perfection and completion, but I get frustrated when my review percentage is poor (anything below 80%, which it has been frequently lately) and it makes it difficult to put time into studying grammar and immersing. What’s a reasonable amount of time to spend on each thing, does it all have to be done daily, and if not, how do you structure it and stick with it?

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#2

I think 1 hour a day focussed study is enough to keep progressing at a steady pace. I do roughly 1-2 hours a day. I do around 150-200 reviews a day. I don’t think I can do focussed studying for 2 hours a day over a long period.

I mostly use the Reading mode on Bunpro and feel my reading speed and comprehension has measurably increased in speed compared to a year ago. If I can I’ll listen to the Asahi Shumbun podcast for an hour, but that’s probably more for N2-N1 in terms of difficulty. And try to do some reading or anime, but that’s more for fun.

Reading until you’re at N2+ is quite a slog unless it’s curated content. So don’t worry if that’s slow or frustrating.

So I think you’re doing fine. Vocab + Kanji + Grammar will build strong foundations for comprehension. Just keep at the daily grind, take a break from adding stuff if it’s overwhelming, and you’ll get there.

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#3

For me anything more than 20 minutes of repeated srs every day is not bearable, it gets harder and harder every day, while I think learning should always be fresh, interesting, and engaging.

N3 should be enough to start reading manga and some novels with lookups.

I would drop wk and Bunpro to at most 15 minutes each, and would add weekly activities that do not include srs into them.

For example you can choose a manga and make it your objective to read it. You can read a book and add words to anki, after you’ve finished the book you could review words and write some useful out of them on paper and try to learn them well (that anki deck is just for a week). You could try then also writing down new kanji from words you’ve seen in the book.

So my recommendation is finding a lot of activities you like in a language and doing each week or two before it becomes a chore, and then moving to the next one. After month or two you can again return the first one and it will again feel fresh.

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#4

I’m not nearly as far in as you, but I hit wanikani, anki, bunpro and at least one duolingo lesson a day. This usually comprises 200-300 reviews and as much as 20-30 new concepts. (although if I’m not feeling it for the day or I’m quite busy I will just keep it to reviews or limit new items drastically.) If I have more time and/or I’m feeling hungry for extra Japanese study, I will add an hour or two of active immersion. I try and stay consistent with that and I feel like it’s kept my progress very steady. I also suffer from ADHD and I’m currently choosing not to medicate it. So I feel your pain.

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#5

Depends on what you want to do. Bunpro gives similiar like a teacher structure into your study routine, so thats great as a base.

I recommend todo what you are interested in. You passed already N3 and if you are doing something you like, you might happen todo it for a longer period then intendet, which is the spark in the learning journey you need to progress rapidely without depression.

For the ADHD problem i recommend exercising with deep breaths. (people might call it meditation)
It calms you down and improves focus.

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#6

I had reset everything back to N5, despite already reaching N3. So back to square one with only Bunpro as the tool.

First, I determined what was the lowest duration I can study on a very bad day. It was 5 minutes in my case. Then, approximated the total number of cards I can handle in 5 minutes, which was about 30 cards.

I had N5 Vocab and Grammar decks added to daily intake. I started with 3 cards per day on vocab. Did the daily, and checked how much capacity I have so far. If after a week, the activity graph in bunpro was a bit flat, I added +3 cards to vocab and +1 to grammar. All while still attempting to make sure that 5 minutes of study time is still feasible. Then monitor for another week.

If within that week, I am unable to finish the entire review stack, I decrease new card intake by -3 cards vocab and -1 grammar. If the review stack is still not feasible to finish, I outright stop intake and remove the deck from visibility. Once the review stack is back to about 5 minutes of study time, I resume intake of new cards.

For troubled cards, I make sure to cram it once it appears to improve recall and understanding.

The cycle repeats when adding a new level (N4, N3). Just focusing on one level deck at a time.

Locking in on the duration of study, and not the number of cards, helped with sustaining it.

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#7

yeah, that is very slow. that comes out to 24 seconds per vocab. I don’t know how exactly Wanikani works, so it’s hard for me to really judge it, but usually it should only take a couple of seconds to recall a card. if it takes longer than 10, you basically failed and should just move on. but again, I don’t know how much Wk expects you to recall per card, so maybe 20+ seconds is normal? I can only say that my average in Anki is about 6-7 seconds per card.

besides that, my main recommendation would be to do your reviews in small bursts whenever you find the time rather than one long session. again, not sure if Wk allows for that, but in Bunpro it’s pretty easy to just do 10-20 words or a few grammar reviews at a time, and in Anki I have multiple smaller decks rather than one big one.

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#9

I’ve been where you are and can completely sympathise with so much of what you’re saying! It can be really difficult to know what the best path forward is sometimes. But you seem to be putting a lot of thought into it, so I’m certain you’ll develop a plan that’s right for you.

Here's my usual routine if you'd like to have a look! Put under a read more since I've added a fair bit of detail

I work full-time and have some caring responsibilities, and study Japanese purely for fun and don’t need it for work or uni or anything, so your learning needs might be very different to mine!

I’ll pop my routine below, but my routine and my expectations are very different, if that makes sense :sweat_smile: I like to set myself a very low goal, so that on days that I don’t have the time or energy to do much, then I don’t feel guilty for doing less and then fall out of my routine, which I have done very often in the past. For example, my goal for doing exercise is to do 5 minutes a day, even though I usually do way more. If I’ve had a busy day, I can still quickly do just 5 mins on my exercise bike before bed and then be happy that I’ve at least met my goal. And on days I do more, I feel like I’ve been really productive! I try to take the same approach with Japanese studying.

  • Wanikani:
    Goal: 3 new items and 10 reviews a day
    What I usually manage: 6 new items a day, and around 70 reviews per day to clear my review pile.
    I do about 30 reviews in a morning, then as many as I can at midday, and then I try to clear the pile to 0 before bed.
    I get overwhelmed if there’s too many reviews, and I find my brain stops processing information if I do too many in one go, so I usually do them in bursts of no more than 20 at a time, then put an alarm on my phone for 5 mins or so to go read a book or something to give my brain a rest before doing another round.

  • Bunpro:
    Goal: 1 grammar item and 5 reviews a day
    What I usually manage: 1 new grammar item a day and 2-4 vocab a day, ideally something I’ve already learnt on WK so that I can use the practice sentences to help get the nuance of the word.
    This leaves me with only about 20 or so reviews a day
    I’m not as good with this one for some reason. I keep forgetting do them :joy:

  • Bunpro’s kaijugation practice feature:
    Goal: 1 session per new grammar item learnt
    What I usually manage: I get hooked on this, and I like to do it several times a week

  • Youtube videos:
    I’ve started watching Natural Japanese videos a lot recently, and I’ve found it’s helped so much!!

Goal: listen to 1 sentence a day from a video
What I usually manage: I might only watch 1 minute of the video a day or an entire video depending on how much time and energy I have, but my strategy is this (it seems like a lot at first, but it only takes about minute to do them all):

  1. start the video and open up the video transcript with time markers
  2. listen to one sentence at a time, or one section of a sentence. The first listen, try to work out as much meaning as possible. Use context clues from the video.
  3. Play it again once or twice to identify words and grammar I know. The time markers in the transcript can help you jump to the start of the sentence.
    Pause the video and think about what I think the sentence means.
  4. Read the transcript for this sentence. Can I identify any more words from reading it that I didn’t pick up when listening? What do I think the sentence means now?
  5. Copy and paste the sentence into Google Translate. Identify what I got right and what I missed.
  6. Watch that bit of video once more now that I know what it means to see if I can follow along.
  7. Watch that bit of video yet again, but shadowing this time, breaking the sentence up into sections if I need to by pausing to give my brain chance to catch up.Do this until I can speak along with the video for the duration of the sentence without any major fumbles.
  8. Listen to the sentence again and do a little victory dance, happy in the knowledge that I kinda get what it says and can say it myself as well!

Pros: I can watch fun videos about something I like! There’s lots of comprehensible input channels now, like the one I linked above, that make videos with different The visual clues can give extra context and help you remember what something means. You can change the speed of the videos if you need to slow it down a bit. It’s fun to watch the video through once you’ve studied it and feel a sense of achievement as I understand all of it or enough to know what’s being said.

  • Reading NHK news easy:
    Goal: read 1 article a week, either a few sentences a day or an entire article in one go
    What I usually manage: One article a day some days, though usually no more than 3 or 4 articles a week. I find it useful to read news articles since it also gives me an idea of current events and culture and things like that, and helps practice kanji that might not come up much in other types of reading!

  • Reading stories or manga:
    Goal: Read one paragraph a week of a book at an appropriate level or a page of an manga a week
    What I usually manage: a short story a week or a book of manga a week
    I’m currently working through a book of about 50 stories for Japanese learners that are all about 3 or 4 pages long and get progressively more difficult through the book, which I find perfect since I can get through one story in a sitting if I really want to. And it means that I’m constantly feeling a sense of achievement since I’ve worked through another story!

  • italki speaking practice:
    Goal: 30 minute lesson a week. Ideally part of it with time to ask questions about any vocab or grammar that’s confusing me recently but the bulk of it being chatting about fun things
    What I usually manage: currently this is out of my budget, but I do want to get back into it soon since I used to find it so useful!

Personally, I like to focus on things that I find fun and help me keep my motivation and momentum up. Things like watching youtube videos of someone talking about their pet or doing a cooking tutorial is going to help me enjoy my hobby way more than something like textbook drills, so I make sure to spend more time doing fun things than I spend on drills. Sometimes, doing something that makes you learn loads but burns you out is way less useful than what keeps your momentum up. Plus this is a hobby, you should get to enjoy your hobbies!

As I say in my routine bit under the cut, I like to set my goals really low so that on the days I’m busy and can’t get to do much practice, I don’t end up in a guilt spiral and end up demotivating myself. I know you say that you feel like you’re going slow with your vocab reviews, but you’re doing way more than double what I am and it sounds to me like you’re doing absolutely loads! Personally, I’d recommend going slightly slower with your vocab if you can. If you take some of the time you spend on WK and instead play games/ watch videos/ read books etc, then the vocab reviews might come easier to you and you’ll enjoy them more since you’re not feeling guilty for having them looming over you so much. Plus, because you’d be encountering the vocab in the wild, that’ll help reinforce the vocab you learn and will also help you learn new vocab easier if you’ve come across it already in a game! And that way you’re also learning the nuance of the vocab since you’re seeing it in context more.

I think it’s also useful to consider what your goals are. What are you wanting to use Japanese for? If you’re wanting to learn Japanese so that you can play Japanese games, then I’d focus on playing as many games as possible, or reading as many books that are at your current reading level if that’s your end goal, etc. And also think about how you personally stay motivated. Do deadlines help you, or do they just loom over you and hinder your learning? If you enjoyed having more structure, something like an italki teacher might be useful to give you some external accountability, as long as it’s in your budget.

I’m a big believer in celebrate wins. You’re doing an amazing job and deserve to recognise that!! Learning a language is a lot of work, and getting to N3 is a huge achievement. I’m a big fan of also celebrating little wins as well. Watching an entire 5 min video or cutscene in a language you’re learning from scratch is a huge thing to be able to do! Reading a short story in a language that doesn’t share the same writing system as yours is incredible! Please be proud of how much you can do.

And finally make sure you also give yourself plenty of time off every day where you’re not learning Japanese and relaxing, to give your brain time to absorb what you’re learning and to just enjoy yourself. Time off helps us process new ideas and information, so remember that the occasional nap is a key language learning strategy!

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#10

I ‘learn’ 1 grammar point a day on Bunpro, 5 vocab on Bunpro, and 5 lessons on Wanikani. I get all my reviews to zero every day.

I spend 30 minutes to an hour watching content in Japanese. Currently watching Terrace House opening new doors.

This contains my study into about 2 hours of work a day. Reading, writing and speaking all get neglected because I prioritize ease of engagement over comprehensive study. My theory is that this will help boost my comprehension enough over a long enough period of time that I will reach a point in my life where I can dedicate more time to the language or the other parts feel more accessible :slight_smile:

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#11

I’ve considered doing a full reset myself, and just slowly working through the levels again, but I think i would lose interest pretty quickly running into things I know or feel like I should know. But, and this seems to be a common suggestion here, maybe I should be going small and working with 1-2 grammar points and 3-5 new vocabulary per day.

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#12

That’s definitely an interesting approach but I think there’s some merit to it. I struggle with deciding what is important to me as far as my studies go which makes prioritizing difficult. My professors put a lot of emphasis on writing and so that makes me feel like I should be able to physically handwrite kanji, which definitely can help with the recall, but the more I think about it, the less useful it seems given our current dependence on digital media. As long as you can type the readings and recognize the kanji you need, does it really matter if you can write it from memory? Probably not. It might help with differentiating kanji that look very similar, but who knows.

I suppose I’m kind of in the same boat as you but I neglect taking in native content and spend my time doing vocabulary and grammar studies under the impression that I need to be at a certain level in order to even engage with the real thing.

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#13

For WK, you have to type the inputs, and there are 2 cards for each item, one for meaning, one for reading. So if you have 100 reviews, you need to type 200 entries. In general, if I know the items fairly well, I can do 100 items in ~20 minutes. If I have a lot of new items that take me longer to recall or that I get wrong, it can take longer.

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#14

Thank you, first of all, for taking the time to write up such a detailed response and for including your routine. I do need to work on setting realistic goals so I’m not just mucking about when it comes time to study. Obviously the ADHD thing makes it difficult to focus anyway, but I have noticed that having at least some sort of plan in place can help.

I will have to give your listening practice method a try at some time, maybe with anime. I’m assuming you use YouTube and the captioning tool on there? I haven’t found a good place to watch anime for free that has accurate Japanese subtitles. I think, especially when they aren’t ai captioned, they tend to differ from the actual spoken text (at least, that has been my observation using Netflix for example).

Also, thank you for the reminder to celebrate accomplishments. Historically, I have not been good at that either. :sweat_smile:

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#15

I mean thats badass but i would be worried about burning out. Personally i have a cap of 100 SRS items a day and if it starts to exeed that i will stop adding new items.

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#16

What is used to do, is add every day 3 words that I know, but with kanji I have trouble reading into my Anki deck, where the front is audio of the word or cloze.

When card appears I have to write the word by hand, this makes kanji stick super well, those kanji become a nice ground for learning new vocab with the same kanji in it. I don’t know if you need this though, as you do wk.

Anyhow, don’t you want to include some native content as your main type of study? I feel like most people who survived and can be seen did that at around that level or maybe even earlier

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#17

Sounds like you will want to stop or reduce new cards until you get to a comfortable review count as many of the others have said. It’d be good to reduce that to an amount to where you can do something fun in the language. You can pick based on your weakest skill, like books or games for reading, shows or comprehensive input videos for listening, journal for writing, or hello talk, study group, or online game for speaking. You can also just do whatever sounds like fun in your target language, cause using it to have fun is the best way to stay motivated and is often also quite effective.

I personally am working a lot of overtime, so I pretty much only add a card if I don’t have reviews. Because of that, my reviews are quite low for BP and WK. Instead, I’ve started reading easier manga, and that’s been very enjoyable and a reasonable confidence boost. I’m currently not looking up anything really. If I don’t understand, I just leave it and move on. So long as it’s not huge chunks of the book, it’s both fun and useful practice.

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#18

Since you’ve already passed N3, I think your bottleneck may be less “not knowing enough Japanese” and more that your study system is consuming the time you could be using to turn that knowledge into actual comprehension.

I’d put a hard time cap on SRS rather than a completion goal. For example: 20–30 minutes, then stop even if reviews remain. Use the recovered time on one piece of native content you genuinely want to understand.

I’d also use a simple rule for lookups:

  • If it prevents you from understanding what is happening → look it up.
  • If you understand the sentence but one nuance is fuzzy → maybe note it.
  • If it’s just an interesting unknown detail → keep going.

At N3, spending 15 minutes reverse-engineering one sentence can easily give you less benefit than encountering the same grammar naturally five more times.

For listening, your observation about subtitles not matching the spoken line is important too. Japanese subtitles are often captions or editorial subtitles rather than perfect transcripts, so differences don’t necessarily mean you misheard something. Comparing the spoken form with the written subtitle can actually be useful because it exposes contractions, omissions and paraphrasing.

If you had to choose, would you rather analyse difficult lines while watching, or mark them and do a short review session after the episode? That choice can make a huge difference to whether immersion still feels like immersion.

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#19

I have a few suggestions that have helped me in the past with similar issues:

  1. Review at the same starting time every day and/or after an activity you do daily (this acts as a habit cue). Usually first thing in the morning is best so you can get it out of the way instantly and not have it consume your mind the rest of the day. Another good option is if you are lifting/exercising, do reviews between your sets

  2. Don’t stop new cards and don’t restart entirely, but do reduce new cards at least for a little bit. This will be important for tying into the next piece of advice

  3. Try to always keep your immersion for the day higher than your review time. Learning vocab and grammar should always be seen as a tool to help you immerse more effectively

  4. Keep immersion as fun as possible. Being engaged and connected with the content is significantly more valuable than watching content that might have “more useful words”

  5. Keep distractions out of sight. This is another piece of advice from Atomic Habits that is extremely effective. Your environment shapes your actions which is very important to be conscious of with ADHD and can help you modify it to do what you need to get done

  6. If you know what you want out of your day you can create a long prompt listing everything down (this action alone already helps a lot to consolidate your thoughts) and feed it to ChatGPT in order to make a personalized daily routine. If you feed it words like “mode switching”, “Atomic Habits”, “energy waves throughout day” it will also spit out specific advice that is often pretty helpful

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#20

I like the idea of adding words you already “know” but still fail to read automatically.

I’d probably keep the original sentence too, especially when the word tends to appear in a common collocation. That helps connect kanji → sound → meaning in context instead of reinforcing only kanji → isolated reading.

For native content, I’d also only save words that actually interrupted comprehension or keep reappearing.

When you find one worth keeping, do you usually build the Anki card immediately, or mark the sentence and process everything later?

#21

It depends on the person. For example i sometimes write out by hand (or do shadow writing) most of the kanji im reviewing during my study session—sometimes even entire sentences—so it’s perfectly normal to spend more than 20 seconds on per card.
And even beyond that, I don’t see why we’d need to go as fast as possible when reviewing—you can take that time to analyze the sentence, understand why the word you’re reviewing is used here, and so on (instead of translating 1 word and ignoring the rest). Spending 20 seconds per card doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve failed…

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