Study - From Hiragana to Real Japanese

[Asher]

Hi all!

Hope that everyone is having a fantastic start to their 2026! Did anyone do anything exciting over the holiday season?

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The reason I am making this post today is to gather a bit of information about how people studied hiragana/katakana when they first started learning Japanese, and then how they transitioned from ‘knowing how to read kana’, to ‘starting to learn words/grammar’.

Using myself as an example, the process basically went like this.

1. Decided that I wanted to learn Japanese (Had absolutely zero prior experience).

2. Kind of knew (or at least had the idea) that I would get nowhere without at least hiragana and katakana, so started looking online for resources.

3. Watched a few Youtube videos on pronunciation, downloaded and printed out a blank writing sheet directly from Google images. Practiced writing them all for a week or so before being at least comfortable enough in recognizing them to move on (didn’t even know there was such thing as stroke order at this point, purely just cared about recognition).

4. Found some more in-depth articles on random websites just to fill in the gaps that I didn’t know like sound elongations/combinations しゃ etc, sound skipping った etc. Watched a tiny bit of Youtube again just to hear it all in action.

5. Downloaded a random 2k vocab deck from Anki, studied about 200 words, realized I was just learning words without any actual context, so started to look for a grammar resource.

6. Found Bunpro. Started using it fairly painlessly and just kept learning vocab either through Bunpro or other random vocab decks once I could read the short example sentences.

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I think my example is probably quite an unusual one, as I never did a Japanese class in school, but did know of ‘Genki’ from friends that had studied Japanese/just the general fame of the book. But since I am not really a textbook person, I didn’t choose that path.

What was it like for everyone else? I think there would be people that had a whole range of different experiences, so I am really interested in hearing them! For example

• Did a class in school, gained interest again but started from vocab cause already knew kana.
• Came back to Japanese after attempting it earlier and failing/losing interest. Jumped straight into kanji.
• Started with a texkbook straight away and looked for something else after having completed it or losing interest in it.
• Started one method, failed, another, failed, another failed, searched for ‘how to learn Japanese’ on Reddit until finally finding something that worked.
• Downloaded a hiragana/katakana deck on Anki or something similar and just did pure recognition with no writing.

No matter how you went about it, I would really love to hear it! What was your roadmap from absolute zero to the first ‘full’ sentence you ever read?

[Sean]

It was too long ago for me to even remember properly 🫠

I think I was in the Genki camp.
Learnt hiragana/katakana in high school then 三日坊主’d it and didnt pick it all up again until I had to take a general course and did Japanese 101 (which used Genki)

[btluppi]

I think my path was similar to @Asher 's.

I just googled apps to learn kana (there are several out there). The one I chose could test you on translating the kana to romaji, romaji to kana, multiple option questions, etc. And it even had a feature where it would ask you to draw the kana for a certain romaji. I was able to select a set of kana to be tested on, so I learned them in batches and progressively expanded my testing set.

After that I got into WaniKani and started learning kanji–>vocab. It felt kind of natural as I had just learned symbols (kana) and now was learning more complex symbols (kanji), while practicing my kana knowledge.

I tried using Genki to learn by myself but I thought it was a bit boring and it didn’t fit into my schedule like the apps, because I needed to set aside a good chunk of my day to read through the textbook.

After learning a good amount of vocab (and realizing that just learning kanji and vocab would not get me anywhere), I started Bunpro. That was a very exciting part of the journey because suddenly all that kanji and vocab started to connect.

Edit: I should add that starting Bunpro after having kanji and a good vocab knowledge felt very good. I think that if I had started without that background I would have felt overwhelmed since Bunpro starts exposing you to (at the time) complex phrases right away.

[hx9]

My path was simple

1. Google search => “How to learn Japanese”
2. Read several articles, Reddit posts etc. and after very little searching, got a hit that actually detailed out the early process. Learn Japanese: A Ridiculously Detailed Guide
3. Learned kana from that site, and since it was working, used the free trial of Wanikani.
4. Guide said to learn grammar after learning a bunch of vocab, so eventually I explored several applications recommended on the Wanikani forums. Settled on Bunpro after the free trial since it uses the same SRS system, was focused on grammar and had a very solid UI.

[Fernando-BP]

Learning vocab is very broad, so I’m still learning, but with hiragana and katakana I remember that the way I learnt them was by practicing their stroke order in an app until I could get through all of them without making a single mistake. xd
Then, to read faster, I started reading song lyrics even if I didn’t know Kanji yet, just so I could follow the song a bit and feel like I’m progressing.

As for vocab. I remember using Anki with a vocab deck, but honestly I think I learned more by using a Discord bot (I don’t really remember the name of the bot) It would give me words written in kanji that I had to type in kana in the chat, and when I got them wrong, it showed me the reading and the word’s meaning.

And with grammar, I tried a lot of methods Tae’s guide, youtube videos and the last and the most helpful one was Bunpro with basically everything needed for me (clean explanations, structure and SRS reviews)

I still remember my japanese learning peak but got all destroyed by uni taking all my free time , made me reset my progress like 3 times

[maurice620]

My path was pretty similar! I used the same guide and tried to get familiar with the pitch patterns, then jumped onto Wani Kani and on here, started learning vocab en masse and then started learning grammar too. I got into textbooks too late for my taste, only in September of this past year (when I started my uni’s 3rd year Japanese course), but by that time I managed to blow through Genki I and II, and 上級への扉.

I used a lot of SRS when I was learning Korean, so once I got the hang of Japanese’s scripts that’s what I spent the most time chasing, and from there it’s been a process of reading lots of books, watching media, listening to podcasts, using workbooks, etc to get things leveled-out skill wise.

[John-Bunpro]

Fun topic – thanks, @Asher !

It was too long ago for me to even remember properly 🫠

If it was too long ago for you, @Sean , I don’t even know what that says about me.

Anyhow, as the resident old geezer on the team, I started learning in 1997 – the internet was in its infancy, and popular resources like Genki and Anki didn’t even exist at the time.

The process for me was (roughly) like this:

1. Took a Japanese class in university on a whim (I had traveled to Japan with my family as a kid, and always had an interest in the language/culture due to things like video games. We used Yokoso!, a precursor to Genki that follows a similar sort of format.
2. Quickly realized that my class was moving too slow and it would be forever before I could play the video games I wanted to in JP (this was back when even AAA titles like Final Fantasy would take a year-plus to get translated into English), so in addition to my classes, I found resources like dictionaries (an old version of JMDict — whose definitions appear on Bunpro and jisho.org, etc. – called EDICT was around then), as well as actual paper dictionaries and grammar references like the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series and the New Nelson Kanji Dictionary and started obsessively self-studying by playing Final Fantasy VII in JP and looking up literally everything I didn’t know.
3. Took part in a study abroad program in my third year, and then an intensive/immersive spoken Japanese language course in my fourth year because I felt like my speaking ability wasn’t progressing as well as my reading ability (at this point in time, I was pretty socially awkward and embarrassed about trying to speak with natives).
4. Eventually ended up dropping my computer science major to study Japanese language and literature, and ended up going to graduate school for a master’s degree in this. Many of my classmates were native Japanese, which gave me more avenues to practice speaking and gain insight from natives who were training to be Japanese professors.
5. Throughout this whole time, I did my best to spend pretty much every waking hour outside of class interacting with Japanese in one form or another, reading Japanese novels, playing Japanese games, watching TV series my Japanese friends sent to me, talkig to natives, and basically “immersing” myself in the language (even though this was before “AJATT” and “immersion” kind of became buzzwords – I like to say I did AJATT/immersion before it was cool )
6. After grad school I went to Japan on the JET Programme as a CIR, allowing me to get experience working in a Japanese government office where I was forced to work and interact in the language eight hours a day (I was the only non-Japanese in the office).
7. Decided I liked Japan enough that I wanted to spend the rest of my life there, so after my three years on JET were up I found a different job at a Japanese company and worked there for 11 years before going freelance.

And I guess the rest is history.

TL;DR – I did a combination of “traditional” learning and “immersion”/self-studying back in the days before people really talked about it in those terms. I still believe that while there are far more tools and resources available today, the basic progression of language learning really hasn’t changed – if you get a solid foundation in Japanese grammar and vocab (and Bunpro is a great way to do this ) and then actively engage with the language through media or talking to native speakers, you stand a great chance of developing true fluency.

In any event, I’m always heartened/encouraged to see learners today who are as excited/motivated about learning Japanese as I was almost three decades ago, and I feel very fortunate to be able to work with this great team on Bunpro so that I can share what I myself learned with the next generation!

[mhs05]

I began some time in late 2022 or 2023. I’m not entirely sure.

1. Decided to try learning a new language. I was tossing up Mandarin or Japanese and thought, considering the abundance of Japanese media I’ve been exposed to I thought that might give me a leg up (in reality, it really didn’t) so then I began by googling hiragana/katakana resources. This landed me on Tofugu’s Learn Hiragana Ultimate Guide.
2. After about a week I could handle reading Hiragana and Katakana (tbh I still confuse ツ シ), at that point I think I got upsold on Wanikani? According to my stats I began that in January 2023.
3. For about a year I grinded out Wanikani levels which was quite fun. I still find learning kanji to be super fun, having those Leonardo Dicaprio pointing meme moments a couple days after learning something still hasn’t gotten old. That said, there was a huge problem. I didn’t know any grammar, whatsoever.
4. I eventually bought the Genki books but I had little motivation to use them since I found the scenarios very boring.
5. Late 2024 I discovered Bunpro and I’ve been a lifetime member since.
6. Since January last year I’ve been working with a tutor and at this point I can read some native level text but the density of unknown words in things I would like to read makes getting through them really tiring. Happy to say, very rarely it’s my lack of grammar understanding getting in the way. Slowly making my way through the N2 grammar deck at the moment.

I still can’t talk worth a damn. I mean, I can to a certain extent but I can’t say anything interesting. I have the ingredients somewhere in my head but the recall is still too slow. This is the main thing I want to focus on this year on top of boosting up my vocab. At my current rate I should hit the final level of Wanikani in 6 months or so.

[thelizard]

Timeline February 2025 to now

0. I went to Japan. Here multiple things happened. that lead to me deciding to learn Japanese. Including:
   – I’ve always considered myself a massive weeb but didn’t speak a word
   – My friend who moved to Japan a year before seemed to have substantially more fun than me when he dragged me through the entirety of Shinjuku’s nightlife.
   – Winter 2025 anime season was the first time I started noticing a decline in subtitle quality due to AI use in anime.
1. Therefore, I decided I want to learn Japanese.
2. Due to the typical way Chinese is taught (I took some Chinese classes eternities ago), where classrooms will just let you use pinyin / romaji for a very long time before bothering to teach characters, I was under the misconception that it would probably be similar in Japanese and it took me a moment to realize that every single beginner resource really relies on Hiragana straight from the start.
3. I spent about two full days reading a lot of “how to learn Japanese” before actually starting. Realized that the first thing I need to do is to learn Hiragana. Here I disregarded the Anki recommendations because Hiragana seemed like such a small set of characters, that I can probably just bruteforce it. In the end I was happy I did because this took like two days of constant repetition whereas Anki would have taken much longer.
4. I downloaded Anki and started the Kaishi Deck, while reading Tae Kim and watching Cure Dolly.
5. I quickly realized that Anki doesn’t quite work for me in this setup and that I lack grammar exercises. My retention over 2 months of Kaishi usage never really exceeded 70% and I genuinely just forgot words all the time. So something had to change.
6. Stumbled upon Bunpro. Picked Tae Kim path without thinking about it much because I really liked Tae Kim’s explanations.
7. Over time started burying Anki cards and added Vocab to Bunpro instead because I really liked the fill-in style.
8. Later realized the entirety of my learning stack is mute and I’m just typing and reading. I am getting zero listening practice. So I started forcing myself to actually immerse.
   – This is when I went back to Anki, to create listening practice cards from the immersion material I mined. I typically pick sentences where I understand “almost everything” but 1-2 unknowns.
   – This works substantially better than using a premade deck in isolation for me
9. I went to Japan again. I was surprised and happy that I was actually able to navigate and communicate to a very limited degree.
10. After coming back from Japan I was hit by a wave of motivation due to the results.
11. Now my current stack is Bunpro Vocab (fill-in), Bunpro Grammar, Daily listening practice (Anime, Random streamers on twitcast, Youtube, etc)
12. I’m going to Japan again in 3 weeks and afterwards will decide how to proceed with my learning, but I feel like further adjustments are necessary based on what I perceive to be my current bottlenecks, which are:
    – vocabulary count
    – real time parsing of multi-clause complex sentences
    Hence my current instinct is to switch to a mode where I dedicate most time to immersion now that a year has almost passed since my initial decision, and only add material on Bunpro after I actually encounter it in immersion. But I want to see how I’ll do in Japan before actually adjusting.

[BreadmanNin]

I love topics like this. Pretty cool reading about everyone’s first steps. And Bunpro staff too! Somehow it has a motivating effect to see the staff at a huge language resource like Bunpro started at zero just like everyone else.

As for me…
A few years ago I signed up for Japanese classes at a school. A day before classes started, I opened the textbook and saw that it required hiragana and katakana to be able to follow along. I nearly jumped out of my chair at this realisation, started cramming hiragana and katakana like my life depended on it (my dignity did, at least) and ended up learning hiragana and katakana in a single afternoon. It has stuck pretty well ever since, so I guess the extreme pressure worked quite well.

I quit those classes after only half a year. It was hard to combine them with work because they started at 4 PM. After that, I didn’t do much studying for a while.

In 2024 I went on a holiday to Japan together with my sister. One of the most exhilarating experiences to me was being able to ask simple things in Japanese and getting an answer in Japanese that I mostly understood. Such as asking the taxi driver if it’s OK to drink tea in the car, or asking the hotel staff what was inside the gachapon capsule my sister pulled (they were miniatures of famous buildings in Tokyo, but I didn’t recognise this particular one). That holiday rekindled the fire and once home I started picking up the textbook from those Japanese classes. But learning from the textbook didn’t work well for me and frustrated me, and when I opened up about this on a forum I frequent, friends recommended Wanikani to me. I found Wanikani to be a lot of fun at the start (these days I have quite a few reservations about it, I don’t like it much anymore), and quickly came across Bunpro to study grammar. That’s where I am right now. Studying with Bunpro is going so well that suddenly I’m finding myself taking JLPT exams.

[Reporterdem]

So bit of background for me first. I have always been a huge fan of Japanese media since I was five years old watching Pokemon / Digimon / Cardcaptors, which later led to me spreading my wings into other anime and manga when I became a teenager (and understood that the things I liked were a specific type of media that all came from Japan and weren’t just ‘cartoons’!). As time went on I fell into my day job of writing at length about anime, manga and light novels (which started as a hobby) and I was beginning to realise there was a lot of stuff I wanted to read that simply wasn’t being licensed for the English market. Things like Pet Girl of Sakurasou or Dusk Maiden of Amnesia, where I watched the anime but at the time had no way to continue the story with the original work. I wasn’t bothered about speaking or listening at this point, but I wanted to be able to read.

So I decided that I wanted to try and learn the language. Luckily for me, I hung around in some communities where my acquaintances knew Japanese, so I asked them for tips on how to start. They told me to learn the kana first, get a textbook (like Genki) and read Tae Kim’s Guide to Grammar. So I went something like this in the end:

1. March 2018. Downloaded a quiz app on my phone that let me drill the kana until I recognised them on sight. Then got a notebook and wrote them over and over again. (even if it seemed unlikely I was going to be regularly writing in Japanese, I wanted to make sure I could)
2. Started reading Genki / Tae Kim’s guide
3. Through more talking with friends/googling, I found Japanese Talk Online, who had built community decks on Memrise. I was starting to understand the need for an SRS approach to learning vocab, so I started avidly using them. I’d learn a few words a day and write them down in a notebook.
4. Eventually realised that I needed something a bit better than Memrise and started using WaniKani. Same system, learn 5~ words a day during the week and write them down in my notebook too. At this point, I was still using Memrise as well.
5. Finally dropped Memrise and kept using WaniKani. Bunpro was fairly new to the market, but I thought it would help me learn grammar, so I signed up. Struggled to understand it since grammar was a lot to get my head around, and eventually retreated, thinking it would be easier once I had more vocabulary under my belt. (What I actually needed was just more patience and experience with the language in general).
6. Kept using WaniKani, eventually tried reading manga and often bounced off due to finding it difficult, but I pushed through with the little understanding I did have. What I didn’t understand until WAY later is that reading is also a skill you have to learn…
7. Reading improved slowly, but surely. Was no longer having difficulties with easy series, but still felt like novels or LNs were too much for me (again the not understanding reading is a skill problem…).
8. Kept doing WK started watching JP-subbed dramas and more YouTube content involving seiyu and anime that I liked. Kicked myself for not starting this kind of immersion several years earlier, because my skills started improving dramatically, despite being worse than my reading because I’d never used them. I was realising how much fun stuff I’d missed out on due to my fear of not understanding enough or being discouraged because I didn’t understand that grinding SRS systems and reading Genki wasn’t going to give me that magical ability to understand everything without exposing myself to the language broadly and being okay with not understanding everything.
9. Finally started using Bunpro again, also Mochi so I could make my own flashcards for vocabulary I was finding in manga / dramas I was watching and then looking up but doing absolutely nothing else with to remember.

Which basically brings us to today where I use Bunpro / WK / Mochi daily, but do a lot more immersion and my language skills are lower maybe mid-intermediate, depending on the day

I understand more than I think I do, but there can be simple stuff that trips me up since I took a very disjointed approach to learning even if I was consistent in turning up to do it every day. Honestly, a lot of my journey was figuring out how to learn in general. I’d been homeschooled as a kid, so had a very different experience to those who went through school. And for Japanese specifically, I couldn’t afford classes or a tutor as a young adult, so I was really having to figure out how you’re supposed to learn anything, never mind a complex second language. If not for my love of Japanese media, I have no doubt I would have bounced somewhere along the way. I wasted a lot of time on inefficient approaches (like ignoring trying to read). Looking back I really can’t believe I managed to get to where I am now.

And I feel like I have come full circle with the experiences of some of my peers, where I now pointedly tell newbies who are learning to immerse themselves in the language. Even if they can only understand a little bit, it’s better to start that process early because there is no perfect moment where the tools have taught you enough grammar or vocab to ensure you never come across something you don’t understand. It can be discouraging, but it’s for the greater good in the end.

[cupnoodle]

I’d say my path was kind of similar to the OP, but uh maybe worse and way less efficient haha

My initial major exposure to Japanese was TV and music, so I was familiar with some words and basic pronunciations. Tried to learn using Duolingo several times (gamified learning works a lot better than textbook learning, for me - bunpro so far has been a nice happy medium of the informative nature of a textbook and the gamification!) but always ended up falling off somewhere in the late-beginner phase.
Duolingo gets pretty boring after a few weeks, I find, and few of its example sentences were things I could find any use for, and its instruction on grammar was limited enough that I was legit learning more just via casual exposure watching TV shows and movies.
I also tried Anki many years ago, but didn’t really have any other inputs at the time, and no understanding of how to make the most of it as a tool, so I ended up having a poor experience with it.

Anyway, multiple rounds of failed Duolingo led to a mostly-decent comprehension of hiragana and an honestly very subpar understanding of katakana, which is where I’m still sort of “at” with literacy. I really struggle with katakana to this day. The problem I run into is that a lot of the beginner resources that cover things that fundamental are also too easy in terms of vocab and grammar to be interesting enough for me to stick with, so now I’m working mostly on grammar and vocab and sort of filling in the kana blanks through trial and error when reading graded readers and bunpro vocab example sentences. Todaii daily news has also been helpful on this for me - both Todaii and bunpro’s example sentences have a listening feature on a lot of things, so I can read it and then listen through to sort of “check my answers”.

I consider myself fairly literate and eloquent in English (my first language) and I credit that to the fact that I’ve always been an avid reader, so I guess my approach is partly trying to retrace that pathway, just in a different language this time.

I don’t think I’d recommend my pathway to this point to others interested in learning Japanese lol it’s been a long and winding path that’s only recently begun to bear fruit (I finally have a learning setup and combination of tools that’s working for me, for now, I think), but I was never on a deadline with learning this language, I’m just doing it because it’s fun and I think it’s a language that sounds nice, so maybe it’s fine not to be speedrunning it.

[eciu]

Mid 2024 I decided that I want to go to japan.

1. Without any research took Duolingo and learned Hira/Katakana there. serious commitment of 1 lesson/day. I’m still on it, but just to keep the streak rolling, but can’t recommend it as a good source.
2. Late 2024 took a random 1,5k Anki vocab deck went through like 1k+ words in 6 months until I got bored of it.

November 2025 I partied too hard and ended up buying the tickets to japan, so I had to pick up the pace again.

3. Began to mine sentences and to build SRS deck on my own.
4. Refreshed my old deck with over 1k words in review pile.
5. I’ve memed myself into feeling guilt when i’m not passively listening to a Japanese language content (music/podcasts) while I’m not learning, and got pretty much used to doing it.
6. Started to brute force anime with JP subs. My general flow was:
   • read a line,
   • look up all words I didn’t know,
   • tried to translate it for comprehension,
   • asked AI to rate my translation and explain mistakes.
7. doing 5 without any grammar knowledge was kinda hard, but during translation session AI recommended Bunpro “on its own” and thats how I ended up there.
8. Tried learning kanji in the similar way as I’m learning vocab and for me, it greatly increased words retention and acquisition. Also, I had a lot issues in spotting the differences in some kanjis like 矢失末夫未未来 and I’ve made a huge progress on that.

4 months left before my trip and my aim is to not have to rely hard on translating app when speaking to someone.
And to not force the person I’m talking with to speak like he would speak to a 4 year old kid.

[sunflowii]

1. Worked for a Japanese company in Manila that hired a Nihongo sensei for us. Learned katakana, hiragana and some phrases (usually formal as it’s a work setting). Don’t remember if we got into grammar but I got discouraged with learning Japanese because I’m ethnically Chinese and I could barely speak Mandarin, how dare I learn a different language?
   Good outcomes:

• learned katakana and hiragana which I would review before going on trips to Japan later in life. Got a kick out of knowing what a restaurant served based on the signs outside and being able to ask “Where is …”
• sensei had us watch My Neighbor Totoro and that fostered my love of Totoro which led me to make sure that the children in my life (including those of friends) knew who Totoro is.
  But love of Japanese stuff goes waaaaay back to childhood robot cartoons like Voltes V.

2. Husband and I just LOVE being in Japan so I finally told myself that it is ok to learn Japanese ('cause we also tried to learn Mandarin but failed) because we are very motivated to keep going back to Japan anyway.

3. Online tools:
   a. Started with Minato - free online course. Fell asleep sometimes
   b. WaniKani - finally found something I stuck to. Side effect: “Learned” Chinese as well. Still continuing with this after 2 years though have slowed down.
   c. Tried Duolingo - it was too easy to get the right answer from the multiple choice questions.
   Tried Tae Kim - couldn’t stick to it.
   Tried some youtube instructors, couldn’t stick to it.
   d. Bunpro - found this and stuck to it. Been using it for more than a year.

4. Wanted more speaking and listening practice - found an online tutor in the same Canadian province I’m in. We did Genki II together.

Happy with WK, BP and online tutor so going to continue.

[ce4qi]

I remember reading through the tofugu guide a couple of years ago and learning hiragana and katakana and from there I think I started using wanikani but then soon hit the end of the free trial and couldn’t commit LOL.

after that I’ve been on and off with actually learning Japanese since then - just doing a 6k anki deck (which I reset recently because I had so many reviews from being noncommittal and couldn’t barely remember the readings and meanings)

I also tried using Tae Kim each time I tried to learn again but kept on restarting with grammar every time so was a bit of a waste…

But I actually found Bunpro around December 28th, so a bit over a week ago and it has helped SO much to keep me on track with learning now - and I have actually gotten further than before with Tae Kim while using the Bunpro deck with it - and I’m currently completing all my reviews with my (restarted) anki deck.

So basically Bunpro is my saviour LMAO (lets hope I don’t dwindle again, especially with a levels next year) and learning Japanese is apparently my New Year’s resolution!

[Rhynn]

I started learning Japanese several times, starting from the time when I was a teenager. I remember thinking katakana looked easier so I started with that, but never quite got it to stick; I didn’t have any guidance whatsoever except what I found on the (then still much smaller) internet. At some point I think I found some really old textbook which I started copying in order to learn some grammar. Not surprisingly, none of those early attempts were very successful!

Fast forward to about two years ago. I play a lot of JRPGs and always heard everyone say that the translations are never quite the same as the originals. And I’d finally had enough; I wanted to find out for myself just how true that statement actually is. So I bought a Genki bundle and started gathering online resources for learning hiragana and katakana. I still remembered how I never quite got it to stick before and was determined to fix that issue now. With a combination of writing them a bunch of times, playing kana learning games and seeing them in use, I think I can safely say I won’t ever forget them again, haha.

I started working through Genki on my own, but my motivation for it started flagging pretty quickly. I think I also found WaniKani around this time, and reached around level 10 before feeling overwhelmed. I liked learning kanji, but it just wasn’t quite right yet.

My stack of Japanese learning materials steadily grew (books, games and online resources) and my actual learning… did not. I don’t regret buying most of the resources I now have access to, but I certainly overwhelmed myself in the beginning.

Then pretty much exactly a year ago, I realised that yeah, I still really want to learn Japanese. And if I wanted to succeed, I’d have to make a change in how I was approaching it. So I bought a daily journal and told myself that I’d have to do just 10 minutes of study a day, but do it every single day. If I felt like I’d done my best for the day, I’d get to colour the day green. I’d also write a bit about what I did that day, and I used colours to make it all feel just a bit nicer.

And that actually worked! I can proudly say that I’ve been able to colour every day last year green without cheating, and my daily habit has actually grown from those 10 minutes to “however long it takes to do my daily reviews”. On good days, I add in learning new stuff. Now my daily habit looks something like this:

-Start the day by doing Duolingo while still in bed, to wake up and get the brain started on Japanese. I don’t use Duolingo as a reliable source, but the kanji practice is nice.
-Either before or after work, I do my WaniKani reviews, then Bunpro, then KanjiGarden (though I’m considering dropping KanjiGarden, since I don’t really like the order in which it throws kanji at you and it doesn’t distinguish at all between common and rare readings)
-Then I do my daily Anki reviews - no pre-made deck, but fully based on what I’ve encountered in my various places of learning. It’s extra review, in a way
-Every monday evening, I have Japanese class; we’re working through Genki and it’s a lower level than what I could handle, but I find I really need the speaking practice especially and learning from a native teacher is invaluable. And it’s just a fun class
-Recently, every Sunday I’ve started going to the library for some solo Genki learning ahead of class
-Whenever I feel like it I pull out any of my other books; Minna no Nihongo, several kanji books, etc. The extra practice with stuff I’ve already seen is always nice (I find it really helps me retain grammar concepts a lot better) and often there’s information that just isn’t included in Genki.

I’ve also recently started taking reading a bit more seriously, and whenever I watch a Japanese show on Netflix I try to pay more attention to what’s being said than to the subtitles; but, I’m watching mostly for entertainment at the moment so I’m also fine with just zoning out a bit when it happens. I can always go back and re-watch shows I enjoyed without subtitles!

[Jacob-Bunpro]

It’s been awesome reading everyone’s journey! I started learning Japanese fairly randomly a little over 4 years ago out of a desire to add a skillset and expand my worldview as someone from a small rural town in the Southeastern US (we still don’t even have a stoplight to this day)!

After coming across this extremely helpful google doc discussing how someone would learn Japanese in 1 year from scratch (lol) (but actually the doc is really good), I spent the first month researching how to learn a language, while also using some type of game (similar to GoKana) to learn hiragana and katakana.

From there, I worked through Genki 1 using Tokini Andy’s videos/course. At the time, Andy’s wife (then fiance) Yuki would even grade the exercises in the book or writing assignments if you sent them in (not sure if they still do that). I would continue with his videos all the way through Quartet 2 (although, I probably don’t recommend using him past Quartet 1 as I think at that point you should be learning Japanese in Japanese).

I used WaniKani from day 1 to study kanji. After finishing Genki 2 and transitioning to Quartet, I started iTalki lessons twice a week as well as Bunpro, starting from scratch with N5 vocab and Grammar. I still do have weekly tutoring sessions, mainly consisting of reading news articles and discussing current events to stay sharp.

The hill I will die on is that if you’re serious about learning Japanese and want to attain fluency, a holistic approach is best. Develop Kanji, listening, and speaking/writing skills at the same time.

[JCee94]

My windy inefficient path (excluding the myriad of tools I tried out and didn’t use very much)

1. ~September 2024 Decided I want to learn Japanese to better enjoy my hobbies. No prior Japanese learning. (Plot twist, to date I enjoy my Japanese related hobbies less because now they feel like homework :P)

2. Doing minimal research, I download Duolingo and learn kana, and a few hundred words and am shown how to string a few sentences together.

3. After about 3 months, I realize it’s not working very well, due to a myriad of pain points. Do some research, and see that Genki is popular.

4. I got through about 6 lessons, realized I’m really bad at learning Kanji, add Wanikani in Spring 2025. I also try out Hellotalk to meet natives and try to practice speaking.

5. Around summer 2025 I realized that studying and listening wasn’t enough to get me talking, so I started Pimsleur for speaking practice.

6. My Japanese friends tell me the words I’m learning on Wanikani aren’t used in speech very often. They suggested I try to target learning more useful words, after trying a few popular methods to learn words, I settled on Bunpro around the end of the summer. With it’s help, I finished Genki 1, and learned a lot more besides!

My current learning routine after wandering around blindly:
A. Bunpro and Wanikani for SRS (40%)
B. Daily phone calls with native speakers. (40%)
C. Mix of listening to anime, and reading short stories on various websites for immersion. (15%)
D. If I have extra energy I’ll do a Pimsleur lesson. I’m almost done with the program! (5%)

7. That brings us to the present! My goal for this year is to get way more listening and reading practice! I’d like to see immersion become 60-70% this year.

[CherryApple]

The First time I tried to learn Japanese was when I was ~12 years old (~2004). There was a Magazine (Daisuki) with vocabulary lists. I don’t remember If there we’re also any grammar Lessons, but I don’t think so.

The second time was between 2017 and 2020. I tried to learn Hiragana and Katakana with flashcards and tried to use the books “Japanisch Schritt für Schritt 1&2”. I failed again, because I Had to spend a lot of time (5,5 years) on my “further education” (is that the right word?) after my traineeship (3,5 years).

I started again Aug 2024 with Duolingo and JapanesePod 101. I learned Hiragana and Katakana with it. And I started a Volkshochschulkurs in oct 2025. The course and the Grammar book we used weren’t good, so I didn’t continue that. But because my english is now a lot better, I found out, that there are a lot of better learning Materials in english (textbooks like Genki and digital recources).

Duolingo didn’t feel good, because of the streak addiction and too much repetition. On JapanesePod 101 I did Level 1 and 1.1 of their learning path. Level 2 was too much. At the Same time I also used Japanese from Zero 1-3 and the YouTube videos. I also tried Bunpro, Wanikani and Satori, but I didn’t like Bunpro and satori at that time. With Wanikani I was able to get to Level 10 before I quit. I “read” my First book 十分で読めるこわい話 vol. 1 with the books Club in Wanikani and continued with Genki 1. I repeated Japanese from Zero 1-3 and tried to find a way to learn vocabulary. I Just wasn’t able to learn vocabulary with flashcards. Neither physical nor digital flashcards. So after a year I knew only around 600 words that I learned because they came Up in the Grammar books again and again.

A few weeks ago I bought subscriptions for Satori and Bunpro. It feels a lot easier now to use them. I’m not as overwhelmed from the language as a year ago anymore. I understand more words and the Sentence structure. In the beginning I’ve added a lot of already known/learned words and grammarpoints to my Reviews. Now I’m learning new words and grammarpoints and hope that I’ve found the right recource in Bunpro and don’t need to search for a new way to learn vocabulary.

My Goal is to learn as much vocabulary and grammarpoints as possible in 2026, because I want to try reading books again in 2027. When I’m able to read books with Furigana without looking Up too many words and grammarpoints I want to continue learning Kanji.

Edit: I also tried Migaku, but that isn’t the right method for me yet.

[Noxsora]

1. took night classes from 2009-2015 Japanese for busy people, Genki 1 then Genki 2. I watched the Genki Japan .net videos. I went to Japan for 2 weeks in 2009
2. lingo deer and Genki Audio CD 2017-2018
3. passed N5 December 2018
4. Tried out several apps in 2020. Kanshudo, Wanikani, bunpro, Japanese Pod, Memrise Yomichan. I decided to do Jalup (now nihongo lessons) and Kanji damage
5. October 2021 I move to Japan and read my first manga.
6. In Feburary 2022 I finish Kanji Damage and start Jalup’s Japanese definitions.
7. In summer of 2023 I do Jalups manga decks. I read 日常, Dragon ball along side the vocab deck in Jalup.
8. I pay for 1 year of bunpro 2024. I do the N4 deck, Quartet deck, (I compleated N5 during the free trial back in 2020) Pass N4 in July! I hoped I could get though N3 on bunpro in 1 year, but not so
9. after I passed N4 I play Atelier Ayasha. It’s great for around this level. You can repeat the audio as many times as you like. I also get WiFi in 2024, so I’m watching more anime
10. Starting April of 2025 I go to a Japanese tutor at the community center. I also start mining. I read my first Book! I read a ghibli picture book of When Marnie was Here, then Watched the Movie. And read the kids book Mona the Witch