Study - From Hiragana to Real Japanese

[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

[Izzat-Bunpro]

This is a great topic! I always like to read others’ journey and see how similar/different it is from my own. As for my own journey:

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2013: Came across JapanesePod101 and thought that the idea of learning Japanese was cool. So I signed up for it, watched a couple of videos but never got any interest going so I stopped soon after.

2015/6: In my 2nd/3rd year of uni, I got to know about my uni’s exchange program and came across a prospectus of Waseda University. It looked gorgeous and kinda got me interested to study there/Japan one day.

2017: Maintained my grades well and got offered for the exchange program in my final semester but there was no Japanese uni offered that year () and chose South Korea instead (still a good experience!).

2019: Early in the year I got to know about MEXT scholarship. Researched a lot more about it, went to a briefing and decided to apply it. This is also where I decided to start learning Japanese again while waiting for the result. Started with Hiragana/Katakana by watching JapanesePod101 and other youtube videos. Also started using Duolingo and other apps like Anki, Drops etc.

2020: COVID happened. Dropped Duolingo because I lost the streak in a really busy period. I didn’t feel good about paying to ‘recover’ the streak because of my own discpline (I think I was being too hard on myself but also glad that I stopped Duolingo). Started researching about other ways to learn and decided upond enrolling in a local language school for 8 months. However, it turned out to be not worth the money I paid because by the time the classes ended, I felt like I was barely N5 and could’ve also saved money and learned whatever I learned by myself (Still had fun and made some friends though!)

2021: Still in COVID era. Stopped learning Japanese altogether in order to focus on what I was pursuing at that time.

2022 Jan-July: COVID restrictions finally eased and JLPT exams starts to be offered again in Malaysia. Immediately registered for July’s N5 exam despite not studying regularly. 2 weeks before the exam, started to feel the pressure and only did Hiragana/Katakana practice using realkana (similar to GoKana) and kanji/vocab practice using its kanji counterpart, realkanji. Passed N5!

2022 Aug-Dec: Similarly, registered for N4 and barely studied. Did the same practice + only learned 2 grammar points before the exam: ～ように and ～ために (I think I came across this a lot in mock tests and always got confused so just decided to learn these 2). Passed N4!

2023: When taking my N4, I realized that I could no longer just rely on my vocab/kanji practice and not learn grammar as I noticed the reading part got harder for me because I did not know a lot of grammar. This was the time I decided to actually learn and focus more on grammar. Researched and tried around a few apps and came across my savior, Bunpro! What I loved about Bunpro was that every grammar point was listed by JLPT levels, making it really easy for me to structure my grammar studies and schedule how many I should learn per day as opposed to other apps/sites where they are grouped by similarities rather than JLPT levels. And as I only have enough money to subscribe for around ~1 year, I planned my studies accordingly to this constraint I have. I learned 3-5 grammar points per day until I finished that level, took a month break before starting a new level. All in all, I managed to finished everything around ~11 months, which is just within the timeframe I wanted to and continued taking JLPT every 6 months when possible. Just to sum up, my JLPT journey was as follows:

July 22: N5 passed!
Dec 22: N4 passed!
July 23: N3 passed!
Dec 23: N2 failed! (found out my reading was bad!)
July 24: N2 passed!

Honestly, I owe a lot to Bunpro for making it easy to learn grammar as it was my crutch for the longest time. Used to hate learning grammar and just stuck with learning vocab/kanji because I was good at that and didn’t want to leave my comfort zone but Bunpro changed that! (I still have a lot to learn though, learning Japanese never stops! )

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For JLPT N1, highly likely taking it this July, expecting to fail and retake it Dec My problem currently is that I can read and listen but my comprehension is lagging a lot behind. So by the time I finished reading a sentence/paragraph or listened to a convo, I lost track of what I read/listened to, which cost me a lot of time during JLPT. So this is what I will be working on.

Seeing everyone work hard studying Japanese here makes me want to do the same!

[Neon_Kitsune]

My learning journey isn’t linear at all. I first wanted to learn Japanese in high school, but this was quite a long time ago and I had never attempted to learn a language before and all I had were whatever books I found at the bookstore (not great, didn’t finish). Throughout the 2010s, I went back and forth between Japanese and other languages. I think in 2015, I printed out some hiragana and katakana practice sheets from the online learn Japanese resource the NHK had (Easy Japanese?).

At some point I found out about Genki and I slowly worked my way through the first book, but it was slow going since Japanese wasn’t my main language focus at the time and I was focused on grad school as well. I think I found Wanikani around this time as well, but only did the free levels at the time (I’m a Lifetime member now - my kanji learning methods weren’t working for me…tried a lot of other things that didn’t stick.)

It was in the last several years that I found resources that worked for me: Bunpro, renshuu, Satori Reader, Tadoku, etc. And thanks to the Bunpro and Wanikani forums, I finally found the encouragement and community I needed to push myself to engage with native content. While anime without subs and most video games are still out of my reach, I’ve finished several volumes of manga so far!

So there you have it! Long story short, it took me many years of starting with various resources, and then abandoning Japanese altogether, to where I am now.

[RoyalCorTex]

I’m still pretty new, but I figured I’d share my journey too.

I started learning Japanese at the beginning of 2023 because I had a trip planned to Japan in March. I used Busuu to learn the basics, and in my opinion, they actually have a pretty solid way of teaching hiragana and katakana. I just kept repeating those lessons for a couple of weeks until everything finally stuck.

At first, my only goal was to be able to get around in Japan, but after my three-week trip, I decided to keep going—mainly because I met my future girlfriend there

I ended up using Busuu for about three years and finished their A1 and A2 courses. That said, I want to take it a bit more seriously now. Looking back at the last three years, I feel like my progress was honestly pretty slow, so I’m trying to be more consistent and structured going forward.

That’s why I decided to change my approach and switch to Bunpro for grammar and vocab, and Anki for kanji. ^^

[JamesBunpro]

0. Decided to learn Japanese. Somehow found out I needed to know kana first (maybe from the intro to Genki? The exact reasons are lost to the mists of time…)
1. I brute forced kana with some app (can’t remember it, was very janky) but basically just drilled it over few days until I could get 100% on their kana quiz (reading only, no writing).
2. Tried to learn with Genki but soon found I wasn’t getting the progress I wanted after a few weeks (naive as to what I was getting myself into).
3. Heavily researched language learning and Japanese learning and gathered resources for about a month or two (you can be the judge as to whether this was procrastination or a very good decision).
4. Tested various forms of SRS and worked out that basically all the kanji learning methods which were popular at the time were not for me, so decided on just doing vocab cards only. I do remember I had a very very high failure rate when I started. I think some explicit kanji study probably helps initial vocab study feel smoother, when you’re still new, but, in terms of time spent, you’re probably looking at a similar amount of time regardless as you are doubling up vocab reviews with kanji ones.
5. Signed up for Bunpro when I had an SRS vocab size of about 500-1000 words (real vocab size of 50-100, maybe). Learnt basic grammar via a mix of Bunpro, google, and consulting basically all the common beginner resources (youtube channels, textbooks, DoJG, etc). Around this time I also started watching TV shows in Japanese and reading novels/manga, and just literally looked up everything to try work it out (this was 80% of my time, slowly climbing up to 100% as I dropped SRS after a couple of years).

[Obviiious]

Oooh story time! I think my story is probably super unique as well, lol.

TLDR backstory:

• Thought I wanted to learn Chinese because I loved Hanzi, but hated it.
• Took my 15 years to realize that Japanese uses the similar Kanji.
• Fell head over heels in love with the amazing Japanese language, culture, history, food and everything - and here we are 8 months later.

Full backstory for those interested

• It started when I was around 8-9 years old I think, after watching the first Lord of the Rings movie in 2001 and then reading the books. I was absolutely FASCINATED by the fantasy languages.

• Once in High School that interested outgrew the fantasy space once I learned about real-life logographic languages. Dipped my feet at a few different languages, but one set of symbols stood out to me specifically; Hanzi characters. I quickly learned that these were Chinese characters and this had me take an interest in China and Chinese culture.

• Once at University, I applied for a local Chinese School to spend my free Saturdays learning Chinese for a couple of months. Unfortunately, I was 22 at the time and as a lot of young guys around this age I had other (the wrong) priorities. Besides, I came to the conclusion that Chinese was actually super difficult to speak and I had no real connection with the country and big parts of the culture. Decided to give up on learning other languages all together and also dropped out of University because I thought I knew what I wanted from life. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t)

• Fast forward about 15 years. Had some big life-changing stuff happen in 2024 which made me realize that I should actually be doing the things I enjoy and want to do in life, instead of what others expect me to do. Rediscovered my absolute love for foreign languages and Kanji, and what do you know, I find out that Japanese uses the same Kanji as Chinese.

• Decided to do some research into Japenese and Japan first - just to find out that basically everything I have ever liked or wanted in my entire life is either Japanese, rooted in Japanese culture/history or has some really big ties to Japan. Even the way I like to think or go about my life has much more in common with Japan then my home country.

1. Decided to give it a go: Watched this 2 hour Youtube video around 5 times, used some Kana sheets on my iPad and used DuoLingo kana practice. I learned to read and write all Hiragana and Katakana in about 3 weeks.
2. Have not enjoyed myself so much for years and decide I want to dedicate myself to learning this language. First thing I did: Booked a 4 week trip to Japan for the next year (Only 2 months left now!!) to be my first ever trip outside of Europe in my life.
3. Started doing Anki to learn vocab (random words, no sentences…) and did some research in ways to learn grammer, Genki I was the best recommended textbook I found so started with that.
4. Quickly realized that Genki I Lesson 3 is absolute shit and couldn’t wrap my head around it until I found Tokini Andy on Youtube. He explained verb-conjugation as it should be explained lol. Started combining my self-study lessons with his additional explanation. (And I still use his web-course to date as additional study for each lesson now that I’m working on Genki II Lesson 17 - together with the grammer explanations on Bunpro!)
5. Waited a long time on purpose to actually start learning Kanji, because this was my main fascination in the beginning I was afraid this would take up all my learning time. Found WaniKani to be a great resource for me personally, to slowly pace this on top of my other studies.
6. Realized learning random words on Anki is absolute shit as well, started looking for alternative decks or apps and accidentally found Bunpro which had pre-constructed cards with different sentences and nuances, absolutely amazing. And even a WaniKani integration, wooh! After trying it for a like 2 days I decided to switch over and delete Anki a.s.a.p… (Did have to move about 300 vocab in one day - but it was pretty early on so not that big a deal.)
7. Started with ‘immersion’ (or whatever you want to call it) - and realized Bunpro is an ABSOLUTELY amazing tool to combine everything I learn from Textbooks, Lesson, WaniKani, Listening, Reading, etc. etc. in one single place and use the reviews to keep everything top of mind.
8. Now, I’m using Bunpro for about an hour a day to learn some new words, check grammar write-ups, do some reading practice and do my daily reviews. (I still use Genki as a basis to structure my learning path, supported by both Tokini Andy resources and the Bunpro resources. I plan on continuing with Quartet after that.)

[okayfrog]

0. Tried Duolingo in iunno, 2017/18 or so? Was kinda fun. Eventually wanted more and I think I dropped it.
1. Late 2020, covid time, plenty of free time. Decided to give WaniKani a shot.
2. Purchased the Genki books in early 2021 to help with grammar, but since it feels more classroom-oriented, never really gave it a shot.
3. After using WK for ~a year and a half, realized I really don’t have much of a grasp on grammar and started using BunPro in April 2022.
4. Went on vacation mid-2023 and fell far behind on BP and WK. While I eventually caught up on BP, I still haven’t caught up on WK.
5. End of 2023, played through first video game in Japanese.
6. Went to Japan in early 2025, which really brought back the desire to learn Japanese.
7. As of now, early 2026, I have almost “learned” every grammar lesson on BP (177/184 on N1), and have almost caught up to the WK pile. No real daily Japanese reading, but I come across a lot of posts on Twitter in Japanese and I’m able to make out the gist of them probably 95% of the time which is nice. Challenging myself this year to play through any Japanese video game I start in Japanese so I think this is really the year where I start transitioning from “learning” to “applying.”

It’s weird in that it feels like it’s taken me longer than most people, but at the same time, it still doesn’t feel like it’s been that long.

[Bruhseph]

I technically did some Japanese in Year 7 & 8 of high school, but honestly barely remember anything other than saying what my name was or the word for horse. Around 3/4 years ago I learned Hiragana in a night using Tofugu’s guide and the testing website that he recommended, after that I started on Wanikani. Can’t even remember my account details, I think I remember getting to around level 20? Eventually I fell off for about a year, came back and decided to do an Anki core deck for vocab + kanji, and I think around that time I also discovered Bunpro and started doing grammar. I was pretty on and off with Anki for a few months, discovered jpdb.io and jumped to that without looking back. Was still on and off with studying for about a year, fell off once again since uni was keeping me busy.

I came back to studying around a month ago, still using bunpro and jpdb. I seem to have lost my main jpdb account and am using one of my alts that only had like 800 vocab learned, but a lot of the stuff I learned is still kicking around in my head so after spending a couple weeks studying the Sono Hanabira: Tenshi no Akogare visual novel deck I was able to finally do some immersion. Took me about 20 hours to read, now reading Sono Hanabira 1, about halfway through with 5 1/2 hours of reading. I’ll occasionally use jiten.moe to find media which may not be in the jpdb corpus. My current pace is 20 words/day, 6 grammar points/day. Making all of my reviews due at 3AM on Bunpro has really helped me keep the time I spend on Bunpro pretty low.

TL;DR for people wanting advice: Use the Tofugu katakana and hiragana guide, and don’t spend more than a day or two learning. Avoid services that try to tell you what your pace should be, pick what works best for you. I am also firmly in the camp of not bothering to learn kanji. Just study vocab so you know actual words sooner instead of wasting months or a year on pictographs that aren’t even words. I recommend jpdb.io since it gives you a very direct route to immersion, which you should aim for as soon as possible since that’s what makes learning fun. Bunpro is also very good. Make sure you clearly know why you’re learning Japanese. If you wanna watch anime and play games then don’t even bother with learning to properly handwrite (unless you’re having some serious issues) or speaking. These are skills you can pick up if you ever become interested in them, but what’s going to motivate you the most is doing what you want with Japanese ASAP. Similar with if you just want to speak, or listen (maybe there’s some freaks out there who just want to handwrite Japanese…)

For immersion, I personally think visual novels are one of the best ways to start. Not as many words or as long as a novel, and listening is not as vital a skill as watching anime (though you can still get some practice). I also found the workflow a lot easier than anime once you get it set up (look at the guide on themoeway for how to set everything up). You can pretty quickly study enough to pick up a visual novel (70-80% coverage) and if it’s a part of a series or written by the same author you will have a lot of vocab overlap with sequels. Oh and Yomitan is your best friend ever.

[Toaster]

I never felt I had a compelling enough reason to learn Japanese; I grew up hearing that cartoons are too different from ‘real’ language and didn’t see many potential use cases. That perspective changed when I booked a trip to Japan around the end of 2024, igniting a surprising amount of motivation to try. I learned German in a traditional classroom setting, but I wanted to see how far I can get with self-learning a language. Here is a summary of the path I followed in learning the phonetic scripts and my first sentences. I was introduced to many of the online resources through TheMoeWay website.

• Read Learn Japanese In 7 DAYS!: The Ultimate Crash Course by Dagny Taggart

  • Would not recommend due to errors and ambiguous authorship; I think these language books have finally been removed from Amazon

  • The book did offer a sense of whether I would like the language or not

• Memorized kana characters using Quizlet flashcard decks

• Read and practiced using Writing Japanese Hiragana by Jim Gleeson

  • I like that this book gives a bit of history and shows print, pen, and brush styles

• Tofugo’s Kana Quiz

  • While I only stumbled across this resource later, I think it is great for drilling any irregulars/ones that you struggle with

• Japanese Kanji and Kana by Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn

  • Introduction only, I enjoyed the historical outline

• Kaishi 1.5K Anki vocab deck

  • Has full sentences, human-voiced audio, and illustrations

  • Practiced writing each word with Kanji and reading

• IMABI

  • Read through the beginner contents and really like the explanations, but would have skipped some in hindsight

• JLAB’s Beginner Anki Deck

  • Grammar (structured similar to Tae Kim’s guide) and listening comprehension

The resources above had plenty of sentences to my feet wet. From here on, I have been trying to consume more native content, drill grammar through Bunpro, and acquire more vocab through immersion (I just add it to Anki). With how much content and resources are available now (e.g. podcasts, browser dictionaries, etc.), I feel incredibly fortunate that I am starting now. I can’t imagine trying to learn 20 years ago, let alone in the 1900s!

• Reading Content (Ordered ~ sequentially)

  • Tadoku Library

    • While great content for first books, some of the stories here are a little bizarre

  • eBooks (I have had good experience with Kobo)

    • Ruri Dragon

    • Konbini Ningen

• Listening Content (Ordered ~ sequentially)

  • Nihongo Con Teppei

  • NHK Easy News

  • Youtube – 朗読

    • I enjoy readings of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s works, and it can be rewarding to pick up a little more each time you listen to a single story

  • NHK Radio News Podcast