Learning Japanese: The Essentials

This guide is an overview of everything helpful to know when learning Japanese.

Concepts here apply to learners of all levels, from absolute beginner to highly functional.

We recommend reading (or skimming) this guide no matter where your Japanese level is, and bookmarking it to revisit if you ever feel lost or confused in a specific area.

Don’t feel like you need to read all of it in one sitting. It’s a lot of info.

Each topic is written to be on the more concise side, but... there is a lot to talk about. Many sections contain links to more info for whenever you want to take a deeper look!

How is Japanese different from English?

Before we get too much into how to learn Japanese + effective study methods, let’s go through a few* things that are unique about Japanese as a language, coming from the perspective of an English native.

*There’s a long list of other differences that deserve to be mentioned, such as word order and cultural differences, but if we listed them all, we’d be here all day. You’ll learn as you study so let’s take a look at the big/common things for now^^

Writing systems

To be functional in Japanese, you need to know 3 scripts in Japanese.

"Hiragana" and "katakana" can be referred to as "kana", and each character in these two writing systems represents a sound. There are 46 kana in each set, adding up to 92 in total. This makes it about double the English alphabet when you include lower and uppercase letters in the count.

The third writing system is called "kanji". These characters represent ideas, not sounds, so learning to read(pronounce) and understand them comes with time and exposure to the language, particularly with words that are made up of kanji, which is a significant portion of the language.

Kanji are usually what many learners are the most afraid of, as there are 2,136 of the “common use” kanji, along with a few hundred more that are used in people’s names or are less common but you still might see them around on signs, fancy menus, and so on.

That means, in total, you'll want to learn 2,000-3,000 different characters to be highly proficient in Japanese.

Whether that prospect seems exciting or scary to you (or both), it's best to take your time with kanji and treat it as it is: a part of the language.

To show you why it's valuable to take your time, the average native speaker of English knows about 20,000 to 30,000 words.*

Japanese words just come with kanji as a bonus.**

You've already learned tens of thousands of words. You can branch out into another language, no problem ^^

*This is a really difficult thing to define, by the way. A native speaker might only be able to come up with, say, 15,000 words, but would understand the other 15,000 when they see or hear them.

**With enough time, all (or nearly all) learners end up relying on kanji to figure out what new words mean, similar to what we do with Latin roots in English. Long-time learners also often feel that they struggle to remember words that are only written in kana much more than they do words with kanji, thanks to all the extra meaning that kanji can hold.

Context

Japanese is a high-context language. Context fills in most of our sentences, so we don’t need to say the subject or object of the sentence very often in Japanese.

English, on the other hand, is a low-context language. We need to be very clear in our language about who and what we’re talking about by including the subject in every sentence.

This means a lot of words that we would normally say in English get completely dropped in Japanese.

Common words to drop are the words for “I” and “you”. We learners want to use these words because we have to say them in nearly every sentence we say in English, but it’s completely unnecessary in Japanese.

In fact, adding these words usually makes us sound less natural, and not preparing to hear the lack of these words can often create confusion for us in our Japanese interactions.

A quick example:

Imagine it's time for lunch and you're going to warm up some leftovers or make food. You want to ask your roommate, significant other, or whoever you're living with if they want you to warm up/make their food too.

In English, we might say, "I'm gonna eat, do you want something too?" or something like that. (Obviously, there are tons of ways to ask this ^^)

In Japanese, we can drop the vast majority of the above words.

It might turn into something like this:

Casual

食たべるけど食たべる？

I'm gonna eat, do you want something too?

eat

・

けど

・

eat

We don't need to say who is eating, that much is implied by the context of the situation. The first 食たべる is for the speaker, and then the next is a question directed at the listener. It's all you need.

You don't need to add things like 私わたしは or worse, あなたは. Doing so would make it sound kind of off. People just don't say it that way.

This isn’t some shortcut— this is how Japanese is used in everyday life.

Unfortunately, many learning resources only focus on "textbook" Japanese, which is surprisingly quite different from how it is used in everyday life in Japan and Japanese media.

Without having the full picture, this overfocus often results in a wall between your studies and real life:

You can understand your learning materials just fine, but you go out into the real world and feel completely lost.

To prevent this wall, NativShark teaches Japanese comprehensively. You'll learn everyday Japanese, textbook Japanese, and all the other tools you need to reach your Japanese learning goals, including kanji, how Japanese sounds spoken by natives at full speed, and so on.

With that said, you also need to spend a lot of time practicing Japanese in lots of different contexts.

This means studying with “native materials”*, which are different from “learning-focused materials”**, is an essential step to increasing your functional ability with Japanese.

*Native materials are any piece of media designed for a native speaker of the language. They include TV shows, anime, movies, books, manga, games, podcasts, streams, and much much more. Read more about native materials by clicking here.

**A learning-focused material is something designed specifically for a learner of the language. A native speaker has no reason to interact with these types of materials, and if we only spend time using these and not pairing these materials with native materials, we run the risk of having unbalanced Japanese abilities. NativShark is a learning-focused material designed to get you into native materials as efficiently as possible to maximize and support your functional abilities.

The more Japanese you see in more contexts, the easier it will be to understand the future Japanese you will see. You’ll also get a better grip on all the Japanese you’ve seen up to that point.

Pronunciation

Not surprisingly, Japanese pronunciation can be quite different from English.

As you study, you’ll learn about all the differences including the bigger ones such as how the Japanese らりるれろ sounds (the “R”-sounds) are a combination of L, R, and D. You’ll also find yourself figuring out how え and お are different from their English counterparts of “e” and “o”.

No need to worry about memorizing these terms, but Japanese features something called a “pitch accent”, which is fundamentally different from how we speak in English (English uses something called a “stress accent”).

Pitch accent in Japanese involves the tone(pitch) of your voice going up or down when you speak. A stress accent as we see in English is different and involves certain syllables in words getting louder and being pronounced for slightly longer.

This means that it is helpful to pay attention to natural audio from native speakers, trying to copy how they pronounce words and the flow of their sentences.

Don’t worry. Just like we talked about learning kanji above, this will take time. It’s not important to get it 100% correct on the first try.

In fact, this part of the language is completely optional. Some students try to get a "natural"* accent, while others don't find this to be all that important.

This is perfectly acceptable, as natural phrasing is generally the more helpful tool to practice if you want to be readily understood by fellow speakers of Japanese.

*Trying to “perfect” your pitch accent, while it can be a fun goal, is generally hard to measure since speakers from different regions use different accents in their words or sentences. A speaker from Kagoshima will sound quite different from a speaker from Tokyo, for example.

If I mess up the pitch accent, will I still be understood?

In most cases, yeah. It won't cause you issues. At least, not as many as if you're using highly unnatural words in situations they usually aren't used in.

Off the top of my head, I can think of maybe one or two times where my inaccurate pitch accent caused real (but momentary) confusion.

I (Ty) can't tell you how many times my unnatural phrasing has caused confusion. It's far too many to count. On top of that, this often resulted in me not being able to get my point across at all.

Pitch accent is but one ingredient in our context soup. The situation, other words in the sentence, and the overall conversation will help the listener understand what you're saying even if the pitch accent is "wrong".

Natural, situationally appropriate phrasing is nearly always the stronger tool for effective communication.

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See this article for more information on natural phrasing being the key to being readily understood in Japanese:

Sounding more natural when speaking

And how to improve speaking ability in general:

Practicing and improving speaking

Shadowing

Speaking out loud and copying a recording of a native speaker is called “shadowing”.

Shadowing is a great tool to help you actively improve your pronunciation, overall flow, and naturalness of your sentences.

If you’re using a resource that uses natural audio from natives such as NativShark does, it can be helpful to listen to and repeat aloud sentences you come across throughout your studies. Some days you might repeat every sentence, some days you might repeat one or two, and some you might not bother at all.

All of the above is okay depending on your study goals, how natural you want to sound, and how smoothly you would like to speak.

However, if you want to be able to speak and keep up in a conversation with multiple speakers, being able to get your sentences out smoothly and quickly will be of great use to you.

With that in mind, we do recommend that most learners do shadowing to some extent during their studies when time and brain power permit.

If you really want to nail your pronunciation and overall sentence flow as much as possible, it can be helpful to record yourself with an app on your phone that can immediately play back recordings.

When using such an app, you would…

listen to the audio of a native speaker
speak into the mic, trying to mimic the audio as much as possible
listen to the recording you just made
listen to the native speaker’s audio one more time to compare
repeat until you’re satisfied*

*Just aim to be even mildly better than your first attempt. Aiming to be perfect immediately will result in stress, which results in burnout and quitting your studies. Showing up and making small improvements consistently will be the best tool we possibly have for reaching a high level of proficiency in Japanese. Once you’ve done this enough, you’ll be surprised by your own abilities at times^^

What do you need to learn Japanese?

There are 3 core things we need to learn Japanese to a high level of proficiency:

A good core learning-focused resource
A healthy handful of native materials
Patience and consistency

If you have these 3 things, you’re on the path to a high level of proficiency in Japanese. You just need to keep walking down it.

Let's take a look at each one.

Core learning-focused resource

An effective core learning-focused resource will teach you everything you need to know to hop into native materials as efficiently as possible. It will also help ensure you don’t feel lost when doing so.

While its main focus is likely to be grammar and vocab, it will also show you what you need to know to make sure you’re learning Japanese as comprehensibly as possible.

This means that it contains…

Grammar
Vocab that is used in everyday life
Explanations of the writing system
Natural audio spoken by native speakers with natural speed + pronunciation
Everyday language presented with real contexts
Textbook and academic language
Topics including culture, history, pop culture, etc. so you can understand references in daily life

Patching together a study plan from tons of different learning-focused resources can be a lot of effort filled with risks of burnout and large knowledge gaps, as many resources only effectively focus on one or two areas of the language (e.g. kanji only, vocab only, listening only).

We recommend finding a single learning-focused resource that can take you from absolute beginner to a high level of proficiency without dropping you off before you reach your goals.

NativShark is one of those resources.

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See these articles for more info:

How long will NativShark last me?

Should I use NativShark or a textbook?

The best way to learn Japanese

Is GENKI worth the money?

Native materials

Along with our core resource, we also need a way to solidify the learning we’ve been doing by seeing it in new contexts while also learning new things along the way.

Native materials are indispensable for this. But first…

What are native materials?

Native materials are any piece of media designed for a native speaker of the language.

They include TV shows, anime, movies, books, manga, games, podcasts, streams, and much, much more.

Based on our experience at NativShark of teaching Japanese to thousands of students, and all non-native Japanese-speaking members of the team learning Japanese to a high level of proficiency as adults…

Native materials are not optional.

Thankfully, there’s a high chance that native materials are why we’re learning Japanese to begin with ^^

There are also a ton of types of native materials, and they’re a joy to use when you approach them with the right mindset.

There are many valid approaches and strategies for using a native material, and it will vary depending on your goals, but we generally recommend that you do native materials that interest you the most. It’s just more fun that way.

Fun is what keeps us on the learning journey. None of us can last long if we dread showing up.

When should I start?

You should start when you want to

However, once you reach these points, you should definitely start if you haven't already:

Using NativShark → Milestone 6 (Unit 90)

Not using NativShark → After learning about ~60 grammar points and ~1,500 words (This is an incredibly rough estimate and difficult to put an exact number on because of how dependent it is on the learning-focused resource and how varied they are).

When you get started, you're going to need a dictionary, and you're not going to understand a lot of sentences.

This is completely normal and okay ^^

Native materials are not the "test" at the end of the journey.

They are there to help you learn and solidify your Japanese throughout your journey. Even native speakers learn new words from these, and you will too.

Things will get easier and easier the more you do it. But if you never leave the safety of your learning-focused resources, it will always be difficult.

With the above in mind, you want to be in a state of “I kind of get the gist” as much as you possibly can when using native materials.

At the start, you don't have to spend too much time studying with native materials. Start slow with even just a sentence or two a day, and work your way up to paragraphs, pages, and so on.

If you're watching anime, maybe watch an episode and only rewind when something you think would be cool to learn catches your ear. Then experiment with Japanese subtitles, or even no subtitles.

No matter what you do, as long as you use native materials and study with an effective core resource, your comprehension will increase as you keep studying. And be sure to have fun! If you enjoy what you're doing, there isn't exactly a wrong way to do it.

We recommend choosing a game, manga, or TV show that you love and know by heart in your native language. That way the only new variable is the Japanese you encounter. This gives you the ability to make educated guesses of what is being said, instead of needing to piece together the story or how to play as well.

By the way, don't worry about what's "level-appropriate". Do what you love instead.

Many NativShark team members including myself often found opting for something "level-appropriate" to be... well, kind of boring. Finding things from lists of "level-appropriate" materials never really led us to things we were interested in.

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Check out our guide for how to study with native materials!

If you’re learning Japanese with the specific goal of passing the JLPT in mind, check out this guide on your core study plan, which involves both Nativshark and native materials.

We also have a native materials list, hand-made by the NativShark team

Patience and consistency

There is no “flip of a switch” moment when aiming for a high level of proficiency in Japanese.

Imagine it more like a volume knob on a stereo.

Studying means turning the knob of Japanese proficiency. Once you have your learning-focused resource and a handful of native materials secured, you just need to keep showing up and turning the knob.

However, when we don't show up and study, we risk the knob turning the wrong way, and us forgetting what we've learned.

There are even some days where we show up but still feel like the knob didn't turn... or is turning the wrong way, even.

Thankfully, this is just our mind playing tricks on us more often than not. What we need to worry about is making sure we show up and study as often as possible, and we'll reach our goals in time.

Habit tagging can help greatly with this.

Habit tagging means you add(tag) studying Japanese onto something you already do every day. Maybe you study with your morning coffee, before or after dinner, or before or after your daily walk or such. You might tag studying onto turning your computer on, or the first time you reach for your tablet or phone in a given day.

No matter what, remember to be patient and kind to yourself on your journey.

For example, forgetting a word or needing to use a dictionary isn’t a bad thing when using native materials. In fact, every time you forget and remember a word, you're solidifying it more and more for the next time you see it.

Forgetting is not a bad thing, it's a natural part of the learning process.

Remember: Your main objective should be to improve in small steps. Those small steps add up to a high level of proficiency as long as you keep taking them.

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Read these for more info on…

There is no passing or failing when learning

The power of moving on when stuck

Habit tagging

Finding your study sanctuary

Accountability

Why showing up as often as possible is so important

Your study goals

Someone studying to work in a Japanese business will want to focus on learning Japanese which is different from what one would need to make friends in a bar.

NativShark gives you the tools you need to get into these scenarios as quickly as possible, but you have to make sure that you’re learning how to use these tools in the real world as well.

That’s why NativShark is designed to pair with native materials ^^

So to give a few examples, after you finish your core studies with NativShark/ your core learning-focused resource on any given day, you might do the following things based on your goals:

Learning to play games in Japanese? → Play lots of games in Japanese and/or watch Japanese gaming live streamers

Learning to make friends? → Try starting conversations with strangers in Japan, download a language exchange app, go to lots of events where making friends is encouraged, etc.

Learning for business? → Read books or articles about your specific field, take it a sentence a day if it’s too tough. (See the NativShark JLPT guides as you may need this certification to get a certain job or visa.)

Learning to travel in Japan? → Watch lots of travel vlogs in Japanese, travel in Japan when possible

Learning to watch anime without subtitles? → Watch lots of anime with Japanese subtitles or no subtitles

Learning to read manga or books? → Read lots of manga or books

Learning because of a Japanese family member? → Talk to them in Japanese as much as possible, perhaps make some days a “Japanese-only” day if you live together.

It really is this simple.

See the above section on native materials for more info, or check out the links below:

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More info:

What are native materials?

How to learn Japanese with native materials

Your NativShark and native material JLPT study plan

What is NativShark?

NativShark is a comprehensive learning-focused resource designed to be the only resource you need* to use during your core studies.

It's also designed to be simple. All you need to do is log in and press this button as often as possible:

From there, the system will show you what you need to see when you need to see it. You don't have to worry about what to study and when.

*You can supplement NativShark with other learning-focused resources, but it’s entirely optional. We generally recommend spending time with native materials instead of finding more learning-focused materials outside of NativShark. Doing so helps ensure better-rounded Japanese abilities, and allows you to focus on why you're learning in the first place

NativShark fully covers #1 in the list of 3 things you need to learn Japanese, as discussed above. (The other two being a handful of native materials + patience and consistency.)

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More information on NativShark here:

How long will NativShark last me?

Should I use NativShark or a textbook?

How content is organized

The most important tool on NativShark

Studying with NativShark

First, let’s go over what an average study day looks like.*

*Depending on your study goals and how much time you have available in your schedule, you may want to adjust some specifics regarding how many new Units to do per day or such. We’ll try to give a solid baseline that can and should be adjusted as appropriate for you individually.

NativShark utilizes the “Study Now” button for all of your core studies:

In a sentence, you just need to keep pressing the Study Now button as often as your schedule and available brain power permits.

That will bring you to your review flashcards, or into a new Unit if you don’t have any review flashcards to do for the day / have completed your reviews already. The system will show you things as you need to see them, so just pressing the button and following it is enough ^^

Let's go over some key things to pay attention to while we're doing our studies with Nativshark.

Review flashcards

After pressing the Study Now button, reviews will be what you see first on most days.*

*If you don’t see reviews, it simply means none were assigned to you that day. The Study Now button will send you into a new Unit if this is the case. We’ll see more about this shortly.

When doing review flashcards, 99.99% of students should be pressing the smiley face option 99.99% of the time.

Doing so will ensure that you keep your daily reviews on the lower side, allowing you to progress through new content much faster.

Progressing through new content is much more valuable than reviewing because you’ll be learning new Japanese while also reviewing Japanese you’ve learned in new contexts.

Seeing Japanese in lots of new contexts = more learning.

Getting stuck in reviews = not progressing and, in the worst-case scenario, burnout and quitting.

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More info that should hopefully help prevent headaches in the future:

How should I answer flashcards?

There is no passing or failing when learning

The power of moving on when stuck

Tip: if you’re on a desktop, you can press the spacebar to hit the “smiley face” option on flashcards. You can also press “a” to archive cards you don’t want to see in the future.

Units

A Unit is a complete package of Japanese language knowledge. Units consist of lessons, vocab, grammar, cultural notes, and Dialogues which let you practice the Japanese you've seen before in new contexts.

You can scroll down on your My Journey page to see all of the Units available, and you can click on them if you’re curious to see what you have in store for you as well.

*Keep in mind that if you click into a Unit on your My Journey page, it will be considered as “browsing” and not “studying”. The only way to progress in your studies is to hit the Study Now button at the top of your My Journey page.

If you either complete your reviews or have no reviews to do on a given day, then you will see a new Unit when you press the Study Now button.

When going through a new Unit, read the lessons and other content presented, but don’t try to memorize everything in the lesson.

You’re just working on getting a first exposure to X concept, and solidifying what you learn comes with review, seeing it in other contexts, and time. (This is what makes continuing through new Units and doing native materials so valuable.)

Learning is a percentage— we’re just trying to up how well we know something little by little every time we see it. Consistency will take care of the rest for us. We shouldn’t expect to see it for the first time and have it 100% known with all of its nuances taken care of.*

*More on this concept in the Production vs Comprehension section. We’ll also write an article on this in the future!

How often should I do new Units?

Units can —and should— be done at a pace that works best for your schedule.

Most students find 3-5 new Units a week with 1-3 review-only days to be a comfortable pace, while 7 new Units a week with 0 review-only days to be more challenging and demanding on one’s schedule.

Of course, the faster you progress through new Units, the faster your Japanese will improve, generally speaking.

Highly ambitious students might even do 3 new Units in a single day, every day. (It is extremely rare to be able to maintain this pace for 99% of us. I know I couldn't do it ^^;)

Balancing this with all the other priorities in your life is important, so be sure to do a pace you can sustain in the long term. Learners who choose an intense pace that strains their schedules risk burnout more than learners who choose a comfortable pace do.

Be sure to adjust study time based on your schedule, too. Just as your language abilities evolve, your study schedule should as well.

Learning Japanese is a long journey, so your schedule is going to change one way or another. That’s perfectly normal and acceptable ^^

Kana tool

Hiragana and Katakana will be presented to you during your beginning Units on NativShark.

If you’re already familiar with all of them, these can be skipped by pressing the “skip” option under the beginning slide of each kana set when they appear in Units.

If you are learning hiragana and katakana for the first time, we recommend using this tool and making lots of use of the audio to help solidify everything you’re learning.

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If you want some extra practice with kana, you can use the kana tool to review kana or take a quiz on all of the kana here.

Lessons

When going through a lesson, give everything a read, and be sure to play both the male and female audio at least once each when possible.

If you’re in a place where you can’t or don’t have earbuds, no worries. Just remember that the more you make use of the audio, the better off your ears will be for catching natural Japanese.

I might sound like a broken record here but don’t worry too much about memorizing every sentence you see. You’ll see it again later and in other contexts.

Each lesson is there to introduce you to a new concept. You’ll solidify this concept as you keep progressing and seeing more Japanese.

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More info:

Who writes NativShark lessons?

The layout of a NativShark lesson

Formality markers

Comprehension rating system

Why is stuff color-coded in lessons?

There is no passing or failing when learning

Kanji flashcards

Kanji flashcards use elements and mnemonics to help make individual kanji easier to remember. However, kanji flashcards should take the least amount of your time compared to anything else in the NativShark system.

Many students give us feedback that they can understand kanji in sentences and everywhere else on NativShark, but struggle with these flashcards.

This is normal. Even native speakers can struggle to recognize kanji in isolation.

These cards are here for two purposes: as a first introduction, and as a reminder that a certain kanji exists. No need to quiz yourself on them. Just see them, remember them if you forgot, and move on.

Deeper understanding of kanji comes with Japanese in context, which is found everywhere else in NativShark. In fact, you can feel free to archive these flashcards upon seeing them, because you'll be learning kanji in words as you move throughout NativShark.

Kanji flashcards are introduced starting at Unit 21.

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More info:

How does NativShark teach kanji?

How should I answer flashcards?

Vocabulary flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards come after the kanji ones.

Vocab flashcards always are paired with a sentence, two pieces of natural audio, and (beginning in early Phase Two) a context in which the sentence is said.

Again, don’t worry too much about being perfect here.

You’ll see everything in your reviews, following NativShark Units, and in your native materials again and again, as long as you keep moving.

Be sure to listen to the audio as often as possible when going through these!

Once context appears on them, take the time to read the context at least once when you first see the card, as that will help you immensely when it’s your turn to use or understand this Japanese out in the wild.

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More info:

How do you determine what vocabulary is "useful" or "common"?

Why are there always sentences on the front of vocab flashcards?

How should I answer flashcards?

There is no passing or failing when learning

Dialogues

Every Unit (except the very first) ends with a Dialogue.

Dialogues are natural conversations usually between 2 or more speakers of Japanese. As with all audio on NativShark, it features native speakers who are speaking as they would out in the real world… unless the context of the sentence is that they’re the main villain in an anime.

Sometimes we make them do that too 🤣

Don’t worry, since all Dialogues come with the context of the situation they’re spoken in, you’ll know when and where you can use any given language you see in them.

Dialogues are great examples of how people interact with each other in various situations. They’re fantastic for improving your listening skills, and you can “shadow” (copy by speaking aloud) them to help improve your speaking abilities.

Shadowing Dialogue sentences helps you not only improve your pronunciation and general spoken flow of each sentence but also get natural phrasing ingrained into your system.

This is extremely helpful for building a bank of reliable phrases you can grab from when you’re out speaking with friends or colleagues in the wild.

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Be sure to incorporate Dialogues into use if you’re taking the advice of this article:

Sounding more natural when speaking Japanese

It can also be helpful to add Dialogues to Review Sets if you want to focus on listening or speaking practice!

What are Review Sets?

Studying on the go

NativShark is designed for desktops, phones, and tablets. So you can take it anywhere you have an internet connection~

You can also add NativShark as an app so it appears on the home screen of your phone or tablet.

Personally, I love studying with my tablet, and recommend you give it a try if you happen to have one as well! Adding it as an app to your home screen really improves the experience, too.

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See here for info on how to add NativShark to your home screen!

Improving specific areas of your Japanese

If you’re like me (Ty here!) then you might know the feeling of being imbalanced in your Japanese ability. For example, being comparatively comfortable reading, but when it comes time to listen to what someone is saying, you’re a deer in headlights.

Or maybe you’re the opposite and your listening and speaking skills are doing great, but kanji and reading overall are the most terrifying things in existence.

While improving one skill does indeed improve your overall proficiency to an extent, sometimes we end up leaving some skills a bit further behind due to a lack of focus on them.

NativShark is designed to help keep you as balanced as possible, but as humans, we’re naturally going to gravitate toward one skill or the other just based on what native materials we study with and how we interact with Japanese the most often.

So, sometimes we need to focus on our weaker skills to get them up to a level we’re happy with.

Alternatively, if your study focus is on watching anime and nothing else, you might not mind having a stronger listening skill than reading or speaking skills. You might even choose to leave some skills a bit further behind and continue strengthening the skills you want to use the most.

All of this will depend on your personal study goals.

While training anything in Japanese, all of your skills will slowly go up, but the skills you focus on the most will (probably obviously) be the strongest.

Before we get into specifics, it’s important to compare two groups that each of these skills fit into first.

Comprehension vs Production

Comprehension is your ability to understand the Japanese that you encounter. This can be spoken or written Japanese.

Production, on the other hand, is your ability to make your own sentences in Japanese, written or spoken.

Your comprehension skills will always be ahead of your production skills, and you will always feel some level of imbalance here.

Not to worry, every speaker of every language has an imbalance in this skill.

This includes you, in every language you know^^

This makes intuitive sense— you wouldn’t be able to produce a piece of language that you didn’t have some level of understanding of.

To give an example of comprehension always being ahead of production, imagine writing a university-level biology or math textbook from the top of your head without referencing anything.

It would basically be impossible to do, right?

But you could read one and be able to follow along and understand what it’s (generally, at least) trying to tell you. And the more you keep studying it, the more you’ll become able to explain it to others well.

We just need to keep seeing a lot of Japanese in a lot of different contexts, and our overall skills are going to improve naturally with time.

Thanks to how tests function, school leads us to believe that we either “know” something or we “don’t”. Our answers are either “right” or “wrong” when we take tests.

The thing is, learning is not a binary state of “knowing” or “not knowing” something. There is a ton of grey area in between, and almost all of our knowledge exists in this grey area.

Let’s say that “knowing” something is a percentage.

If you “know” it, it’s at 100%. If you “don’t”, it’s at 0%.

What percentage is “it’s on the tip of my tongue” at? We just need a few more seconds and we can probably say it. Is that 80%?

What about if someone explains it to you and it’s easy to understand, but you aren’t able to explain it yourself? Is that 40%?

What about if you’re simply tired and you would’ve understood or explained something better if you weren’t tired? Is that 20%? 60%?

Either way, all we need to do with our Japanese learning is make sure we slowly up that percentage every time we see a piece of language. No worries from there ^^

Here's an article that goes into further detail on that

And here's another that helps explain the actions you can take to build on this idea!

While studying and increasing this percentage does wonders for all of our abilities slowly, taking some time to focus in on them can also be extremely helpful.

Let's take a look at each category.

Speaking and sounding natural

Depending on where you live, speaking skills can be difficult to train.

But we’re going to see a common theme when training all of the skills we talk about here:

If you want to get better at speaking, you need to speak.

Thankfully, this doesn’t mean “Go find a native Japanese speaker and start talking. Good luck”.

There are many steps we can take to practice speaking, including ones that don't require anyone else to be around.

In fact, practicing speaking can be divided up into two parts:

Getting your tongue to make the right sounds in quick succession
Forming sentences on the fly

...the above of which could be practiced and approached as if they were "laying the groundwork" for speaking to people later down the road.

Making the right sounds

I'm willing to bet you know the feeling of trying to say a word or sentence in Japanese and being completely tongue-tied. I know I'm quite familiar with that feeling at least ^^;

This is because our tongues just haven't had enough practice making the right combinations of sounds in Japanese yet (along with plenty of other potential factors).

To help with this, we can do something called “shadowing”.

Shadowing is when you copy a recording of a native speaker while trying to match their pronunciation, intonation, and speed.

This can be done with your learning-focused materials or native materials, but for core studies, it can be most helpful to do it with a learning-focused material such as NativShark due to how simple it is to replay the audio + the naturalness of the audio. (Be cautious of computer-generated audio and textbook speech.)

Don't be afraid to sound silly and don't worry if you can't get it perfect! Just aim for small improvements each time you try it. These improvements add up over time

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See this article for more details:

Practicing and improving speaking

Sounding more natural when speaking

Forming sentences on the fly

Interestingly enough, the above-mentioned "shadowing" also helps solve the other part of the speaking equation: expressing yourself in a way that is readily understood by potential listeners.

If you're using words that aren't commonly used to express your idea, you're (unfortunately) less likely to be easily understood, regardless of your pronunciation and/or pitch accent.

You have to be able to know what to say, and when you can say it.

As long as the language you're shadowing has context and is natural/appropriate for that context, then you're building a bank of words you can pull for that context.

Past that, it's just getting a lot of exposure and practice to build that bank further.

On another note, try to make a lot of your own sentences. They don't have to be perfect. The fact that you're trying to recall and produce Japanese to express your ideas is what counts here.

So do things like speaking to yourself in your house. Continue the Dialogues in NativShark after they end. Respond to your flashcards sometimes. This could be out loud or in your head!

Writing (handwritten or digital) a journal about your day or whatever is on your mind would also help you practice forming sentences ^^

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Again, these articles have more details:

Practicing and improving speaking

Sounding more natural when speaking Japanese

The above ideas are great ways to practice speaking before we even have a person in front of us.

We will want a real person to talk to eventually though, so...

Finding a speaking partner

If you have trouble finding a speaking partner, try searching for a language exchange app for your phone.

You can also decide to use a tutor for speaking practice as well.

If you’re using a tutor alongside NativShark, we generally recommend just practicing whatever conversation you find relevant to your life, instead of trying to learn grammar from them.

Many tutors teach in a more traditional style, so they’ll probably end up using unnatural textbook-only language while speaking slowly and unnaturally to you… sometimes even if you specifically ask them not to.

Of course, this isn’t to say tutors are bad by any means, but it’s good to keep in mind that they’re used to teaching students in a certain style, and it’s generally best to show up knowing what you want from them.

Don’t be afraid to try a few and stick with the tutor that works the best for you ^^

If you’re using NativShark, your grammar, natural vocab, and natural listening skills are covered. So focusing on producing your own spoken Japanese with tutors, and having them respond as they would in everyday life will likely result in the most efficient progress!

Listening

This sentence probably sounds familiar:

If you want to improve your listening skills, you have to listen.

If you’re studying with NativShark, listen to the audio as much as possible. Give both the male and female audio on all sentences you see at least one time before moving on.

When doing reviews, spend some percentage avoiding reading sentences until after you’ve listened to both recordings and tried to understand them based on your listening skills alone.

You don’t have to do this method exclusively, but the more you do it, the more active listening practice you can get.

With that said, it does help to read along when listening as well. Especially at the beginning, this can be incredibly helpful while you’re building your main foundation in Japanese.

With that in mind, if listening without reading along is a bit too difficult, read and listen to a review card as normal, and then close your eyes and listen again to see if you can catch it.

Feel free to try replaying the audio a few times, but try not to get caught up if you can’t catch something. Sometimes what we need the most to understand something is to listen to/see a bunch of other Japanese and then sleep on it.

Switching the audio to be on the front of the card or having the audio auto-play can be helpful options with this if you’re interested in doing so. You can view your flashcard settings in your study settings.

Using native materials that involve listening is incredibly helpful as well!

We suggest things such as YouTube/Twitch live streams, podcasts that feature native speakers talking at normal speeds, anime, movies, TV shows, the news, etc.

Feel free to experiment with these and find ones that work for you!

Keep in mind that these can be active or passive listening, so you can have it on in the background and only pay 10% attention to it as you do something else (passive), or you can choose to focus fully on it (active).

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More info:

Why is the audio so fast?

Do the lessons contain audio?

The power of moving on when stuck

Reading

Say it with me :

If you want to improve your reading skills, you have to read.

Reading comes in two categories: reading the characters/scripts, and reading comprehension.

Reading characters

If you’re brand new to Japanese, then you probably haven’t learned to read anything or almost anything. If you’re using NativShark, hiragana and katakana are introduced to you there, so you’ll be learning them as you go.

If you want to review or spend extra time on them, we have two tools to practice them:

The Kana Review Tool

Kana quizzes and tests

Note that “kana” is the word used to refer to hiragana and katakana combined.

Kanji are a bit of a unique beast, however. You’ll need to know about 2,000-3,000 of these to be highly proficient in Japanese.

While that sounds like a scary number, it’s best to not think of kanji any differently from the vocab that you learn them in. Pretty much every native word in the Japanese language uses some combination of these kanji, so you’ll be seeing them over and over in many different words and situations.

That means they’ll solidify as long as you keep getting exposure to lots of Japanese in lots of different contexts.

In fact, as long as you don’t give up studying Japanese, I can almost guarantee you that one day you’ll be reading something written in kana only while wishing you had kanji to help you out. They really do make reading so much easier once you get used to them.

By the way, if that number still seems big, the average native speaker of English knows about 20,000~30,000 words, so this number of kanji is a mere fraction of what you already know in English or your native language.

With this in mind, you can just focus on learning kana, and kanji will come with time. (Of course, kana also come with time but have less than 100 characters ^^)

Remember: we just want to up the percentage in which we “know” something every time we see it, bit by bit. The rest is simply showing up.

Reading comprehension

Once we start solidifying our ability to read, we want to start practicing understanding the sentences we come across. In other words, we can focus on reading comprehension.

It is best to practice these reading skills both with NativShark (or your chosen learning-focused materials) and via native materials.

While in NativShark, it can be helpful to try to read the Japanese you see before you listen to the audio. This will work anywhere; in lessons, flashcards, etc.

With that said, it doesn’t hurt to get a boost from the audio if we’re struggling, or just doing our normal studies.

Since progressing and seeing more new content is most helpful to our overall learning, spending too much time reading reviews probably isn’t the most helpful thing to do to achieve our goals.

Similar to how we can focus on our listening skills, you can opt to just read along with the audio for most of your studies, and then dedicate some portion to trying to read everything before playing any audio.

You should be using native materials to practice your reading with as well.

There are tons of options for practicing reading: books, manga, video games, the news, online articles, magazines, etc.

Native materials are discussed in an above section of this article!

Writing

Writing is generally broken down into two categories: Typing, and writing by hand (from memory).

Typing

Learning to type on a phone or computer is an essential skill for most learners.

Thankfully, typing in Japanese is actually much easier than you might think.

You can type on your normal qwerty keyboard on either your phone or computer and convert it to Japanese (via adding a keyboard option for Japanese in your keyboard and language settings).

Phones also have a 9-key and a 9-key “kana flick” keyboard if you want to try those. These keyboards have a bigger learning curve, and native speakers use them based on their preference, so no choices are “wrong”.

Feel free to join the community Discord to ask questions about keyboards if you’d like to! #general chat could be a good place to ask, though there are a few suitable channels^^

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We have a guide about how to set up keyboards here if you haven’t done so yet:

How to set up Japanese keyboard on Android (type Hiragana & Katakana)

With that said, most computers will come with an “IME” built into them if you set Japanese as a language in your language settings. If you search for “keyboard” in your computer’s settings, you should find it.

Many phones and computers nowadays will have this option as well, so you don’t need to install anything from the internet unless you want a bit of a special keyboard.

Writing by hand

Writing by hand is completely optional. You do not need to learn how to write anything in Japanese, and can still reach a high level of proficiency and functionality without it.

In fact, writing mainly slows down your progress to a high level of functionality, rather than speeding it up.

This is due to the differences in comprehension abilities and production abilities. You don’t need to be able to produce kanji to be able to read them.

On a personal note, I (Ty) passed the JLPT N2 before I learned to write anything at all.

I had the second-highest certificate level of the biggest standardized Japanese test out there but was completely unable to write a simple and incredibly common kanji, 見, from memory.

I remember sitting there trying to conjure 見 from my memory. I drew a few things similar to it but definitely off in some way. My brain was a deer in headlights, and that wasn't a problem because I could read it without issue when I needed to.

Nowadays, I only worry about writing my name and address off the top of my head since I live in Japan. Even then, I still keep them noted on my phone so I can reference them when I draw a blank.

Learning to write kana (not kanji) can be helpful for some learners, though it’s also not necessary.

Since there are less than 100 characters between both sets, learning them won’t take too much time out of your total studies. It’s fine to go ahead and learn them to a basic level if it interests you or you find it helpful.*

*If you decide to skip this, then it doesn’t hurt to learn your name in kana so you can write it on restaurant wait lists during travels/life in Japan.

All that said, if you want to learn to write kanji for your own interest, that's great!

You might find writing a diary that goes over your day to be really fun. This helps you practice your sentence-making skills along with learning kanji that are relevant to your life, which helps make things more enjoyable.

We strongly recommend you do not write kanji in isolation X times in a row during your normal studies (or ever, for 99.99% of learners).

This is probably the easiest way to burn out of learning Japanese that exists.

FAQ

How do I come back after a break?

If you’ve had a break in your studies, it’s far better to pick up where you left off, instead of starting everything from the beginning again.

You may have forgotten a nice chunk of knowledge, but it will come back to you faster than you expect once you start warming up the connections in your brain again by studying again.

Resetting or starting from the beginning, on the other hand, flat-out feels discouraging because you’re presented exclusively with things you used to know.

It’s better to learn new things while remembering old things as you go. This will help break you out of the “beginner loop”, as we like to call it.

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More info about this on these articles here:

I just came back after a break and feel lost. What do I do?

Resetting after a break

There is no passing or failing when learning

The power of moving on when stuck

What if I want to use NativShark but I’ve studied Japanese before?

Thanks for considering NativShark!

While there are plans for a placement system in the future, NativShark currently starts all students at the beginning.

We highly, highly recommend going from the beginning because NativShark is not a traditional resource.

We’re willing to bet that you’ll be filling in many holes and gaps in your knowledge as you progress, especially in your ability to deal with natural language if you’re coming from traditional resources such as textbooks, classrooms, and most online learning materials.

That said, you can speed through this content and focus on what you don’t know until you start reaching content that feels consistently unfamiliar to you.

To aid in this, be sure to skip kana that you already know, which can be done at the bottom of the first slide on any kana set.

Be sure to make use of the “archive” button during your reviews which will begin to show up after day 2 of your studies, as well.

Archiving allows you to avoid seeing a piece of content in your reviews, which means you can progress faster through the system while not drowning in reviews, especially with content that you’re already familiar with.

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For more information:

What is “archiving” and how do I do it?

I already know kana, can I skip it?

What if I already know some Japanese? Can I skip content?

How should I answer flashcards?

How do I tell the difference in meaning or nuance between two similar words in Japanese?

Sometimes, we’ll run into words that a dictionary will translate as exactly the same, or very similar.

Let’s take 鈴すず and ベル as an example.

Looking in a dictionary, they both mean “bell”.

But these words have different nuances and don’t necessarily point to the same type of bell.

But how can we know this?

Well, we have a few options. A good go-to to have is Google Images.

Just type each of these words into a Google Image search and compare how they’re different.

For 鈴すず we get:

For ベル, we get:

As you can see (besides ベル also being a Disney princess 🤣), it tends to refer to bells that have an open bottom or one you might see on a desk for a customer to ring.

鈴すず, on the other hand, is spherical and a different type of bell.

Do I have to worry about all of these tiny differences?

No, not really.

Most of the time you can pick this up with just exposure to the language in context and in real situations.

You'll probably experience a funny moment thanks to not understanding nuances though, and that'll become a good learning moment ^^

I remember one time I was talking to a friend about Christmas, and I said クリスマスの木き instead of クリスマスツリー.

If you don't know the difference, it's an easy mistake to make. They seem like they should be the same thing in English.

But when my friend started laughing, I knew I hadn't quite hit the mark

However, there are times when a Google Image search isn’t quite enough, especially if you’re comparing two verbs.

A Google search of A B 違い is a great way to handle this as well. For example, you might google 食べる食う違い.

The thing is, you’ll have to be able to read the Japanese that pops up telling you the difference, which is often harder than normal Japanese because it’s part of a definition.

This means that sometimes, asking a native friend, getting help in a community like the NativShark community’s #japanese-help channel, or simply making a mental note of the context and situation you saw it used, not worrying about it, and moving on are all good options.

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Good luck with your studies!

If you have questions after this guide, please come ask them in the NativShark community! Fellow students and NativShark team members will be able to answer them.

They might just get added to this guide as well~