How to learn Japanese fast & effectively | Tips from a native Japanese polyglot 🇯🇵

How can I learn Japanese easily? Really, the two main parts of learning Japanese are the speaking and listening skills and the writing skills. If you want to learn Japanese easily in an effective way, you have to know these two parts and how to study them. So, in this video, I will show you how to conquer kanji and the most difficult parts when it comes to learning Japanese.

Hi guys, it's me, Dory! If you're new to this channel, firstly, I appreciate you and thank you for coming to this channel. Secondly, I'm a native speaker in Japanese; you know, my mom is Japanese. The reason why you should watch this video is that, firstly, I'm a native speaker in Japanese, so I know the most common mistakes that foreigners and non-native speakers make, and I know how to change them.

The second thing is that I didn't grow up in Japan; I grew up in Turkey, so outside of Japan. Therefore, I needed to study Japanese, and I had struggles studying in Japanese because I don't use it in my daily life other than talking to my mom. So, I literally went through the same path that you're currently following. I'm going to timestamp every single thing down in the description below so that you can skip to the part that you're interested in. And now, let's get started!

So, firstly, let's talk about the first main part, which is the listening and speaking skills. When it comes to Japanese, there are four tips that I can give to you when learning Japanese. So, the first step that I can give you is that don't study Japanese in romaji; please don't do that!

So, romaji are basically the Latin alphabets. When learning Japanese, it's really important to study Japanese in hiragana, katakana, and kanji—the alphabets that we use. The reason behind that is that when you study Japanese in romaji, in Latin alphabets, your pronunciation becomes really far away from how Japanese should sound like. Because in Latin alphabets, you cannot express the pronunciation that we actually do in Japanese. But when you learn them in romaji, katakana, and kanji, you actually know how to pronounce them in a correct way. Therefore, it's always, always, always important to study them in Japanese alphabets.

So, please don't study in romaji; please don't do that! The second tip is going to be: watch animes. If you want to improve your listening and speaking skills, it's really important to do enough input so that you can do a good quality output, right? So if you want to get the details of how to learn a language while watching something, I have a super popular video about that which you can watch, so I'm not gonna get into details in this video.

But when watching anime, the problem is that it really depends on what type of anime you watch. Most of the time, the conversation held in anime is really different from day-to-day life. If you're watching something school-related, it's probably not that different. But if you're watching, for example, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which is my all-time favorite anime—I love it so much! But today, we're not going to talk about that; JoJo is a different level, it's something different. JoJo is my life; JoJo is my love; it's the meaning of my life!

For example, in JoJo, the characters talk in a really different way than normal Japanese. They have a pretty distinguished accent—or not an accent, actually, the way they talk. So if you, for example, learn Japanese from JoJo, you probably have a very, very unique Japanese, which we are currently not aiming for. Therefore, my tip is gonna be, rather than learning Japanese only from animes, I would recommend you to follow Japanese news on YouTube. You can watch Japanese news online, and there's so many of them, which I'll probably link down in the description below so that you can watch them.

News announcers in Japan are really well spoken; they pronounce every single word so understandably that everybody in the whole of Japan can understand the news and follow them, even like the really, really old people. You have free access to these news, so why aren't you using them, right? The other thing that I would recommend is that you watch dramas and movies and listen to a bunch of Japanese songs so that your brain will easily pick up Japanese, and so that Japanese will become a part of your life.

I would highly, highly recommend that, of course, watch animes and enjoy them because when learning a language, the important process of learning a language is the fun factor. If you don't have fun when doing something, it's going to become work. It's always important to have fun when you're doing something so that you won't feel like it's work. You're doing this for yourself; nobody's pushing you to learn Japanese, right? So if somebody's pushing you, I'm sorry for that, but you know, I would recommend that.

So, the last tip when it comes to listening and speaking skills would be: now you did like all of the inputs, so you listened to a bunch of animes, you watch news, all that stuff. But the important thing is that when you don't speak, you probably won't be able to speak Japanese. You'll probably be able to understand Japanese, but you will have struggles when it comes to speaking. Talking in Japanese, I have a detailed video about this, too, on why you can understand some sort of language but you are not fluent in that, which you can watch here.

In order to be fluent in that language—not only like understanding that language but also becoming fluent in that language—you need to practice that. The more you practice, firstly, you build the confidence, and secondly, it becomes easier and easier for you to perform that act. Therefore, we need to talk in Japanese; talk to native speakers. You can use a bunch of different apps and services, and there are like so many ways to do that. We are in an internet era, so it shouldn't be that hard to find someone else to talk in Japanese.

So, let's come to the juicy part, which is the writing skills. I don't know why writing in Japanese is so hard, and as a Japanese, I'm so sorry for you because, you know, as a kid growing up outside of Japan, I struggled so much when it comes to writing Japanese. Even though I can read in Japanese, I also have struggles writing in Japanese because I don't use it in my daily life. Even Japanese people have struggles in writing.

So, when it comes to writing in Japanese, there are three alphabets that we use, which are hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are actually basically the same thing, but the way that we use them is different. So, there are 50 of them; correct me if I'm wrong. You might think, then why do you guys have two types of the exact same thing? The reason behind that is that the origin of katakana is related to religion. But the way that we use these in our daily life is that we use katakana for foreign words. For example, "computer" in Japanese is "konpyūta," which is a foreign word, so we write that in katakana.

When it comes to hiragana and katakana, it's not that hard to learn. You can basically learn them in one day or so. I heard from my friends who were learning Japanese and they told that I could like learn hiragana and katakana in just one day, so it's not that hard. So let's not talk about these; let's talk about the kanji part because kanji is so hard. Kanji is hard; I'm not gonna lie. If I had the ability to change that, I would just like delete all of the kanjis and replace them with something else.

Kanjis are basically the Chinese characters; every single one of them has a meaning to them. In Japanese, you combine kanjis with hiragana and katakana to write. I feel like if you're a foreigner and you're not living in Japan, I feel like not everyone should learn kanji. If you're learning Japanese only for animes or movies and stuff, I feel like you don't really need to learn kanji. But if you're learning it for academic purposes or if you're living in Japan, or if you want to write something, read something in Japanese, then I'm sorry, you need to learn kanji—unfortunately.

But let's talk about how to learn kanji, and I'm going to explain how I learned kanji when I was a kid. Yes, I was born in Japan, but as I said, I grew up in Turkey, and I was going to a Saturday Japanese school when I was in elementary school until like the end of middle school. We only had like once a week Japanese lessons where we would learn kanjis and read them and, you know, basically paragraph understanding and even like write kanjis and learn these. So, I was doing that once a week, but once a week is obviously not enough.

Most of us, most of the mixed kids that were in my Japanese school, we were super bad at kanji because we don't use them, so it was not enough. But I really love reading in Japanese. I really love Japanese literature, Japanese books, mangas, and a lot of magazines and stuff, so I was reading a lot in Japanese. I even won some sort of reading competition in Japanese like Saturday school because I was reading so much, and we had a library there, and I was reading a bunch of Japanese books, which helped me.

But after graduating from my Saturday Japanese school, I didn't have access to this library and I wasn't able to read that much, and my Japanese reading and writing skills literally went really bad because I wasn't using them. So, the thing that I'm currently doing is that I have a Kindle, and on that Kindle, I have an account in Amazon Japan. And from the Amazon Japan account, you can buy Japanese books on Kindle. You can press the kanji that you cannot read, and it shows how you can read it in hiragana, and it also tells you the meaning, which really helps me. That's what I'm currently doing.

When I was a kid, my mom used to make like physical flashcards which we can memorize the words and how we can read them. Why flashcards are so effective is that there is a science behind that, and that science is called active recall. So, active recall is a fancy way to say the retaining information from your brain in order to learn something effectively in a scientific way. There are two things that you should do: one is active recall, and the second thing is spaced repetition.

By learning kanji using flashcards, I was doing active recall. So I was basically looking at the card and trying to read that kanji, and I was trying to retain the information from my brain. I was thinking, how can I read this kanji? Actively trying to recall the information that is in my brain, that is the most effective way of studying. I'm going to like link a couple of scientific research papers behind it so you can read and learn about it. But basically, when learning something—not only for kanji—you should do active recall.

But let's talk about realistically preparing yourself. Flashcards would take hours and hours. My mom used to do this, but since we want to learn Japanese in an easy way, we need flashcards that are already made. For that, you can use the Mochimochi app, who is currently sponsoring this video. Thank you so much, Mochimochi, for sponsoring this video!

In the Mochimochi app, there are so many flashcards that you can use, and the good thing about these flashcards is that not only you can flip and see the meaning and, you know, do the active recall practice, but it actually has the voice. So you can press the voice button and hear how to pronounce the word correctly. In Mochimochi's flashcards, there are kanji as well as vocabulary flashcards. So, when learning kanji, you can use these flashcards as well as vocabularies. There are audios, images, examples, and meanings of them.

So when you are learning kanji, it wouldn't be boring because, you know, I used to study kanji with a textbook and stuff, but it was so boring to write the exact same kanji like for 50 times without any images, without any sound, or without any games and stuff. But the Mochimochi app makes it really, really fun, and the interface is so cute that it really motivates you. The sound, the interface, how the app is built is so cute, and I feel like it makes just like the learning process really fun.

It's always important to make the process fun if you want to do it easily. When it comes to the Mochimochi app, there are different levels of Japanese. You can start from the really basic to different levels, so you can pick your own level in that app, too. So now, let's talk about the second scientific way to study, which is spaced repetition.

Basically, spaced repetition means revising the things after a certain amount of time. And the more you revise when you study something and when, of course, time passes, you start to forget. Because our brains are designed to forget things so that we don't overload our brain with unnecessary information. By the time you forget, when you revise that thing, you will remember that thing, and you will memorize that thing because you're basically telling your brain that don't forget this information; this is important.

So you revise and retain that information, and how much the Mochimochi app can help you is that there is something super cool feature called golden time. The really great thing about this golden time feature is that the Mochimochi app reminds you to revise the words and kanjis that you studied. When you're doing spaced repetition, you know, we're lazy humans, so it's kind of hard to schedule when to revise things.

When you start to learn a lot of things, it becomes harder and harder for you to like schedule everything. But the Mochimochi app does it for you. It just says, "Hey! You should revise if you want to retain this information; it's time to revise." With the notification, you just click to the app and you revise things before forgetting so that you can easily remember kanjis and vocabularies.

In that app, it has a countdown timer, so it says how many minutes or how many hours or how many days later you have to revise the new words, new kanjis that you studied, so that you know when to do what. And as I said, since the Mochimochi app really focuses on spaced repetition, it will divide your vocabulary and kanji into five different levels.

So, level one is just learned, and level five is long-term memory. So that it shows where you're currently at. You know, you just learned a new vocabulary, and then in that golden time, you revise that. So now you got into level two, but you're not at level five yet. Just because you revise it at once, it doesn't mean that you have it in your long-term memory.

Now I really like that because you see clearly the process so that it's easier for you to work on your revisions and timetables and stuff, and it also really motivates you, in my opinion. So for learning kanji, I would highly recommend you to use an app like Mochimochi so that it can motivate you, at the same time support your learning system. Since there are so many activities on the app, you can give it a try and do every single day.

I think like when waiting for a bus or when even you are in the loo, I think you can just like do a couple of exercises and remember kanjis and learn kanjis. It's always important to study something in a fun way. There are full vocabulary and kanji courses from N5 to N2 for JLPT exams and Japanese communication specialized vocabulary courses, such as IT services, nursing, etc.

The good thing is the courses are divided into small lessons so that you don't need to do a lot of things in one sitting. If you're just waiting for a bus, do a wrong lesson! Don't say I don't have time because we have time. The thing is we need to make time for the things that we actually want to prioritize. Waiting for a bus, do you want to exercise? You're currently in the loo, do your exercises. You're waiting for someone; do you want to exercise?

Right? So the important thing when it comes to kanji, speaking, reading, and writing, or whatever it is, is to practice, practice, and practice. It's going to take time, but don't forget this is a full journey of learning Japanese. Rather than blaming the language and the system, the thing that we can do is only to practice.

So I hope I could help you in some sort of way, and thank you, Mochimochi, for sponsoring this video. And let me see you in my next video! Bye!