How To Start Learning Japanese: The Big Beginner Mistake

You've mastered hiragana and katakana on your own – congratulations!

But now you're staring at those intimidating kanji characters, wondering if you should dive into memorising thousands of symbols or find a teacher to guide you through the maze.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.

This is exactly where most people get stuck when figuring out how to start learning Japanese.

And it's the same crossroads where many learners make a costly mistake that sets them back months or even years.

If you prefer watching videos to reading, hit play on the video version of this post at the top of this page. Otherwise, here's what you'll discover in this post:

Nicole's Beginner Japanese Dilemma

Recently, I received an email from Nicole, a Japanese learner who perfectly captured this common dilemma:

“At what point in the Japanese learning journey should you seek a teacher? I've learned hiragana and katakana on my own fairly easily, but everything else about Japanese seems a little daunting and it's hard to know where to begin. I'm just working on learning kanji at the moment, but I can only read a few symbols but I don't know their kunyomi or the onyomi… Should I just keep trying to remember to recognize the first set of kanji or get a teacher to direct my studies more? I want to get into the language itself rather than just memorising a few beginner or survival sentences.“

Nicole's question resonates with me deeply because I went through exactly the same feeling of thinking, “Wow, this is really daunting.”

There's so much to Japanese. And one of the biggest challenges is that it's very different from English – much more so than other languages.

In many other languages, you've got some points of comparison, but not really so in Japanese, apart from the occasional English loan word.

How To Start Learning Japanese: The Common Beginner Mistake

Here's where most Japanese learners, and unfortunately, most Japanese teachers, get it wrong.

The conventional wisdom says that after you learn hiragana and katakana, the next logical step is to tackle kanji.

After all, you've got 50 or so hiragana and katakana to learn, but many thousands of kanji to master, so you better get started, right?

Wrong.

Now here's the thing – I'm going to give you my approach to this, and it might not be the same as everybody else's, but I'll tell you what worked for me. I would strongly recommend that you do not spend a lot of time on kanji at this stage.

The reason? Well, there are many reasons actually. First of all, if you start down the road of trying to learn all the kanji, by the time you come up for air, a year will have gone by.

It's very time-consuming. And the only way you can really learn kanji as a beginner is by learning them by rote.

You'll have to use things like flashcards to test yourself on these individual kanji, maybe use some kind of mnemonics or visual cues to remember them.

But here's what's going to happen: whatever way you go about learning the kanji, you're going to be learning them as isolated things, as isolated meanings.

That's not the way to learn any language, but particularly not Japanese, because kanji always adapt and change when you start to use them in words and in context.

It's equivalent to being able to spell every word in the English language without actually knowing what the words mean.

Why Most People Get Stuck When Starting Japanese

I remember when I was living in Japan, I'd sit on the train in Tokyo going to work and just drill myself on these kanji.

I'd learn all these kanji, but I very quickly forgot them because I'd have no way to apply them. Kanji are very complex, not only in terms of actually writing them, but in actually using them as well.

As Nicole identified, they've got the kunyomi and the onyomi, and I know what it's like when you're looking at these kanji lists. They've got all these different readings and you're thinking to yourself, “How on earth could I remember all these different readings?”

The answer is: you don't have to.

You can quite easily get to a very good level in spoken Japanese, for example, without knowing a lot of the kanji and all the different pronunciations.

What happens is that as you speak more and as you use the Japanese language more, you start to get to know these different readings of the kanji and the different pronunciations anyway. And you get to do it naturally, which is a far better way of doing it.

This might surprise you, but Japanese teachers, textbooks and a lot of the mainstream Japanese as a foreign language education teaches you the language like an academic subject.

Let's learn all the kanji now, let's learn all these grammar patterns… You can do it that way, but it's very inefficient because you're just not getting everything in context.

The Right Way To Begin Your Japanese Learning Journey

The thing that you need to do really comes back to the advice that I give for every other language, and it's even more important for Japanese: you need to start listening to loads of dialogues.

You need to listen to Japanese and you need to learn the vocabulary that comes from that in context. And you need to learn the kanji that comes within that in context as well.

That's what's going to not only improve your vocabulary and help you speak the language better, but the kanji and vocabulary that you learn within those dialogues is going to stick because it's within a story and within a context. That's how we learn languages.

The other thing about this approach is it means you don't get bogged down in textbooks. I'm really sorry to say, but a lot of Japanese textbooks out there are terrible.

Not only are they too structural and they try to teach you in too academic a way, but they also look very unfriendly. They're not very nice to read, and I really struggled with Japanese textbooks as a whole.

I really would recommend that you go down the route of finding a lot of nice, rich Japanese dialogues that you can read and listen to. That's exactly what you'll find in my story-based course, Japanese Uncovered, which teaches you through stories, not rules.

You can read the text, you can listen to it, you can read the translation, and then you can really get into the language itself rather than just memorising sentences. This is the way to do it: expose yourself to the real thing.

Now, if you're in Japan or maybe you've got lots of Japanese friends and you can go out and get lots of exposure to Japanese in a spoken way, that's brilliant.

Most people can't though, so what I would recommend is to get some resources that have lots of dialogues that are appropriate for your level, whether you're still a beginner or whether by now you've progressed to a slightly higher level.

Find texts that you can read and listen to at the same time, study those, start to get to know Japanese that way. I guarantee you will start to learn much more deeply and much more effectively.

Do You Need A Teacher When Starting Japanese?

Nicole also asked whether you need a teacher, and for all the reasons I gave, I would say no, honestly.

What's going to happen with a teacher is they're going to guide you down this pre-prepared path of learning kanji, studying grammar…

I understand why they do it – it's easy to teach that way, it makes logical sense – except that you'll fall into this trap of studying, studying, studying and never really making any progress.

I wouldn't say that you need a teacher right now. You need a teacher generally when you really stop being able to make progress on your own and under your own steam.

But what you definitely could benefit from is a tutor that you can practice speaking with. If you're not in Japan, my top recommendation for online Japanese tutors is LanguaTalk. Just practise Japanese from home as many times as you want.

If you start speaking you can quickly start to learn words and phrases that you can use over and over again. A tutor who knows that you are interested in speaking can just do that with you.

Make sure to tell them you don't want them to teach you; you just want to practise. Get them to:

• help suggest things to say
• ways to say things better
• check your pronunciation
• build your conversation muscle.

Essential Resources For Japanese Beginners

I hope that gives you a bit of clarity over how to go about approaching Japanese because it is a tough language.

You do need to be self-directed, spend your time on the things that really matter and not follow a lot of the standard advice out there.

Here are my very favorite Japanese resources that will help someone in Nicole's position really start to listen to real Japanese and learn that way:

Japanese Uncovered

Japanese Uncovered is a comprehensive online beginner course, that takes you from a complete beginner in Japanese up to an intermediate level. And it's fuelled by a fun and unique method called StoryLearning®.

StoryLearning is an immersive process that was invented to teach you languages naturally. It’s so natural, in fact, that it’s based on how human beings learn their native language.

In the course, you'll learn through an exciting original story in Japanese, written especially for beginner learners… illustrations included!

Even though you learn through story, you have a teacher and experienced language learner at your side, all the way through the course, giving explanations in English and tips to help you learn the material fast. 

Uncovered teaches all of the key aspects of the language: reading, listening, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, speaking and writing.

So, by the time you've finished, you'll be a confident intermediate-level Japanese speaker, ready to go out and actually use your Japanese in the real world! 

JapanesePod101.com

JapanesePod101 has a lot of dialogues and a lot of content to listen to.

The great thing about their service is that you not only get the dialogues to listen to, but if you get the premium version, you actually get the dialogue written down.

So you've got clickable audio so you can go through and break it down word by word and listen to every line of the dialogue over and over.

It's extremely useful – I've used them to learn Japanese and Cantonese as well. Check out my JapanesePod101 review and my CantoneseClass101 review to find out more.

FluentU

FluentU is great because it's based on videos. And lots of people love videos for real-life practice in speaking, watching and listening.

They also give you the transcript, so it's perfect for someone who wants to really get into the real language.

Master Japanese by John Fotheringham

Master Japanese is a guide by language blogger John Fotheringham.

The great thing about this guide is that when you get to the point where you want to learn kanji, he breaks it down in the best way I've ever seen.

When you decide that you do want to start really learning kanji, you must pick up a copy of this guide.

He also gives you lots of resources for finding natural Japanese to listen to – radio stations, podcasts and things like that.

Your Next Steps In Learning Japanese

If I was learning Japanese from scratch, these four resources are the only ones I'd use.

But the key to how to start learning Japanese successfully isn't about finding the perfect textbook or the most comprehensive kanji app – it's about immersing yourself in real Japanese dialogue and building your vocabulary in context.

Don't get trapped in the endless cycle of kanji memorisation that derail so many learners.

Instead, focus on listening, understanding and gradually building your Japanese learning journey through meaningful exposure to the language.

Your future Japanese-speaking self will thank you for taking this more natural, effective approach from the very beginning.

Ready to start your Japanese learning journey the right way? Pick one of the resources above and start reading and listening to real Japanese.

How To Start Learning Japanese FAQ

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.