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Acquiring Japanese Efficiently

Breaking out of the Gaijin Ghetto

Dylan Robertson
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Table of Contents

Part 1: Learning Japanese

Language Learning Principles Cheat Sheet
Japanese Quickstart Summary
Resources for Immersion
Netflix
Youtube
Audiobooks
Resources for Passive Immersion
Beginner Reading Material
News
Novels
Using an Ipad and Kindle for Reading
Visual Novels
Building a base level of ability in the language
Kana
Basic Pronunciation
Kanji
Vocabulary
Grammar
Technology for Learning Japanese
Anki (Settings, Add-Ons, Tips)
Yomichan
Online Dictionaries
Making the Monolingual Transition
Sentence Mining
Output
Early Output
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Writing
Speaking
Shadowing
Critiquing High Level Japanese Learners’ Speaking Ability
Dedicated Practice Areas for Advanced Learners
Pitch Accent
敬語
関西弁
日本語能力試験
漢字能力検定
Resources for Academic subjects in Japanese
国語
古文
漢文
日本史
世界史
数学
物理学
化学
英語
経済学
哲学
法学
Example Language Learning Routines
Absolute Beginner Routine (your first ~2-3 weeks)
Beginner Routine
Advanced Beginner Routine
Intermediate Routine
Upper Intermediate Routine
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Part 2: Language Learning Theory

Core Principles of Language Acquisition
The Input Hypothesis
Language and Consciousness
Theory vs Practice
On Language Learning in General
Improving Comprehension
Active vs Passive Immersion
Thousands of Hours
Various levels of comprehension
Comprehensible vs Incomprehensible Input
Domains
Comprehension Factors
Reading Immersion
On Frequency Lists
Improving Performance
Output Theory
What does Output actually entail?
Is Early Output Bad?
Language Learning Parent
Improving your Speaking Ability
Output Troubleshooting
Applying Scientific Principles of Hypertrophy to Language Learning
Specificity
Overload
Managing Fatigue
Stimulus, Recovery, Adaptation
Variation
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Periodization
Individualization

Part 3: Miscellaneous
Other Guides for Language Learning
Youtube Channels
Interviews
Progress Reports
Useful links
FAQ
Experimental Ideas
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Learning Japanese
Becoming the ultimate weeb
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Language Learning Principles Cheat Sheet

Let's quickly summarize the core methodology behind language learning.

1. Input is KING.
a. Since language is largely acquired through comprehensible input, prioritize
listening to and reading real Japanese media.
b. Compelling input: make language learning fun by immersing in content that you
are interested in. Learn about your hobbies in Japanese or find hobbies/things that
are uniquely Japanese!
2. Consistency
a. Build an Immersion Environment: make it as easy as possible to interact with
Japanese media by utilizing the internet.
b. Hit your minimum daily (maintenance) goals for language learning every day.
i. Most days you should strive to surpass this daily minimum.
3. Volume
a. More time spent with the language each day leads to more progress (in reality it’s
a bit more complicated than this).
b. Break out of the English bubble and try to live your life fully in Japanese: replace
English content with Japanese content.
4. Intensity
a. Immerse in a mix of content slightly below, at, and above your current level.
i. Easier material helps to build automaticity of understanding.
ii. Harder material challenges you to push your cutting edge level of
comprehension even higher.
b. Gradually use harder content as you improve.
5. Frequency
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a. Break up your total daily volume into 2~3 mini-sessions throughout the day
(morning/afternoon/night) instead of doing one giant session to boost efficiency
and lower fatigue.
6. Concentration
a. Be actively engaged when immersing: the more you pay attention and try to
understand your immersion the more benefit you will obtain from it.
i. Look up words that you don’t know/don’t understand.
b. Get rid of distractions: no social media/discord in the background.
7. Specificity and Prioritization of Goals
a. Set and work towards clearly defined goals regarding
listening/reading/speaking/writing ability
i. Be realistic with the amount of time you can dedicate each day.
ii. Break your goal down into a daily action plan.
iii. Track your stats to evaluate your performance and adjust your action plan.
b. You can’t improve everything at once; focus on one area at a time and keep the
others on maintenance.
i. As a beginner you should largely focus on listening/reading first.
8. Variety
a. Branch out into new and different domains/genres or mediums every so often.
i. Once you pick a new domain/medium you should stick with it for a couple
of weeks/months to get better at that certain area.
b. Example Domains: Slice of Life, Romance, Comedy, Crime/Mystery, History,
Politics, Economics, Law, Medicine, Philosophy, etc.
c. Listening Mediums: Anime, Drama, Movies, YouTube, Podcasts, Audiobooks
d. Reading Mediums: Graded Readers, Manga, Blogs, News Articles, Wikipedia,
Light Novels, Visual Novels, Non-Fiction Books, Modern/Literary Novels
e. Variety helps to keep things fresh and interesting, mitigating fatigue.
9. Active Study
a. Learn vocabulary and grammar in context as it comes up in native materials.
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i. Use Yomichan to make looking words up and creating flashcards quick
and efficient.
ii. Utilize a spaced repetition system (Anki) to review these new
words/grammar in context.
b. 1T Principle: have only 1 new word/grammar point being tested on each card.
10. Learn your target language in your target language
a. Use monolingual (Japanese-Japanese) dictionaries.
i. This helps you describe words/concepts in Japanese.
ii. J-J definitions are also more precise than bilingual translations.
b. Pay attention to the example sentences to see how the word is actually used in
context and what other words it is commonly used with.
11. Theory on Output
a. Your comprehension limits your performance: increasing your comprehension
increases your potential ability for performance as well as giving you some ability
to output naturally.
b. Maximizing your output ability requires dedicated practice and feedback:
i. Speaking with Natives
ii. Chorusing
iii. Pitch Focused Reading
iv. Shadowing
12. The Attitude of a Linguist
a. Tolerate some amount of ambiguity: find a balance between looking up words in
the dictionary and actually engaging with Japanese content.
b. Be Self-Sufficient
i. Only you are accountable for your progress: own it and stop making
excuses.
c. Understand that the language learning process takes thousands of hours: show up
every day and enjoy the process.
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Japanese Quickstart Summary

1. Start listening to and watching native Japanese content (from day 1)

a. Split your time evenly between using Japanese subtitles and watching raw.
b. Don’t use English subs.
2. Learn the basics of Japanese (~2-3 weeks)
a. Hiragana + Katakana
b. Basic pronunciation and Pitch Accent
c. Learn to recognize the most common Kanji using Recognition RTK450
3. Learn the most frequent 2000 words and basic grammar (~3 months)
a. Recommended Anki decks: Tango N5 and N4.
i. I recommend learning ~20 new cards per day.
b. Sentence mine Tae Kim and the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar.
i. I recommend doing 5-10 new sentences per day.
4. Start Reading Immersion (like halfway through step 3)
a. Start with beginner content: NHK Easy News, Graded Readers, Children’s stories.
b. Progress to harder content over time (blogs, real news, LNs, VNs, real novels)
--------------------------------------------------------100 Day mark---------------------------------------------------
5. Continue increasing comprehension through input + mining native media
a. At this point I recommend learning ~10-15 new cards/words per day.
b. Increase difficulty and variety of immersion content
6. Monolingual Transition
a. Start using J-J Dictionaries.
7. Begin Outputting
a. Start speaking with native speakers for a couple hours per week.
8. Loop the Loop (Expand your Ability)
a. Immerse in new/more complex domains.
b. Mine native material in order to increase your comprehension.
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c. Output on that topic to increase your performance.
d. Native feedback → Go back to immersion and notice the correct version.
e. Repeat indefinitely.
9. Dedicated Areas of Practice
a. Accent/Pronunciation
i. Chorusing
ii. Shadowing
iii. Pitch Focused Reading
iv. Studying Pitch Accent (extensive use of NHK Dictionary)
b. Proper use of honorific language （敬語）
c. Understanding various dialects of Japanese
d. Handwriting Kanji
e. Learning various academic/professional subjects in Japanese
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Immersion Resources

This is where I am going to link a bunch of resources so that you have material to watch, listen
to, and read.

Here are some other useful resource lists:

The Moe Way Resource List
Stevijs3 resource spreadsheet
Jpdb.io (Difficulty rating of Japanese media)
Nyaa (Site for torrenting just about anything)
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Netflix

Netflix is the best way to watch anime, drama, and movies in your target language.

You will want to change your account’s language in Netflix to your target language in order to
access more content and subtitle files.

You will also want to use a VPN in order to access region locked content (more shows).
Nord VPN
Private VPN
Windscribe
Proton VPN
SoftEther VPN tutorial (free)

Using Audio description

Increases density of input by having descriptions of scenes where there would otherwise
be no dialogue.

Language Reactor download (for Netflix and Youtube)

Language Reactor allows you to use Yomichan to look up words instantly as you watch.
Settings
Vocabulary highlighting: disable
Force original tracks: off
Show transliterations: no transliterations
Translation language: your TL
Show human translation: off
Hide subtitles: Hide translations
Playback speed: normal
Highlight saved words: off
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On mouse hover/left click/right click: do nothing
Show subtitles list view: on
Show subtitles below video: on or off (depends on preference)
Override arrow keys: on
Auto Pause: off

Language Reactor + Yomichan for dictionary look-ups

Animelon (stream anime + Japanese subs)

Has same setup as Netflix + Language Reactor
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Youtube

Youtube and Podcasts are the best way to listen to a lot of unscripted, natural Japanese.

Creating a Target Language YouTube

Create a separate account for TL videos only
Change location and language to TL to access more/trending content
Gets rid of temptation to click on English videos as they won’t show up

Beginner Content
Comprehensible Japanese
ペッパピッグ ー Peppa Pig
あかね的日本語教室
日本語の聴解のためのPodcast

Video Games/Let's Plays

牛沢
キヨ (various games w/ friends)
日常組 (Minecraft)
フジ工房
レトルト
花江夏樹 (Voice actor plays games with friends)
心霊バスターズ (Lets Plays)
ザクレイ (Super Smash Bros)
ふうはや (Minecraft)

Podcasts
4989 Utaco (female Japanese person living in America)
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Blog w/ transcripts
大愚和尚の一問一答 (Buddhism and Life Advice)
FMななももこ (female, relaxing)
だげな時間 (Podcast in Kansai dialect about random topics)
ゆる言語ラジオ (linguisitics)
スーツ背広チャンネル (Suits going on rants)
ひろゆき (Q&A livestreams)
メンタリストDaiGo (Q&A Livestreams)
山里亮太の不毛な議論 (panel member from Terrace House)
アバタロー (audiobook excerpts)
窪田等の世界 (Audiobooks)
西村俊彦の朗読ノオト (Audiobooks)
のがラジオ (female podcast)
新ニッポンの話芸　ポッドキャスト

Educational Content
中田敦彦のYouTube大学 (energetic lectures)
フェルミ漫画大学 (non-fiction/business books summarized in voiced manga form)
大人の教養TV (educational videos on history, religion, etc.)
Lesics日本語 (Engineering videos)
セゴリータ三世 (Technology/product reviews)
TEDx Talks in Japanese
Japan in Motion
CASTDICE TV
武田塾チャンネル （Introduces and compares various 参考書）
トライイット　(Middle/High School lectures)
とある男が授業をしてみた (Middle school lectures)
岡崎健太のOK塾 (Explains modern/classic literature, poems, etc.)

Normal YouTubers/Vloggers
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エガちゃんねる (comedian does extreme videos/challenges)

きまぐれクック (cutting and cooking fish)

Wakatte.tv (street interviews with college/high school students)
ひろゆきの部屋 (clips/highlights from livestreams)
李姉妹ch (Japanese/Chinese bilinguals)
東海オンエア
世界のフシギ探検ch (mysteries about the world)
Genki.jp (picking up chicks + sightseeing in various cities)
Naokiman Show (horror stories & mysteries)
Naokiman 2nd Channel
Zozozo - JapaneseHorror
スーツ旅行 (Suits traveling Japan)
スーツ交通 (Suits traveling on trains)
たかしの部屋 (Vlogs, games)
ぷろたん日記 (Bodybuilding, Vlogs, Eating)
たっくーTV
OTAKING / Toshio Okada (Otaku, anime)
しもふりチューブ
エスポワール・トライブ
フェルミ研究所 (Original manga with voice acting)
グレープカンパニーチャンネル (comedy)
JURIのモテ男くん養成ch (Relationship advice for men)
深田えいみ (AV star does vlogs and gives sex advice)
みことね (cute girls vlog in 博多弁)
佐賀よかでしょう。(Construction/building things)
千原ジュニアYouTube
ジュキヤ (Street interviews)
高須幹弥高須クリニック (Doctor gives health advice, cosmetology)
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News
FNN ニュース
DHC テレビ
飯田浩司のOK!Cozy up! (podcast)
24 Hour News Livestream

Aussieman's Youtube Recommendations for Kansai-ben

大阪太郎 (Live streams)
朝倉未来 (MMA, Vlogs)
ヒカル
わいわいのゲーム実況チャンネル
かわにしみき
エミリンチャンネル
チャンネル　がーどまん
タケヤキ翔
古川優香
ふくれな
てんちむCH
PROWRESTLING SHIBATAR ZZ
BUNZIN TV
本田
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Audiobooks

One Drive Folder of Audiobooks

Itazuraneko Audiobooks

Google Drive of Audiobooks

青空朗読 (audiobooks for works on Aozora Bunko)

Audiobooks taken from Audible JP (~3000 hours of content)

Spreadsheet Tracker (See what folder the book you want is in)
Folder 1
Folder 2
Folder 3
Folder 4
Folder 5
Folder 6
Folder 7
Folder 8
Folder 9
Folder 10
Folder 11
Folder 12
Folder 13
Folder 14
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The main 3 audiobook streaming services (comparison 1, comparison 2)
Audiobook.jp
Amazon/Audible
Kikubon

How to immerse with Audiobooks

1. Listen to the book as you read alongside it
a. This is more like “having the book read to you” and you pause when you see an
unknown word in order to look it up.
2. Listen after you read the book
a. Good for reading at your own pace, creating flashcards as you read, and then
using the audiobook to reinforce learned vocab/grammar
3. Just listen to the audiobook
a. Get in additional listening hours as you go about your day while walking, driving,
cooking, stretching, cleaning, etc.
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Passive Immersion Resources

Listen/relisten to content as you cook, clean, walk, commute to work, etc.

Turns the “dead-space” in your day into productive language learning.
Repetition of material helps you internalize the language.

Content to use: podcasts, audiobooks, anime/youtube videos you have already watched.
I mainly use Youtube premium and just download podcasts to my phone since it's so easy
to do.

Condensed Audio Files for Passive Immersion

Condensed Audio Catalog

Condensed Audio Mega Folder

Condensed Audio Google Drive and Condensed Audio Google Drive 2

まりもえお！ (Podcast)

Creating your own Passive Immersion Playlist

Extracting audio
Condensing audio
Two Tips for Condensing Immersion Audio
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Beginner Reading Material

These are materials that you can start reading while still learning basic vocabulary and grammar.

NHK Easy News

Has links to the real news article if you want to challenge yourself (this is a good option
when you are trying to get to that higher level)

福娘童話集
Thousands of various folk tales, ghost stories, and children stories
Will often have accompanying audio of natives reading the story out loud

Free Graded Readers from Tadoku

日本語多読道場
Free graded readers from N5-N1+

Use Japanese subtitles while watching Netflix

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News and Web Articles

NHK News Web

Visit the 特集 or スペシャルコンテンツ section if you want to see more unique stories.

FNN プライムオンライン

Japanese Newspapers (various regional newspapers)

The Players Tribune JP (Sports Articles/Interviews with athletes)

文春オンライン

ログミーTech (Tech articles)

ウィキペディア (Wikipedia)

日本史辞典 (Japanese history articles)

仏教ウェブ入門講座 (Introduction to Buddhism)

Mainly focused on self-help rather than religion.

トライイット (Classroom instruction on various schools subjects)

高校講座 (NHK resource for Japanese High School subjects)

Twitter is good for casual reading (create a Japanese only account)

Beware of the TOEIC/TOEFL learners- they are a poison and they are everywhere.
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Novels

Itazuraneko library (contains literally every book you could want)

Boroboro (thousands of e-books)

Aozora Bunko website (Actual literature)

This site is amazing for reading older books; try it out once you feel comfortable with
modern novels.

Trophies' collection of books (Various epubs of light novels).

ッツ’s Epub Reader

Obtain an epub of the book you want to read and insert it into this page.
Supports vertical and horizontal text.

小説家になろう (Web Novels from upcoming authors/amateur writers)

Mainly fantasy themed LNs.

Buying Physical and Digital Books (mainly from Japanese Amazon)

If you can’t find a book from one of the above sites then you probably need to buy it.
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E-Readers

Useful Ipad/Iphone Apps

Amazon Kindle App
Read books that you purchase on your Japanese Amazon Account
Buy books individually or use Kindle Unlimited
All books on Aozora Bunko are free for Kindle btw.
Dictionaries (by 物書道)
Contains a plethora of different types of dictionaries that you can use.
Buying the dictionaries is a bit expensive, but it’s totally worth it.

Ipad’s Split Screen Functionality

Sentence Mining with an Ipad (Ghetto version)

Save a list of sentences/words in an email draft/notes app & email yourself the list.
Access on your computer and make cards.

Using a Kindle
Just watch the video, it’s complicated.
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Visual Novels

The Moe Way Visual Novel Guide + VN Setup

Anacreon Text Hooker Page

So you can look stuff up + see how many characters you have read.

Clipboard Inserter Extension

Make sure to enable access to URL files in the settings

Download Textractor
Download the “english only” version
You will most likely be using the x86 version
Run Textractor.exe
Remove the following extensions: any machine translator, extra window, extra newlines,
styler.
Attach a hook to your VN
The text should automatically be appearing on the Texthooker page if the clipboard
inserter extension is enabled.
You can now use Yomichan to look up words and create cards w/ ShareX.

Download qBittorrent
This is so you can download torrents of games

Obtaining VNs
Buy legally on Steam
The Moe Way Discord Server (probably the easiest way)
Itazuraneko VN Library
Nyaa
Sukebei
東京図書館
Nostalgic visual novels online
Ryuu games
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Learning the Basics

So now that you have a bunch of content to read/watch/listen to, let's actually get started learning
Japanese so that you can understand and enjoy that content.

This section of the guide should take about ~500 hours (~3-6 months) to finish and at the end of
it you will know the most common 2000 words of the language, the basics of grammar, and will
be able to start understanding actual Japanese content.

Make sure to read through the technology section as well and download Anki and Yomichan.
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Kana

Learn Hiragana (Tofugu)

Primarily used for particles, conjugations, and furigana.

Learn Katakana (Tofugu)

Primarily used for loan words from foreign languages, and emphasis/italics

Practice Kana Recognition

Learn how to recognize and type all of the kana by going one row at a time.
I recommend using all of the various fonts as some characters can look different.

Typing in Japanese
Download the Google IME
I suggest using the Google IME, I think it’s better than Windows IME.
Guide for installing Windows IME
Typing Hiragana (Tofugu)
Typing Katakana (Tofugu)
Useful IME shortcuts

Ensure that your computer is using a Japanese font (sometimes it will default to a Chinese one).
Change your System locale and Region to Japanese in language settings.
You can still have your Windows display language in English.
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Basic Pronunciation

Learning about and focusing on proper pronunciation and pitch accent from the beginning will
pay dividends and save you a lot of agony down the road.

Basic Japanese pronunciation guide (Tofugu)

Read through this guide as you learn kana so that you know proper pronunciation.
Uses IPA notation and tongue/mouth diagrams to help explain.

For an introduction into Pitch Accent, watch the following videos:

Dogen 10 Minute Intro to Pitch Accent
Word level Pitch Accent
Sentence Level Pitch Accent
Darius on Strategies to Acquire Pitch Accent

Work on your Pitch Accent Perception

Do ~10 min/day until you can get 100% effortlessly w/o replaying the audio on the
following quizzes: 2 mora words, 3 mora words, minimal pairs, all words, word +
particle.
NALA-J (a more difficult pitch accent perception test)

Watch Dogen’s Phonetics Series.

This is the best collection of videos available in English on Japanese pronunciation
covering pitch accent, phonemes, devoicing, vocal placement and various resources.
Just a video a day is fine.

More Useful Resources for Pronunciation and Accent

Forvo (look up a word and listen to native speakers pronounce it in isolation)
Youglish (look up a word and hear a native speaker pronounce it in a YouTube video)
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You can download pitch accent dictionaries to Yomichan to quickly look up the accent of
a word simply by hovering over Japanese text.

You can also download Forvo audio to Yomichan so that you don’t have to go to the
website every time- this will save you a lot of time!

Use ShareX to record native audio and include it on your Anki cards.

For those who use iPhone or Android, the NHK Accent Dictionary App is amazing.
Buy it from the App Store or Google Play, it’s well worth the money and is
cheaper than the physical dictionary.
Here is an free, online version of NHK Accent Dictionary
This only has audio of the base word + particle.

More resources and exercises on pronunciation and accent can be found under the “Pitch
Accent” section for when you reach an intermediate level (can read actual Japanese) and are
wanting to take your speaking ability to the next level. The above resources are all you need for
now and will start you off on a strong foot in your Japanese pronunciation.
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Learning Kanji?

Interesting videos about Kanji (not much practical use though)

Origin of Kanji
What they never told you about Kanji
Why Japanese Kanji suck

Let’s take a quick detour in how the philosophy of learning Kanji has evolved over time.
1. Rote Memorization.
a. Write out the same kanji over and over again on a piece of paper.
b. For some reason, this is still what they do in the Japanese education system,
despite the obvious inefficiency and lack of a systemic approach.

2. Remember the Kanji

a. James Heisig brilliantly combines the SRS, mnemonics, and a logical system of
increasing complexity to teach you how to write 3000 kanji by hand.
b. This is what the old AJATT method recommended doing before even learning
vocabulary and grammar! Many people never made it past this step…

3. Lazy Kanji
a. Khatz, the founder of AJATT, eventually realized that, as a beginner you do not
need to be able to handwrite thousands of kanji before you actually start learning
the language (seems a bit obvious in hindsight really). Instead, let’s just learn to
recognize them and then get on with learning vocabulary.
b. This became the de facto approach by around 2018, and is what MIA
recommended.

4. Recognition RTK
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a. Furthering the above approach, and renaming it to sell a product, Lazy Kanji was
reduced from 3000 characters to the most frequent 1000 characters, and then even
further to the most frequent 450 characters.
b. The reasoning for this was that you don’t need to learn thousands of kanji before
starting to learn vocabulary as a beginner (when the words are mainly going to
use extremely common kanji); you really just need to get over the initial “kanji
hump” and learn to recognize that characters are made up of components.
c. After you pass this initial hurdle, you learn new kanji for free as you learn to read
new words through immersion + the SRS.

Common beginner traps to avoid when it comes to learning Kanji

1. Learning to write kanji at the beginning.
a. Focus on recognition first: this is the fastest and easiest way to get comfortable
with reading native content.
b. Typing only requires recognition of the correct kanji.
c. Once you reach an advanced level you may want to develop handwriting ability,
that will be covered later in this guide.

2. Trying to memorize a bunch of “readings” of kanji.

a. Almost all characters have multiple “readings” (pronunciations) and even if you
learn them you won’t know how to pronounce words: just learn vocabulary.

3. Using Wanikani
a. It’s expensive, slow-paced, and free alternatives exist.
b. It tests you on random readings and vocabulary out of context

4. Doing all of RTK 1 + 3 at the beginning before learning any vocabulary

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a. Learning 3000 kanji before you learn words that use them is a giant waste of time
and doesn’t give you any actual Japanese ability: this is nothing more than a party
trick.
b. You only need to prime your brain with the most frequent kanji in order to
overcome the “Kanji hurdle” and be able to start learning vocabulary.

The genius of the Heisig method (Remembering the Kanji)

1. Learn to deconstruct characters into primitive elements
a. Characters are made up of components, not just random squiggles.

2. Learn kanji in a logical order of increasing complexity

a. This is the most important part of RTK. Some very common kanji are incredibly
“complex” (have a lot of strokes): it’s much easier to learn simple Kanji first, and
progress over time to the more complex ones, despite the difference in frequency.

3. Create a “mental dictionary entry” for each kanji in your brain

a. Build a foundation that will make learning vocabulary easier.
b. Kanji will look familiar to you and no longer like random blobs.

Recognition RTK 450

This deck takes the strengths of the RTK method above, avoids the beginner trap of
learning to write kanji, and uses a frequency list so that you learn to recognize the most
common 450 Kanji in order of increasing complexity.

After going through this deck you should find learning vocabulary easier.

The deck is short enough that it should only take ~3 weeks to finish if you do 25 new
kanji per day.
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Kanji frequency data
450 Kanji covers 65-75% of all Kanji that appear in most Japanese content.
1000 Kanji cover ~90% of all characters that appear in most Japanese content.
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Vocabulary

While you could just start sentence mining native content from the get-go, using a pre-made deck
is going to save you a lot of pain, frustration, and time.

I recommend using the Tango N5 Deck & Tango N4 Deck

These decks present the most common ~2000 words in Japanese by using sentences,
allowing you to learn them in context, and are ordered in a largely i+1 format.
Every card includes audio from native speakers and includes pitch accent information.
You can finish both of these decks in ~3 months if you do 20 new cards/day.

Core 2.3k VN Deck (alternative to above)

I’m not a big fan of this deck for beginners for a couple of reasons, but some people find
that it suits them better than the Tango Decks.
It uses vocab cards instead of sentence cards; this makes active recall harder due to the
lack of context on the front of the card. Sentence cards are good for beginners so that they
can practice reading and get used to various grammar patterns.
The example sentences used in this deck are not logically ordered in an i+1 format,
making them quite difficult for beginners and not particularly enlightening for seeing
how a word is actually used in context.
It doesn’t include pitch accent information for the words you learn.

After you finish one of the above decks, start mining new words from native media.
At this point you should find that you are starting to understand actual Japanese content.
When you start mining your own cards I recommend learning ~10-15 new cards/day in
order to keep your daily Anki time at a reasonable amount.

You should also be reading through a basic grammar guide while going through these decks.
 36

Grammar

Another nebulous and often misunderstood area of language learning; grammar. Here are two
interesting videos on the subject:
How to (not) think in your target language
Why You SUCK At Japanese Grammar

People like Stephen Krashen or Steve Kaufmann state that grammar study is absolutely useless
and thus don’t do any of it. On the other hand, traditional classroom learning has you wasting
your time with hours of grammar drills, fill-in-the-blank exercises, and doing contrived
speeches/dialogues with other foreigners. Even Khatzumoto, who is probably the most often
misquoted person on the internet regarding grammar study, studied grammar by sentence mining
the following book: All About Particles: A Handbook of Japanese Function Words.

Why study Grammar?

1. Studying grammar allows you to improve your comprehension of native media by
exposing you to various sentence patterns in the language.
2. The more you understand in your immersion the more enjoyable it becomes and the more
language you acquire from it.

How to study Grammar?

1. Sentence mine a basic grammar guide like Tae Kim DJT or Sakubi DJT for new words,
particles, conjugations, phrases, etc.
a. Front: Japanese sentence with 1 new thing to learn.
b. Back: explanation of that new word/grammar point.

2. Study Japanese → English.

a. You should only study to increase your comprehension of native media, not to
learn how to formulate sentences and translate thoughts from English to Japanese
 37
b. Just become aware of various patterns and what they mean; natural use of the
language is obtained through understanding (thousands of) hours of immersion
and gaining a correct intuition for the language.
c. Eventually you will learn your target language in that language once you go
monolingual.

3. As you sentence mine native media, you will continue to learn new grammar.

Example Bilingual Sentence Card from the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar

Example Monolingual Sentence Card mined from native media

The Dictionary of Japanese Grammar Series is a very thorough and complete resource and I
highly recommend that you sentence mine at least the Basic version after Tae Kim.
DoJG search engine
 38

Technology for Language Learning

This section will focus on setting up software that is going to make learning Japanese more
efficient.

Yomichan and Anki are going to be your best friends while you learn Japanese.
 39

Anki

Loved, hated, and feared, Anki remains one of the best ways to reinforce vocabulary and
grammar that you learn from native media. While many people might differ on what settings or
card type they like using, one thing remains certain: mining native media is a core component to
immersion learning methods.
The currently recommend version is Anki 2.1.55 qt5

What is the Role of the SRS?

1. Create a ‘mental dictionary’ for new vocabulary/grammar that you mine from native
media.
a. Word exists → learn reading/pronunciation + meaning of the word in context.
b. This will prime your brain to notice this word and its usage in immersion.
c. The full usage/meaning of a word/grammar point is acquired through immersion
and seeing it used in multiple different situations.

2. Repeated and increased exposure to words

a. Using the SRS will let you see words more often than they naturally appear.
b. At an intermediate level, you will be learning words that only naturally appear
every couple of months during immersion (making them quite hard to acquire, but
they are still frequent enough that every native still knows them). Using Anki to
remember these words can greatly speed up the language learning process.

Overall, Anki supplements immersion learning through effective studying of vocabulary and
grammar, acting as a catalyst to speed up your acquisition of the language.

Pro Anki Tips

1. Try to spend only 20-40 minutes per day in Anki; at the very most don’t exceed 1 hour of
Anki time per day.
 40
a. Beginners benefit from being on the higher end of this spectrum as they need to
learn the most common words and grammar patterns relatively quickly in order to
jumpstart their comprehension in the language.
b. Advanced learners are usually on the lower end of this spectrum as they start
knowing more and more words and stop seeing new words appear in native media
as often.

2. Download the Anki app for your iPhone.

a. This lets you do reviews anytime you have a few spare minutes during the day.
b. This is the best $25 you will spend on language learning.

3. Aim for a retention rate of 85-90%.

a. If you are above 90% that means you are reviewing cards too frequently and
wasting time in Anki that you could spend immersing in your target language.
b. If you are below 80% then you aren’t remembering enough, and need to adjust
your settings, or review cards more frequently.
c. I generally like remembering more than I like forgetting, so that’s why I aim for
the upper half of the 80-90% spectrum. Being around 80% retention rate just
doesn’t feel fun.
 41

Optimizing Anki

Anki’s default settings are not amazing and can quickly lead to you spending unnecessary
amounts of time studying with a reduced retention rate (which we obviously want to avoid).

While reading the user manual takes a while, it is the best way to learn about Anki and how each
setting affects the algorithm.

Anki Tutorial | Deck Options and Algorithm

If you don’t want to read the manual, then this video will give you a basic understanding
of how Anki works.

Various articles about optimizing Anki settings

Anime Cards

Optimizing Anki for Language Learning by Eminent

Anki Settings for Med School

 42

Recommended Anki Settings

Preferences → Scheduling
Enable review time above answer buttons
Enable remaining card count during reviews
Enable v3 scheduler
Learn ahead limit: 400 minutes (some number bigger than 60 and less than 1440)

Options
Daily Limits
New cards/day = up to you. Generally 10-20 is a good number.
Maximum reviews/day = 9999
Anki works best if you do all of your reviews everyday.

New Cards
Learning Steps and Graduating Interval
Vocab Cards: 1m 5m 1h 1d → 3 day graduating interval
Sentence Cards: 1m 1h 1d → 3 day graduating interval
I simply don’t feel that I need the extra learning step with sentence cards
due to the added context they have.
Easy Interval: 4 days
Insertion Order: sequential show new cards in order added)

Lapses
Relearning steps: 5m 1h
Minimum interval: 1 day
Leech threshold: 4-8
 43
It’s better to not waste your time on cards that are hard to learn for some
reason and instead go for the low-hanging fruit.
Leech action: suspend card
This allows you to go in and edit the card (to make it better for learning)
or delete it.

Display Order
New card gather order: Deck
New card sort order: Order gathered
New/review order: show after or before reviews (up to your preference)
Review sort order: due date, then random
May want to adjust if you have a big backlog of reviews

Just leave the timer/burying/audio sections as is, they aren’t important.

Advanced
Max interval:
Starting ease: 2.50
Easy bonus: 1.30
Interval modifier: adjust based upon your retention rate
If >= 90% then increase
If <= 80% then decrease
Hard interval: 1.20
New interval: something between 0.30 and 0.70
Min interval: 1 day

Notes on Settings
1. Learning new cards after reviews is the most flexible option
a. Allows you to choose how many cards to learn each day.
 44
b. Ensures that you do all of your reviews every day.

2. Learning new cards before reviews forces you to wait the proper amount of time between
learning steps and leads to (slightly) better retention.

3. Ease factor is not affected when cards are in the learning queue.
a. No negative penalty for failing cards that you haven't finished learning.
b. This is why some people like longer learning steps: when a card finally
“graduates”, you will actually know it w/o the card being in ease hell.
c. However, failing a card in the learning queue forces it to go back to the beginning
and you have to repeat all learning steps- don’t make too many learning steps.
 45

Anki Add-ons

Straight Reward
This add on will allow you to avoid ease hell by recovering ease on cards that you
repeatedly pass.

Review Heatmap
Visualize your progress and stay consistent.

True Retention
More accurate retention stats

Pass/Fail (JP Version)

Copy the PassFail folder to %APPDATA%\Anki2\addons21 (paste this in your file
explorer address bar).
Gets rid of the hard/easy buttons and the ease problems associated w/ them + reduces
mental fatigue from decision making.

Kanji Grid
See how many unique kanji you have in your Anki collection
You have to put all of your decks as subdecks (under a parent deck)
Just drag and drop the decks onto parent
You can take them back out when you are done
Make sure to select the parent deck when generating the grid
Enter in the fields that you want it to check (this depends upon your card types)
46
 47

How to grade Anki cards

How to review Sentence Cards:

1. Read the sentence on the front of the card.
2. Read the definition of the target word on the back of the card.

How to review Vocab Cards

1. Read the word on the front of the card.
2. Read the definition and example sentence on the back of the card.

Criteria for Passing a Card

1. Sentence Cards: you understood the meaning of the sentence and knew the
pronunciation/reading of the target word.
2. Vocab Cards: you knew the pronunciation of the target word and understood the meaning
of the word in the example sentence.

Note: some people only test themselves on the pronunciation of the target word and only read the
definition and example sentence if they feel that they need to re-confirm the meaning of the
target word. This can help you save time in Anki, but I think it defeats part of the purpose of the
SRS because you’re not reviewing the meaning of words in context. It could be a valid strategy if
you are short on time for Anki, or already reading a lot of Japanese material (in which case you
largely acquire the meaning of words through context).
 48

Sentence cards

1 Target (1T): Contains only 1 new word/grammar point to learn.

The sentence becomes understandable once you look up the target word.
“Pick low-hanging fruit” and make cards in an i+1 format.
Do not include multiple unknown words/grammar points in your sentence cards:
the only thing that you shouldn’t know on the front of a card is the new thing you
are learning.

Sentence Card Format (*=essential)

Front of the Card
Sentence in Target Language*
Back of the Card
Definition of the target word*
Native audio of the target word (highly recommended)
Furigana
Pitch Accent Coloring
Native audio of the sentence
Image of the show/scene if mined from Netflix/Youtube

Example Monolingual Sentence Card

 49
Benefits of Sentence Cards
See the word being used in context
What words are commonly used together
Solidify grammar points
Essential for set phrases, idioms, and words that have multiple meanings

Disadvantages
Longer review time, especially if you include sentence audio.

Example Monolingual Sentence Card made from Anime

 50

Vocabulary Cards

Vocab Card Format (*=essential)

Front of the card
Word in Target language*
Back of the card
Definition of the word*
Example sentence*
Native audio for the word (highly recommended)
Native audio for the example sentence
Image

Example Monolingual Vocab Card made from Anime

Benefits
Faster repping time if you only test yourself on the pronunciation of the target word and
don’t read the definition/example sentence.
 51
Disadvantages
Lack of context on the front of the card leads to a lower retention rate.
Adjust your interval modifier accordingly.
If the word has multiple meanings or is only used as part of a phrase/idiom then
reviewing only the word will not test you on the particular meaning.
I would use a sentence card in this case.

I would create a separate deck for vocabulary cards as they have a different intrinsic difficulty
than sentence cards and thus you will want to mess with the interval and lapse modifier in order
to adjust your retention rate (without affecting your sentence deck).

Example Monolingual Vocab Card made with Yomichan

 52

Hybrid Anki Cards

Format
Front
1. Target word w/ example sentence underneath.
2. Example sentence w/ target word bolded.
a. I usually color code based on pitch accent.
Back
Definition of the target word*
Native Audio for the word (highly recommended)
Native audio for the sentence
Image

Hybrid cards allow you flexibility in your style of reviewing. You can either read the full
sentence, or just test yourself on the pronunciation of the target word if you want to save time
and are confident in its meaning.

Example Hybrid Card

 53

More Anki Tips

Stay consistent: do all of your reps everyday

Use the heatmap add-on and keep your “streak”.
“Catching up” on multiple days of reps is not a fun experience.

Don’t use the hard/easy button (Download the pass/fail add-on)

Removes decision fatigue- you either know the card or you don't.
Improper use of the hard/easy button can easily cause you to have to spend way more
time reviewing Anki cards (ease hell) or lead to lapses due to aggressive jumps in
intervals.

Timebox your reps

If you can't do all of your reps in one morning session, then just do them when you have
freetime throughout the day.

Dealing with Leeches

Option 1: Delete them
If a card isn’t sticking then forget about it and focus on the cards that are easy.
Option 2: Move all your leeches to a separate deck for leeches and relearn them
Go into the browser and reset the card’s interval to make it new again
Right click, “reschedule”
Place at end of new card queue
 54

Tips to save time in Anki

1. Keep sentence cards on the shorter side so you don’t have to read as much.
a. No one wants to read a whole paragraph for one card: 3-7 words is usually plenty.

2. Only include one example sentence for vocabulary cards.

a. You don’t need to include every usage case on your cards- you will learn them
through immersion.
b. If a word has multiple, different meanings, and it isn’t obvious what the others
mean if you already know one of them, then make a sentence card for each
meaning.

3. Only include the relevant definition of the target word.

a. Pick the one definition of the target word for the meaning that is used in the
example sentence.

4. If you really want to save time, then consider using bilingual definitions.
a. They are much faster to read than monolingual definitions due to the decreased
length of the definition and the increased reading speed in your native language.
b. However, the shorter definitions are also less precise.
c. Make sure to still use monolingual definitions when immersing though!
 55
5. Don’t include sentence audio because they add a lot of time to each card.
a. It is fine if you only have native audio for the target word.
b. It can even be fine if you don’t have any audio since some words are really only
ever used in books and never in the spoken language.
 56

Yomichan

The ultimate technology for learning Japanese has arrived and its name is Yomichan.
This plug-in easily allows you to look up the definitions of words simply by hovering
over them, and even allows you to create high quality vocab and sentence cards with just
one button click (go to “Sentence Mining”).
Yomichan supports bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, frequency lists, pitch accent
dictionaries, and audio from Forvo (native speakers).

Yomichan Setup Tutorial

Yomiception! Using Yomichan on unknown words within Yomichan definitions

Select “Allow scanning search page content” and “Allow scanning popup content”
Set the max number of child popups to 2 or 3.
I find that if I’m having to do more than 2 or 3 recursive lookups in order to understand a
monolingual definition then the word just wasn’t meant to be learned- just move on.

Turning Yomichan into an online dictionary page: the Yomichan Search Page
Click on the “magnifying glass” and a separate page will pop up.
 57
You can then use this page as normal: look up words, look up words in definitions, and
create Anki cards.
This is useful for things you can’t Yomichan (eg. PDFs), and have to copy and paste in
order to look up.

“Magnifying Glass”

Using the Yomichan search page while reading 三四郎

 58

Yomichan Dictionaries

Shoui’s Dictionary Collection

Installing Dictionaries/Frequency Lists for Yomichan

Download the contents as a .zip file (don’t extract)
I put all of the dictionary zip files into one folder for organization
Open Chrome and click on the icon for Yomichan Settings.
Select “Configure installed and Enabled Dictionaries”.
Click Import and select the dictionary files that you want to import.

Recommended Dictionaries
大辞林　第三版 (my favorite dictionary, includes pitch accent information)
新明解国語辞典　第五版 (unique definitions, includes pitch accent information)
ディジタル大辞泉 (includes pictures, similar to 大辞林)
実用日本語表現辞典 (covers phrases/slang that don’t appear in other dictionaries)
JMDict (quick bilingual reference for when you just want a rough idea)
漢字遣い参考 (gives you alternative forms of the word to search if it isn’t popping up)
Kanjium Pitch Accents (pitch accent graph and number)
大辞泉 Pitch Accent (lists more modern accents that young people are starting to use)
Innocent Corpus Ranked Frequency List (frequency list for novels)
Anime and J-Drama Frequency List (frequency list for Netflix)

Matt vs Japan's In-Depth J-J Dictionary Walkthrough

 59

Online Dictionaries

If for whatever reason Yomichan doesn’t work, then the following websites are good alternative
options to look up the meaning of a Japanese word or phrase.

広辞苑無料検索 (literally has every dictionary)

Weblio (大辞林 第三版, 実用日本語表現辞典)
goo辞書 (デジタル大辞泉)
コトバンク (デジタル大辞泉、大辞林 第三版 and 精選版 日本国語大辞典)
Jisho (Standard Japanese-English dictionary)

You can usually google things and find an answer

〇〇　意味 (will usually give you top results from Weblio, kotobank, or goo辞書)
〇〇とは (same as above)
〇〇と〇〇の違い (difference between two things)
〇〇の尊敬語・謙譲語 (for when you need to write business letters/emails)
 60

Monolingual transition

Using J-J dictionaries for target word definitions

Suggested that you have at least ~3000 bilingual cards
You can always try to go monolingual earlier if you feel like it.
If you have not gone monolingual after ~1000 hours (~6-12 months) then focus on it.

I do not recommend going “cold turkey” one day, but instead recommend a gradual transition.

How to make the monolingual transition

1. Start looking up words in a monolingual dictionary when immersing
a. If you understand the definition then create a monolingual card.

2. If there is an unknown word in the definition then create a bilingual card for it and then
create the original monolingual card.
a. If you can make this secondary card monolingual then do so, otherwise just create
a bilingual card.

Tips for the Monolingual Transition

1. Look up the definition of words that you already know
a. This will let you get a feel for how dictionaries tend to phrase ideas since you will
already know the concept that is being described.

2. Cross reference multiple monolingual dictionaries

a. They often provide different perspectives and will give different definitions (some
are short and concise while others will give you a lot of additional information)

3. Learn “dictionary vocabulary” by mining unknown words in definitions.

 61
a. You can create cards where the front is the dictionary entry of a word and the back
is the definition of the unknown word in the original definition.

Example “Dictionary Card”

The more you use a monolingual dictionary the more you will get comfortable with it.

Ultimately the monolingual transition will take multiple months before you are comfortable with
the vast majority of definitions that you come across; it is okay to reference the bilingual
dictionary.
 62

Sentence Mining

Mining with Yomichan (This guide is based off of Animecards)

Create high quality vocab/sentence cards with one click.
Make a second Yomichan profile and set hotkey to be ctrl + shift
Shift → make vocab cards
Ctrl + shift → make sentence cards
Include image and sentence audio w/ 2 hotkeys using ShareX.
Anki Connect
Yomichan Forvo Server
Improved Anime Card template (Register an account before downloading)
An's handlebars for pitch accent (use if you have more than one pitch accent dictionary
installed so that it only takes the first entry)
My Yomichan CSS Code

Manual Mining (Old School)

Learning with Netflix + Anki
MIA Japanese Deluxe Note Card (this is my favorite note type)

Making monolingual sentence cards in real time

Making sentence cards

Example Sentence Sources

用例.jp (taken from books)
Youglish (searches for native speakers saying the word in Youtube videos)
Neocities Sentence Search (includes audio)
 63

Card format for Vocab Cards Card format for Sentence Cards

Example Vocab Card w/ audio and image Example Sentence Card w/ audio and image
 64

Output

Let’s actually start using Japanese now to communicate with native speakers.

Here are some other good guides on starting to speak/write:

Matt vs Japan's Guide to Starting Output

Chronopolize's Guide to Outputting in Japanese

Aussieman on why you suck at speaking Japanese

Useful websites for native feedback & interaction

Hello Talk
Using a tutor with Italki
Tandem
Language Learning/Exchange Discord Servers
LangCorrect
 65

Writing

Writing allows you to focus on producing thoughts/ideas correctly without having to worry about
pronunciation or staying up to speed in a real time conversation.
Being able to take your time can help you avoid making mistakes as well as work on your
phrasing.

Remember that language isn’t math.

Don’t try to translate from English; focus on going from pure thought/meaning into
Japanese.
Don’t try to make up your own ideas that you have never heard before; try to mimic
phrases that you have heard natives say and are confident in.

When writing you may be uncertain on how to express some ideas:

Look out for how natives express these types of ideas.
Target your immersion by reading/listening to specific topics that you want to talk/write
about.
Introspection: do the sentences that you are writing feel natural and correct?
Confirmation: get corrections from a native speaker (or google).

To be a good writer you need to be an avid reader.

If you want/need to write business emails then you should read a bunch of examples as
well as learn about the proper formatting and writing style (read articles on the topic).
The same goes for essays, speeches, academic papers, etc.

You also need to practice writing a lot: be consistent and try to write something everyday.
 66

Speaking

Speaking consists of two components:

1. Phrasing thoughts naturally in the target language (vocabulary, grammar, honorifics,
formality)
2. Pronunciation (phonemes, pitch accent, intonation, rhythm)

You also need to understand what your conversation partner is saying (listening ability).
If you can’t understand what is being talked about then it’s going to be really hard to have
a conversation.

Errors
These are subconscious; you aren’t aware that you are wrong.
Use native feedback to become aware of errors.
Look out for the correct version in your immersion.

Mistakes
These are generally much easier to notice: slip of the tongue, fumbling with words,
stuttering, freezing, etc. (you are aware that you messed up)
Record your speaking and listen back to it in order to identify areas to improve.
You can also have natives point out what areas need improvement.

Practice Ideas
1. Talk to natives (make friends and just converse w/ them)
2. Monologue on a random topic (a good exercise for overcoming output anxiety)
a. Use a random topic generator
b. Book/Movie review
c. Rants
d. Summarize a news/wiki article in your own words
3. Shadowing (discussed next)
4. Reading aloud
 67

Pitch Focused Reading

Welcome to what is perhaps one of the most brutal, and brutally effective, exercises for fixing
your pronunciation/pitch accent: reading out loud.

Either use your own tools to look up the accent of unknown words/phrases or have a native
speaker listen to you and correct you.
You can use Yomichan to look up the accent of unknown words.
You can consult the NHK accent dictionary for verb/adjective conjugations, compound
nouns, suffixes, particles, and counters.
Using the native speaker is going to be the more sure-fire method, but it might get
expensive if you have to hire a tutor all the time if you don’t have any Japanese friends
willing to help you.

This exercise is highly touted by Darius in his video on strategies for acquiring pitch accent as
well as by Matt vs Japan in his video on starting output. It forces you to consciously recall the
pitch accent of everything you read, and is absolutely brutal if you have been ignoring working
on your accent but heavily focusing on reading- you will be humbled.

Start out by doing this for ~20 minutes per day, adding time gradually. As you get better (and fix
your pronunciation), you will find that you just naturally start to read with the correct
pronunciation (which is ideally what you should have been doing all along).
 68

Shadowing

The 3 Types of Shadowing

1. Chorusing: mimicking the same sentence repeatedly.
2. Repetitive Shadowing: mimicking the same video clip repeatedly.
3. Continuous Shadowing: mimicking long form content w/o pausing or rewinding.

Perfect Sentence Shadowing (Chorusing)

Laoma Chris's video on the topic
Olle Kjellan's Original Paper on the topic
Pick 20-30 sentences
Create a looping audio file for each sentence
Use an audio editing program like Audacity
Loop the sentence 10-20 times for the audio file
Leave a 0.5-1 second gap after each repetition of the sentence
Put the mp3 files on your phone/computer
Shadow one sentence at a time for a couple minutes
Switch to the next sentence
Swap out the 20-30 sentences with new ones every couple weeks.

Matt vs Japan's Ideal Shadowing Setup (Continuous Shadowing)

The ideal content for this would be podcasts, audiobooks, or YouTube videos from your
language parent.

Repetitive Shadowing
Using the same setup above, we repeatedly shadow the same 5-10 minute Youtube clip.
Using your “language parent” here is a good idea. Shadowing the same person repeatedly
will get you used to the way that they talk.
 69
Work your way through their content and shadow it all.

Recording yourself allows you to listen back to the clip and notice any discrepancies that you or
a native can correct.

Chorusing can be used by beginner/intermediate learners, and is the best form of shadowing for
working on your pronunciation and accent.

Repetitive/Continuous Shadowing is best for advanced learners to work on their fluidity and
intonation due to the freeflow nature of these exercises.

Audiobooks are easier to shadow than natural speech (podcasts/YouTube) due to the clearer
pronunciation and slower rate of speech. Try starting off with them and then transition over to
shadowing your Language Parent once you get the hang of the exercise.

Combine your shadowing material with your pitch focused reading material.
Do PFR on a book, and then listen to and shadow the corresponding audiobook.
This gives you repetition with the words/phrases that you were corrected on/had to look
up.
 70

Critiquing High Level Japanese Learners’ Output

Let’s see what even some high level people struggle with and what gives them away as
foreigners.

Brutally Honest Nitpicking of Eric (KoreKara Podcast)'s Japanese

Prone to skip small ッ and shorten long vowels when pronouncing loan words
Lack of variety in sentence ending particles （語尾）
Incorrect pitch accent occasionally
Sometimes phrases ideas in a weird way

Brutally Honest Nitpicking of Dogen's Japanese

How good is Dogen's Japanese? Dogen NitPicked by a Japanese guy

Japanese Learners Tier List | AJATT/Refold

Conclusion: むいむい is insanely good.

Nitpicking Matt vs Japan's Japanese (2017 ver.)

Kaz mainly picks on Matt sometimes messing up pitch accent (this video was taken
before Matt started studying pitch accent seriously and working on his pronunciation)

Nitpicking オージマン Aussieman

Native level accent (verified by multiple Japanese people from Kansai).
This is largely because Aussieman mixes standard and kansai dialect. Is he
making a mistake, or is he just speaking with a hint of a dialect ? It’s hard for
natives to tell, but either way he sounds like a Japanese person who grew up in
Osaka and then moved to Tokyo.
Aussieman doesn’t really care about reading ability; others may/may not feel the same
depending upon their goals.

Nitpicking Mr. Katsumoto's Japanese, the AJATT founder

The famous Blue Shirt Video
Mainly correcting Pitch Accent
 71

Topics for Advanced Learners

How far should you learn Japanese?

That is entirely up to you: some people are content with just being able to read their
favorite LN/VNs, others want to achieve a native-like accent, dedicated individuals may
want to go to university/graduate school in Japan or work professionally with their new
found language abilities.
Take your ability as far as you want: this section will help provide you resources to do so.
 72

Pitch Accent

Revisit the ‘Basic Pronunciation’ section if you can’t yet differentiate between the various pitch
accent patterns of isolated words and/or haven’t watched Dogen’s series on Japanese phonetics.

Can pitch accent be acquired naturally?

Most people will need to put active work into improving their pronunciation and accent if
they want to sound like a native speaker (this may or may not align with your goals).

How to improve accent and pronunciation:

1. Train your ability to perceive pitch accent
a. If you can’t perceive pitch accent in real time as you listen to Japanese then you
won’t be able to accurately imitate them. Improving your perception will improve
your ability to mimic and produce the language.
b. You should have done this in “Basic Pronunciation” using kotu.io

2. Maintain “Phonetic Awareness” when listening to Japanese: pay attention and try to pick
out the pitch accent of words, devoicing, nasalization, etc.
a. Check yourself by confirming w/ the NHK Accent Dictionary or Yomichan.
b. Dogen recommends repeatedly listening to the same movie in order to do this.

3. Learn the correct accent of individual words

a. Pay attention to the pitch accent of words that you look up.
i. Yomichan has multiple pitch accent dictionaries.
ii. Monolingual dictionaries list the pitch accent of words.
1. 大辞林、新明解、ディジタル大辞泉
b. Include pitch accent information and native audio on your Anki cards.
 73
c. You may need to go back and re-learn the accent of words you already know if
you didn’t focus on pitch accent from the beginning (I cover this more below).

4. Learn the rules of Pitch accent by reading through the NHK Accent Dictionary.
a. Pitch accent of compound nouns, verb conjugations, adjective conjugations,
suffixes, particles attaching to nouns/verbs/adjectives, counters, proper nouns
(names, places), etc.
b. All of the rules regarding pitch accent are incredibly simple- there are just a lot of
them that you need to know.
i. Focus on one at a time.
ii. Use pronunciation cards if necessary.
c. I recommend buying the app version from 物書堂
i. Has audio files from trained native speakers.
ii. Has a search function for ease of use.
d. This online version also exists, but it doesn’t have nearly the same level of
intricacy and audio files as the app does.

5. Pronunciation Exercises (see the relevant sections under “Output”)

a. Pitch Focused Reading (PFR)
b. Chorusing
c. Shadowing
d. Aim for at least ~20-30 minutes per day..

6. Go to Announcer School in Japan (this is mainly in jest)

a. Not yet confirmed to be necessary, but also not yet disproven.
b. However, むいむい, the best foreigner at Japanese, went to announcer school and
the effects show- she sounds great.

Supplementary Resources for Pitch Accent

 74
新明解 Accent Dictionary PDF
日本語標準アクセントの概要 + 詳細
助詞・助動詞のアクセントについての覚え書き
Pitch Accent of Verb Conjugations and Pitch Accent of Adjective Conjugations
This is just summarizing info from the NHK Accent dictionary in English.

Supplementary Resources for Pronunciation

東京外国語大学言語モジュール
Website that covers basic Japanese pronunciation and accent

日本語の発音を知る (blog)
Pronunciation of phonemes described in Japanese
Uses IPA notation + has mouth/tongue diagrams

Dogen’s Recommended List of Books for Japanese Pronunciation/Accent/Linguistics

日本語アクセント入門 (really good introduction to standard Japanese and various
dialects)
アクセントの法則 (great book comparing standard and kagoshima dialect)
美しい日本語の発音:アクセントと表現
音声を教える

The hardest part about pitch accent is being able to recall the correct accent of all of the words
you know (step 2): you either know it or you don’t.
Maintaining phonetic awareness during listening and doing the recommended
pronunciation exercises (especially pitch focused reading as it forces you to recall and
produce the correct pronunciation) are great ways to relearn the pitch accent of words that
you “already know”.
 75
Pair your shadowing material with your pitch focused reading material: do PFR on a
book, and then shadow the audiobook. This gives you additional practice with the same
content (and thus the same words/phrases that you probably had to look up) and lets you
mimic a native speaker who does PFR professionally.

Another thing you might look into doing is using Anki to remember the accent of words
using, what I’m going to call, “pronunciation cards”. This could be words, verb
conjugations, or even phrases that you had to look up during your PFR sessions (and feel
that you need a bit of extra practice/review to remember the accent of). You probably
want to include some form of pitch accent identification (graph, number, color, or arrow)
and native audio from Forvo (for words) or Youglish (for phrases) using ShareX.

“Pronunciation Card”
Left: just use Yomichan and then delete the definition/example sentence
Right: make them manually
 76

敬語

Honorific language is an interesting subject, because it really only matters if you want to use
your Japanese in a professional environment. Learning to understand honorific language is quite
simple, and can be acquired through normal immersion + sentence mining, but learning to use it
correctly is a different matter. Even natives have to specifically study this when they first get a
job, so you should do the same: get a book on the subject in Japanese and study it.

敬語の指針 (Itazuraneko)

A comment from reddit suggests the following books:

敬語の教科書1年生
敬語の使い方が面白いほど身につく本
入社1年目ビジネスマナーの教科書・入社1年目 ビジネス文書の教科書

Often you can just google 〇〇の尊敬語・謙譲語 and find a good business article/blog
explaining the proper usage of some conjugation/phrase, etc.
 77

関西弁

Japanese is not like Spanish where there are many different regional dialects that you have to be
able to understand. There are really only two main dialects: standard Japanese, which you
already know, and 関西弁. Other dialects simply don’t appear frequently enough for them to be
worth learning unless you move to that region and live there, in which case you can probably just
pick up the dialect naturally through lots of interactions with native speakers.

Aussieman’s advice for learning Dialects

1. Listen to a lot of content from that region (mainly Youtube and podcasts).
2. Speak to people from that region in that dialect.

As always, doing some active study and learning about the kansai dialect can help you.
京言葉 (In depth blog covering grammar and accent)
YouTube関西弁講座-大阪おっちゃんねる- (has 5 playlists covering 大阪弁)
京阪式アクセント（基礎）
大阪弁講座 (Itazuraneko)

Books from Amazon

聞いておぼえる関西(大阪)弁入門
かんさい絵ことば辞典
大阪ことば学
 78

日本語能力試験

Take the N1 and get your certification so that you can work/go to college in Japan.

JLPT文法解説まとめ
Sentence mine the website for new grammar patterns
or use the already pre-made Anki Deck

新完全マスター読解 日本語能力試験N2 and 新完全マスター読解 日本語能力試験N1

Good reading comprehension books to get used to the types of questions and texts that
the JLPT uses.

Past JLPT N1 Tests (2010-2019)

Take an official test or two as practice to get used to the formatting + timing.

Kotoba quiz bot codes (via Discord, good for extra practice)
N2 Vocab: k!quiz n2 nd 20 font=5
N1 Vocab: k!quiz n1 nd 20 font=5
N2 Grammar: k!quiz gn2 nd 20 mmq=2
N1 Grammar : k!quiz gn1 nd 20 mmq=2
N1 Listening: k!q ln1 10 nd font=5 mmq=2 atl=20

Note: if you are actually good at Japanese and can understand native media (novels, podcasts,
news, etc.) with minimal use of a dictionary then taking and passing the JLPT N1 should be very
easy for you to do with minimal specific preparation for it.
 79

漢字能力検定

We’ve come full circle back to learning Kanji (remember how that was like 40 pages ago?), but
this time we are going to learn how to write them from memory. Now that we are fluent in
Japanese and have a high level of reading ability this will be a much easier process to do and we
can do it entirely in Japanese without having to resort to using made-up english keywords from
Heisig.

Using this Kanken Deck is the main way that you are going to learn how to write Kanji. This
deck will prompt you with a Japanese sentence (learning in context) and you will have to write
out the underlined target word. At the end of it, you should be able to pass the 漢字検定２級
with a little bit of practice using the resources below.

漢検DSシリーズ (practice problems on the DS)

漢検　過去問題集 (books that the DS version utilizes)
漢検　分野別問題集 (practice problems by problem type)
漢検　実物大過去問　本番チャレンジ! (practice tests)

漢字検定WEB問題集 (Free practice questions for each level)

漢検の過去問題 (free example test with answers)

漢検１級模擬試験倉庫 (some dude’s blog that is very in depth + features advice from people
who have passed the highest level)

Doth passes Kanken ２級 in 653 days

 80

Academic Subjects

This section is going to provide resources for learning academic subjects at the middle, high
school and college level. This is really just super specific, educational immersion content and can
be done at any time you feel. The most useful things here to study for improving your Japanese
ability would be 現代文、日本史、世界史、哲学、法学 as they mainly involve a lot of reading
and writing. You might also want to study translation, Classical Japanese, or even specific STEM
fields.

CASTDICE TV

武田塾チャンネル

トライイット (Middle/High School lectures)

【中学数学】・【高校数学】
【中学理科】
【中学歴史】・【日本史】・【世界史】
【中学地理】・【高校地理】
【中学公民】
【中学英語】・【英文法】・【英語構文】
【物理】
【生物】
【化学】
【古文】・【漢文】

とある男が授業をしてみた (Middle/High School lectures)

【中１数学・理科】・【中２数学・理科】・【中３数学・理科】
【国語】
【歴史】
【地理】
【公民】
【中１英語】・【中２英語】・【中３英語】
【数学I・A】・【数学II・B・III】
 81

Japanese Universities

大学受験パスナビ (find information on specific unis)

大学偏差値ランキング (search by 国公立・私立、地域、学部)

Wakatte.tv rules: if 国公立 or 理系、 +5 to listed value (+10 if both).

Good Universities ＝ 東京一工、旧帝大、早慶、TOCKY、MARCH

国公立
東京大学
京都大学
一橋大学
東京工業大学
大阪大学
東北大学
名古屋大学
神戸大学
筑波大学
横浜国立大学
千葉大学
私立
慶應義塾大学
早稲田大学
上智大学
明治大学
中央大学
 82

Entrance Exam Format

大学入試センター (official website for national entrance exam)

共通テストの方針 (learn about structure + formatting of exam)
What subjects you will have to take on this exam are pretty much pre-decided by the
uni/program you are applying to so check official university websites.

大学入試の仕組みを理解しよう！
Series of articles that outline the structure of university admissions pretty well.
The rest of the website has lots of other information about entrance exam prep as well.

東大対策・京大対策 (wiki articles on the entrance exam structure for each subject)
 83

国語・現代文

Middle School Level (Introductory)

国語の文法 (Modern Japanese grammar explained at a middle school level)
中学校国語文法 (supplementary Wiki article)

岡崎健太のOK塾
Videos that explain/summarize old/modern literature in a very easy to understand way.

The following section is largely focused on reading/analyzing old literature (1868~1950) and
writing essays.
If you are still struggling to read LNs/VNs and modern books, then focus on that first-
this content is a level above that and uses much more flowery language and vocabulary.
Aozora Bunko will be your friend here for reading these older literary works.

Entrance Exam Prep Books

入試 漢字マスター1800+ (Kanji book)
現代文キーワード読解 (Vocab Book)

船口のゼロから読み解く最強の現代文・記述トレーニング

入試現代文へのアクセス 基本編・発展編・完成編

現代文読解力の開発講座
現代文と格闘する

得点奪取　現代文　記述・論述対策
記述編 現代文のトレーニング
 84

早稲田の国語（赤本）
東大の現代文27カ年（赤本）

Supplementary Links: 中央大学　現代文　出題傾向と対策・過去問題解説

 85

古文

Learning Classical Japanese has no real practical benefit for your ability in modern Japanese, but
it does allow you to enjoy a wider range of literary works and can be a fun endeavor. Some
classical Japanese structures still exist in modern Japanese, and so this could give you a deeper
insight into why some structures are the way that they are.

For the gaijin,

Haruo Shirane Classical Japanese Grammar
Haruo Shirane Classical Japanese Reader

High School Level (Introductory)

歴史的仮名遣い教室
古典文法 (same guy who made the 「国語の文法」website)
森山の必ずできる古典文法 (Youtube videos)
The playlist is in reverse order (start at the bottom).

The following books are commonly used to prepare for college entrance exams:
読んで見て覚える 重要古文単語315
GROUP30で覚える古文単語600

望月光　古典文法講義の実況中継(1)・(2)・［センター国語］

古文上達 基礎編 読解と演習45・読解と演習56

読んで見て覚える 古文攻略マストアイテム76

得点奪取　古文　記述対策
 86

鉄緑会　東大古典問題集　資料・問題篇/解答篇　2013-2022

Supplementary Links
中央大学　古文　出題傾向と対策・過去問題解説
百人一首で始める構文講座
 87

日本史

History is probably one of the most practical subjects to learn in this list because it simply
involves reading a lot about politics, economics, war, religion, ya know, the domains of language
that are generally considered more difficult immersion material. You could read the news for this
type of content, but I think that this is just a more fun way to do it. Have fun learning to read all
the people and place names…

中学生のための、よくわかる歴史 (History articles at a middle school level)

一度読んだら絶対に忘れない日本史の教科書
金谷の日本史なぜと流れがわかる本　原始～・中世～・近現代史・文化史

石川昌康　日本史B講義の実況中継　原子～・中世～・近世～・近現代
【大学入試完全網羅】高校日本史 (Supplementary Videos)

HISTORIA　 日本史精選問題集
実力をつける日本史100題

一問一答 日本史 ターゲット 4000

日本史B一問一答

“考える”日本史論述
段階式 日本史論述のトレーニング

東大の日本史27カ年（赤本）
 88

世界史

一度読んだら絶対に忘れない世界史の教科書

青木裕司 世界史B講義の実況中継(1)・(2)・(3)・(4)
【大学入試完全網羅】高校世界史 (Supplementary Videos)

HISTORIA　世界史精選問題集
実力をつける世界史100題

一問一答 世界史 ターゲット 4000

斎藤の世界史Ｂ一問一答

判る!解ける!書ける!世界史論述
世界史論述練習帳new

東大の世界史27カ年（赤本）
 89

数学

Is this more about learning math than language…?

College entrance exam prep books

基礎問題精講　数学I・A　・数学II・B・数学III

標準問題精講　数学I・A・数学II・B・数学III

１対１対応の演習　数学I・数学A・数学II・数学B・数学3 微積分編・数学3 曲線・複素数

編

上級問題精講　数学I+A+II+B ・数学III

鉄緑会　東大数学問題集　資料・問題篇/解答篇 1981-2020
鉄緑会　東大数学問題集　資料・問題篇/解答篇 2013-2022

Calculus
大学基礎数学 微分積分キャンパス・ゼミ・演習 (Introductory)
微分積分キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

Vector Calculus
ベクトル解析キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

Linear Algebra
大学基礎数学 線形代数キャンパス・ゼミ・演習 (Introductory)
線形代数キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

線形代数学概説

Statistics/Probability
大学基礎数学 確率統計キャンパス・ゼミ・演習 (Introductory)
確率統計キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

Differential Equations
常微分方程式キャンパス・ゼミ ・演習 (ODEs)
 90

ラプラス変換キャンパス・ゼミ (Laplace Transforms)

偏微分方程式キャンパス・ゼミ (PDEs)

Complex Analysis
複素関数キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

Fourier Analysis
フーリエ解析キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

Numerical Analysis
数値解析キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

Abstract Algebra
代数学　群論入門・環と体とガロア理論・代数学のひろがり

Number Theory
整数論　初等整数論からp進数へ・代数的整数論の基礎・解析的整数論への誘い

Other
集合論キャンパス・ゼミ (Set Theory)

有限要素法キャンパス・ゼミ (Finite Element Method)

 91

物理

Entrance Exam Prep (High School Level Physics)

宇宙一わかりやすい高校物理　力学・波動・電磁気・熱・原子

物理のエッセンス　力学・波動・熱・電磁気・原子

名問の森　物理　力学・熱・波動1・波動2・電磁気・原子

難問題の系統とその解き方 新装第3版 物理 力学・熱・波動・電磁気・原子

鉄緑会　物理攻略のヒント よくある質問と間違い例
鉄緑会　東大物理問題集　資料・問題篇/解答篇　2013-2022

Introductory College Physics

大学基礎物理 力学キャンパス・ゼミ
大学基礎物理 電磁気学キャンパス・ゼミ
大学基礎物理 熱力学キャンパス・ゼミ

Classical Mechanics
力学キャンパス・ゼミ・演習
解析力学キャンパス・ゼミ

Electrodynamics
電磁気学キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

Wave Mechanics
振動・波動キャンパス・ゼミ・演習

Thermodynamics/Statistical Mechanics
熱力学キャンパス・ゼミ・演習
統計力学キャンパス・ゼミ

Quantum Mechanics
量子力学キャンパス・ゼミ
 92

化学

Entrance Exam Prep

橋爪のゼロから劇的!にわかる 理論化学・無機・有機化学

大学受験Doシリーズ 鎌田の理論化学・無機化学・有機化学

2022 実戦化学重要問題集 化学基礎・化学

理系大学受験 化学の新研究・新演習

鉄緑会　東大化学問題集　資料・問題篇/解答篇　2013-2022
 93

生物

Entrance Exam Prep

リードLightノート生物基礎・生物

生物合格77講
大森徹の最強講義117講 生物

生物問題集 合格177問

大森徹の生物 実験・考察問題・記述・論述問題・遺伝問題・計算・グラフ問題

大森徹の最強問題集159問 生物

東大の生物27カ年（赤本）
 94

翻訳・英語

University entrance exams require you to translate passages between English and Japanese.
These are the standard books used in graduate programs in the US:
The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation
Japanese–English Translation An Advanced Guide

You might need to take TOEIC/TOEFL to get into a Japanese university depending on how you
are applying.

All the links below are probably going to be useless for native English speakers (besides the
JP-ENG translation books) but I’ve included them anyway.

Vocab Books
システム英単語・システム英熟語

鉄緑会東大英単語熟語 鉄壁

Grammar Books
関正生の英文法ポラリス[1 標準レベル]・[2 応用レベル]・[3 発展レベル]

英文法レベル別問題集 1超基礎編・2基礎編・3標準編・4中級編・5上級編・6難関編

真・英文法大全

入門英文解釈の技術70・基礎英文解釈の技術100・英文解釈の技術100

Reading Comprehension Books

関正生の英語長文ポラリス(1 標準レベル)・(2 応用レベル)・(3 発展レベル)

英語長文レベル別問題集 1超基礎編・2基礎編・3標準編・4中級編・5上級編・6難関編

ポレポレ英文読解プロセス50
 95
Books on writing essays
大学入試問題集 関正生の英作文ポラリス[1 和文英訳編]・[2 自由英作文編]

大学入試 すぐ書ける自由英作文

ハイパートレーニング　和文英訳編・自由英作文編・最難関大への英作文

東大英作の徹底研究

Listening Comprehension
キムタツの東大英語リスニング Basic・キムタツの東大英語リスニング・ Super

CD2枚付 改訂版 鉄緑会 東大英語リスニング

 96

経済学

Introductory Economics
はじめよう経済学 (Youtube Series with HWs, quizzes, and answers)

試験攻略入門塾 速習! ミクロ経済学・マクロ経済学

マンキュー入門経済学・ミクロ編・マクロ編

Microeconomics
ミクロ経済学の力・技

Macroeconomics
マンキュー マクロ経済学　入門篇・応用篇

…add more later

公認会計士の資格
 97

哲学

Introductory Philosophy
素人が哲学をわかりやすく解説してみた (series of short introductory articles)
14歳からの哲学入門　「今」を生きるためのテキスト

…. Add more as i read more

 98

法学

伊藤塾・伊藤塾 YouTube
Buy various law books for studying/passing various exams.
Lots of articles about law school, bar exam, etc.

Introductory Law Textbooks

条文の読み方 (highly recommended to read before starting undergrad law program)

伊藤真の法学入門
伊藤真の憲法入門
伊藤真の民法入門
伊藤真の刑法入門
伊藤真の刑事訴訟法入門
伊藤真の民事訴訟法入門
伊藤真の行政法入門
伊藤真の会社法入門

LEGAL QUEST series (very dense)

民法I 総則
民法II 物権
民法III 債権総論
民法IV 契約
民法Ⅴ 事務管理・不当利得・不法行為
民法VI 親族・相続
憲法I 総論・統治
憲法II 人権
経済法
国際私法
民事執行・民事保全法
会社法
労働法
行政法
民事訴訟法
知的財産法
刑事訴訟法
 99
刑法各論

Recommended Links
有斐閣 (Buy various law texts/dictionaries)

基本書まとめWiki＠司法試験板
Wiki maintained by law students w/ book recommendations from academics.

法科大学院協会　「共通的な到達目標モデル」について
Good website to read in general.

Law School Entrance Exam Practice Problems

慶応義塾大学　過去の入試問題 (free PDFs)
京都大学　過去の入試問題 (free PDFs)
東京大学　過去の入試問題 (have to purchase)
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Example Routines

The above section gave quite a bit of resources that should keep you busy for years…

If you’re just beginning it might have been a bit confusing/overkill, so here are some example
language learning routines to help structure your learning.

These routines are largely broad guidelines for what you should be focusing on during each
phase of your learning and are just general suggestions.
If you want to output earlier, then do it!
If you want to prioritize reading more in the beginning, then do it!
If you just wanna skim grammar in the beginning and then learn as you sentence mine,
then do it!
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Absolute Beginner Routine

Kana: ~10 min/day of Kana Recognition Practice for ~2-3 weeks

Read through Learn Hiragana and Learn Katakana to help you learn before practicing
Read through Basic Japanese Pronunciation as you learn the kana.
Learning just to recognize the characters is all you need for now: you don’t have to learn
how to write.

Pronunciation: ~5-10 min/day of Pitch Accent Perception

Watch this 10 minute Introduction to Pitch Accent first.

Kanji: Recognition RTK 450 (~25 new cards per day)

Finish this while learning kana and basic pronunciation.

Listening: 60-180 min/day

Split equally between listening with Japanese subtitles and listening raw.

Passive Listening as you can throughout the day

This will help accustom you to the sounds of the language, but it's okay if you don’t do
passive listening during this phase.
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Beginner Routine

Anki
Tango N5 and Tango N4 (~20 new cards per day)
Skim/read through Tae Kim and just get a feel for the basics.
Then, sentence mine the DoBJG (~5 new cards per day on top of Tango cards)

Pronunciation: watch 1 Dogen Pronunciation/Accent Lesson per day

Continue doing ~5-10 min/day of Pitch Accent Perception until you are ~100% accurate.

Listening: 60-180 min/day

Split equally between listening with Japanese subtitles and listening raw.

Reading: 30-60 min/day of easy, graded material

Add this in after you finish Tango N5.
See the Beginner Reading Section for resources

Passive Listening as you can throughout the day

Start listening to easy beginner podcasts or relistening to anime you have watched.

This entire routine should take ~3 months to work through if you follow the suggested pace.
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Advanced Beginner Routine

Anki
Mine your immersion content for ~10-15 new cards per day.
This is how you are going to continue to learn new vocabulary/grammar.
Start trying to use monolingual definitions.

Pronunciation: 20 minutes per day of either Chorusing or Pitch Focused Reading

Listening: 60-180 min/day

Split evenly between listening w/ JP subs and listening raw

Reading: at least 60 min/day

Start trying to read manga, news articles, LNs/VNs

Passive Listening as you can throughout the day

Aim for at least an hour a day while you walk, cook, clean, drive, etc.
Relisten to YouTube videos/anime that you have watched and mined.

This routine might last ~6-9 months and is mainly meant to bridge the gap between the beginner
and intermediate levels.
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Intermediate Routine

Anki
Mine your immersion content for ~10-15 new cards per day.
You should primarily be using monolingual definitions by now.

Grammar
Read through 国語の文法 and 中学校国語文法
Sentence mine the entirety of JLPT文法解説まとめ (~5 new cards/day)

Pronunciation
Read through the NHK Accent Dictionary
20 minutes per day of either Chorusing or Pitch Focused Reading

Listening: ~60-180 minutes/day

Split evenly between listening w/ JP subs and listening raw
Transition to mainly raw listening as you start reading more and stop needing to mine
listening content for new words.

Reading: ~60-180 min/day

Focus on reading LNs/VNs for at least 60 min/day.
The rest of the time can be LNs/VNs, manga, news, non-fiction books, wiki, etc.

Passive Listening as you can throughout the day

Aim for at least an hour a day while you walk, cook, clean, drive, etc.
Anime, YouTube, podcasts and audiobooks are all okay to use.
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Upper Intermediate Routine

Anki
Mine your immersion content for ~10-15 new cards per day
You should primarily be using monolingual definitions.

Reading: ~60-180 min/day

Focus on reading modern literary novels for at least 60 min/day. When this starts getting
easy then start reading literary works on Aozora Bunko.
The rest of the time can be LNs/VNs, manga, news, non-fiction books, wiki, etc.

Listening: ~60-180 minutes/day

You should mainly be doing raw listening by this point, and only using JP subtitles if you
are going to be mining a show that is difficult.

Passive Listening: at least 60 min per day.

Focus on listening to podcasts and audiobooks.
It’s okay to still relisten to content that you sentence mined.

Pronunciation: 20 minutes per day of Chorusing, Pitch Focused Reading, or Shadowing.

Speaking: at least 3 hours/week

Start talking with a native speaker using Italki
Discord also works, as does a number of other ways to speak to natives

Writing: try to do a small amount of writing every day (~at least 10-15 min/day).
This might be a couple of sentences, maybe a couple pages.
Twitter is good and so is texting natives.
r/WriteStreakJP is okay.

At some point during this you will become “conversationally fluent” and how you go about
continuing to improve is up to you: some focus on reading, others focus on accent, you may want
to learn how to handwrite kanji or go live and study/work in Japan, etc. Follow your interests.
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Language Learning Theory

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
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Core Language Learning Theory

The first section provided you with all of the resources that you need to learn Japanese; this
section provides all of the juicy details on the fundamental theories underpinning language
acquisition necessary for beginners to understand.
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Input Hypothesis

Stephen Krashen: A Forty Years' War

1. Learning vs Acquisition
a. Acquisition: subconscious knowledge of the language (Intuition)
i. Largely unaware when acquisition is happening
ii. Leads to fluent and accurate use of the language
b. Learning: conscious knowledge about the language
i. Acts as a conscious monitor
1. Hard to use when speaking in real time due to time constraints
2. Useful for when writing though (even natives do proof-reading)
ii. Conditions for using a conscious monitor
1. Have to know the rule that needs to be applied
2. Have to be thinking about applying the rule
3. Need to have time to apply the rule

2. The ability to acquire a language never goes away

a. There is a gradual decline in ability as you get older but it is still possible to reach
a very high proficiency in a foreign language.
b. Adults have a more developed cognitive brain and a larger ability to think
abstractly and logically.
c. Language learning metaskills
i. Using the right method and refining areas to work for you
ii. Consistency and dedication and hours spent trump all.

3. Natural Order Hypothesis

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a. Language is acquired in a certain order, which does not depend upon
simplicity/complexity.
b. Knowing the rule consciously doesn’t mean that you can use it fluently:
Conscious knowledge =/= acquisition

4. Input Hypothesis
a. People all acquire language in the same way- through comprehensible,
compelling input.
i. Comprehensible: when the message is understood.
ii. Compelling: the story is so interesting that you forget that it is in another
language.
b. Output is the result of comprehensible input (acquisition) and not the cause of it.
c. Recommends going through a “Silent period” in the beginning where one does
not speak and instead only focuses on listening and reading in order to build
comprehension.
5. Affective Filter Hypothesis
a. Having negative emotions, external pressures, etc. act as a barrier to language
acquisition.
b. The ideal is to reach a “flow” state when immersing in the content.
i. “Motivation doesn’t matter. I am pronouncing the death of the concept of
motivation… Tell them a good story and they will acquire the language.”
ii. This is the importance of input that is compelling; if you are interested in
the story then you will want to interact with the language more frequently
and for longer durations of time.

If language is acquired in a certain, natural order then how do we move from point A to point B?
Consume comprehensible input that contains the next rule that you are ready for.
Your current level is denoted by i.
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Input that is just above your level and can be understood through context, visuals, etc.
(things that make the language more comprehensible) is denoted as i+1.
i+1 is the most natural and easiest way to acquire a language

Language acquisition is a gradual process that occurs a little bit at a time.

It won’t feel like you are progressing everyday but keep being consistent and you will see
progress as you look back on weeks, months, and years.
Consistency and building a habit of interacting with your target language everyday is the
number one thing to do.
Many people severely overestimate what they can do in a day, but severely underestimate
what they can accomplish in a year.

Optimal Input (Stephen Krashen)

Comprehensible: you can understand the story and follow along with the plot
Compelling: the story is intrinsically interesting
Dense: little to no amount of blank space
Massive Volume: immerse for multiple hours per day
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Consciousness and Language acquisition

Consciousness and the Unconscious Mind

Language is processed in the left hemisphere of the brain (barring extreme cases)
Your sensory organs collect data from the environment which gets sent to your
unconscious mind for filtering; important information is then sent up to your conscious
mind.
It is believed that some portion of this filtering is due to innate ability and another
portion is due to accumulated experiences.
For language learning, we want our brain to turn this raw auditory data into meaning.
When you are fluent, there is no time delay between hearing the sounds and
understanding the meaning of what is being said- it’s impossible to not understand.

Levels of Pattern Recognition (Noticing)

1. Spontaneous (Random)
a. The more you are exposed to something the higher chance of randomly noticing
it.
2. Intentionality: actively paying attention to something (being on the “look out” for it)
a. After learning something your brain will start to become aware of it and notice it
more (Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon).
3. Deliberate Practice
a. The main mechanism for getting good at a skill.
b. Requires a clear goal for success and failure and immediate feedback on
performance: without feedback you can’t improve.
c. Failure is the mechanism for improvement; you need to practice things that you
can’t yet do in order to get to the next level (don’t get stuck in your comfort
zone).
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Linguistic Competence vs Performance
Competence: your understanding of what is correct or not within the language.
Performance: what you actually produce within the language.
Your level of performance can never exceed your competence level.

The main task of the language learner is to develop near native competence (to install an
unconscious model of the language in their brain).
Trying to boost your performance level while still at a low level of competence is largely
a waste of time since you are bottlenecked by it.
Boosting your performance level is relatively easy once you have the intuition of what is
right and wrong.

Language vs General Skill Acquisition

Certain parts of the brain are innately dedicated to language acquisition.
Just through getting input you will develop a high potential for linguistic performance
and will be able to naturally output to some degree.
Explicit practice is needed to refine and actualize your latent output ability.

1st vs 2nd Language Acquisition

Adults have largely the same capacity to learn a language as a child does.
Children seem to not need deliberate practice in order to improve in their first language,
while an adult language learner does.
Adults need to be actively engaged with the language in order for acquisition.
Only doing passive immersion is not enough: this is not an osmosis method.

Deliberate Practice and Language Acquisition

In the beginning we participate in deliberate practice by actively trying to understand the
language during immersion with dictionary lookups and conscious study to reinforce
those lookups.
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Eventually you will reach a plateau where you understand all of your input but are not
able to output at the same level.
If you want to continue improving past this plateau then you need to figure out what
aspect of the language you are missing/lacking through your mistakes in output.
You can then focus on those weak areas, improve your comprehension and refine your
output abilities to even higher levels.
If creating a deliberate practice loop is not possible, then you at least want to maintain
attention when immersing and try to notice the correct pattern.
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Theory vs Practice

If you want to get better at a language then you actively have to use that language.
Regularly engage with target language content meant for native speakers.
Don’t fool yourself by using dumbed down content for language learners: graded readers,
textbooks, dubbed shows. These are a good stepping stone, but they aren’t the real thing.
If you want to get better at speaking then you need to actually practice speaking Japanese.

Balance efficiency and enjoyment

If you don’t enjoy the process then you will end up quitting- and that’s the least efficient
method.
It is easiest to start out with building habits (doing something everyday, even if for a
small amount of time), and then increase the time you invest with the language as you
keep going.

Language isn't math (Matt vs Japan)

“Human language is highly specific in unpredictable ways”

Thinking in your target language and using rules to translate your thoughts into your
target language leads to unnatural speech, and possibly not being understood.
Each language expresses different, unique ideas from others, and will express the same
idea in different ways: set phrases, idioms, etc.
If you want to express an idea in a way that sounds natural to native speakers then you
need to know the specific way that a native speaker would express that idea, and the type
of ideas that a native speaker would express in the first place.

Getting better and being able to engage with content and people in a meaningful manner is the
most fun part of the process.
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Being good is much better than being mediocre, which is much better than being a
beginner.
Sometimes you have to grind in order to get better: periods of intense immersion and
study are probably necessary to break through these plateaus.

Studying helps speed up the language acquisition process by giving you (repeated) exposure to
different aspects of the language.
Studying is not a replacement for immersion, but rather acts as a catalyst for it.
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On Language Learning in General

There are two main components to learning a language: improving your comprehension, and
improving your output performance.
You need to utilize Input, Active Study, and Output in order to reach an advanced level.
Input is the most important aspect of language learning acquisition.
Active Study is used to boost your comprehension of native media by repeatedly
exposing you to new information.
Output is necessary to refine and polish your performance to the highest level
possible through practice and identification of weak areas.
The optimal approach will focus on Input and Active Study from an early stage, and will
introduce Output once an intermediate level has been reached.

Improving your comprehension is the large bulk of language learning and is the most important
aspect.
Improving your comprehension also gives you an intuition for “correctness” in the
language which influences your ability to output naturally.
Many people can reach conversational fluency solely through comprehensible input,
Anki, and minimal speaking practice (5~20 hours).

Improving your output performance is another important part of language learning and it allows
you to express yourself in a more natural and eloquent manner.
Refining your performance ability requires dedicated practice on top of already having a
high comprehension level.

Deliberate Practice (Specificity) is the driving mechanism behind improvement in any area.
Input: trying to understand native media by using dictionary lookups.
The optimal difficulty is to have media just slightly at or above your level (i+1).
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This optimal level is often hard to achieve in practice unless you utilize graded
material, thus maintaining interest in content is emphasized as all input is
comprehensible to some degree.
Most native content is not at this magical i+1 level when you are a
beginner/intermediate and thus you need to use a dictionary to look up
unknowns in order to make it more comprehensible.
You have to look up the reading/pronunciation of unknown words in
Japanese when reading since you can not guess them accurately with
consistency.
Try to use (graded/native) material at your level as much as possible for
the most rapid gains, and then use interesting native content for more
volume (exposure to the language).

Active Study: learning new vocabulary and grammar in context

Increases comprehensibility of immersion content by providing repeated exposure
to new vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns.
Mining from your immersion material makes your studying relevant to what you
are doing in the language and decreases the difficulty of native content.
Use frequency lists to help you learn the words that are going to benefit your
comprehension the most.

Output: practice speaking/writing and get corrective feedback

This spotlights your weaknesses (areas you have not acquired) and shows you
what to focus your immersion, studying, and output practice on in order to
improve.
Try to write/speak about a topic you already understand well (don’t wing it on
something you’ve never heard about before).

Downfalls of utilizing only one approach

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Only using Comprehensible Input
1. You never pressure test your actual language ability with native speakers. You
don’t get to see what you actually have acquired, and what hasn’t been.
2. Output skills will be at an overall lower level due to lack of practice.
3. Slower rate of progress than if you were to use dictionaries and active study to
increase the comprehensibility of your immersion material.
4. Limited material: there is only a finite amount of graded material meant for
beginners. Making the jump to material meant for native speakers will prove a
difficult challenge w/o active study of new words that appear.

Only Active Study

1. Won't develop an intuition for how the language is actually used by natives
through mass exposure.
2. Same deficiencies in output as listed above.

Only Output
1. The lack of input means that you won’t be hearing how natives phrase their
thoughts naturally: you will be creating your own version of the language.
2. Largely focused on translating thoughts from English to Japanese.
3. Inefficient use of time if you have low comprehension.

Immersion isn't quite all you need. Here's why

This is possibly one of the best series of reddit posts of all time on language learning and
is the main reason why I made this section of the guide.
Reading this will be well worth your time.

Guy learns Spanish by immersing for 900 hours w/o Active Study
Interesting case study showing the power of pure input
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He does note that he would’ve made faster progress if he were to look up unknown
words/grammar and use an SRS.

Linguist teaches himself french with 1300 hours of TV (No reading, no subtitles, no output, no
grammar) + corresponding reddit post
What was good
1. Invested lots of hours
2. Passed B2 after spending 6 months abroad in France
What was bad
1. Initial test results were poor (lack of study and preparation)
2. Output skills were significantly worse than comprehension skills
Conclusion: Input works if you do enough hours, but we can make the method much
more efficient by looking at other people’s success and failures.

Improvements that could be made to a pure input approach:

1. You need to make the content understood in some way
a. Use level appropiate content and gradually increase difficulty
b. Dictionary lookups while immersing
c. Use target language subtitles
d. Vocabulary/grammar study
2. You need to practice speaking/writing in order to get good at it

Interesting Remarks from OP

1. His reading ability was way ahead of his listening even though he didn’t read!
a. He missed out on a lot of easy gains by skipping reading.
2. OP notes that concentration is essential and that he learned next to nothing when
his mind was wandering and not focusing on the input.
a. Osmosis isn’t real: pay attention when you’re listening.
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Improving your Comprehension

Your main focus as a beginner is becoming able to understand your target language; let’s take a
look at what factors affect your comprehension, and how to go about improving it.
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Active and Passive Immersion

Active immersion: focusing all of your effort on your immersion (listening or reading).
Stay engaged with the content
Try to understand as much as possible
Turn off and get rid of any distractions (Social media, Discord, cell phone, etc.)

Passive immersion: listening to audio while doing some other task

Ex: Walking, Cooking, Cleaning, Commuting, etc.
The more attention you can pay to your passive immersion the more beneficial it will be
Your level of attention will naturally vary over time, however you should aim to
focus on the material as much as you possibly can.
Having audio on in the background and not paying attention to it has no benefits: you
need to be actively engaged with the content.

Active/Passive immersion ratio (Matt vs Japan)

Active immersion is the most important component of language acquisition
Passive immersion is used when you aren’t able to actively immerse because you have
things to do.

How often should you look words up? (Matt vs Japan)

Try to avoid looking up every unknown word: tolerate ambiguity
Focus on learning higher frequency words

Mindset and staying engaged when you don’t understand anything

Instead of focusing on what you don’t understand, focus on what you can.
“Small victories” will keep you in the game.
Focus on picking out new words that you have recently learned.
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See unknown words/grammar points as opportunities to grow and become better.
Focus on the sounds of the language

Having fun in a Language you suck at (Matt vs Japan)

Use Compelling input: something you want to watch
A lot of motivation issues are due to a lack of interest in current immersion
material: find something new to watch/read.

Tricks to increase comprehension in the beginning

Watch something you have seen before.
This could be a show you have watched before with English subtitles or a dubbed
TV show from your Native Language.
Read a short summary of the show/episode before watching it.
Use Target Language subtitles and read alongside the audio.

Audio immersion should be started from day 1

Use Youtube and Netflix
Build up a habit of immersing and then increase time once you are consistent
“Grow some balls and listen to anime all day”
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Brutal Force

Why you still can't understand your TL

Not enough time spent with your target language

This is the number one reason why you’re not as good as you want to be.
Invest another couple hundred hours into the area you are struggling with (listening,
reading, etc.) and you will see a lot of benefits.

Fear of ambiguity
Change your mindset into thinking about “small victories”.
Everyone sucks at the beginning.

Balance your reading and listening ability in order to avoid a big discrepancy level between
them.

Knowledge vs Ability
Conscious knowledge can be gained through studying
Having some knowledge of the theory can help make your practice more effective but
don’t get caught up in only learning theory: ability is only gained through hours of
actually practicing the skill.

Focus on the sounds of the language

Try to identify words that you recognize
Listen to how words blend together

Listening is harder because you need to be able to understand native speech at full speed
Parsing the phonemes: ability to differentiate between similar sounds
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Connected speech: how words are combined/slurred during natural speech.
Phonetic Ambiguity: have to rely on context to fill in the blanks
Homophones: same pronunciation, different spelling & meaning
ex. meat, meet
Homonyms: same pronunciation & spelling, different meaning
ex. bat (the animal), (baseball) bat

Compressing your Language Immersion

More time immersing each day leads to compounding gains.
I recommend a minimum of actively immersing for 2 hours a day.
Most people making solid gains are doing 4-6 hours/day.
However, it is better to be consistent than intense for a couple of days and burn out.
Once you are consistent then start increasing your time listening and reading.

Language Density
Match difficulty of TL media w/ energy level.
Use a mix of harder and easier content each day.
Balance efficiency and enjoyment
There are some times you have to grind but for the most part the journey is just
about having fun in your target language every day.
Novels are the best form of content for reading
Large vocabulary
Complex sentence patterns
Mix of descriptive language and dialogue
Podcasts are the best form of listening content
Unscripted, natural speech on a wide variety of topics
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Levels of comprehension

Let’s analyze our favorite graph in some more detail and give benchmarks for comprehension
levels (for reading):

Assume ~650 characters/page and ~2 characters/word

~325 words per page
Assume ~20 characters/sentence
~32 sentences/page
~10 words/sentence.
85% comprehension of native material is about ~1.5 lookups per sentence (~50 unknown
words per page).
This requires around ~2000 words.
You would be better served using easier/graded material. This would be quite
painful to look everything up.
90% comprehension is about ~1 lookups per sentence (~32 lookups per page).
This requires around ~3000 words.
Most people would still want to use easier material here; the extremely motivated
might be able to start pursuing intensive reading.
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95% comprehension is about ~1 lookup every 2 sentences (~16 lookups per page).
This requires around ~6000 words.
This is a challenging, intensive read, but should be doable for most people.
98% comprehension is about ~1 lookup per paragraph (~7 lookups per page).
This requires around ~12,000 known words.
This is usually the “just right” spot for intensive reading.
99% comprehension is about ~1 lookup every 2 paragraphs (~3 lookups per page).
This requires around ~18,000 known words.
Starts to feel like you can read smoothly but you’re probably still annoyed that
you need to use a dictionary every page.
99.9% comprehension is about ~1 lookup every 3 pages.
This requires around ~24,000 known words.
I would call this “extensive reading”. You can enjoy the story and only need to
pull out the dictionary (Yomichan) occasionally.
Native level comprehension (99.99%) requires ~30,000 words.
Conclusion: increasing your vocabulary is always a good idea for improving your reading
ability.

Note: use the “xx lookups every xx often” as a benchmark for gauging whether or not you feel a
material is level appropiate or not. You might start out with a high number of lookups per page at
the beginning of a book, but they will usually decrease as you continue reading since authors
tend to reuse the same vocab throughout a book/series.

Keep immersing and mining and your understanding will improve.

90% of the battle is showing up everyday and being consistent; if you interact with the
language every day you will get fluent- it’s only a matter of getting used to the language
(time + effort invested).
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Incomprehensible Input

Does Input have to be "Comprehensible"?

Context & Comprehensible Input

Why you should immerse with native content even at an early stage:
1. Build the skill of “Tolerating Ambiguity”
a. Become comfortable with not understanding everything.
b. Avoid looking up every unknown word.
2. Build the habit of immersing
a. Most people never break into using native content because it is “too hard”.
b. This barrier will always exist and the only way to get past it is brutal force via
massive volume of immersion content and mining.
3. Forces you to have the proper attitude during immersion.
a. Focus on small victories: turn immersion into a game of how many words you can
pick out, how many sentences did you understand, etc.
4. Natural rate of speech
a. The brain has to learn to parse the sounds in real time.
b. The language isn’t dumbed down for you (no crutches).
5. Denser content
a. More exposure to the language in a shorter period of time means that you have
more potential opportunities to come across i + 1 language to easily acquire.

On Graded/Learner Material
You should try to use as much graded material as you can stomach for the easy gains.
Then, as interest wanes, prioritize using something that is compelling even if it is not as
comprehensible.
You will need to do more dictionary lookups due to the harder content.
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Use it as a stepping stone into native content during the beginner phase.
Eventually you should be using content made by natives for natives.

Focusing on visual content in the beginning can help enjoyment while you still have low
comprehension.
Listening: anime, drama, or movies w/ JP subs (audio + visual + reading)
Reading: manga (visual + reading)

Content should be engaging

Engaging with TL media should be fun; if it is boring then you should throw it out and go
immerse with something that grabs your attention.
Having fun with the language will make you more likely to do that activity more
frequently and for longer periods each time.
Enjoyment also comes from a sense of improvement/accomplishment.

Overall: the only way to become really good is by doing the real thing.
5 tips to improve your Immersion
You will never be “ready” to start interacting with native materials.
Make incomprehensible content more comprehensible by using a dictionary and mining
the material.
You should mainly focus on finding compelling content as this is what is going to keep
you engaged with the language. Ideally, something is both comprehensible and
compelling.
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Domains

Increase your rate of progress by narrowing your focus onto one area at a time.
Broad scale: same genre of tv shows, books from the same author
Small scale: a specific tv show, youtuber, book series

When you finish that specific content, move onto something that is similar in style.

The downside is that you might get bored of only immersing in one type of content.
Solution:
Have one main show/book that you are mining
Have variety for the rest of your content to keep you engaged and mitigate fatigue
Don’t feel limited to stick to a single domain if you aren’t enjoying it
As long as you keep immersing and mining you will make progress

Immerse in a mix of easier and harder content

Easy content allows you to internalize patterns as well as reduce the level of effort
required for automatic comprehension.
Harder content exposes you to new vocabulary to learn.
Prioritize using harder content first as it is more fatiguing; switch to using easier content
later in the day.

Building up your first domain will be the hardest part as you are starting from nothing.
Once you are more advanced and have a solid base of comprehension, it might only take
you 2~4 weeks to build up comfortability in a domain.
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Comprehensibility Factors

Visual Context
Listening and reading without visual context adds a layer of complexity because
everything needs to be described entirely with words.
This is why reading novels is the best thing that you can do to grow your
vocabulary.
The same is true for audiobooks and podcasts for improving your listening ability.

Narrative Predictability
Authors tend to repeat vocabulary within a series.
Familiarity with characters, tropes/cliches (the genre) increase comprehension.
Unscripted content (podcasts, variety shows, etc.) tends to be more difficult because they
don’t follow a set storyline and often jump between multiple topics quickly.

Domain Familiarity
Most domains will have specific vocabulary that isn’t really used anywhere else; this will
be an initial barrier when first getting into that field.

Regional Dialects
Differences in vocabulary, grammar, accent, and intonation makes content harder to
understand if you aren’t used to them.

Intended Audience
Infants: exaggerated visual context and extremely simple language, low language density.
Children: simple and repetitive story lines. Good for beginner learners if you can
maintain interest.
 131
Adolescents: stories are complex enough that they can hold an adult’s interest, and the
language is dense and complex enough to stretch an intermediate learner’s abilities
(Middle/High School level content).

Adults: wide use of vocabulary, complex themes and storylines. This is most normal
material that natives would watch/read/listen to.

Technical: college lectures, conference talks, and textbooks on technical subjects

(physics, chemistry, business, etc). Comprehensibility depends on your prior knowledge
of the subject as well as your language ability.

Inherent Difficulty of Various Domains

Slice of Life content tends to use everyday vocabulary and revolve around a number of
typical life experiences such as romance or school. This can be a good first choice for a
domain if you can maintain interest.
Other domains, such as Politics, Sci-Fi, Crime, Business, Medicine, Linguistics, etc., tend
to have specialized vocabulary that is only used within that domain and is more difficult.

Dubbed vs Native Content

Dubbed versions of shows tend to be simplified compared to the original.
Jokes and puns don’t translate.
Lack of cultural relevance to your target language.
Dubbed content is good for getting into your target language, but ideally you will use
native content (part of language learning is learning a culture).

Input Channels
Visual, Reading, Listening
Combining multiple forms of input makes the content easier to understand
3-channel input (easiest)
 132
TV shows w/ target language subtitles
2-channel input
Manga (visual + reading)
Visual Novels (visual + reading, also usually have some voiced lines)
TV shows w/o subtitles (visual + listening)
Reading + Listening simultaneously
Novel + Audiobook
Podcast + Transcript
1-channel input (hardest)
Pure reading: novels, non-fiction books, news/wiki articles
Pure listening: podcasts, audiobooks
 133

Reading immersion

Why you should read Novels

Novels use a wider variety of vocabulary and grammar in order to describe everything
through a written medium instead of relying on visual elements.

Reading your first novel is going to be tough no matter what and at some level you just have to
brute force it.
The more you read the easier it will get: more volume = more gains.
Try to use books in an electronic format (compared to physical books) as you will be able
to use electronic/online dictionaries to easily look up unknown words.
Physical books are better suited towards when you are at a high level of
comprehension and aren’t going to need to use a dictionary in order to understand
the story.

Fiction vs Nonfiction Books

Fiction
Tend to focus on world building: describing scenery, actions, etc.
Larger use of vocabulary, idioms, and phrases.
Mix of dialogue and descriptions
Non-fiction
Information presented in a straightforward way.
Actually learn something in your target language.
Will use domain specific vocabulary relevant to the topic of the book.
→ Read both!

Balancing listening and reading ability

Reading ability will always be easier to develop than listening comprehension
 134
However, listening requires more time to get good at due to the need to parse raw audio
and turn it into meaning in real time.
Aim for anywhere from a 50/50 to 70/30 split focusing on whatever area you want to
prioritize.

Why you can’t understand a sentence even if you know all of the words
1. Vocabulary
a. Words can have multiple meanings
i. Not aware of the different meanings
ii. Unable to determine which meaning is relevant
2. Grammar
a. A sentence is more than the sum of its parts (set phrases, idioms)
b. Unknown grammar pattern/rule
c. Relative clauses makes parsing sentences harder
3. Context
a. In what situation is the sentence being said?
b. Words being omitted if they are obvious from context and the preceding
sentences.

Mistakes will compound and will lead to a lack of understanding.

8 Ways to Read More in a Foreign Language

 135

Frequency of Words

There are generally two schools of thought:

1. Add everything you can find
2. Limit your mining to words that are below a certain frequency threshold

For Beginners,
If you haven’t finished learning core vocab such as Tango N5/N4 or Core 2k then I
wouldn’t even bother with mining: just go through the premade deck.
These words are incredibly frequent and most of what you will mine will
probably be covered in these decks anyway.

For Intermediates, let your judgement guide you:

1. Is this word relevant to my immersion?
a. You don’t need to learn useless words such as plant, fish, bird, and tree names that
you see on quizbot (this is the “rare card collector” trap).
2. Does this word appear familiar/important?
a. If you’ve seen the word before and can’t remember it then you probably want to
add a card for it.
b. This is where having frequency lists can help influence your decision: more
frequent words are more important to learn.
3. Do I need a card to learn this word or can I just learn it through immersion?
a. If a word appears so often then you may be better off looking up the definition a
couple of times instead of making a card.
4. Do I want to add a card for this word?
a. Some things you come across just really pop out and are intrinsically interesting.

There are plenty of 1T sentences out there; grab the easy and juicy looking sentences!
 136

Improving Performance

Once you reach an intermediate level and have a base level of comprehension, you will probably
want to begin conversing with native speakers and start actually using your target language for
something other than being a media junkie.
 137

Basic Output Theory

Competence: one’s unconscious model of how the language works.

Consciously, we use intuition and learned knowledge to determine what sounds correct or
not.
Increasing your competence in the language increases your potential for a high
performance level.

Performance: one’s ability to convert their competence into correct and coherent output.
Performance will always be limited by one’s competence.

Through input your brain constructs a subconscious model of how the language works: your
brain automatically converts listening and reading into pure meaning.
In order to build a strong intuition for what sounds correct or not you need to build up
your competence in comprehending the language first.

Language Activation: your brain runs your subconscious model of the language in reverse
(meaning → language) in order to express thoughts.
Practicing output helps you to turn your latent potential into actual ability.

Ultimately, when you output it should happen naturally: you should not be translating thoughts,
but rather going straight from meaning (“mentalese”) to your target language.

Comprehensible Output Hypothesis

The learner encounters gaps between their comprehension and performance through
self-correction or native feedback.
Reduce your gaps between your active and passive knowledge by paying attention to the
correct versions during your immersion.
 138

Areas of Output

1. Having natural thoughts in the language

a. Choice of vocabulary
b. Syntax
i. Using correct grammar
ii. Natural wording for ideas
c. Register
i. Degree of politeness (Honorifics)
ii. Spoken vs Literary language (formality)
d. Typical thoughts that native speakers have
e. Natural mannerisms of native speakers

2. Physically producing the language

a. Speaking with natural pronunciation
i. Correct phonemes
ii. Stress Accent/Pitch Accent
iii. Intonation patterns
iv. Rhythm
1. Speaking at a natural pace
2. Naturally using pauses and filler words
b. Writing characters by hand (Chinese/Japanese)
 139

Is Early Output Bad?

Is early output a sin?

Output Anxiety and The Biggest Mistake People Make Learning Japanese
Don’t avoid speaking forever; interacting with others is necessary to improve your
speaking ability.

My opinion: it’s honestly fine to start speaking/writing whenever you want.

It is going to be more efficient to focus on comprehension first, but even if you start
outputting at a beginner stage it’s fine as long as input is still the majority of your
language learning routine.
At a more advanced level, you may want to prioritize output and do lots of speaking
practice and supplemental exercises.

Why is it useful to focus on comprehension first and go through a silent period?

1. Outputting at the very beginning is largely a waste of time since you’re mainly translating
thoughts from your NL into your TL when trying to speak
2. Focusing exclusively on building a base level of comprehension in the language with
immersion and Anki leads to faster results than trying to get better at too many things all
at the same time.

Why should you output?

1. Output is good motivation as you get to interact with Natives
2. You need to practice speaking if you want to improve your speaking ability to its
maximum potential.
3. Receive corrections on mistakes that you make.
 140
a. These deficiencies indicate that there is a gap between your comprehension and
your performance; you haven’t fully acquired that aspect of the language.
 141

Adopting a Language Learning Parent

Using a parent narrows your target from sounding like “native” to sounding like a specific
person. A smaller target means that you have a much better basis to judge your output against.

Picking a Language Parent

You should choose someone that you want to sound like.
This person should be the same gender as you.
This person should be close to you in age.
They should speak the dialect that you want to speak.
They should have an abundance of unscripted content available for listening.

YouTube Challenge!
An easy way to find a language parent is to pick one YouTuber you like and to watch
every video they have made.
This should be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of hours of content.
 142

Improving Speaking Ability

Once you are able to have normal conversations with native speakers, you have enough mental
bandwidth available to start paying attention to the more subtle aspects of native speech.

Pronunciation
Phonemes: the sounds that exist in the language
Accent: where the emphasis is placed within a word.
Stress Accent: hard vs soft
Pitch Accent: high vs low
Some languages are tonal (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, etc.)
Sentence level Factors
Rhythm (speed of speaking, using fillers, connecting ideas together)
Intonation patterns
Often words get smashed together in many different ways when spoken quickly.
Assimilation: 2 sounds blend together (contract) to form a new one
Elision: sounds get removed
Intrusion: sound gets inserted between two words

What ideas do natives express commonly?

In order to sound natural you need to express ideas that Japanese people are likely to say.
What are the standard behaviors and reactions that natives usually have in various
specific social contexts?
Body language
相槌

How do they phrase those ideas?

Similar ideas may exist but be expressed differently; pay attention to the specific wording
that is used.
What register of politeness is being used?（尊敬語・謙譲語・丁寧語・タメ口）
What level of formality is being used?（常体・敬体など）
What style is being used? (Letters, E-mails, texts, essays, etc. have different styles)
役割語
What filler words are being used?
How do native speakers tend to connect ideas together? （接続詞）
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Output Troubleshooting

Are you consistently speaking with native speakers for at least ~5 hours per week?

Are you consistently doing both chorusing/shadowing and pitch focused reading for at least
~20-30 minutes every day?

Are you consistently immersing (listening/reading) for at least 15 hours per week?

Are you consistently learning at least 5 new cards per day in Anki?

If your answer is no to any of the above, then I found your problem…

Partially Available Language

Incomplete Idea: a portion of an idea pops into your head, but you can’t express the entire
idea.

Feeling of Uncertainty: you are able to express an idea but are not confident in the
delivery.

Conflicting Ideas: multiple ideas pop into your head and you don’t know which one is
correct.

→ Look for confirmation from a native speaker and pay attention for the correct version
during immersion.

Cross Linguistic Influence

You word something in a way that is technically correct, but native speakers wouldn’t say
it like that. This generally happens when translating thoughts.

→ Focus on mimicking a native speaker.

What type of thoughts/ideas do native speakers tend to have?
What would a native speaker typically say in this situation?

On Native Corrections
 144
Native speakers won’t always correct you; sometimes they just want to keep the
conversation flowing.
Getting a tutor can be a good option since you are literally paying them to correct
you.
Native speakers can usually tell you when you’re wrong, and tell you how to make it
right, but they can almost never explain why you’re wrong.
Just notice the type of mistake that they point out and look out for the correct
version in your immersion.
 145

Scientific Principles

This section is largely inspired by the book, "Scientific Principles of Hypertrophy Training",
from Renaissance Periodization and will draw parallels between Weightlifting and Language
Learning, helping to optimize your language learning routine.

This section is mainly for advanced learners: brutal force via lots of volume of comprehensible
input + Anki works really well for beginners and intermediates. However, there are ways that we
can improve upon that algorithm, and learners of all levels can benefit from the principles,
strategies, and techniques discussed in this section (it just might be a bit of a long read).

Note: If you are interested in getting jacked, the book linked above, and the following playlists
below are amazing resources.
Strength Made Simple
Hypertrophy Made Simple
Injury Prevention Made Simple
Healthy Eating Made Simple
Fat Loss Made Simple
Muscle Gain Made Simple
Breaking Through Strength Plateaus
Hypertrophy Guides per Muscle Group
Advanced Hypertrophy Concepts and Tools (videos complementing the book)
 146

Specificity

The first, and most important principle is that of Specificity, which states that your training
should directly support your goals or potentiate areas that are related to them.
In language learning, there are four main pillars of performance that we care about:
listening, reading, speaking, and writing ability.

Other aspects that are related to these areas of ability could include vocabulary, grammar,
pronunciation, etc.

There are two important components of the Specificity Principle: Direct Adaptation and Training
Modality Compatibility.

Direct Adaptation is the idea that repeated, sequential stimulus is necessary for improvement.
These adaptations compound over time and lead to long-term gains in ability.
This tells us that there should be consistency in our training for a relatively long period of
time: constantly switching up your routine leads to slower progress and less overall gains.

This is similar to the idea of "Domains" where you focus on understanding one
area/genre of the language before moving onto another area. Doing these sorts of "Deep
Dives" into various areas in your target language help you to build a stronger level of
comprehension in a quicker amount of time.

This is a more efficient process than bouncing around between multiple domains while
trying to build up a base level of comprehension in your target language. Of course you
can still do this (and some amount of variation is necessary to manage fatigue and
motivation), but focusing the vast majority of your efforts on one area at a time is going
to be the quickest way to improve.

Training Modality Compatibility describes the idea that all of the components of your training
should support your goal.
There is only a finite amount of resources available (time in a day) and training for
mutually conflicting goals is going to divert your efforts, leading to less than optimal
gains.

In language learning, this would be like trying to learn 2 languages at the same time: time
spent on one language takes away from the other. Ultimately, you will get less gains in
either language than if you were to focus all of your time on only one of them.
 147

Another issue is that different training modalities cause interference: in language learning
this is largely a problem when learning similar languages at the same time (eg. Spanish
and Portuguese), where you might end up confusing the two languages. Thus, not only
are you progressing at a slower rate, but you also are not as efficient in the acquisition of
your target language(s).

Basically this principle helps us to realize that we should only focus on learning one
language at a time in order to make optimal gains in that language. Then once you reach a
level of ability that satisfies your goals with that language, you could start learning a third
language while keeping the original one on maintenance mode.

Another example of Training Modality Compatibility would be that the different abilities
in language learning have inherently different levels of support/interference between each
other; Listening and Reading pair quite well for boosting your comprehension (and even
reinforce each other to some extent), but doing lots of Speaking practice does not directly
help improve your understanding of the language (although it can point out deficiencies
in your knowledge/acquisition).

Considering that comprehension is also a limiting factor for your speaking performance,
this is a good reason for beginner language learners to primarily focus on boosting their
comprehension rather than trying to increase all of their language skills at the same time.
This allows for faster progress overall by focusing on only one goal at a time.

The most important thing to consider with Specificity are the actual goals that you have in
language learning: you can't design a specific training program to work towards those goals if
they aren't well defined.
Most language learners have the vague goal of "Conversational fluency", which is really
not a good goal at all because it is not quantifiable, easily tracked, and it takes a long time
to reach such a goal. "Improve my comprehension" also isn't a good goal (again for the
same reasons mentioned above), even though it is a large portion of what we devote our
time to as language learners.

What we need to do is break these goals down into something that is specific, trackable,
and has concrete actions that can be taken to improve our abilities.
For example, "improving comprehension" is largely correlated with "time spent
listening", "time spent reading", and "known vocabulary". Setting a goal for each of these
 148
categories is going to be the best way for us to measure our progress in "improving our
comprehension".

An example would be to aim for "50 hours of active listening this month". This can then
be broken down into, "I need to listen for an average of 100 minutes per day". This is a
better goal, but you can improve it even further by specifying what type of content you
are going to listen to: "I am going to listen to 20 hours of audiobooks, 15 hours of
podcasts, and 15 hours of anime this month". Again, this can then be broken down into a
daily action plan that can easily be tracked with a spreadsheet to see if you are hitting the
mark. Even further, you could specify what podcast you are going to listen to for 15
hours of this month (if there is a specific one that you are struggling with and want to
improve). Remember that sticking to similar content (ie. one podcast) is going to help
you improve much faster rather than bouncing between multiple podcasts.

You can then set similar goals for reading ("I want to read 20 hours of novels from xx
author/series, 10 hours of news articles from NHK relating to economics, etc.") and
vocabulary (such as a number of new anki cards per day) and then you have a much
better set of goals that support the overall aim of "improving your comprehension".

Just to drill in the point, let's do an example of goal setting for "improving my
pronunciation/accent in my target language" (which is a quite vague goal, but a common
thing that advanced language learners often strive for). A much better goal is going to
detail how you are going to achieve this and is going to be quantifiable.

One example could be, "I am going to shadow xx person's videos for 20 minutes each
day" (I will note that chorusing is a much better exercise for fixing pronunciation/accent
than shadowing due to its specificity and repetitive nature).

Another example could be, "I am going to do 30 minutes a day of pitch-accent focused
reading of xx LN series with a native listening to and correcting me on my pronunciation
mistakes". You could then note down the words that you are corrected on and make sure
to review the correct pronunciation/accent of them at the end of the session (or even put
them in the SRS if so inclined).

Afinal example could be, “I am going to watch 1 video per day of Dogen’s accent series”.
While not directly related to improving your accent, it will help you by giving you
fundamental knowledge about accent and pronunciation. This could be useful if you
didn’t know how verb conjugations affect the accent of the base word.
 149

The final component of specificity is prioritization.

You should focus on the things that are going to improve your ability the most in relation
to your goal. This means that you should do these activities first, while you are mentally
fresh!

If your goal is mainly focused on improving your reading ability, then the first language
learning activity you should be doing in the day is reading.

This also means that you should prioritize harder content over easier content: harder
content is going to require more mental resources and doing it while fresh means that you
can give maximum effort. The easier activities are "easier" to do and thus can be done in
a more fatigued state. An example of harder material for reading would be "novels", and
then once you hit your daily goal with that, you could move onto reading "manga" for
additional volume/time and personal enjoyment.

It's important to note that you can't improve everything at once (unless you're a beginner
or intermediate): it's going to be best to work on one area at a time while maintaining
other areas, and then switching out your priorities every so often to stay relatively
balanced overall (The concept of "Periodization").
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Overload

The second most important principle is that of Overload. This is the idea that your training
should be challenging enough in order to induce adaptations. There are two types of overload
that we are going to concern ourselves with: acute, and progressive.

Acute Overload is the idea that any individual training session should provide enough stimulus
(reaching/surpassing some "minimum threshold") in order to elicit adaptations to improve our
performance/ability.
In language learning this isn't as clear cut as weight lifting: "light" training (using easy
material below your level) helps to improve your automaticity of comprehension (how
fast you understand something), while "heavy" training (hard/difficult material) helps to
push your cutting edge of comprehension forward by exposing you to new vocabulary,
grammar and sentence patterns.

However, if something is too easy then there are limited gains to be made from that
material (and it becomes more of consuming content for entertainment, which is not bad
in its own right, but doesn't directly support improvement). On the contrary, if the
material is too difficult and beyond your reach then you will lose motivation to "work"
(grind) your way through it due to a lack of comprehension or due to the intensity of
effort required to do so.

Ideally, we would find material that is at a level of difficulty that would be "just right" for
our current level. This is great in theory, but unfortunately native material doesn't work
like this in the real world. At the beginning stage, native material is going to be too
difficult to understand what's going on due to the large amount of vocabulary required to
understand it (which you are severely lacking at the present time). On the other hand,
graded material isn't quite "eye-opening" and interesting to immerse with even though it
is at an appropiate level for our current language abilities.

Thus, we end up with a practical conundrum of having to choose between material that is
either more interesting, but too difficult, or something that is not interesting but at the
right level for our current abilities. How you fix this problem is really quite up to you and
how much you can tolerate immersing in content that might not be as interesting as
watching your favorite anime.
 151
Realistically, you should utilize both forms of content (and ideally the content is at your
level + intrinsically interesting), trying to do as much "level appropiate" content as you
can stomach in order to maximize language gains, and then utilize the harder, but more
interesting native material to stay mentally engaged and motivated to learn the language.

One thing to note with Acute Overload is that the "minimum threshold" required to elicit
adaptations grows over time as you become better at the language. Just as you become
stronger in the gym and need to increase the weight on the bar to continue getting
stronger, you will continually need to immerse in gradually harder material for longer
periods of time, more frequently, etc. in order to continue growing your language abilities
and vocabulary size (which is by far the best predictor of comprehension level). This
naturally leads us to our second principle: progressive overload.

Progressive Overload is the idea just stated: training should get progressively more difficult in
order for you to continue making improvement.
There are a couple of ways to make your language learning more difficult: load, volume,
frequency, duration of individual sessions, and rate of perceived exertion.

Before we analyze each of those factors, first, let's analyze the S-Curve relationship
between stimulus and growth.

For a stimulus below the "stimulus threshold", no/minimal growth occurs.

For stimuli surpassing the "stimulus

threshold", increases in growth
occur as the amount of stimulus is
increased.

Eventually, the amount of increase

in ability obtained per increase in
stimulus slows down and flattens
out. This is "chasing diminishing
returns" and indicates that there is an optimal amount of stimulus that gives us the
best gains for our use of time (of course continuing to chase diminishing returns
would give us the best absolute increase in ability, it just takes exponentially more
time).
 152
Thus one could smartly conclude that language learning full time (24/7) would
lead to the most (absolute) gains: this would be correct if you ignored fatigue
(mental burn out) and actually had the free time required per day to achieve this
feat (which most people don't have).

Now let's actually analyze the various components that contribute to the overall Raw
Stimulus Magnitude (RSM).
In bodybuilding, Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) is exactly as the name implies:
it is a relative measure of how hard you think that you worked for a given set.
Effectively, RPE sets boundaries for tension (load/weight, ie. difficulty)
and volume in order to create the "effective stimulus range" (the region
between the "stimulus threshold" and the point where maximal language
gains are made per stimulus).

As stated previously, training with a stimulus less

than the "stimulus threshold" results in no gains in
ability.

Beyond the effective stimulus range, increasing the

stimulus results in incrementally less growth
("chasing diminishing returns"), and eventually no
growth ("junk volume").

In weightlifting, the five reps closest to failure

produce the most hypertrophy (muscle growth) and
are thus the boundary for an "effective stimulus". If
a set is not within five reps to muscular failure then you are missing out on
a large amount of potential gains (and basically wasting your time).

In terms of language learning, you need to have a certain amount of

intensity and volume in order to have an effective stimulus: however, this
isn't a set number, but rather a range of possible intensities and volumes.

Tension, in weightlifting, is the amount of load that you put onto the bar, and is
often expressed as a relative percentage of your 1 rep maximum (1RM).
In weightlifting, various loads (weights) can be utilized in order to achieve
an effective stimulus if relative effort is taken into account. For example, a
set using 30% of one's 1RM, and a set using 85% of one's 1RM have
 153
nearly identical effects in causing muscular hypertrophy if both sets are
taken close to failure (0 to 5 reps away from muscular failure). Of course,
the amount of reps (required volume) that one does with a lighter weight is
going to be much higher than one with a heavier weight in order to
achieve the same level of relative effort. This shows that tension and
volume are roughly inversely proportional and tend to compensate for
each other in terms of creating an effective stimulus.

For language learning this would equate to using easier material for longer
periods of time versus using harder material for shorter periods of time
(there are slight problems with this simple model due to the different
things you would learn/acquire with each type of material, but it is a good
approximation).

If one were looking for maximum efficiency in terms of gains per time
spent then one could conclude that they should only use difficult/hard
material. The problem with this is the mental effort (intensity) required to
sustain such an approach. Using hard material is hard work (as the name
suggests) and there probably exists a limit for how much one can
withstand this type of learning. Additionally, you would miss out on easy
gains that come from using material that you already understand a large
percentage of (and the entertainment value of using such material).
Realistically it's going to be best to utilize a mix of various difficulties of
material in order to maximize our gains (the exact ratio will be determined
by the individual and how much they can take of each difficulty).

Volume is going to be the amount of language learning done in a set period of

time (day/week/month).
For language learning, volume is most often going to be broken down into
"time spent listening", "time spent reading", "time spent speaking", and
"time spent studying (doing the SRS)".

Volume is going to be best tracked with some type of spreadsheet so that

you can quantifiably track and compare the amount and type of language
learning you do on a weekly/monthly basis.

There are a couple of "Volume Landmarks" that are going to be important

so let's go over a couple of definitions.
 154
Maintenance Volume (MV): the minimum volume
needed to maintain your current abilities.
Training less than MV will result in a decrease in
language ability (something we would like to
avoid).

Minimum Effective Volume (MEV): the minimum

volume needed to start seeing improvement in
language ability.
One should note that training in a volume
somewhere between MV and MEV leads to no net
gains in language ability. Thus we want to train at
least MEV, ideally more.

Maximum Adaptive Volume (MAV): the amount of

volume for which we receive maximum gains in
our language ability per unit of time.
Training beyond MAV continues to produce gains
in language ability, albeit at a decreased rate of
effectiveness and with an exponential increase in
amount of time required and fatigue produced.

Maximal Recoverable Volume (MRV): the absolute maximum

amount of volume that can be performed before no more growth in
ability is expected.
Training beyond MRV produces no additional gains in
language ability, and only increases fatigue (this is called
"Junk Volume").

Important to note is that all potential language gains result from

training between MEV and MRV w/ sufficiently challenging
material (in the "effective stimulus range").

In weightlifting it is common to begin a block of training at MEV

and progress towards MRV at the end of the cycle (increasing
Relative Effort each week) before taking a "deload week" in order
to reduce fatigue and potentiate further muscle growth in the next
training block.
 155

In language learning, fatigue is much less of an issue (albeit

burnout does still occasionally occur and warrants strategies to
manage it) than it is in weightlifting, implying that training closer
to MAV/MRV is going to lead to faster results if you have the time
to do so (time per day is going to be the largest limiting factor for
growth in language ability that most people experience).

Volume vs Load
Roughly, volume and load are inversely proportional and largely
compensate for each other.

In language learning, at the extreme ends of load percentages (extremely

easy vs extremely hard) this is going to break down slightly due to the
different type of things you are learning with each type of material: hard
content is going to be mined for learning new vocabulary, while
reading/listening to easy content focuses more on fluidity and
automaticity.

However, this inverse proportionality gives us a nice conclusion that we

can practically use in our language learning: given that both are in the
effective stimulus range, moderately easy content with more volume, and
moderately hard content with less volume are going to provide a roughly
equal stimulus. This means that there is no need to utilize extremely
difficult content in order to make progress. We can utilize content slightly
below, at, or above our current level in order to make sufficient progress in
language ability.

You could use a mix of extremely easy and extremely hard content if you
desired, but it is not necessary and may lead to issues with motivation (this
choice also depends upon availability of resources/content, another
limiting factor in language learning).

Frequency
Realistically, for language learning, frequency (interacting with the
language) should be on a daily basis in order to make consistent progress.
 156
Another interesting utilization of frequency, mentioned by Khatzumoto in
his famous blog, would be the frequency of a certain language activity
done during the day (he even proclaimed a "critical frequency hypothesis",
although it suffers from some bad effects mentioned in the section on
SRA).

For example, let's say that you have a goal of reading 2 hours of novels
every day. Of course, you could just do one giant 2 hour session of
reading, but this takes a big chunk of free time as well as the mental
strength required to read for such a long duration in one sitting. Instead,
you could break up this daily goal into 4 sessions of 30 minutes each, 3
sessions of 40 minutes each, or 2 sessions of 60 minutes each and do
multiple "mini-sessions" throughout the day (this is essentially the concept
of "time-boxing").

You obtain the same overall volume in the day, but this method seems
much more "chunkable" and accomplishable due to the time constraints of
our daily lives.

As the name implies, Progressive Overload needs to continually get more challenging in
order to continue to provide an effective stimulus for growth. There are a couple of ways
to go about doing this:
1. Increase amount of tension (difficulty of content).
2. Increase volume (amount of time spent).
3. Some combination of the above.

How we go about performing these increases is going to tie in with the concept with
Periodization (principle 6).
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Fatigue Management

Our third principle is that of fatigue management: staying fresh and motivated to learn a
language (not burning out) by utilizing various strategies to prevent and alleviate fatigue
resulting from progressive overloading.

It's important to note that fatigue is a necessary component of proper training since the training
must be disruptive enough to continually provide enough stimulus to force adaptation.
The key is to monitor, prevent, and alleviate fatigue as necessary so that you can continue
to push yourself and make consistent progress.

Fatigue is a much bigger issue in weightlifting, due to the physical nature of the sport, but
it still plays a role in language learning as well (albeit a reduced one).

In weightlifting there are 3 main types of fatigue: local, systemic, and axial (some of these are
physical in nature and don't really apply to language learning).
Local Fatigue is present in the muscles that were targeted in training.
This type of fatigue does not generally affect the other muscles that were not
targeted in training (training chest will not impact your legs).

An effective session leaves you with some amount of local fatigue (ranging from
a slight perturbation in the area to Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)
lasting up to a week).

This type of fatigue is usually physical in nature, and thus isn't too important for
language learning.

However, after an intense session of language learning, you may notice what I call
"brain fatigue" from using your non-native language for extended periods of time.

Systemic Fatigue impacts the entire body and is the sum of all physical and psychological
stressors.
A lack of motivation/desire to train is indicative of rising systemic fatigue.

Continued accumulation of systemic fatigue results in depressive thoughts and

degraded immune system function.
 158
This is the main type of fatigue that we are going to be dealing with in language
learning.

Axial Fatigue is a local fatigue in the spinal erectors, but due to the nature of the spine
(its job of supporting loads throughout the body in various positions), often has effects
acting a lot like systemic fatigue.
Again, due to the physical nature of this type of fatigue, we can ignore it for
language learning.

Just make sure to maintain good posture while immersing!

Effects of Fatigue on Adaptations to Stimuli

Fatigue prevents maximal stimulus: as you train you begin to tire out (systemic fatigue
accumulates), and you lose the ability to push yourself.
This is the reason for prioritization of the hardest activities that most directly
support your goals.

Accumulation of fatigue also has hormonal effects such as an increase in cortisol and a
decrease in testosterone.

The most serious effect of fatigue is injury and illness, although injury from language
learning is highly unlikely.

Detecting Fatigue
Perceived Effort
Psychologically draining (harder) tasks accumulate fatigue more rapidly.

This does not mean that a large perceived effort is bad, but it should be worth the
trade-off (a large stimulus that forces adaptations).

Unused Performance
By tracking the performance of other activities after the activity in question, you
can measure how systemically fatiguing an activity is.

If you feel tired and unable to focus on the next activity (under-performing), then
the first one created a large amount of systemic fatigue.
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Stimulus to Fatigue Ratio (SFR) is exactly as the name suggests: it is the ratio between the
benefit and fatigue that an exercise brings.
SFR is a quantifiable score if you have a measure to quantify stimulus and fatigue.

A higher SFR means that you get more stimulus for a given fatigue. In a mathematical
formula, it is simple division: SFR = stimulus/fatigue.

SFR can be increased by increasing the amount of stimulus, or by decreasing the amount
of fatigue for a given stimulus. Unfortunately, increasing the stimulus of an activity
usually also increases the fatigue that it brings.

Calculating Stimulus
In weight-lifting you can quantify the stimulus that an exercise brings by
assigning values to the mind-muscle connection that you have during the exercise,
the pump that the exercise brings, and the amount of muscular disruption you
experience. None of these stimuli really apply to language learning, so we need to
come up with our own way to quantify the stimulus for language learning.

There are a bunch of possible ways that you could do this, but a couple reasonable
stimuli could be the following: density of language, amount of new words, and
duration of time.

Density of Language is the amount of language that you interact with in a given
time.
If you have the ability to do so, the most accurate way to track this is the
number of characters you come across per minute.
1: 100~150 characters/min (6~9k characters/hour)
2: 150-200 characters/min (9~12k characters/hour)
3: 200-250 characters/min (12~15k characters/hour)
4: 250~300 characters/min (15~18k characters/hour)
5: 300~350 characters/min (18~21k characters/hour)
… (you can use whatever ranges you find appropiate)

Naturally, more dense content provides you with more exposure to the
language and is thus a good measure of how effective a session could
possibly be. For example, reading novels is going to be more challenging
than reading manga (on average).
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If you are unable to track the amount of characters that you read (or if
using listening material), you could assign a random point system to
certain types of media such as the following. Since this is an arbitrary
decision, the important thing is that you pick a system that works for you
and then you stick with it.
1: Manga, Easy Anime (not very dense content)
2: News Articles, more difficult anime, YouTube Videos
(moderately dense content)
3: Novels/LNs/VNs, Audiobooks, Podcasts (very dense content)

The amount of new words in the content is easily quantifiable by the amount of
new Anki cards that you mined from said immersion material. Again, the
distinctions here are relative based on your level, so pick ranges that make sense
for you.
1: 0-5 new cards created per hour (easy difficulty)
2: 5-10 new cards created per hour (moderate difficulty)
3: 10-20 new cards created per hour (hard difficulty)

Duration of time is very simple: it's how long you did the activity in question (in
minutes) in one sitting. Again, you should create a point system and stay
consistent with it based upon your own personal levels of endurance.
1: 30 minutes
2: 60 minutes
3: 90 minutes
4: 120 minutes

Adding up the score for these three factors would give you a quantifiable score for
the "stimulus" that you achieved in one language learning activity/session as well
as provides clear methods for how to improve the stimulus (use harder material,
and immerse for longer periods of time).

Calculating Fatigue is going to be based upon the two areas discussed above.
Perceived Effort
0: Training felt very easy and hardly taxing
1: Put effort into the training, but felt recovered by the end of the day
2: Put a large effort into training and felt mentally drained for the rest of
the day
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3: Put an all-out effort into training and felt mentally drained for multiple
days

Unused Performance
0: Performance on subsequent activities was better than expected
1: Performance on subsequent activities was as expected
2: Performance on subsequent activities was worse than expected
3: Performance on subsequent activities was largely deteriorated

SFR and Volume/Load

Note that stimulus increases linearly while fatigue increases exponentially.

One could note that SFR is maximized at low training

volumes (0 training volume would give infinite SFR).
However, this is not a practical conclusion to use since at
low volumes there is not enough stimulus to cause
improvements in ability.

At MAV, absolute growth per stimulus is maximized, but

fatigue is also starting to rise. This means that as you
advance and become better, you obtain your best relative
SFRs while training harder (closer to failure) and with
more volume/frequency.

Practically, we can ask the following questions to help

guide ourselves in progressing.
1. Is the current stimulus sufficient to cause (close to)
maximal gains for time investment?

2. Is the current session so fatiguing that it prevents

planned progress?

Ideally we get a "yes" to the first question and a "no" to

the second question.
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Strategies for Preventing Fatigue
1. Training within Volume Landmarks
Training close to/beyond MRV repeatedly creates excessive fatigue and can
shorten the amount of weeks you are able to progressively overload your training
before needing to deload in order to alleviate fatigue.

If you have under-performed for multiple days in a row, then you have likely hit
MRV.

Ideally, you should program the training block (mesocycle) so that the last week
of training is at or beyond MRV (since you will have ample recovery time during
the deload week), and the previous weeks build up to that volume.

2. Microcycle Pulsatily (fancy words for saying to prioritize things properly and utilize
hard and easy content effectively)
The first component of this is prioritization of activities
(reading/listening/speaking/studying). Since systemic fatigue is generated by the
first activity, all subsequent activities will be performed in a fatigued state:
program the most important activity to your goal first.

The second component of this is to prioritize harder content first in the day/week.
If your schedule is such that you have some days where you can do a lot of
language learning, and some where you can't do as much, then utilize this
to your advantage and do a lot of the harder activity on the days when you
have more time.

This naturally makes the days where you have less time a bit less mentally
fatiguing.

For language learning, if you have the ability to go as hard as possible on

some days, and it won't negatively impact your mental fatigue for the
coming days, then it is advisable to do so. Go as hard as you can sustain
for a long period of time, but don't be disheartened if some days are
naturally lighter than others.

Strategies for Alleviating Fatigue

1. Rest days are an entire day taken off of training to allow proper recovery of the
targeted muscles and central nervous system.
 163
Rest days are often used in weightlifting (usually 1~3 days per week), but should
not be used as frequently in language learning due to the lack of the physical
nature of the activity.

Use rest days sparingly, when you feel that you really need an entire day off. Most
times it will be better to perform a Recovery Day instead.

2. Recovery Days are where you cut the volume/difficulty (or both) of your training
session in order to maintain your current ability.
Recovery days are largely used in an autoregulatory manner (ie. when you feel
that you need them).

An example of when you would use a recovery day is the following: you are
supposed to have a couple more weeks of training, but performance is dropping
early on in the training block (or mental fatigue is high).

You still train as planned on this day, but at a reduced load/volume. This session
provides enough stimulus to conserve your current ability, but doesn't provide
enough for growth, thus eliminating excess fatigue.

This strategy allows you to finish your training block and not have to deload early
or take extra rest days, destroying potential progress.

There are two main ways to perform a Recovery Day:

1. Cut total volume (time) in half but maintain the normal difficulty.
2. Cut total volume (time) and difficulty in half.

3. A Deload Week is a full week of recovery days.

Deload weeks are usually performed at the end of a training block in order to fully
recover from the previous weeks of accumulated stimulus/fatigue, and help to
potentiate gains in the next training block.

A deload week is usually necessary if you have required multiple unplanned

recovery sessions in the last two weeks or if you have an illness with fever.

How to deload: cut volume in half and maintain difficulty in the first half of the
week. In the later half of the week, decrease the difficulty as well.
 164
4. An Active Rest Period is an extended period of time of minimal to no training.
This is usually done once per year for about 2~4 weeks, preferably during a
holiday or vacation period where it would be difficult to train anyways.

For longer periods of active rest (closer to ~4 weeks), perform a deload week,
with the consecutive weeks completely off.

For shorter periods of active rest (closer to ~2 weeks), perform a normal deload
week, with the second week completely off. This is really only 1 week of not
training if placed after a deload, instead of 2 weeks completely off, thus
minimizing loss in language ability.

With regards to Anki, even while utilizing these rest strategies, you will probably want to
maintain doing your reviews each day and instead limit the amount of new cards that you
learn (even lowering it to 0), since catching back up on an entire week (or weeks) worth
of reviews is not going to be a fun experience.

Finally, remember that fatigue masks performance.

You will not feel yourself improving in the short term and usually you will not see big
improvements during the training block, but rather after the deload week at the beginning
of the next accumulation phase.

On a practical scale, you might only feel improvements on a monthly basis (for
beginners) or a multi month timescale for people who are more advanced.
 165

SRA

The Stimulus, Recovery, Adaptation (SRA) curve is a concept in weightlifting that dictates
training frequency per muscle group per week and highlights the problems with extremely low or
extremely high training frequencies.
The SRA curve is U-shaped, meaning that after an effective stimulus, performance is
temporarily decreased due to fatigue, but after sufficient recovery and growth, returns to a
level above the pre-session level.

Optimizing the SRA curve would mean that we obtain maximal growth out of a training
session while minimizing the time of recovery.

Idealized recovery-adaptation is when growth and recovery finish at the same time, with
training following immediately after. In reality, recovery usually takes slightly longer
than adaptation does, and limits how much we can train (training should still begin after
recovery has finished).

Training before recovery has finished (or even before growth adaptations have finished),
leads to junk volume: you are causing excess fatigue for no additional gain.

Let's look at the relationship between the SRA Curve and our Volume Landmarks.
 166
Thus we can see that the hardest training (at MRV) produces the best possible results, and
the most fatigue. Since fatigue for language learning is not physical in nature, it makes
sense to train as much as possible if you are able to sustain those efforts for long periods
of time. If not, then just train somewhere between MEV and MRV and you will continue
to make gains.

Let's analyze the problems with extremely low frequency.

1. Lack of stimulus.
Learning a language only one day out of the week usually does not provide
enough stimulus for your brain to acquire the language.

Depending on the language we are learning and how fast we are wanting to make
progress, we probably want to spend anywhere from 10 to 40 hours a week
learning the language on average (with most of this being input). Doing only 2
hours a day on a random Sunday is simply not enough.

2. Alternatively, training only once per week might provide too much stimulus if you try
to pack an entire week's worth of volume into a single day.
While doing 14 hours of language learning in a single day sounds like a really
cool idea, it is not sustainable (nor would I say that it is conducive to your social
life, work life, physical or mental health).

There are times and periods where doing full time language learning makes sense
if you are really wanting to boost your progress in just a couple months, but this is
simply not feasible or sustainable for most people.

One thing to note is that if you do this much volume in a single day, you will
reach a point where fatigue is so high that the additional hours spent learning your
target language are highly inefficient (low SFR) and you would probably be better
served just calling it a day, preventing additional fatigue.
I tend to find that this point is somewhere between 5 and 8 hours on a
given day for me, depending on the type of activity I am doing (speaking
and reading are more fatiguing than listening for me) and the difficulty of
immersion material.

Next up, let's analyze two important findings regarding training frequency.
1. When equated for volume, higher frequency training tends to be better, with each
additional increase in frequency providing incrementally less gains.
 167
This means that "timeboxing" your daily volume into multiple smaller sessions is
actually more effective than doing one giant power session. Breaking up your
daily volume into 2-4 sessions is probably best.
A simple method would be to do a morning and night session (possibly adding in
something around lunch time/the afternoon if you have the spare time).

2. Higher frequency training supports higher MRVs.

This means that adding more daily sessions will actually give you a higher
tolerance for a larger total daily volume.

Not only is higher frequency training more efficient, it allows you to do more
training!

Theoretically you could break up your daily volume into 10 different mini-sessions (not that you
would want to), let's analyze some of the issues with extremely high frequency training.
1. Limited stimulus per each mini-session.
For a given amount of volume, using such a high amount of training sessions per
day would mean that each session has a lower amount of stimulus, possibly not
passing the "effective stimulus threshold".

This is largely an inefficient use of time, adding junk volume while producing
little growth in ability.

2. Need to "warm-up" each mini-session.

Oftentimes, it takes a bit to get into the groove of an activity: you don't usually
perform best straight out of the gate.

The more sessions you do per day, the more times you have to get "back into the
groove" and the worse your warm up to work ratio is.

Doing just a couple of sessions per day would mean that you spend less time
warming up, and more time actually working (each session is more efficient) on
improving your language ability.

3. Excessive Systemic Fatigue

More sessions per day allows you to do more overall volume for the day, which is
a good thing up until a point, but you could push it too far.
 168
If you're an animal, you could have each "mini-session" be quite long in length
(say an hour) and actually end up with quite a large amount of volume by the end
of the day (10 hours in this case), easily surpassing your MRV, leading to
suboptimal results and excessive fatigue.

Practically, most people should start out with 2 language learning sessions per day and try it out
for a training block.
If you find that you are making steady progress with this training frequency and feel
ready for each session (morning and night), then there is no need to increase the
frequency for the next training block.

If you are training at a higher frequency (3~4 sessions per day) and find that some
sessions feel worse than others (under-performing), and that your progress is
stalled/deteriorating, then it would be wise to consolidate the daily volume into less
sessions per day (and possibly utilize some of the strategies mentioned in the fatigue
management section).
 169

Variation
 170

Periodization
 171

Individuality
 172

Miscellaneous
Trinkets, odds and ends, that sort of thing.
 173

Other Guides on Language Learning

The Moe Way (Shoui’s guide to Japanese)

A straightforward guide to learning Japanese
Their discord server is good if you want free books.

Animecards
Great Technology for making learning Japanese fun and efficient

Refold (Matt vs Japan’s language learning paradigm)

Good framework on language learning theory

All Japanese All The Time (Khatzumoto’s ramblings)

Great motivational pieces given in a quirky writing style.
AJATT Notes and Quotes (My document teaching you the true essence of AJATT)

Tatsumoto (A modern approach to AJATT)

Antimoon (the original website that popularized immersion learning)

My notes from Antimoon

A year to learn Japanese (an extremely long google doc by u/SuikaCider)

r/languagelearning eBook

The Linguist (an inspirational book from Steve Kaufmann)

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Instructive Youtube channels

Matt vs Japan (Language learning, Refold, Japanese)

Dogen (Japanese Comedy, Pitch Accent/Pronunciation)

Brit. vs Japan (AJATT)

Stevijs 3 (Stat tracking, Migaku)

Aussieman (AJATTer who speaks Kansai ben at a native level)

Steve Kaufmann (polyglot)

Luca Lampariello (polyglot)

KoreKara Podcast (interviews famous AJATTers)

 175

Interviews

Matt's AJATT Journey (the greatest 3 hour rant video ever created)
One Year Later

Matt interviewing Stephen Krashen

Phantom Madman 3 Year AJATT Update

Matt vs Japan & Luca Lampariello・II・III

Matt vs Japan & Dogen・II・III

What I’ve Learned interviews Matt vs Japan

KoreKara interviews Stevi

Korekara interviews Justin Sung

Matt vs Japan Interview Nick (professional comedian in Japan)

Korekara interviews Nick

Deep Weeb Podcast interviews Doth

Deep Weeb Podcast interviews HMSLC

Deep Weeb Podcast w/ HMSLC and Doth

 176

Steve Kaufmann interviews Stephen Krashen

 177

Progress Reports

My first year of learning Japanese

Semi-monthly updates of me applying this method during my first year.
1 Year Update Post
2 Year Update Post
JLPT N1 post coming when I get my results back in 2 weeks…
Based upon leaked answers I got ~92% of questions correct which should be like
165/180.

Stevi passes the JLPT N1 137/180 after 18 months

Stevi reflecting on 3 years of Learning Japanese

Doth passes the JLPT N1 160/180 after 438 days

Jazzy gets a perfect score on the N1 in only 9 months (and then subsequently disappeared from
the universe)
 178

Other links of interest

Copy of Japanese Tracking Spreadsheet v2.0

Track your stats with this spreadsheet I made!

地理ゲーム (Learn Geography)

地名辞典 (Geography Dictionary)

四字熟語辞典オンライン・四字熟語の説明 (Yoji Dictionary)

漢字辞典オンライン・漢字ペディア (Kanji Dictionary)

対義語辞典オンライン (Synonym/Antonym Dictionary)

ことわざ辞典オンライン (Proverb Dictionary)

Langpractice Japanese (Practice recognition of large numbers)

A lot of time you just go “big number” and don’t actually register the exact number- this
site helps fix that.

資格の門 (Website that introduces varies tests/certifications)

歴史能力検定 (History Test)

日本語検定 (Japanese language test for Natives)

Subtitles
Kitsunekko Subtitles
 179
Itazuraneko Subtitles
Resynching Subtitles
 180

FAQ

What’s the difference between i+1 and 1T?

i+1 means that there is one unknown piece of information whose meaning can be inferred
through context.

1T means that there is one unknown piece of information that once looked up makes the
entire sentence comprehensible.

However, they are often used interchangeably.

How long should I actively immerse per day?

Most dedicated people in the community usually average 4-6 hours per day. I know some
hardcore people who have consistently done up to 10-12 hours per day.
While there is a time and place to go extremely hardcore on language learning, I would
recommend that you balance it with the rest of your life (work/school, family, hobbies,
exercise) and aim for at least 2 hours per day split evenly between listening/reading. If
this still seems like a lot to you, then I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the reality of
language learning, especially for learning Japanese.

How much should I passively immerse per day?

Ideally, whenever you are not actively immersing.
However, if you aren’t focusing on the audio then it has essentially no benefits.
Do it when walking, driving, cleaning, cooking, etc. and can focus on the content.
Don’t do it when you are already doing some mentally strenuous task such as
homework, studying, Anki reps, reading, etc.

Any tips for passive immersion?

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If you can, actively watch the material first.
Repeatedly listen to the same material ~2-5 times before switching it out for new
material.
Use dense material such as Podcasts, Audiobooks, and YouTube videos of people talking.
A lot of content is available on Youtube and can be downloaded with Premium.

Should I immerse while sleeping?

No: focus on having a consistent sleep schedule. Poor quality and quantity of sleep will
heavily impact your learning and recovery abilities.
This is something that Khatz said (most likely) as a hyperbole, and was meant to
demonstrate the mindset he wanted people to have.

How do I make time to immerse?

Focus on building habits.
Interact with your target language everyday.
Then start increasing the time that you spend with the language.
Reduce distractions.
Get off of facebook, instagram, tiktok, discord, reddit, etc.
Stop watching/reading stuff in English.
Convert this time into watching and reading things in your Target Language.
Wake up earlier and get in a morning session before you go to work/school.
Do passive immersion throughout the day.
Download youtube/netflix videos, audiobooks, podcasts, etc. and listen to them.

Should I focus on reading or listening more?

Do whatever interests you more.
I would personally try to maintain a balance between the two, but having a preference for
one or the other is normal (60/40 or 70/30 split).
 182
I do not recommend solely focusing on only one skill and ignoring the other; this is a
horrible idea and will leave you unbalanced in language ability and will have you missing
out on possible gains.

What are the benefits/disadvantages of focusing on reading?

Benefits:
Can take your time going through the material and can look up unknown
vocabulary and grammar easier.
Reading is a denser medium than listening so you will come across more ‘units’
of language per hour than if you were listening.
Written sources often use a wider variety of vocabulary and grammatical
structures.
Disadvantage: not hearing natives actually pronounce the language.
Solutions:
Read along while listening to the audiobook.
Listen to the audiobook after you finish reading.
Read Visual Novels which have voiced lines.
Balance time spent listening/reading.

What are the benefits/disadvantages of focusing on listening?

Benefit: Improved perception of sounds in real time
This translates into better ability to mimic/produce the language (better accent)
Disadvantage: slower progress
Listening inherently takes longer to get good at compared to reading.
Can’t easily look up new words/grammar if there aren’t subtitles
You are forced to understand material at native level speed and can’t slow down
like you can with reading
Solutions:
Listen to material with JP subs so that you can mine it.
 183
Balance time spent listening/reading.

Is music a good source of immersion?

Music is a great source of motivation and you should definitely listen to it.
However, the density of the language in music makes it a poor choice when compared to
other listening mediums for immersion.
Learning songs is fun though, so sing along with the lyrics and keep listening to your
favorite songs.

How and when should I start reading?

I would recommend that beginners start trying to read as early as they deem possible.
Watch TV shows with target language subtitles.
Start with graded readers, easy news articles, children’s stories, and manga.
Gradually progress to harder content as you get better (light novels, visual novels,
non-fiction books, novels, college level textbooks, etc.)
I didn’t start reading novels until I had about ~5000 sentence cards in Anki
(~1000 hours/6 months). I simply watched JP subtitled anime and read
News/History/Religion articles up until that point.

Should I listen with TL subs or raw?

I’m a big fan of using TL subtitles because they increase comprehensibility, allow you to
look up unknown words in a dictionary, and make it easy to create Anki cards.
However, raw listening is also important so try to balance the two listening modalities.
Another thing you could do is listen with the subs blurred out by using a tool like
Language Reactor. This is essentially raw listening but gives you the ability to look up
words when you need to in order to check comprehension.
I do not recommend listening/watching with English subs at all: this has essentially 0
benefit for language learning.
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I hate Anki and don’t want to use the SRS. Can I still learn a language?
I highly advise against doing this because of the much slower progress- mining is a core
component of the method and is the main way that active study is incorporated into the
routine.
Language learning isn’t all fun and games and involves a bit of work if you want to
improve and make serious results in a timely manner.
Solution: be disciplined. If necessary, timebox your reps throughout the day and do less
new cards per day.

How should I use textbooks (aimed at beginners)?

Don’t. Throw it in the fire and keep yourself warm while you read a book.
Most textbooks are bad and focus too much on doing drills.

Comparison of Monolingual/Bilingual Dictionaries

Monolingual
More complete understanding of the word’s nuance and usage.
Ability to circumlocute (talk your way around something when you forget a word)
Takes longer to read the definition.
Bilingual
Super fast to glance at and get an approximate meaning.
Doesn’t give a complete picture of the word’s usage.

When should I start outputting?

Whenever you want.
I didn’t start outputting until after ~3000 hours of learning Japanese, but I think that I
could have started much earlier without any downsides (besides frustration at lack of
ability).

How do I increase my reading speed?

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Read more: doing lots of reading will naturally improve your speed.
If you are still having to look up words often then focusing on reading speed is a waste of
time- focus on improving your comprehension.
If you are an advanced learner and are still limited by your speed then check this out:
Chronopolize Speed Reading Guide

How fast do Native Japanese speakers read?

Most natives read approximately at ~30,000 characters/hour.
Most natives who read aloud are at ~20,000 characters/hour.

Note: ‘speed reading’ is largely a myth and most of it is ‘skimming’, which results in a
large drop in comprehension (which is exactly what we don’t want).

Do I need to track my Immersion and Anki stats?

I find that tracking my stats helps when I have a more busy schedule because it makes
sure that I hit my daily minimums. If I have loads of free-time during a break or vacation
then I find it to be less useful because I will already be immersing 6+ hours anyway.

Benefits
Set goals and make sure that you are hitting minimums.
See your stats and monthly averages.
Compare to your previous self.

Disadvantages
Tracking adds an additional step to immersing.
Most things are not nicely tracked
How do you track watching shows with TL subtitles?
Reading, Listening, some combination of the two?
Quality of immersion wavers with your level of attention.
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What about the density of the medium?
Reading manga isn’t the same as reading LNs.
You won’t feel like immersing if it is not easy to keep track of.

Can I learn multiple languages at the same time?

No one is stopping you, but I do not think that it is a good idea.
Slower progress
Time constraint (are you able to dedicate 2+ hours to each language everyday?)
So what should you do?
Focus on one language at a time for the fastest gains.
After a couple of years (2-4), learn another language when you have a level of
ability in the first language that you are satisfied with.
Dedicate most of your time to learning your L3 now and simply keep your L2 on
maintenance (~couple hours per week).

Polyglottery and Language Learning Lust (what is also known as “L3”)

Nice pun huh? (-_-)
On your journey of learning Japanese you will probably be tempted to learn other
languages as well. At some point you will have to make a decision on whether or not you
are happy with your ability in Japanese in order to pursue this interest or if you are still
wanting more gains in Japanese.

Multilingualism Benefits
Experience different cultures and talk to a wider variety of people.
Interact with various media.
(possible) Monetary gain.
Travel.
Interest in learning other languages.
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Multilingualism Downsides
Maintenance time required for learned languages.
Attrition of language ability.
“Half-baked” language ability if you never got good in the first place.

Why did you make this guide?

I just took notes on various language learning websites/videos that I thought were
interesting and saved resources for myself.

What are your thoughts on Language Classes?

I am not a fan of them for several reasons.
1. Pacing
a. I find that traditional classes go very slow. Classes cater to the slowest person in
the class, which is a horrible learning modality for the majority of people.
b. Immersion and Self-Study allows you to go as fast as you want, study whenever
you want, and lets you learn directly from native materials that are interesting.
2. Forced Output
a. Listening to other foreigners speak Japanese is not good listening practice nor is it
beneficial to your Japanese ability.
b. Being forced to speak from an early stage is just not productive as you have no
basis in understanding actual Japanese: start speaking when you are at an
intermediate level and wanting to do so.
3. Too much English.
a. Translating Japanese ⇔ English is completely different from actually just
understanding Japanese automatically when you listen to/read it.
b. Explaining Japanese words/grammar in English just doesn’t work that well.
i. This is why you should use monolingual resources as soon as you can.

How should a good language class be structured?

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The class structure that I am going to recommend is going to be best for Japanese learners
who are at least at an intermediate level.
The teacher is there to be a conversation partner who can provide feedback to help you
improve your speaking and writing ability.
1. Classes should be one on one with a native speaker.
a. Having individual attention means that you are getting direct help on what you
need to improve the most.
b. You don’t have to listen to other foreigners attempt to speak Japanese.
2. Self-Guided.
a. Pick a research topic/book/movie/etc. that you are interested in.
b. Do your own preparation outside of class:
i. You read/watch/listen to the content on your own time.
ii. You learn the relevant vocabulary/grammar as it appears via mining and
making Anki flashcards.
iii. You write an essay/make a presentation/prepare to discuss the topic with
your teacher.
c. During class you should discuss the content you researched and receive feedback
and corrections on your writing/speaking ability.
3. Entirely in Japanese.
a. All conversations, explanations, corrections, reports, etc. should be done entirely
in Japanese so that you get used to understanding and discussing more complex
topics in the language.

Why should I not study Kanji readings?

Because it’s useless information; readings are only ever used for pronouncing words.
Even if you know the readings of a kanji you won’t be able to tell how a word is read
because there could be multiple possibilities, but there is only one correct answer.
Look at the following words that 生 is in (each one uses a different reading), you are
better off just studying words.
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生い茂る （おいしげる）
先生 （せんせい）
生き物 （いきもの）
生クリーム（なまクリーム）
生涯（しょうがい）
芝生 （しばふ）
生憎 （あいにく）
生まれる （うまれる）
生え変わる （はえかわる）
瓜生 （うりゅう）
弥生時代 （やよいじだい）
柳生 （やぎゅう）
生す（むす）
生る（なる）
壬生（みぶ）
生地（きじ）
平生（へいぜい）

Is X Textbook good?
No; don’t waste your money.
Avoid using Genki, Japanese from Zero, みんなの日本語, Nakama, Tobira, Quartet, etc.
The free alternatives I link for vocab and grammar are all you need.

Favorite Monolingual Dictionaries?

These dictionaries are the ones that I use literally 99% of the time. They are all you need.
大辞林　第三版 or 第四版
新明解国語辞典　第五版 or 第八版 (don’t use the 7th version, it sucks)
ディジタル大辞泉
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Thoughts on Pitch Accent (and Pronunciation in general)?
1. I think that everyone should at least learn the basics of pronunciation and accent.
2. It’s not that hard to improve if you follow a solid approach and have a genuine desire to
improve it.
3. Don’t worry about it when speaking in the moment: just focus on having a natural
conversation.

Should I learn Japanese Dialects?

You should learn to at least understand them.
I would focus on speaking standard (Tokyo dialect) Japanese.
Kansai-ben is so common that I would consider it a viable alternative.

Do I need to study Classical Japanese?

If you want to then go ahead but don’t feel like you have to; there isn’t much practical
benefit unless you like reading classical works.

Should I study Japanese names?

If you want to do it, then do it once you are at an advanced level.
Make cards with the name of the person/celebrity/historical figure on the front and a brief
summary of their life/importance on the back. It helps if you include an image.

Example card for learning names

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Motivation?
Why You Should Quit Learning Japanese
Don't Feel Motivated to Study Japanese?
In all seriousness, a lot of motivation issues come down to being bored with whatever
content you’re immersing in; don’t feel obligated to finish anything and go find
something new.
Read through AJATT (Sections 0.1 and 0.2) and you’ll find some inspiration.
Please visit the “Fatigue Management” section as well.

Best foreigner at Japanese?

とある中国人のむいむい
Lots of raw listening to Japanese (anime, variety shows and podcasts)
Focused on reading aloud to improve accent/intonation
Lots of speaking to Japanese people
Went to 東京アナウンス学院 (Announcer School) and received specific training
from professional voice actors, announcers, radio hosts, etc.
この中国人の日本語勉強法は異次元すぎる…【学習歴15年】
【努力】中国人が人生をかけて編み出した”日本語の勉強法”を大公開！
Conclusion: Mui-Mui is super based and figured out how to get really good at Japanese
through AJATT all on her own.
Goal: be more like Mui-Mui.

Bouncing back from a break?

After two years of intensive learning, I took an entire month off from learning or doing
anything in Japanese. I did some sporadic immersion or Anki here or there but it was not
structured, organized, or in any way consistent.
Here are my findings:
1. Listening ability didn’t drop off at all.
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a. I had zero problems throwing back on my favorite podcasts or YouTube
channels and understanding them.
b. I speculate that this is because listening ability is 100% acquired and what
you comprehend is so deeply ingrained in your brain’s ability to
understand language that you just don’t really ever lose that ability (or it
drops off very slowly).
2. Reading speed slowed down slightly.
a. This fixed itself relatively quickly and I was back up to normal speed after
a couple hours of reading.
3. Forgetting vocabulary seemed to be the largest issue that I faced.
a. Need to look up the readings of words that “I know” more frequently for
about a week or two.
4. Speaking ability and thinking in Japanese became less automatic.
5. Getting rid of Anki debt is mentally strenuous and regaining consistency is tough.
a. You should probably maintain Anki streaks even during breaks, just limit
new cards to 0.

Overall, my ability didn’t drop off that much and it quickly came back after a couple days
of immersion. Regaining control of Anki was the hardest and least fun part.

Note: I already had around ~5000 hours of learning and studying Japanese before doing
this. Taking a break near the beginning levels may have more of an impact on ability.
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Experimental Ideas

Listening to Sped Up Audio

Obviously you should be at a high enough level to where you already understand the vast
majority of the content so that you aren’t just whitenoising.
Benefits
Exposes you to more language per hour
Trains your brain to understand language at an even faster pace
Disadvantages
Lowers comprehension
Solution:
Do w/ passive immersion content after you have already listened to the material a
couple of times.

Mental Shadowing
While listening, repeat back (in your mind) what you heard.
I’ve found that this increases your focus while listening and can be a good way to prevent
“zoning out”. It seems to make listening a more active and engaging process.
Update: This tactic has gone from “doubtful” to “legitimate”. I’ve talked to many people
who do this and they all say it is beneficial.

??? more things to come as I attempt dumb stuff to see if it works or not.
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To Add/To Do List

Japanese Support for Anki

Furigana for your anki cards if you need it (you shouldn’t if you are truly making i+1
cards, but it can be useful)

Kindle (I just use an Ipad but I will leave these here)

Kanji Eater Smart Japanese Kindle Highlights
Create Anki Cards with Kindle Vocabulary Builder

Alternatives
Highlights2SRS
Clippings.io
Converting Aozora Bunko into Mobi
Convert Mobi into AZW3

Add books for economics/philosophy

I already made my reading list for 2023 and these topics aren’t on it so….

Add thoughts on: Variation, Periodization, Individualization

Still reading the book and watching the corresponding videos.
Expect it to be done by mid-Januarary.
Might take this section out; not sure how much I like adding another 40 pages to the
document… This entire section might be a series of blog posts on refold anyway…

Currently focusing on:

Pronunciation/Pitch Accent (PFR, Shadowing, Pronunciation Cards)
Reading Aozora Bunko novels and modern literature
Kanken Anki Deck
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Writing more (mainly posting on twitter)