I have wanted to learn Japanese as long as I can remember, and aside from a single course I took in college, I have never really pursued that desire. Recently, my family has decided that we want to travel to Tokyo early 2027, and as a result I have decided to set aside some things in life to do intensive Japanese study for the next 12+ months. Only real advantage I have is I got a linguistics degree in college and I already speak a couple other languages beyond English, so it's not my first attempt at language learning.
I've dug around for a while to come up with a few things I think will help me achieve my goal, here is the core list:
WaniKani: The main resource for Kanji and Vocab
Pimsleur: Listening and speaking practice
MaruMori: General reinforcement, grammar, and vocab
Write Japanese: Android app for practicing stroke order on the writing system. This one was not recommended by AI, but was one I tried back in college and really liked, so I'm using it here again. I find writing the characters out in the app really helps me reinforce them.
On top of that, the items I am still on the fence are:
Bunpro: This was a suggestion for a grammar resource, I'm a bit split on it. It feels less effective than I was expecting, but I am still in the kana section, so not sure if it starts to click a bit better later on.
Satori Reader: I was surprised at how little hand-holding there is on this app compared to others. But since I'm still in the middle of figuring out Kana, I figure this is a bit further down the line. I do want to make sure I can read relatively well, as reading through material helps me learn a TON. At the very least, learning to read/write will accelerate my other learning enough to break even with learning without it, with the obvious benefit of learning to read and write.
And a quick overview of my timeline:
Phase 1: The Foundation (Months 1–3)
Goal: Survival Japanese. JLPT N5 equivalent. Familiarity with Hiragana/Katakana and basic sentence structure.
Phase 2: The Expansion (Months 4–6)
Goal: Daily conversation. JLPT N4 equivalent.
Phase 3: The Intermediate Hump (Months 7–9)
Goal: Fluency in familiar topics. JLPT N3 equivalent.
Phase 4: The Polishing (Months 10–12)
Goal: "Mostly Conversational." You can handle travel problems, express opinions, and describe abstract concepts. Solidify the learning from the last 9+ months and prepare for trip to Tokyo.
The timeline above is also split out into 2-week sprints (I work in software development, so yeah, I made a sprit-based timeline, haha).
Any thoughts on other resources that may help me? Overall, my goal is to hit the timeline, as ambitious as it is, and if I slip a little (or a lot) that's fine, but I'm feeling very committed to making this happen and want to see if anyone has any tips that might help me! Thanks!
by tragicmanner