LLearn Japanese

How to start learning?

  • February 4, 2023

Hi. I am a 16 year old guy from the netherlands and i’m looking to learn Japanese. I know a few stupid phrases from anime lol. I don’t really know where to start except duolingo and writing down kanji until my fingers bleed lol. But what alphabet is mainly used in Japan? Hiragana,Katakana or kanji? I’ve looked it up but got a bunch of mixed answers so at this point i’m not sure… any help would be great lol thx!

5 comments

  1. >But what alphabet is mainly used in Japan? Hiragana,Katakana or kanji?

    They’re all used, for example a sentence could be like 彼はコーヒーが好きです which encompasses all of them!

  2. Here are some of the resources I used while starting out:

    https://www.tofugu.com/
    This website has a ton of articles that explore the Japanese language, and Japanese culture. They also have a podcast.

    A couple of other podcasts that I have found useful:
    – Learn Japanese w/Manga Sensei (the companion website: https://www.manga-sensei.com/)
    – Nihongo Con Teppei
    – Japanese with Teppei and Noriko

    These are the apps that I have found useful:
    – Duolingo (for practice)
    – Memrise (for idioms)
    – Kanji Study
    – Kanji Tree

    There’s also an app called “Human Japanese”. There’s a paid version and a free version. I haven’t tried out the paid version, but it seems to explain concepts quite well. It also includes a bit about the history of the language.

    edit: sorry for formatting, am on mobile

  3. Been seeing the 30 day Japanese the Moe Way guide recommended a lot lately. Go check that out if you’re unsure where to start.

  4. How to learn Japanese

    Step 1. Learn Hiragana and Katakana

    Step 2. Learn Words

    Step 3. Learn Grammar

    Step 4. Try and use level appropriate media

    Step 5. Repeat steps 2, 3 and 4.

    Simplest way to start learning Hiragana and Katakana is [https://realkana.com/](https://realkana.com/)

    Go there, click on Hiragana and you’ll see the Japanese “Alphabet”. You’ll see that only one column is selected, that’s fine. After that click study and then just input the answers. Hit space bar to show you the answer. Just keep doing that until you can do the first 5, when you’re comfortable add the next column so on and so forth.

  5. As stated before, learn kana first….then I would learn basic sentence structure as Japanese is very different from English and sentence structure really got me at first

    For these 2 things you can use Duolingo…..Duo is a great way to start, but not a good way to keep going…meaning after you have gone through all kana and maybe the entirety of the first 2 units, youre probably better off dropping it and moving on…but at least this will be a good start for you

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