Disclaimer. This article is not about typing Japanese, although I have discussed that earlier.

It is about the organic way of learning Japanese and what we can discover about it by noticing how we touch-type.

I actually started out by replying to a comment on my typing article. But I found there was so much to say, and I think it is so important, that I made an article about it.

Cure Yasashiku said:

As an interesting aside, with just one finger disabled, I was not able to touch type at all…even with the OTHER hand…it was really strange.

Now I do not find this strange at all. In fact I would have been very surprised if it hadn’t happened.

Why?

Because touch-typing, like language but on a much smaller scale, is an organic skill. That is why it can teach us so much about language.

The reason Cure Yasashiku could not touch-type with one finger disabled is that touch-typing is a complete, organic whole. You can’t half-touch-type. You are either touch-typing or you aren’t. And for that you need all your fingers (if one finger was permanently disabled you might find a workaround, but that just means adopting a different style of touch-typing).

When you are touch-typing the process is automatic, like speaking your native language or a language you have really learned. You aren’t thinking “what key is where?” In learning language, we are aiming for the same automaticity, rather than merely theoretical knowledge of grammar, kanji and vocabulary.

Using Japanese immersively is like touch-typing. Treating Japanese as a “subject of study”, with the occasional “practice” conversation or reading, is hunt-and-peck.

With hunt-and-peck we never get away from using our eyes to fully trusting finger-memory. With “study-Japanese” we never get away from using English as our base-language and continually relating Japanese to it.

Once we are fully touch-typing we forget what key is where. Our fingers go straight to it automatically, but if you ask “where is the ‘m’ key?” I don’t even know.

Once we are fully immersed in Japanese we are no longer “peeking” by thinking “what is this word in English?” We are treating the Japanese word as its own reality: an organic part of the entire Japanese “keyboard”. Sometimes we will not even remember how to put a Japanese word into English (some are very hard to express in English anyway).

Many Japanese learners never get away from hunt-and-peck Japanese. They may pass exams, just as hunt-and-peck typists can become pretty fast. But they never really internalize Japanese to the point where it lives in their hearts as a whole system unrelated to English.

These people populate “Japanese learning” forums, avidly discussing Japanese day after day – in English. And the interesting thing is that a very significant minority of these people are not native English speakers.

What does this mean? I have talked about English speakers regarding English as “Real Language” and Japanese as just “a language”. But in fact non-English speakers often do the same.

Why?

Because they need English. If they want to participate in large Internet forums, if they want to immerse themselves in the dominant popular culture of this world (can’t think why anyone would, but people do), If they want to discuss Japanese (or many other things) with any significant number of enthusiasts, they have to use English.

Thus English is not just a “subject of study” to them. English becomes real language in which an actual part of their life and real communication takes place.

To use our typing analogy, with English they have switched from hunt-and-peck to touch-typing. But, unless they are living in Japan (and not always then) Japanese does not apply the same pressure. They don’t need it. It can remain a “subject of study”. It can continue to be hunt-and-peck Japanese.

When I was in Japan, I spent a very short time (less than a week before I fled back to the Mie-prefecture countryside) in a shared house for foreigners in Tokyo.

One of the first people I met there was a French student, who was studying at a Japanese university. Before he even saw me (I was on the other side of a half-open door) he greeted me in English.

I do not speak English in Japan, so I replied with a hesitant “Sumimasen…”

The door was open by now and the Frenchman stared at me.

“Nihonjin desu ka? Iie…” (Are you Japanese? No, you’re not…)

He was clearly shocked and surprised. He seemed to look over my shoulder in case four horsemen were about. Here was a European-ish looking foreigner in Japan speaking Japanese. Why on earth would that happen? Even if I was a Finn or a Russian, surely I could summon up some English.

However, when it became clear that I didn’t speak English, we continued quite happily in Japanese. We spoke on several occasions afterward and always in Japanese. But under “normal circumstances” every word we said to each other would have been English, even though we were in Japan and both perfectly capable of communicating in Japanese.

We communicated in Japanese because we had to. There wasn’t another language that both of us were able/willing to talk.

All my discretionary activities are in Japanese. If I can’t read a novel in Japanese, I can’t read it. If I can’t play a game in Japanese, I can’t play it. Some people have said “that’s real dedication”. Now if by dedication they mean “exceptional self-sacrifice” or something like that, I wouldn’t agree at all.

But if they mean that part of my mind is a “dedicated device” that only uses Japanese then yes. That is exactly the point. I do not regard English as the language of default. I regard Japanese as the language of default.

I am not living in English and peeking at the Japanese keys through English-language eyes. I am living in Japanese and touch-typing.

When we first learn to touch-type it is slow and laborious. We do it in class and go back to hunt-and-peck the minute we have to type a real essay or email. But at some point we have to make the switch and use touch-typing as our real input method. Otherwise there is no point learning at all.

It is the same with Japanese, at least if we are serious enough about it to want to make it our own language. At some point we have to stop hunting-and-pecking through the eyes of English and start touch-typing in pure Japanese.

And the earlier we start doing that, the better. It doesn’t matter if it is slow at first. What matters is that we are really living Japanese if only in a tiny way.

A lot of Japanese learners – even quite advanced ones – never make this transition. But it is possible to start doing it as soon as you have learned basic grammar.

I hope you will.

Making the mental switch from romaji to hiragana is vitally important.

This may seem like advice directed at beginners, and it is important for them. However, what I have to say is important for serious immersion Japanese learners at all levels, so I would ask even more advanced learners to stay with me and read this article.

Some people have suggested that it would be all right to learn Japanese, at least at first, using only romaji. Most serious Japanese learners disparage the use of romaji but often without explaining exactly why. I am going to start by explaining why it is so important to make the mind-switch from romaji to hiragana and actually think in kana.

When thinking about the meanings of words we should, and as we advance inevitably will, start thinking in kanji. However, when we think of the sounds of words we need to think in kana, because kana are precisely adapted to expressing the Japanese sounds in the way Japanese people perceive them.

Many more advanced learners, even after they have become fluent readers of Japanese, do not fully break the mental link between Japanese sounds and romaji. They have not fully switched from romaji to hiragana in their minds. We are going to talk about why this happens and what can be done about it. But first of all, let’s look at why it matters.

Why we need to mind-switch from romaji to hiragana

What is wrong with romaji in the first place?

Very simply the fact that it does not accurately represent the sounds of Japanese. If we continue to think that あ=a, し=shi, ふ=fu (or hu, depending which system of romaji you use), we will have a fundamental misconception about Japanese sounds.

Thinking in kana will not automatically teach good Japanese pronunciation, but thinking in romaji will make it much harder.

How Romaji is the HIdden Enemy of your Japanese

There are different systems of romaji transliteration and all of them have faults. The reason there are several is that it is a trade-off between one set of faults or another. The Hepburn system (which is currently the most usual in the West) is not the one commonly used in Japan. In some ways it is a good system and in others it perpetuates some very wrong ideas about the kana structure.

When you think about it, it is actually not possible for romaji to represent Japanese sounds accurately because romaji itself does not have fixed sound-values.

If a North American speaker pronounces the word ほとんど as if it were a word spelled “hotondo”, what comes out is something more like はたあんど. In traditional standard British English, the Japanese あ sound is closer to the short “u” than to most of the various sounds that “a” makes in English. And so on.

So this is the first reason for switching from romaji to hiragana. We need as early as possible to start associating Japanese sounds with Japanese characters and cutting out the intermediary of Roman characters, which necessarily misrepresent the sounds as ones we are familiar with in English.

The second reason is that romaji, and especially the usually-used Hepburn system, misrepresents how Japanese people think about kana and this actually gives a false idea of many points of grammar. A lot of the serious problems I correct in Unlocking Japanese and my grammar video lessons have their origin in romaji-thinking.

For example, on the Wikipedia article on Japanese verb conjugation we are told that:

The eba provisional conditional form is characterized by the final -u becoming -eba for all verbs (with the semi-exception of -tsu verbs becoming -teba).

But つ-verbs becoming てば is not any kind of exception. It is 100% regular  (watch this video to see exactly how this all works), and the apparent “semi-exception” only exists in Hepburn Romaji.

In a variety of ways, thinking in romaji causes us to see Japanese in ways that are a) different from how Japanese people see it, and b) an impediment to understanding how the language actually works.

In the Wikipedia example above, instead of thinking in terms of “the final u becoming -eba” (a purely romaji-based concept) we should be saying that the final う-row kana becomes the equivalent え-row kana plus ば. And then there are no exceptions, semi or otherwise, and we are seeing the language the way it actually is, instead of through romaji glasses.

Romaji to hiragana: still a problem for more advanced learners?

“But I know hiragana inside out. I read Japanese books all the time,” the more advanced learner may say.

Yes, I do too. But I have caught myself, and other advanced learners, making little errors that indicate that we are still thinking somewhat in romaji. I have puzzled over why this may be. After all, we left romaji behind a long time ago.

Didn’t we?

Well, in a way we might not have. First we learned the sounds of Japanese as romaji equivalents. But perhaps more importantly, we type Japanese in romaji every day.

Now this may be less important if you hand-write Japanese a lot (perhaps in school). But many of us hardly hand-write at all in this electronic age, and we have argued that it may not be necessary.

However, if we mostly type Japanese on a keyboard via romaji, without even being aware of it, we are continually maintaining and strengthening the romaji to hiragana link.

Especially if we touch-type, this is largely subconscious. But we may actually have a much stronger mental connection to how the kana are made up from romaji than how they are made up in themselves.

When you try inputting kana directly (say putting your name in a DS game) you can find yourself wondering momentarily where the “cha” character is before remembering that you want ち plus ゃ. Of course you know ちゃ instantly when you see it written, but it isn’t the way you are used to inputting it.

This does have an effect on how you think about Japanese. I suspect the author of the Wikipedia article cited above was advanced in Japanese, but she was still thinking in romaji-linked patterns.

As full-immersion learners, we want to complete the romaji to hiragana mind-switch and break the mental romaji link.

Because of the strong subliminal influence of the keyboard in this process, I have been experimenting with typing directly in kana on my computer. This is possible with a Western keyboard (I will show you how to make it easy), and I have found it much easier than I imagined to re-learn touch-typing with a completely different keyboard layout.

Whether you want to do it or not is another matter. Most Japanese people type kana via romaji, but they are thinking in kana to begin with, so it doesn’t pose a problem for their Japanese! (It might adversely affect their relation to kana for English, but then they primarily use romaji as a minor part of Japanese).

In my next article I share my experience of typing on a kana keyboard and how it meshes with the Japanese learning process. Plus tips on how to go about it if you want to try→

People often ask what is the best way to learn Japanese. It is an important question, because learning Japanese is not a quick process whatever method one uses.

One is sinking many, many hours into it, so it is natural to want to be sure that one is using those hours effectively.

This leads some people to spend more time reading up on methods than actually learning the language, or in some cases it leads people to keep changing methods in case the current one isn’t the best way to learn Japanese.

I really understand this. I went through the same kind of doubts and worries early in my Japanese journey, but I discovered something that can eliminate the whole anxiety of not knowing which is the best method.

I am going to explain why the method I chose works so well, but also, and perhaps more importantly, why, whether it is the best or not, it can remove the whole anxiety surrounding the question of the best way to learn Japanese.

In a nutshell, the best way to learn Japanese is to use and enjoy it. Studying only takes you so far, which is why people can study the language for years and pass exams without becoming proficient in practical terms.

How the brain learns language

There are reasons for this. At one time scientists thought that there was a particular part of the brain that handles language. More recently, though, it appears that the language function is distributed over many parts of the brain. This is because language (not a particular language, but the language-function) is hard wired into the brain.

What this means in turn is that words and experience are intimately bound together. To the brain, saying “It’s been a rough day” and touching sandpaper are somewhat similar sensations.

In other words, language and experience are intimately bound together. Which is why learning words from abstract “vocabulary lists” is one of the least efficient ways we can learn. The brain is not forming sensory or emotional connections with the words.

The best way to learn Japanese is to be in Japan, interacting and using the language for everything all the time. That way the brain builds up all the natural associations of words and grammar with things and experiences that make up true knowledge of any language.

Of course, many of us don’t have the option of being in Japan (and if we are there in an English-teaching environment we still may not have the option of true immersion).

In that case the second-best way is the best way to go.

What is the second-best way?

The answer to that should be obvious.

Getting as near to the best way as possible!

Even if you can’t have every experience in Japanese, you can create a “Japanese zone” in your life where you experience in Japanese.

As you know, when you become involved in a book or an anime, it is an experience. You are seeing and doing things, even though at second hand. You are experiencing emotions, hopes, fears from fantasy adventures to everyday life. Japanese acquired this way works in the brain very similarly to the way “real” language-experience does.

If you communicate and interact in Japanese: not just “practising” but actually discussing things that really interest you in themselves and forming relationships in Japanese, then language is working in your mind like real language and not just “play-language” or “study-language”.

The brain treats real language very differently from the way it treats “game-systems” like algebra or chess or language-study. Real language operates all over the brain, becoming part of its way of processing everything else.

How to go about creating real immersion for your brain is essentially the theme of this site and we have a lot of information on it. You can start from here if you decide to.

Eliminating the “best way to learn Japanese” worry

I think what we have said above is convincing.

And I think it is convincing because it is true.

But…

There are a lot of other ways of learning Japanese online and many of them claim to be the best. Most of them can work (there are a few notable exceptions). You may be drawn to some of them at some time and wonder if they aren’t the best way to learn Japanese.

Of course, I believe immersion is the best way to learn Japanese. At least for some people. But whether it is or isn’t, it is the way to stop worrying about what is the best way of learning Japanese.

Why? What do I mean by that?

I mean that the whole worry about “the best way to learn Japanese” comes from the fact that you are sinking hours into studying the language, and naturally you want to be sure that you aren’t wasting time by using a less effective method.

But true immersion does away with all that.

It does away with the whole “studying Japanese” concept. It does away with the idea that you spend countless study-hours with 10,000 sentences or drill-books or Remembering the Kanji or  Memrise or anything else in the hope that one magical day you will know enough to really use and enjoy Japanese.

You can see why people worry about whether their current method is the best way to learn Japanese.

It is an act of faith.

If I do enough of this grueling study I will reap the Great Reward.

But what if I don’t? What if I am on the wrong path?

You can’t know.

You can be told that someone else became native-level fluent in X-months using Y-supermethod. But you don’t know if that person is being 100% honest with you (or himself). Nor do you know if he isn’t some kind of prodigy who just happens to be very good at languages (and whatever anyone says, such people do exist). Nor do you know if the method that worked for this person is the one that will work for you. People learn differently.

So how can you find out what really is the best way of learning Japanese?

I don’t know if you can. But what you can do is do away with this whole act-of-faith approach.

When you do that, the whole “best way of learning Japanese” approach suddenly becomes irrelevant.

When you were picking up your native language as a small child you weren’t worrying about the best method of learning it. You weren’t even particularly concerned with learning the language at all. You were concerned with getting on with life. You were concerned with expressing your thoughts, enjoying movies, understanding what people were saying.

That wasn’t called “language study”. That was called “living”.

Our approach is to do the same thing with Japanese.

You do need to learn some basic grammar. We show you how to do this. It doesn’t have to be a lot. The rest you will pick up as you go along.

At this stage you don’t need to worry about the best way of learning Japanese. Learning basic grammar is very straightforward and there is no mystery about the fact that you are learning it.

Once you have learned the basics you start using Japanese. Watching Japanese-subtitled anime, reading for-Japanese-children’s books, playing video games in Japanese, communicating in Japanese.

This isn’t an easy, no-work method. It is hard, especially at first. All methods are hard. But as you ease into it, it is fun. You enjoy the anime. You enjoy the games. You enjoy reading. You start to interact with people in Japanese. You start to carve out an area of your life where Japanese is Language. The only language.

I believe this is the best and most natural way of learning Japanese. But whether it is or whether it isn’t, can you see how it has made the whole worry over “the best way to learn Japanese” irrelevant?

This is not an act-of-faith method. You aren’t slogging away at flashcards, classes, Kanji books, SRS sites etc in the hope that one day you will be able to use Japanese.

You are using Japanese right now.

Slowly at first. Strenuously at first. But you are using it. And every day you use it, it gets easier and more fun.

There is no mystery here. There is no waiting for the “destination” and hoping you didn’t board the wrong train. The destination is here, now.  What you are doing is learning to get around that destination. First of all crawling like a small baby. Then standing up, holding onto the legs of chairs. Then being able to toddle.

It’s a long job. Any method is a long job. Get-fluent-quick schemes don’t work, or only work for a certain kind of person (and a certain very limited definition of “fluent”). Really learning a language takes time. It takes children time to learn their native language. Many, many, many “study hours”.

Except that they don’t call them “study hours”.

And neither will you.

They call it “living”.

And so will you.

Is this the best way to learn Japanese? I think so, but I can’t prove it and I could be wrong.

I don’t really care.

And neither will you.

The real point is: suppose doing 10,000 sentences and learning 2,000 kanji in the abstract were “the best way”.

Suppose spending every night working through drill-books were the best way.

Would I do it?

No.

First of all, no one really knows whether or not they are the best way for any given individual.

But more importantly, I don’t want to put off using and living Japanese into some future that may or may not arrive.

If I was doing that I probably would be feeling desperate about whether all this slog was the best way to learn Japanese. It is like walking blindfold and just praying you are headed in the right direction.

Right from the first few months I was starting to use Japanese. It wasn’t a thing that would happen one day if I was diligent enough. It was something that was happening right now if I was diligent enough.

(That’s right, I’m afraid we can’t skip the diligence part)

Other approaches make using and enjoying Japanese a future-thing. True immersion makes it a now-thing.

And you know that the more you do it, the better it gets. You learn more words. You learn more of the ways that words are put together (“grammar”). Every single thing that you watch or read or play puts you one step further forward than the last one.

But you don’t need to worry about “the best way to learn Japanese” any more than a growing child needs to worry about the best way to learn her language.

To get started with real immersion, take a look at these articles:

How to Learn Japanese Online – a basic introduction

Japanese Immersion: How to Get Started

There are two ways of going about learning Japanese: immersion and study.

They are not, of course, mutually exclusive, but I am coming to the conclusion that they constitute two very different “cultures” and relationships with the language.

This feeling was recently confirmed by an article on a well-known Japanese-learning site entitled “What Would Happen if Your Japanese Got Too Good”.

The question was essentially: would you be bored if you “finished learning” Japanese? The very fact that the question was asked is interesting, and so were some of the replies. “There is always more to learn: old Japanese, obscure kanji etc.”; “There are plenty of other languages to learn” etc.

The site in question is one that encourages an “RPG” approach to learning Japanese and likens levels of Japanese skill to levels in a game. In one way this is making Japanese learning fun, which I am all for. On the other hand, it is what I would call “meta-Japanese” fun. The fun of this approach is in “learning Japanese”, not in Japanese itself. This seems to go hand in hand with the fact that the site is over 90% in English and essentially devoted to “meta-Japanese” English discussion.

Now I want to make it clear that I am not criticizing this approach. It works for a lot of people. The site is a very good one and I have great respect for its founder. However, it is an example of the “two cultures” that I am speaking about.

The article in question underlined what I have been thinking for a long time. That “learning Japanese” can easily become an end in itself. Again, I am not criticizing. If studying Japanese is your hobby, please enjoy it. It is undoubtedly a good hobby to have.

It just isn’t my hobby. I have never found much commonalty with the “language-learning community” because I am not interested in language learning. I am in love with Japanese. I want to dive into Japanese and live Japanese. I regard Japanese as my language, not “a language” I am “learning”.

What would happen if I “finished learning” Japanese? Well, what happened to you when you “finished learning” your native language?

Think about that for a moment. When did you “finish learning” your native language? Were you ever consciously learning it at all? Did “learning” it matter to you? Or were you just interested in getting on with life: watching movies, playing games, reading books, talking with friends?

Because that is my interest in Japanese. I am simply interested in getting on with my Japanese life. The fact that I have to “learn” it is just something that gets in the way.

It isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a thing. Like the small child who struggles to express her thought in her own language, or the older child who wants to read a book that has a lot of words and expressions she doesn’t understand. We “learn” by getting over the problems life throws in our path.

But “learning Japanese” isn’t the game to me. The game is the game. The book is the book. The movie is the movie.

A famous Internet personality founded what is broadly called “Immersion learning” in Internet circles today. He would write at length about how you don’t need to study you just need to dive into Japanese and “get used” to it. You just need to have fun and learn naturally. He would become very voluble (and at times a bit vulgar) about this.

And I have to say that (minus the vulgarity) I agree with every word he said along these lines. The problem is, he didn’t believe it himself. And neither do the many people who currently follow some version of his approach.

While he preached immersion, sometimes quite ferociously, his recommended practice was something else altogether.

What he actually said one should do is learn kanji via the Heisig Method, which essentially involves learning many hundreds of kanji “blind”, without knowing a single actual word of Japanese. Heisig-sensei himself likened it to putting oneself in the position of a Chinese student who begins knowing no Japanese but a lot of kanji.

The other arm of this method was learning 10,000 sentences using electronic flashcards (Anki). Oh and while you’re at it, do a lot of passive listening to Japanese audio.

Is this unfair? A little, but it is essentially the case. What starts off (and I have no doubt this person was sincere) as an “immersion” approach becomes in practice a massive program of abstract study.

Now I agree that pure immersion from day one is inadvisable. We do recommend learning the basics of grammar and continuing to learn grammar as you go along.

Like the site mentioned at the beginning, we do bring the RPG analogy to Japanese, but in a very different way. Rather than the RPG being a meta-Japanese game of “learning Japanese”. We liken Japanese itself to a huge, complex RPG, and we liken abstract learning to the game’s huge manual.

We recommend reading the introductory tutorial chapter of the manual, just to get enough information to get started, and then diving into the game itself, learning by playing and referring to the rest of the manual as and when necessary.

We do not recommend a long preparatory phase with the goal of using Japanese somewhere at the end of it. We do not recommend hundreds of hours of kanji study, thousands of sentence flashcards or extensive textbook study. We recommend spending most of that time on actually using Japanese. You will need some grammar help, and you will need Anki flashcards for learning kanji, though you will be doing it organically, learning kanji as you encounter them in real words.

Essentially, at every point after the first few months of getting  kana and basic grammar under your belt, you are using Japanese first and only “studying” as and when you need it as a support to your real-life use.

In this actual immersion approach, using Japanese is primary. Meta-Japanese elements (study, flashcards, English grammar explanations and the rest) are exactly what the word meta implies. Something on the side of your real Japanese life.

Now to be clear, I am not for a moment attempting to disparage all other ways of learning. There are fundamentally two approaches, and both of them work.

Ours isn’t new. We didn’t invent it. We did pioneer some of the ways to do it via the Internet, but the world is in fact full of people who went to places where other languages were spoken and learned them (at least the spoken versions) just by being there and using them. The true “immersion method” is as old as language itself.

The “study-first” approach isn’t quite so old but it has a long, long pedigree.

We are not claiming that true immersion is faster than study-first (no genuine method is all that fast) or easier than study-first (no method is easy). Which is fastest and most efficient depends on who you are, how you learn, and what your priorities are.

The real point is that these are two very different approaches. Two very different relationships with the process of acquiring Japanese.

Many people thrive on study. Many others burn out and give up before they get anywhere near the “goal” (whatever that actually is).

Many people love raising their levels by study (the idea of treating them as RPG levels was inspired).

True immersion learners probably have no idea what their level is (I know I don’t). On the other hand, they don’t much care. They are more concerned with whether they can enjoy this anime, read that book and express the idea that is in their mind.

I tend to think of study-first and immersion as the “Classical” and “Romantic” approaches respectively. If you want to pass exams the Classical approach is probably better. If you have a methodical mind you may well find it better (though I know some very methodical people who use true immersion).

But:

If your love of Japanese is such that you want to dive into its warm waters and swim toward the golden sunlight…

If Japanese feels like your true language, not just “a language” to “learn”…

If you see mechanics of learning as just a necessary evil and what you want is to embrace Japanese herself…

If you are determined enough to climb the sheer cliff-face of real use, rather than use the long stone steps of study…

Then the Romantic method will call to you. And here is how to get started.

(If you need help with starting on the Romantic path to Japanese, you might want to go here)

So, you want to learn Japanese organically by immersion rather than by abstract study. It makes good sense, at least for many learners.

The problem is, how do you get started?

We have outlined the overall game-plan for immersion learning and talked about a lot of the specifics, like tackling kanji, vocabulary and grammar from an immersion perspective.

The problem still remains. How do you get started on what feels like the sheer rock-face of native Japanese material when you are a beginner or near-beginner?

As we have said before, it isn’t easy. It is like an assault-course that recruits look at and say “that isn’t possible”. But if you are sufficiently determined it is possible. And generations of recruits have gone through it before you.

So, as someone who has been through it, how would I recommend you actually start?

First of all, you really must pick up some grammar. You don’t have to be studying it for years. But get the basics, as explained in the linked article. You can do it pretty quickly by working smart rather than hard.

You can increase the smart-not-hard factor immensely by reading Unlocking Japanese, which shows you how to see Japanese grammar in its true simplicity and logical clarity. Traditional grammar books/sites are good, but they are stuck with 20th-century models of Japanese grammar which introduce many unnecessary confusions and complications into a language that is in fact much more simple and logical than European languages. Do yourself a favor by short-cutting your grammar from the startl

Even before that (or rather, at the same time), learn hiragana. This is not a big job, but it is easy to turn it into one. You can, and should, learn hiragana in a week. Any longer and it starts becoming increasingly inefficient. You are wasting time forgetting almost as fast as you are learning.

How soon after this you learn katakana depends on your approach. A lot of small children’s material uses only hiragana or uses furigana (small hiragana to tell you the pronunciation) over any katakana or kanji (and even romaji), so, just like a Japanese child, you can manage for a short time with only hiragana. It depends what material you want to begin with.

All right, with that preparation done, how do you begin?

Japanese Immersion: The first steps

What I did was this:

Learn hiragana and katakana. Learn the rudiments of grammar essentially by going through Genki 1 (though I didn’t use the exercises) and pecking around various online grammar resources.

A few months in (I don’t recall exactly), having done most of Genki 1 and a few other things, started watching Japanese-subtitled anime. I began with Karigurashi no Arietty and Tonari no Totoro.

I would not say this was the ideal way to go about it, but I was treading a new path and had no one to advise me. Arietty, especially, was punching considerably above my weight and that was my very first. But it did work. It was like climbing a sheer rock-face (and it always will be but I am going to suggest some slightly gentler starting-slopes). I had to skip a lot of the more complicated sentences. But I got through it, taking a very long time, enjoyed it, and learned an enormous amount.

Gentler slopes

If I were doing it now, with rather more experience of how to go about it, what would I do?

I might start with the White Rabbit graded readers. These are a bit of a cheat as they are actually aimed at Japanese learners, not natives. On the other hand, they are really part of the pre-immersion preparation period done in a pseudo-immersion way.

They are a good way to consolidate your hiragana, early grammar and very early kanji.

I might then move on to the real thing in graded readers. That is graded readers intended for actual Japanese children. This could be your first step into genuine Japanese immersion.

Remember that small Japanese children have a far bigger vocabulary than you and a much better grasp of simple grammar, so even these are a little deep-endy for a beginner. So you can take pride that you are making your first step into the ranks of the immersion elite!

What about anime?

I believe anime is crucial. Books are good, but you can’t hear them (the for-foreigners books have CDs, but this is rather artificial though it may help you with your early pre-steps).

I would make one particular recommendation of a show that I wish I had known about when I was starting. That is:

Arupusu no Shoujo Haiji
Heidi, Girl of the Alps

Why this anime?

• It has Japanese subtitles with furigana. This is pretty rare for Japanese subtitles, at least ones that are easy to get hold of. This will make your early days much easier. I had to copy kanji out of the subtitle file and paste them into Denshi Jisho to look them up.

• Most of the interaction is small-child to small-child or adult to small-child. This means that you will mostly be getting dialog at child-level. However, it is not baby-talk (like, say, Chi’s Sweet Home) which is both difficult and of limited value. It is good usable Japanese.

Please feel free to skip adult-to-adult conversations in the beginning. You are a child in Japanese. Note that the first episode has a lot more of this than most. You might want to begin with Episode 2.

• There are a lot of episodes. 52 in fact. It is good to have media with a lot of episodes/volumes because every work has its own subset of vocabulary, so you are building steadily on the base you are acquiring.

(Note: obviously exercise due diligence and make sure whatever version you get has the Japanese audio and Japanese subtitles).

Heidi isn’t the only option of course, but it is one you may well want to think about. I think it is what I would go for if I were doing it over again.

As it is, I discovered the Precure series which was quite a bit easier than Ghibli, even though at first I was largely lost in the explanatory sections.

It is important to remember at the early stages that some things will be above your head. When I was in Japan the first time I had host-sisters of four and eight years old. They were crazy about Precure. There was a great deal they (especially the four-year-old) didn’t understand. That didn’t stop them getting a lot out of it and adoring it (and of course learning a lot).

Won’t I be bored stiff immersing in works for children?

It somewhat depends who you are, of course. But Totoro, Arietty, Haiji and many others are classics, loved by adults and children alike. Precure has considerable depth that makes it far from being just a children’s show (just choose one of the “deeper” series like Smile or Doki Doki).

Immersion, especially early immersion, does entail working at something like your “Japanese age”. Learning grammar and your overall adult experience gives you a boost that allows you to work at the four-year-old level at three to six months in (if you are dedicated). If this is genuinely unsatisfactory to you, true immersion may not be for you.

Our concept has always been based on “walk-before-you-run Japanese”. University Japanese is “run-before-you-walk Japanese” in the sense that it tries to teach adult interactions to people who have no grounding in the language and  couldn’t hold a two-minute conversation with a five-year-old.

True immersion involves working your way up, rather than cutting corners and trying to build the roof before you’ve laid the foundations.

In organic immersion you are, in some respects, starting again as a child and getting the chance to experience all kinds of wonderful, innocent (but often profound) things.

Instead of learning abstract rules and vocabulary lists, you are growing up in Japanese, absorbing both language and culture.

If you are open to that, it turns “learning Japanese” into a wonderful, magical journey.

If you need personal help in getting started with Japanese immersion, go here.

IMPORTANT: This article is kept for the record but is outdated. I no longer do individual coaching sessions. I do always answer questions from my patrons on Patreon, and you will find a lot of other important material there.

There is also a KawaJapa Japanese-only LINE group. If you are interested in joining. Please let me know in the contact form at the bottom of this page (in Japanese, please).

A lot of people tell me that they really like the immersion approach to Japanese on this site but that they really wish they could have some personal help in such things as:

• Getting started
• Transitioning from the conventional “study-first” approach to Immersion
• Communicating/interacting in Japanese-only

In some cases I have given them some help and have found myself in the position of an Immersion senpai (or sometimes oneechan).

Because I wish I had had someone to help me when I was starting, I am trying an experiment in helping other people to use our immersion methods.

I am not a teacher and I am not a native Japanese speaker. What I am offering is two very specific services. These are:

1. Strategy Sessions

We have always said that there is no one “system” for Japanese Immersion. Everyone learns differently. Everyone works differently. Unless you are an absolute beginner, everyone is starting from a different base.

What I am offering here is simply to talk it over with you. There is nothing fancy about this. I am not offering any magic. It is simply that I have been through the assault-course of early immersion and I have helped several people with differing skills and priorities from myself to get through it.

I am not setting myself up as an expert. I am just a doll who lives in the territory you are trying to move into, and can show you some of the ropes.

I am simply offering to be the senpai I wish I had had when I was doing it all from scratch!

2. Japanese Immersion Relationship

To learn Japanese you have to use Japanese. Not just input but real two-way communication. Ideally you should have someone with whom your relationship is exclusively Japanese. I have talked about the psychological reasons for this elsewhere.

What is ideal is an relationship/environment where Japanese is Language itself. There is nothing else to fall back on. When you think of communicating with that person you have to think in Japanese.

In the early stages (and way up to intermediate in some cases) this can be very difficult. Your Japanese isn’t good enough yet to form relationships.

I have helped people through this stage. I have gone from patiently asking questions like:

まど　の　そと　は、何が　見えますか？

to discussing things like the history of language in Japanese, with the same person, in about a year.

Obviously that person was also working hard on immersion! But what I was doing was bringing out her ability to communicate. Getting over the psychological barriers and creating an environment where Japanese is not “a language” but the means of communication.

I wish to make it clear I am not a native speaker. My Japanese isn’t perfect. I will be your senpai, not your sensei. The point here is not to learn Japanese from me (you will probably learn some, but that is incidental). The point is to learn to use Japanese as the means of communication. That is both psychologically and practically a whole new skill-set and outlook. And short of going to Japan there aren’t many ways of acquiring them.

If you don’t mind having a doll for a senpai and you want to meet me, please use this form. I’ll explain the practical details below.

[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

Practical details

Cost is currently US $10 per session. You can pay by Paypal regardless of your currency. This is an experiment on my part. If it goes well and I like it I will probably end up charging rather more. If it doesn’t or I don’t, I will stop doing it altogether. So it might be a good idea to try it now!

Pay now if you are ready. It is all right if you want to ask questions and arrange the session time first via the form above.

Sessions will be via Skype. I don’t use a camera.

Once you have submitted the form I will contact you and we will arrange a session. If you have preferred time(s) please include them in the comments section of the form, but don’t worry. We can work it out later.

Please be aware that if you choose the Japanese Immersion Relationship option we will not speak any English, so if you have something you need to convey to me in English please do so in writing beforehand.

Writing Japanese is important. Vitally important.

I am not talking about pens and paper here. Whether you need to learn to write kanji by hand is something we have already discussed, and a brief summary of the answer is “not necessarily”.

But you do need to write Japanese.

That is to say, you need to express things in written form. There are four fundamental skills in any language: listening, speaking, reading and writing, and you do need them all even if you don’t intend to do a lot of all of them.

Input-only Japanese will only take you so far. Your mind needs to use Japanese regularly as a means of communication – yes, real two-way communication – if it is ever going to treat Japanese as real Language and not just something it plays at.

Spoken communication is very important. But written communication is too. In speech you will begin by expressing yourself very simply and will make mistakes.

With reading you have a chance to take in complex sentences that you could not follow at spoken speed (and without seeing the kanji)

With writing you get a chance to compose some of those more complex sentences. Your Japanese is still limited, but your written Japanese can be a lot less limited than your spoken Japanese. It can, and should lead your spoken Japanese into deeper and more complex levels.

When writing you have a chance to work out the correct way to express what you want. In speech you have to manage the best you can in real time. Communicating somewhere like the Kawaii Japanese Forums gives you the opportunity to learn how to express yourself.

It is good to use the method outlined in How to Write Correct Natural Japanese. Look for precedents for what you want to say. Instead of constructing an English sentence and dropping in Japanese words, you can find out how a natural Japanese sentence expresses the same idea.

You will never get this from speaking. You will get it over time from listening and reading, but it takes a long, long time because you are not really aware of the problems. Once you have struggled with expressing a certain kind of structure, you will be much more receptive when you read or hear it again.

Children learn natural expressions by hearing and using them. They have a huge advantage though because they don’t already have a different template for structuring that  thought. To them the structure they learn in their native language becomes the natural and only way to express it.

You will find it much harder to pick up passively because your mind will continually try to revert to its older and more familiar template. In certain not-very-useful ways, the mind is surprisingly language-neutral. Unless it was very impressed with a turn of phrase it will tend to remember what was said but not exactly how it was structured. And it will tend to re-build it for recollection in the manner it is most familiar and comfortable with. Which leads to “eihongo” (English-structured Japanese – the counterpart of wapanese).

You can hear and read a great deal of Japanese without this changing much, simply because even a great deal of Japanese does not add up to all your years of English exposure, or the fact that you first learned to structure language in English.

Writing intelligently, using precedents to make sure you are constructing a sentence in a Japanese manner, rather than using Japanese bricks to build an English house, helps you to internalize the correct manner of structuring Japanese and recognize it clearly the next time you see it.

In this way, even if you had no particular desire to write Japanese in the long term, writing Japanese is an invaluable aid to hearing and reading Japanese and really taking in its structures rather than gliding over them as the mind prefers to do.

Writing little stories (I started off that way), or a diary is a fine. But I cannot stress too much that your mind won’t take Japanese seriously as a language unless you are using it, not just practising it. When you are communicating something you want to say with other people the mind is suddenly forced to see Japanese as Language, rather than a game or an exercise. The mind works very differently around Language – its means of communication – than it does around other self-consistent structures like games or branches of  mathematics.

Part of the reason people find “languages” so difficult is that they never become Language. They never move from being games or exercises to being the primary means of communication. The mind cannot and will not prioritize other systems in the same automatic and intuitive way that it prioritizes Language.

So, 1: you should write Japanese and 2: you should write it communicatively.

One way to get started on this is to go to the Kawaii Japanese Forums. At the time of writing I am in Japan and popping some of my posts on the Forums. If you wanted you could reply, talk about your time in Japan, or whether you want to go to Japan, or comment on another thread, start a thread of your own about your favorite anime or… well whatever you might do in English.

Only in, you know, Japanese.

Sorry to sound oversimplistic,  but this seems to be a point  that most English speakers just don’t get. They spend time studying Japanese and even watching anime or reading Japanese, but then they want to talk about it. There are endless sites and forums discussing Japanese from every angle.

In English.

Well, of course in English. English is Language, isn’t it? Japanese is just – Japanese.

Japanese is fine for practising, studying and playing with, but when you actually want to communicate you naturally go back to Language.

These people also wonder why they never really internalize Japanese. After all, they work on it such a lot…

Problems with writing Japanese and their answers

1. I can’t express everything I want to in Japanese.

Answer: That’s right. You are a growing child in Japanese. Like any child you can express what your current level allows you to express. Children can’t “cheat” into some other language. If you want to grow in Japanese you shouldn’t either, at least for your Japanese life.

2. I might make mistakes and look stupid.

Answer: Not might. You will make mistakes. You won’t look stupid because you are learning and trying your best. Anyone who calls you stupid is stupid. I don’t know if there is some harsh culture of mistake criticism in Western Human circles these days. Anyway the solution I would suggest is to use a kawaii Japanese persona for your Japanese writing. No one needs to know it is you. That persona will be the Japanese child you are raising. Enjoy the freedom to grow a new you!

3. I don’t now how to express things properly.

Answer: Use our precedent method. It isn’t foolproof and you will still make mistakes, but it will get you a lot nearer to writing correctly and teach you an enormous amount of Japanese that you can’t learn easily any other way. Using the precedent method allows you to punch considerably above your weight in Japanese and advances you as you do it.

4. I don’t want to write messy text full of simple slip-ups.

Answer: This is a danger. As learners, we can’t proofread Japanese as efficiently as we can English. However there is a Secret Weapon.

Use Rikaichan or (better) Rikaisama. In this case I would suggest using it in English mode. Rikai, among its other great merits, is a formidable proofreading machine. Run it over your text and it will tell you

• Whether the word you used meant what you thought it meant.

• Whether you misspelled it.

• Whether you conjugated it correctly.

• Whether you made a 変換ミス henkanmisu. That is, selecting the wrong kanji when converting kana. Japanese people do this fairly often too.

And various other useful information. A quick proofread with Rikai will help you clean up your writing considerably. It’s kind of like having a Japanese-competent co-editor.

All right. If you’re ready to join the tiny elite of learners who actually use Japanese, you know how to get started.

Name your Japanese child and start raising her!