Ayyy fellow Canto speaker on the same boat

I don’t really watch anime but I want to read Japanese text. I’m currently 2 months in following the Tofugu guide. I spent about a week on memorizing Hiragana and Katakana, and have been grinding Kanjis and vocabularies on Anki since then. At some point I also read the Japanese sentence structure guide from 8020japanese out of curiosity. This combination allows me to learn Japanese much faster at my own rate than pre-designed methods like Duolingo.

Since I’m a native Cantonese speaker, learning Kanji is rather trivial, so I mostly spend my time learning both Onyomi (Chinese pronunciation) and Kunyomi (Japanese pronunciation).

I am at a point where I can read some simple sentences and guess some words base on Kanji (for example はじめる means “start” on my Japanese Wii), but I definitely still have a long way to go before I can do anything fluent. If you watch a decent amount of anime, chances are you can probably learn faster than me.

Consuming media is a great way to supplement your language-learning, but be careful not to confuse the dialog used in anime with actual conversational Japanese. Just like how nobody actually talks like a Western cartoon character does, Japanese people don’t talk like anime characters. Anime dialog is largely dramatized.

Also for what it’s worth; depending on what you’re watching, the English dubs have gotten way better in recent years. There’s a lot of good talent in the dub scene these days, and Japanese directors are getting better at trusting the performance of western voice actors, instead of demanding that the actor sounds the way they think it should sound in English. In my experience, most dubs post-2010 are generally pretty good. Generally.

Hi, I came the other way. Air Force baby who spent most of her younger years speaking Japanese and eventually got English happening.

So many people have asked me if they can learn Japanese, and my answer is the same: it’s a whole-ass language that takes many years to be good at, to use for communication. Most people realize they’re not going to be good at a language in three weeks and they bail.

Don’t use a language for just one thing (unless that one thing is to communicate with a society).

I committed myself to learning English because my family and I live in America now, and I needed to communicate with a society in it. (And I think my English is pretty good now but it’s not without a lot of trying, even now. I actually have to fight to maintain my Japanese, by reading books and watching movies and TV!)

My weeb ass: My time has come.

I did it, and for the record my native language has absolutely nothing in common with Japanese. I started with Duolingo and kept at it until I could power through easy manga, at which point and I started doing that. The good news is that if you can power through the early bits, your entertainment (assuming it’s in Japanese) will supplement and eventually replace your studying. Here are the things I think I did right:

1. Be willing to invest serious time into studying and/or consuming comprehensible material (also known as immersion). At what point it becomes “not worth it” is up to you, but I’d aim for at least an hour a day.

2. Watch anime often and attempt to understand what you’re hearing (this is separate from studying). You’ll fail most of the time at first, but this keeps your ear open so you improve your listening without doing much if any extra work. It also helps you keep track of your progress, since the better you get the more you’ll understand. I took a half-year break and when I came back I found my Japanese had improved at least in part because I was watching anime in the interim.

3. Don’t fall for the studying trap. At some point, and probably earlier than you expect, you’ll have to drop actual studying material and focus your efforts on immersion. I started by reading a manga called Yotsubato after getting to conditionals on Duolingo, but really any manga with furigana works. If you find something other than manga you like better then go for that, but you need something and it needs to at least keep you on your toes language-wise and still be ultimately comprehensible. Humans learn language by recognizing patterns within copious volumes of content, not by rationally analyzing those patterns; that latter stuff is for linguists.

4. Keep challenging yourself. It’s easy to think you’re not ready to advance to the next level, but you should accept that the transition will be painful anyway and often try your hand at more advanced material (meaning immersion material here, as I said don’t bother with advanced studying material). In my case, I thought my Japanese was plateauing after sticking with one thing for too long, but after I read my first light novel I improved ridiculously fast. We’re talking serious improvement in a matter of weeks here. You’re likely to underestimate the level of material you can digest, so you should take that into account when making decisions.

Note regarding your native language: I speak basic Chinese and Chinese and Japanese are different enough that you’ll be almost no better than an English native speaker when it comes to fundamentally understanding the language. However, the writing system and the prevalence of Sino-Japanese words mean that you’ll have a leg up in guessing the meaning of words you don’t know when reading, especially after you learn to reverse engineer character simplifications. For example, you’ll see something like 解説 and be like “oh that’s just 解说.” At least coming from the other direction this is super convenient, but it’s obviously no substitute for actually learning the language and it won’t help you at all when it comes to listening (this is the case for Mandarin, but apparently Sino-Japanese words are pronounced reasonably close to their Cantonese counterparts). You also get the joy of seeing exactly how the Japanese butchered Chinese words, so… uh… good luck. You’ll have fun with 样/様. On the plus side you won’t be like “what the hell is this” when you run into counters, but the counting system still has “fun” stuff for you. So to directly answer your questions:

YMMV, but I don’t think it’s hard at all. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s no more or less difficult than English.

If you can commit then no, but obviously yes if you give up in three weeks.

This isn’t as important a decision as you’d expect, but Duolingo will do fine.

PS: There’s more and more anime with good dubs these days.

Dunno if this will be helpful or not, but I’ve seen this game getting rave reviews, and apparently it can really help you learn Japanese:

https://opencritic.com/game/18105/shujinkou

An RPG that simultaneously teaches you Japanese.

I tried this during my weeb phase some 20 years ago.

I stumbled across a video lecture series om some torrent site, and despite being very old (from the 70s or 80s) it was actually pretty good for teaching everyday conversational japanese.

I never progressed beyond the very basics due to life happening, but it got me far enough that I could at least grasp the general topic at hand. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a decent understanding of the language if I had kept at it.

Japanese is a fairly simple language with easy grammar. From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart that knowing one probably won’t help you much with the other, although I may be mistaken.

If you have any fluency in Chinese, Japanese will be a little easier. Language learning difficulty; https://blog.rosettastone.com/the-complete-list-of-language-difficulty-rankings/ https://www.ecinnovations.com/blog/top-10-most-difficult-languages-in-the-world/

No one actually provided good immersion material Check iroironanihongo on Youtube.

Check specifically for the playlist named: [BEGINNER] いろいろなアニメ

Me and my GF are currently doing this. Some recommendations from personal experience:

• Pimsleur is really nice for getting from 0 to being able to speak and understand some amount. It’s very much less overwhelming than jumping head-first into grammar. You can find torrents for it. It’s also a really good way to learn to listen to and speak Japanese out loud, something most other resources lack.
• everyone recommends Genki, and I concurr; it’s a good book series on grammar, with plenty exercises. Will really help filling in the gaps where you have gotten a feeling for things with Pimsleur, but are not able to grasp the underlying concepts intuitively.
• don’t shy away from Hiragana and Katakana. They are easy to learn (seriously, spend an afternoon on each and then do kana.pro for a week and never look back). Ignoring this will prevent you from using most learning resources.
• use Anki; again, everyone says this, because it’s true. You can download a pre-made pack for Genki. 10-15 cards a day are a good leisurely pace, allowing you to tackle a new chapter in Genki approximately every 7-10 days.
• don’t fall in the rabbithole of watching YouTube videos on learning Japanese. Just study instead. If there’s a concrete thing you struggle with, look for a Video on that topic. Most of the geberal advice videos seem to come from English-speaking folks for whom Japanese is their first foreign language (which is great! Don’t get me wrong!), and the resulting information ranges from obvious to questionable.
• decide if you want to learn Kanji (if you don’t know them anyways, given your stated experience). I’d recommend it. It’s actually quite fun, and if you want to watch Anime in Japanese, there’s a good chance you’ll have to use Japanese subs for a while to help along anyways…
• most people online seem to suggest only learning to read Kanji, because “you never need to handwrite things today anyways”. I call bullshit. It’s marginal additional effort, can actually help you with recognition, and if you ever end up needing / wanting to write by hand, you’d have to start all over otherwise.

Lastly, no, it is not a waste of time. Apart from anime, a new language means new ways of thinking, of challenging yourself, of being able to experience people and culture through a new lense, and potentially increasing job opportunities.

Plus if you ever end up visiting Japan, it really comes in handy.

Feel free to ask any followup things that I’ve forgotten about…

Edit: I forgot to mention: I am nowhere near fluent yet, and do not claim the suggestions above as “ultimate Japanese learner advice” or anything like that.

Also, very quickly you’ll start noticing phrases, words, topics when watching anime or japanese videos or music, even if you can’t follow the full conversation. That’s what really motivated and kept me going early on.

I attempted this. I enrolled on an evening course and followed it for a year, doing all the exercises and so on. After one year, I had a rudimentary understanding of the simplest symbols (no kanji) and could do a minimal baby talk. From there, there is a lot of vocabulary. I abandoned. It’s not an easy path, but maybe missing other languages in the same family helps. For me, Japanese was my first non-European language. Fascinating but haaaaard!

I have friends who learned japanese quite easily. Granted, they where living in japan so that’s way easier being deep into easy practice and daily exposure.

But grammar is quite easy, as well as phonetics (that actually depends on your mother language, for us it is at least).

Of course don’t learn the traditional symbols, or don’t learn how to write it at all, since that would be useless to your goal. If that is even possible I don’t know.

Disclaimer: I didn’t study japanese

No, no one has ever done this :P

Japanese can be difficult to native english speakers from what I hear but I don’t personally have experience enough with the language to tell you.

Generally I would say learning an entire language for the sake of consuming a specific media, especially a language not widely spoken outside of its country of origin, is a waste of time yes. At the very least, it is not usually motivating enough to get you to stick to learning that language long term.

However, I don’t mean to discourage you. Language learning is still fun and teaches you a lot about its culture of origin and their values. In my experience language learning apps like duolingo (especially duolingo these days) are not the way to go. Buy some textbooks, there are tons of japanese language learning youtubers who can point you to good ones, then go on some chat sites and practice what you are learning. Don’t just watch anime, listen to japanese music too, try to pick out what they are saying as you listen. Good luck 👍

has anyone else attempted this.

Yes. Every Western Weeb for starters.

It’s not an easy language to master even if you lived full-time in Japan. Everything about the language is needlessly complicated. The grammar, the writing system, the social conventions that influence word choices. Anime Japanese is its own kettle of fish. Overly colloquial or stylized samurai talk - neither of which you’ll get taught in most language courses.

Now, you could be a savant who picks it up in no time. More likely you’ll be in it for a couple of weeks and give up - or life. It’s not a bad hobby. Even beyond Duolingo you’ll find plenty of resources online and lots of it free.

Just depends on how much time and effort you put into learning, if you’re willing to study for 3 hours a day you’ll probably pick it up in a couple years, if you do 5 minutes on duolingo a day probably not going to progress very far