Tools & Reference

Learning any language is a major, lifelong undertaking. Anyone claiming it can be easy is trying to sell you something.

Still, it’s never been easier. The advent of the internet¹ has made learning anything easier, and Japanese is no exception.

1. Learn to read

As mentioned elsewhere, Japanese is much easier to study if you can read the language. The diagrams on this site won’t be of much use to you if you can’t.

a. Hiragana and katakana

Learning the two phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, isn’t a huge undertaking and should be your first step toward learning the language. It should only take a week or two at most to learn both.

The best resources I’m aware of are Tofugu’s Learn Hiragana: The Ultimate Guide , as well as Tofugu’s Learn Katakana: The Ultimate Guide. Both have accompanying books, and both are completely free.

b. Kanji (gulp!)

This is probably the single biggest hurdle to becoming proficient in Japanese.

The most important part of learning a language is massive amounts of input. If you can’t read the language, you cut yourself off from huge swaths of available content (including all content available online written by Japanese natives).

Learning kanji helps you understand when words are related and when they aren’t. It helps you to reason about the language.

It is possible to learn Japanese without learning to read kanji, but it’s much, much harder. Don’t be like the author and wait decades to learn how to read.

Expectations are important:

Even with the best state-of-the-art tools available, it will take anyone at least a year to memorize enough kanji to read much of anything. More realistically, it will take several years and is something you never really stop learning.

Wanikani.com

For the author, Wanikani.com was a godsend. In roughly 3 years, he learned to read well over 2,000 individual kanji characters and well over 6,000 vocabulary words (this is considered a fairly modest pace by many on the site). Wanikani is completely free for the first three levels. The remaining 57 levels require a paid subscription.

Kitsun.io

Kitsun is also mentioned frequently by people the author respects (though he’s never used the service). It’s also a paid service, and uses a spaced-repetition-system (SRS) like Wanikani. In particular, like Wanikani it forces you to explicitly prove you’ve learned something by typing it in (rather than just clicking a button to indicate how easy or difficult an item was).

Anki

For those more technically minded, Anki is a completely free option. It’s excruciatingly configurable and can be hooked into other tools mentioned here.

Anki is an SRS tool for memorizing absolutely anything (it’s pretty much the defacto memorization tool of choice for medical students).

For learning to read Japanese specifically, the animecards site has several useful recommendations for configuring Anki.

2. Learn grammar

You should start studying basic Japanese grammar while you are learning to read. It’s better to learn a bit about grammar as you build your vocabulary rather than trying to do things sequentially.

Japanese grammar is also an incredibly deep subject, but in many ways it’s actually simpler and more logical than English grammar.

The author’s favorite grammar resources are listed in the grammar section of this site.

The author isn’t convinced that an SRS is the right tool for learning grammar, but many people recommend bunpro.jp as well.

3. Add dictionaries

Our vocabulary never stops growing. It’s possible to learn some words from context, but it’s almost always easier to look things up in a dictionary.

Few of us even own any paper dictionaries any more, which is a shame. There are some really great ones. Kenkyusha’s 新和英辞典 is pretty much the gold standard in Japanese-English dictionaries if you happen to come across one in a used bookstore.

Apps and browser plugins

Yomichan

First and foremost, stop reading this and immediately install Yomichan.

The author can’t recommend Yomichan highly enough. It makes consuming Japanese content online so much easier!

Yomichan is a browser plugin (for Chrome or Firefox). Any Japanese text displayed in your browser (including Gmail and social media) becomes trivial to look up: just hover your mouse over an unknown word while holding down the shift key, and a detailed definition pops up on your screen.

Not having to cut-and-paste into an online dictionary doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but avoiding the mental “context-switch” is an unbelievably huge win. Looking up words simply and easily, in-context, without having to open up even another tab in your browser is a profound win.

It’s so good that even if you prefer another browser, the author recommends installing Chrome or Firefox expressly for consuming Japanese content with Yomichan.

TheMoeWay has a nice tutorial on how to configure Yomichan (including adding audio sources, integrating with Anki, etc.).

The default jmdict and kanjidic dictionaries are more than sufficient to get started, but more advanced learners will quickly benefit from adding more (including monolingual, japanese-japanese dictionaries).

Phone Apps

The author uses an iPhone. His favorite dictionary app is Yomiwa which is also available for Android.

In addition to looking up words and characters phonetically (typing), it allows you to look up words by radical, by drawing with your finger, or even with optical recognition. The latter can be incredibly handy when looking up words from dead-tree books.

The Outlier kanji dictionary (an optional paid addition) can be fascinating for learning the history behind some of these characters.

Online resources

Dictionaries

Probably the most popular bilingual dictionary online (for good reason) is Jisho.org.

It’s well worth learning some of the search options available.

While bilingual (Japanese-English) dictionaries will likely always be in one’s repertoire, it’s a very good idea to get in the habit of using monolingual (Japanese-Japanese) dictionaries whenever (and as soon as) possible. If nothing else, it gives you more practice reading Japanese.

More importantly, some nuance is inevitably lost when translating between languages. It pays to see how Japanese natives define words in their own language.

The author’s favorite online monolingual dictionary is Weblio’s 国語辞 典.

As usual, Moe has some good recommendations.

Sentence databases

One thing that tends not to occur to beginners is the power of searching professionally translated sentences. Seeing how a word or particular grammatical construct was translated by a professional can be incredibly helpful.

The “Tanaka corupus” and the tatoeba project were developed expressly for this purpose.

The author regularly searches the Weblio 英語例 Japanese-to-English sentence database to see how Japanese words are used in context.

You can also look up words in Linguee. In addition to providing definitions, it links to “external sources” that used that word or phrase (usually translations of academic material).

AI translation services

“NLP” (natural language processing) is an extremely active research space in the artificial intelligence community.

While they can still be startlingly wrong or at least misleading on occasion, it can be extremely useful to feed an AI model a sentence or more of text to see how it would translate it (in either direction).

Google and Apple both have AI translation engines (both web based and on your phone). They improve almost daily and can be a great help to learners.

The author’s favorite AI translation service is DeepL translate.

Other resources

Learners may also find the following resources useful:

• Tae Kim’s Japanese grammar guide

• Satori reader. This is an excellent paid resource with professionally translated and graded content to practice your reading.

• This online Japanese expression etymology site

• Japanese baseball terms (Apologies, the author is both a Hanshin Tigers and SF Giants fan [yeah, he knows].)