NihongoShark eBook 001

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This is the amazing and incredible NihongoShark 1 Year Japanese Mastery Plan. If you follow all of the guidelines in

this book, then you should be fluent in Japanese within 1 year.

How to Learn

Japanese in

1 Year

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Intro

I grew up as a classic child otaku. I was a ninja for Halloween five years in a row. I asked for swords for my birthday. Ninja stars. I kept track of the Japanese video game scene like a stalker watching his ex-girlfriend.

Needless to say, I was pretty interested in everything Japanese.

Still, I didn’t start studying Japanese until I was in my early twenties. It sounds ridiculous, because I always wanted to learn Japanese. It was my dream. But people had always told me that it was an impossible language to learn. And I, not knowing the first thing about learning a foreign language, believed them. Until, one day in college, I decided to take Japanese 101. Just because I had the extra space in my schedule. Just for fun. That was back in 2008.

2008. The birth of an obsession.

Once I had one taste of the Japanese language, that was it for me. I studied nonstop. It was ineffective studying, but it was obsessive. Japanese journal. Writing out the same kanji 8,000 times. Buying every book on mastering Japanese I could find. Watching anime. Trying (and failing) to read manga. Playing Japanese-language video games. Classes. Flashcards. Leaving my girlfriend of five years to move to Japan.

What a mess.

It wasn’t until 2010, after about 2 years of studying Japanese and 6 months in Japanese-language school in Tokyo, that I finally got a hold of my own, ideal Japanese learning system. It’s a system that I’ve spent the last two years working on.

I tested this language study system by applying it to Spanish. In doing so, I learned to read, speak, and write Spanish fluently… in 3 months.

Keep in mind, Japanese is not Spanish. The vocab and grammar take longer for an English speaker to learn, not to mention the writing system. So it will probably take more like 1 year to become fluent in Japanese using this study system. Still, a year is pretty fast for learning Japanese. I remember one time in

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Like 8+ miles a day. But it’s at least feasible. And I think learning Japanese is the same way. It’s not easy, but it’s definitely feasible. You just need to make sure that you’re walking every. single. day. Also, you need a map to ensure that you’re walking in the right direction. And, really, that’s the aim of this book. It won’t teach you much Japanese at all, but it will teach you how to learn Japanese.

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The 1 Year Japanese Mastery Plan

It took me years of trial and error before I realized which tools were the right tools for me to learn Japanese as quickly as possible.

I’ve taken quite a few Japanese classes over the years, and every single one focuses on four things: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This makes sense. That’s what it means to be totally fluent in a language, right? You can understand it, speak it, read it, and write it. There’s one gigantic problem with this, though: The definition of fluency is not a method for attaining fluency.

That stuff works eventually. It is studying after all. But it is so, so, so slow. We want to learn Japanese fast.

And to learn any language fast, you only need to focus on three things: listening, vocab, and grammar. I still think that speaking and writing are useful tools for learning a language, but they are not tools for learning a language fast. They are not crucial to becoming fluent until you get really, really close to being

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curriculum, and put me into one-on-one study sessions with the school’s founder.

Coming back to the United States, people think that I’m fluent in Spanish because I went to Peru. That’s simply not true, though.

“I always say that the only way to learn a language is to just go live in the country where they speak it. Just get thrown in there, and you’ll pick it up in no time.” – Person who speaks no foreign languages. This assertion makes the same mistake that curriculums make when they set aside time for speaking and writing practice in the early stages of learning a language. Yes, writing and speaking are absolutely essential skills when learning a language. But they are not a productive use of your time until you have solid vocab, grammar, and listening skills.

With that, I hope that maybe, just maybe, I’ve convinced you to at least entertain the possibility that these are the three focuses for fast-track fluency:

1. Vocab 2. Listening 3. Grammar

To shark-learn those three focuses super fast, we have the Japanese Mastery Plan.

Mastery Plan Breakdown

Our Japanese Mastery Plan has 4 Phases and 1 Principle.

The 3 Phases describe the process you will use to learn Japanese, and the 1 Principle describes how you’ll pass through those phases.

The 4 Phases

Phase #1 – Prep Your Ninja Tools (Week #1)

This Phase of the Mastery Plan should take no more than one week (a day, if you’re fast), and it will set you up for fast track studying throughout the rest of the year. Mostly it’s just about getting all of the tools that will prove invaluable for the duration of this year of studying.

Phase #2 – Prep Your Ninja Brain (Months #1-4)

I won’t get into it too much here, but Phase #2 is the most difficult part of this 1-year study plan. Or maybe I should say: it’s the easiest part to fail. In the first few months of your year of studying, Phase #2 will have you master some core aspects of the Japanese language, which will propel your studying in Phase #3.

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Phase #3 – Lay Your Fluency Foundation (Months #5-12)

Phase #3 is all about building up a gigantic foundation for you to achieve fast fluency. This means learning a ton of vocab, a ton of grammar concepts, and listening to a quite a few audio lessons. Since you’ll have prepped in Phases 1 and 2, though, you’ll be achieving these goals at an incredibly fast rate.

Phase #4 –Go Jouzu! (Months 13+)

For those that make it this far, this book will become obsolete. In Phase #4, you’ll start focusing on the aspects of Japanese that most other curriculums focus on from the beginning, aspects that, though helpful, would slow down your fluency achievement had you not already performed Phases 1, 2 & 3.

If you’ve followed through with everything in the first three phases, then you should be functionally fluent within 1 month of studying in Phase #4.

The 1 Principle

There is only one principle to this Japanese Mastery Plan: Never stop. A shark never stops swimming. You never stop studying Japanese.

Don’t get us wrong. You can have a life. You can learn other things. But you cannot go a single day without studying Japanese at least a little bit. (Details on daily essentials will be described in Phases #2 and #3.)

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Phase #1 – Prep Your Ninja Tools

This Japanese mastery system is all about smart learning. Part of smart learning is making sure that you have the best resources at your disposal, and that’s what I’ll lay out in Phase #1.

This Phase is all about bombarding you with the ninja tools you’ll need to make it on this journey. In this phase, you don’t really learn any Japanese. That’s why this Phase should only take a couple of days. A week, at most.

Specifically, we’ll prep you with tools for:  Vocab & Kanji

 Listening  Reference  Grammar

Sound good? Yoshi! Let’s go!

Vocab Prep

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that a lot of classes gloss over vocab study, because it’s not exactly suited for group study. To learn vocab, we’ll use Ninja Tool #1: Anki Flashcards.

Ninja Tool #1: Anki Flashcards

Anki Flashcards are the most important language study tool in this entire guide. If you’re not going to use Anki, then you can go ahead and throw this guide in the trash. You can also pretty much forget about learning Japanese in under a year.

Anki Flashcards are intelligent computer flashcards that adjust according to what you do and do not remember.

The basic idea is that Anki shows you a flashcard right about when you will be forgetting it. This means that (1) you don’t waste time studying things you already know and (2) you do spend time studying things you’re forgetting.

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This is the equivalent of side 1 of any flashcard. Anki only really gets going, though, once you click “Show Answer.” Then you see the side 2 of the flashcard:

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If I didn’t remember that 成績 (seiseki) meant “grades” (as in, “school grades”), then I would click “Again,” and it would show me that card again in a few minutes. Or, if I thought it was really easy to remember, I could click “Easy,” and it would wait 5 days before showing me this card again.

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http://goo.gl/4REHA

Don’t create a new deck or start studying just yet, though, as I’ll have detailed instructions on the best way to do that in Phase #2.

If you have any trouble setting up Anki, their website has good documentation and tutorials for pretty much any problem you might be having.

Anki is especially useful, because by using it we can track our vocab progress. You can have a clear understanding of how many vocab words you have memorized, which means that you can track how far along you are in trying to achieve fluency.

Ninja Tool #2 – Remembering the Kanji

This may cause some uproar with readers, as there’s quite a debate going on as to whether one should use Remembering the Kanji in order to tackle the 2,136 Japanese characters you’re required to learn in order to, say, read a newspaper.

Our 1-Year Plan integrates James Heisig’s timeless book. We don’t do it exactly his way, but it is still worthwhile to pick up his book.

Remembering the Kanji is a kanji-learning system that Heisig developed back in the 70’s. Yikes! In most Japanese classes, you learn kanji by order of usefulness. The problem with this is that some of the most useful kanji are pretty difficult to memorize. At the same time, some of the less-used kanji are incredibly easy to learn, and they show up as parts of all kinds of different, more commonly used kanji.

Heisig’s method is essentially the polar opposite of what you do in Japanese classes. He completely disregards (for the time being, at least) the usefulness of the kanji and instead presents them in an order ideally suited for memorizing their writing and meaning only. So, you learn how to write the kanji and what it means, but you don’t actually know any Japanese words that use that kanji.

He does this by dividing the kanji into primitive elements. Then, he takes all 2,136 kanji that you need to learn to read a Japanese newspaper, and he puts them in order of these primitive elements.

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So, for example,

隹

(turkey)

+

木

(tree)

=

集

(gather).

By the time you get to 集 in Remembering the Kanji, you’ve already learned the primitive elements 隹 (turkey) and 木 (tree), so it’s easy to memorize 集 if you make a story to help you remember it, something like, “Turkeys like to gather on top of trees.”

In Phase #2, I’ll present a kanji study method that uses Heisig’s book and method, but adds a few tweaks so that we can speed it up dramatically.

For the time being, it’s a good idea to get Remembering the Kanji. Here it is on Amazon:

http://goo.gl/qe50C

Ninja Tool #3 – Reviewing the Kanji

Reviewing the Kanji is an amazing website. It is made up of a community of people who are using Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji system. This website will save you hundreds of hours learning the kanji.

In Phase #2, I’ll discuss the best way to utilize this site in conjunction with your Remembering the Kanji book and Anki Flashcards. For now, though, just bookmark the following address:

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Listening Prep

I call this ‘listening prep,’ but maybe what it should be called is ‘Nihongo Saturation.’

I’m always a little bit shocked by the results of listening practice when studying foreign languages. Maybe because it’s such a passive method of study—I’m not going after books and new concepts and writing notes and examples, just receiving instruction, honing my ear for Japanese—maybe that’s why I’m always shocked at just how helpful listening practice is when learning a foreign language. It really works though… if you really do it.

What I mean is, if you want to have listening practice improve your Japanese, then you need to Nihongo-ify your life. It’s a question of priorities. How bad do you want this? Because you probably need to cut back on listening to music. Maybe cut out TV completely. We’re trying to do something monumental here. Japanese fluency in 1 year. It’s almost unheard of for someone who’s self-taught. And it’s only possible with a little bit of sacrifice.

I have, for your perusal, a video:

How bad do you want it?

http://goo.gl/5Dard

If you’re like I was before I knew Japanese, every day is tinged with a little bit of sadness, sadness that you don’t have this seemingly impossible thing: Japanese fluency. But if every day you move towards the achievement of that goal, it can allay that sadness. I bring this up now, because listening practice can be incredibly inconvenient. We like listening to music. We like watching shows. But achieving goals is about putting future wants in front of immediate wants. And that means listening to lessons while you eat breakfast, lunch. It means listening to them while you exercise, drive. Language learning is all about numbers. The more hours of lessons you listen to, the better your Japanese will become.

If you do a minimum of 30 minutes of Nihongo listening practice every single day, then you should achieve JLPT Level N2 listening comprehension after about 1 year.

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Ninja Tool #4 – JapanesePod101

JapanesePod101 is a lot more than a Japanese podcast. Ya, that’s the main focus, but really it could also be used for your grammar studies. I didn’t use it for grammar, because by the time I discovered

JapanesePod101, I already knew a lot of Japanese grammar. But I have read quite a few of their lesson PDF’s, and I think they’ve got a pretty good thing going. For now, though, let’s talk about Japanese listening lessons.

I truly believe that JapanesePod101 is an indispensable resource for learning Japanese. Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, other podcasts—none of them are on the same level as JapanesePod101:

http://goo.gl/KDdWm

The reason I’m such a die-hard supporter of JapanesePod101 is that, after a while, their lessons get to be very advanced. I still listen to them every day. And every time I listen to them I learn something super awesome and useful.

I feel a little strange recommending a study program that costs money, but luckily JapanesePod101 is pretty cheap. I definitely don’t regret purchasing it for myself. Still, if you’re not willing to pay, you can still find some good, free podcasts through iTunes, though they’re unlikely to be as structured or helpful as JapanesePod101.

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smartphone or mp3 player. So, maybe start with ‘Absolute Beginner Lessons’ or ‘Newbie Lessons.’ Listen to them. Then maybe listen to them again at 2x speed. Then, when you feel you’re picking up everything that’s being said, move onto the next level. There’s always more to listen to.

Good? Ok, let’s move on. Hang in there; we’ve only got two Phase #1 preps left! And this next one won’t require any studying at all. Awesome, ya?

Reference Prep

It may sound a little bit strange to prep your Japanese references, but when it comes time to use them, it’ll be nice to learn exactly where to turn. This section has 3 Ninja Tools. Get excited!

Ninja Tool #5 – Jisho.org

You may already know this, but if we’re going to become fluent, we’re probably going to need to look up a couple of words in a Japanese-English dictionary.

Here’s the thing, though:

Do not buy a paper dictionary.

Waste of trees. Waste of space. Waste of your time.

Instead, use Jisho.org. Here’s why: When you need to look up a word, you also need to make a flashcard for it. Jisho.org is awesome because (1) it’s easy and fast to look up words, (2) most words also have example sentences with translation, and (3) you can click to see the kanji that make up every word on Jisho.org, and the kanji page tells you what number the kanji is in Remembering the Kanji.

Jisho.org

http://jisho.org/

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To find the Remembering the Kanji number of a kanji, you would go to a page like the one shown above on Jisho.org, then scroll down until you see this:

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1534: blue.

Though I don’t want to interfere too much with your life (like I’m not already with this hardcore study plan!), you might want to make Jisho.org the homepage in your web browser (unless you’re my best friend, and you want your homepage to be Nihongoshark.com). Having your email as your homepage is pretty much just asking the world to distract you. Same goes for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. You’re Nihongo-ifying your life, remember? Which means Japanese comes first. Those other sites are distractions. They’re already pulling you away from productivity, from fluency. Don’t make it any easier for them!

Oh, and if you haven’t yet set up your computer to handle Japanese, here’s a little guide: Using Japanese on Your Computer

http://goo.gl/m5tPJ

Speaking of getting Japanese onto your computer screen, you should also get…

Ninja Tool #5 – Rikaichan / Rikaisama

Rikaichan is a browser plugin that helps you to browse the internet in Japanese. Once it’s installed, you can scroll over any Japanese words you see online, and their meaning and kanji will pop up, like this:

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Awesomeness! Even with Rikaichan, it’ll probably be pretty painful to browse the internet in Japanese, at least until the end of year one (i.e. this mastery plan). Hopefully it will come in handy, though!

Rikaichan

http://goo.gl/Cjc41

In all honesty, I don’t use my computer to look up random words that often, as I’m lucky enough to have a smartphone, and I’m often looking words up on the go.

Rikaisama is pretty much the same thing as Rikaichan, only it’s got some added features like word pronunciation, Anki flashcard import tools, etc. I’ve heard it’s actually better than Rikaichan, but I don’t have much experience using it.

Rikaisama

http://goo.gl/2ym4i

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http://goo.gl/tP4IY

There’s only one problem with the Anki app: the iPhone one is $25! It’s the most expensive app I’ve ever paid for. Actually, it’s the only app I’ve ever paid for.

It couldn’t be helped. By the time the smartphone app came out, my main Anki study deck already had 7,000+ cards! My thinking is that the dozens of hours it’s always saving me through accelerated learning is worth well over $25. Still, ouch.

My #2 Nihongo App: imi wa?

I love Jisho.org, but they don’t have an app (though their mobile site is pretty solid). So, for looking words up on my phone, I usually use imi wa? The problem with imi wa? is that it’s only on the iPhone,

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though. Sorry, other smartphone users.

imi wa?

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Grammar Prep

Japanese fluency grammar preparation. Wow, that sounds terrifying. Guess what, though? Phase #1 grammar prep only takes like 5 minutes. All you’ve got to do for grammar in Phase #1 is pick out which grammar study tool you’re going to use in Phase #3.

Now, there are a ton of great grammar resources for Japanese. After all, grammar is straightforward. Ya, sometimes it’s a little bit backwards for what we English speakers are used to, but it’s at least clear cut. And it’s well-suited for books.

My preferred approach is to pick out a course for my grammar studies before beginning. This is mainly because so many Japanese grammar book series have only one volume. In other words, they always end before you can progress to an advanced level. Good, advanced Japanese grammar books are hard to come by. I’m guessing it must be because so many of us foreigners start learning Japanese, but we rarely progress to anything vaguely resembling an advanced skill level… without going to Japan or majoring in Japanese at a 4-year university. And even that fails sometimes. My experience leads me to believe the array of grammar resources is something like this:

It probably won’t get too advanced, but we want a grammar series with at least two volumes. The options aren’t that extensive, but here are a few I’ve come across…

Ninja Tool #7 – Bunpou Books

Bunpou = 文法 = 文 (sentence) + 法 (method) = the method of sentences = grammar!

Beginner's Grammar Intermediate Grammar Advanced Grammar Japanese-Language Books

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#1 – JapanesePod101 PDF’s

Ok, so Bunpou Book #1 isn’t a book at all. The thing I love about the PDF’s JapanesePod101 publishes is that they get super advanced. It makes sense: they have a PDF for every audio lesson, and they have hundreds and hundreds of audio lessons… which means hundreds and hundreds of grammar study PDF’s. Here are a couple of images taken from a lesson PDF of theirs:

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My main issue with using JapanesePod101 as a grammar study tool is probably the lack of concise, attached practice material. I think that this makes it, perhaps, a better grammar study tool once you’ve already completed a couple of standard grammar textbooks, the kind with workbooks and example after example.

#2 – Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar

In all honesty, I’ve never read Tae Kim’s A Guide to Japanese Grammar, but I’ve heard so many good things that I thought I would list it here as a grammar resource.

This behemoth grammar guide (over 450 pages!) is meant to teach you Japanese “as it’s really spoken,” as opposed to the over-polite Japanese that most grammar books stick you with for the first one or two volumes of study.

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http://goo.gl/jpwZN

#3 – The Genki Series

Genki has a special place in my heart. This one’s pure nostalgia. It was my first encounter with the Japanese language. I still have my workbooks. Looking through them, you can sort of sense the thrill with which I was filling in these examples. Every answer written out completely, each character so neat, each stroke made with care, caution. I was opening the gates to a new world, a world where I sit for five minutes contemplating the history of the word ‘teaspoon,’ because Japanese has a word for teaspoon that has the character for tea(茶) in it! What does tea have to do with a teaspoon? And how did it cross all those miles to mean that for such geographically distant people?!

Ok, I’ll stop. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already plenty fascinated by Japanese. If you do decide to go with the Genki series, you’ll be looking at these books:

a) Genki I

 Text (http://goo.gl/iSbT1)

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b) Genki II

 Text (http://goo.gl/y6sFm)

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c) Intermediate Japanese

 Text (http://goo.gl/Y1BjU)

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Take a look at some reviews. Or better, flip through them at a college bookstore (they probably won’t have good textbooks at a regular bookstore). Compare them with some other grammar books. Maybe compare them with…

#4 – The Minna no Nihongo Series

When I first used Minna no Nihongo, I thought it sucked. I was at an international Japanese language academy in Tokyo, and there was no English in the books! But then I came across the English versions of Minna no Nihongo, and they actually look pretty helpful. Take a look:

a) Minna no Nihongo I

 Text (http://goo.gl/274Og)

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b) Minna no Nihongo II

 Text (http://goo.gl/DQPuH)

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#5 – The Japanese Grammar Dictionary Series

Warning: If you’re still a beginner, do not use these books as a grammar study course. These books are meant to be used as references. Only crazy people with too much time to study read these books from cover to cover (in other words, me). But you might want to go ahead and get them, if you can find them, because it’s great to be able to look up a grammar item you’ve come across, which all other grammar books are really bad for.

I would put these in the reference section, but really they are a supplement to the grammar study

curriculum you choose. Since we don’t have a classroom, we’ll often need a different way of explaining a grammar concept in order for us to understand it, and these books are really useful for that, thanks to their ordered, detailed indexes.

I’m a grammar nerd, so I love these books. They’re pretty much my favorite books in the world. a) A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar

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http://goo.gl/3wCNw

b) A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar

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http://goo.gl/D3Kb1

You can also get the whole set off of White Rabbit Press.

#6 – Books You Should NOT Use

This mastery plan is all about saving time, and there are a lot of grammar books that will cost you more time than you need to spend. That’s why I recommend starting with a grammar book series. If it only has one volume, if they sell it at Barnes and Noble or another major chain, if it has a fun twist (e.g. learn grammar by reading manga), then be very careful. These books may teach you some useful stuff, but you’ll probably end up restudying that same stuff when you’re forced to switch to a different grammar book series, one that progresses to intermediate and advanced levels.

One Last Thing

Congratulations!

Don’t ever forget to congratulate yourself for each step of your journey to Nihongo mastery. You did something great when you decided to learn Japanese. You did something great when you got a hold of this book. And you did something great by reading all the way through Phase #1… which you just did! That’s right. Phase 1 complete! Well, you’ve still got to do the work laid out in Phase #1, but I’m happy to say that you now know everything you’re going to need to do in Week #1 in order to become a master of Japanese this year. Let’s take a condensed look at your Phase #1 Goals:

Phase #1 - Checklist

 Download Anki Flashcards  Get Remembering the Kanji  Bookmark Reviewing the Kanji

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 Get your listening lesson study tools (from JapanesePod101 or elsewhere)  Bookmark Jisho.org (and maybe make it your homepage)

 Install Rikaichan or Rikaisama in your web browser  Download smartphone apps (if applicable)

 Pick and purchase your grammar study materials  Be excited about life

 Don’t let this list intimidate you

Sounds like a lot, maybe. But it shouldn’t take more than a day or two to decide on all of this stuff. And after these first few days, you’ll be prepped to Great White Shark attack the Japanese language. You’ll be prepped for Phase #2!

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Phase #2 – Prep Your Ninja Brain

I should apologize in advance. The truth is, I am very hesitant to propose what I’m going to propose in Phase #2, because I’m worried that many readers will falter when faced with such a huge challenge. Back when I studied Japanese at a language institute in Tokyo, it was pretty embarrassing to compare the average Western student (mostly Americans) with the majority of our student body (mostly Koreans and Chinese), because the Westerners were comparably inept at learning Japanese. I saw Westerner after Westerner fall behind in their courses, unable to keep up with their Asian counterparts—Chinese students who didn’t need to study the kanji; Korean students that already spoke a language similar to Japanese. It was a bit embarrassing, really.

Phase #2 is all about closing the advantage-gap that separates Asian students from Westerners. In other words, it’s about learning to decipher the Japanese Writing System. This phase has three Ninja Brain Preps, which altogether should take you about 104 days to complete. For many it will take longer. For some incredibly motivated students, it may take half that time.

1. Learn to pronounce Japanese (Day #1) 2. Learn Hiragana and Katakana (Week #1)

3. Learn the meaning and writing of all 2,136 Joyo Kanji (Weeks #2-14)

You’re probably looking at #3 and thinking that I’m crazy, but it really is possible if you follow this guide diligently. It’s actually pretty simple to do so. Don’t, however, confuse simple with easy—it’s simple to exercise every day, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Anyways, here we go…

Pronouncing Japanese

Ninja Brain Prep #1 – Learn to Pronounce Japanese

Before you start studying Japanese, you’ll need to know how it’s pronounced. That way, when you read something, you’ll think the sound of the words correctly in your mind. It’s the first step to learning any language. Rather than try to teach you myself, I’ll do what you’ll find me doing for the bulk of this book, which is point you in the direction of the ideal study tools out there.

The first thing I would do is check out some YouTube videos, which can be very good (and free!) for pronunciation practice. This one isn’t bad, for starters:

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http://goo.gl/4u5Hy

That doesn’t give very much background, though. So you might want to use something that has accompanying text-based guides. There are a lot of options out there for this, but I recommend JapanesePod101:

JapanesePod101

http://goo.gl/KDdWm

I suggest checking them out a few times throughout this book, but doing so is completely optional. For now, it’s worth mentioning if you want to look up an immediate solution for hearing some good examples of Japanese pronunciation.

The Japanese Writing System

So now you can pronounce Japanese. Sweet! I’m so proud of you.

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So, for example, sumimasen, which means “sorry” or “excuse me,” would be written in hiragana, because it’s a word of Japanese origin: すみません (su-mi-ma-se-n).

However, a word like nekutai, which means (get this) “necktie,” would be written in katakana, because it’s a foreign loan word: ネクタイ (ne-ku-ta-i).

Often these loan words will just be English words with a Japanese pronunciation, like the example just shown (necktie). The cool thing about this is that once you learn katakana, you more or less will have learned to read thousands of words in Japanese. This is why katakana is a great syllabary to learn if you’re just going to Japan for a short trip. It will come in handy, I promise.

You’ll want to learn hiragana and katakana right away, so you can get away from…

The Evil Romaji

The early chapters of any Japanese introductory-level book will show you the romaji for Japanese words. Romaji are roman characters (i.e. the alphabet). So, when I write ‘yama’ instead of 山 or やま, that’s romaji.

STOP USING ROMAJI RIGHT NOW.

If you study Japanese with romaji, you are sabotaging yourself. It’s super-detrimental. You

must, must, must learn at least hiragana and katakana before you study Japanese any longer than

a day. It takes maybe 2-5 days to learn hiragana and katakana, so just go get it over with, ya?

Ninja Brain Prep #2 – Learn Hiragana and Katakana

There are a number of ways you can pick up hiragana and katakana. For me, I like using flashcards and web apps for hiragana/katakana. If you’re on your computer, this site (realkana.com) has a good

flashcard system for learning hiragana and katakana. There are also a lot of YouTube videos, which can help with pronunciation. If you’ve got an iPhone, they have apps for this as well. Years ago, I just made some paper flashcards and blasted through them in a few days.

Though I haven’t read it personally, James Heisig’s book claims that it can teach you both Hiragana and Katakana in 3 hours total:

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http://goo.gl/guRYF

If it were anyone but James Heisig, I’d probably be a little suspicious of that claim, but he did write a pretty awesome Kanji memorization book, which I used religiously when learning the Kanji (and will be discussing later in this section). For now, let’s get back to hiragana and katakana.

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Shark attack those dealskis! I’m sure it will take more than those little snippets and charts in order for you to master hiragana and katakana, but just be sure that you know them by the end of your first week. Week #1 Goals:

 Learn to pronounce Japanese  Learn Hiragana

 Learn Katakana

This Week #1 prep will be indispensable as you continue throughout the rest of your Japanese journey. Also, it will seem very, very easy once you take on Ninja Brain Prep #3… the most challenging part of this entire book.

Kanji

Kanji! Its endless curves, the way they combine to make words, make meaning of concepts in forms I’d not thought before, the way writing can be a visual art, the incredible depth and history. I hate them. They are like the most beautiful, fascinating, insufferable lover.

Kanji is the third of the three pillars of the Japanese writing system (the other two being hiragana and katakana). The characters are actually Chinese characters that the Japanese began to adopt well over 1,000 years ago. The unique thing about Kanji is that the characters have meaning, as opposed to how hiragana and katakana are simply used to represent sounds. The other unique thing about them is that there are thousands of them!

The sheer number of Kanji that must be learned in order to obtain Japanese fluency (JLPT N1) is just ridiculous. Overwhelming. 2,000 plus! How can we ever hope to do it? How can we, in a year, master something that Japanese people themselves are expected to learn only by the end of high school? I mean, look at all of them:

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Ok, sorry. That was cruel. Forget you ever saw that picture. It will seem much less atrocious if you don’t try to take it all in at once.

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out of the way before anything else. Those of you who are savvy to kanji study methods probably know I’m talking about Heisig’s method. But, actually, I’m talking about my own streamlined method of kanji study. This is the bulk of Phase #2, and it’s also what you’ll be doing for the first 3.5 months of this 1-year mastery plan, should you choose to follow it.

So, without further ado, I present you with…

The 97-Day Kanji Challenge

Studying Kanji is tricky business. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the best way to study the kanji fast. And, truth be told, there are a lot of good ways to study the kanji. But most of them can be pretty overwhelming, so it’s easy to lose motivation and go in search of the mythical “easy, fast way to learn the kanji.”

I won’t mince words: Learning the kanji is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not only that, but it took me longer than 97 days to learn them. It took me a lot longer, because I kept trying different study methods, never thinking that I was on the right track to learning all of the kanji.

How NOT to Learn the Kanji

1. Stroke by Stroke

This is how a lot of Japanese classes will encourage you to learn the kanji. That’s because they teach kanji in the same way that Japanese children learn them—stroke by stroke, over the course of 10+ years. There’s another word for this method: masochism.

Seriously, this is torture. I’m not saying it’s impossible to learn this way. I’m just saying that it wastes an unbelievable amount of time.

2. Learning Each Kanji as a Whole

Kanji are made up of parts… and those parts have meaning. So you should learn the parts first, then the kanji as a whole.

3. Using Only 1 Kanji Study Tool

A lot of people will write books and blog posts and just about anything you can think of in which they tell you about “the best, fastest, most awesome way to learn the kanji”…which, as coincidence would have it, is their way. Not only that, but pay us money for it, too.

No!

There are a ton of useful kanji study tools and methods out there. But the only way to learn kanji fast and effectively is to combine the best ones. And that’s what this 97-Day Kanji Challenge is all about: an

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amalgamation of the best tools available for learning kanji.

How You SHOULD Learn the Kanji

The fastest way to learn the kanji is to use a combination of the best kanji study tools out there.

Not only that, but you also need to be sure to use them in a very particular manner.

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together the right way, they leave you with the fastest way to learn the kanji. If the instructions

in this guide are followed precisely, you will learn all of the 2,000+ joyo kanji in 97 days.

Even the Best Way Will Not Be Easy

I could go on for pages and pages about why I chose the following method of study as opposed to one of the plethora of other options. The bottom line, though, is that I think this is the fastest way possible to learn and retain the meaning of each of the 2,136 Joyo Kanji.

However!

It will be a nightmare getting through this 97-Day Challenge, and I’m really sorry to tell you that. But if you’re serious about learning Japanese, then it’s the most valuable 97 days that you will ever spend studying. If you know the meaning of the kanji—even if you don’t know their readings or example vocab to go with them—every part of your Japanese studies will get easier, and you will learn faster. Concepts make more sense. Vocab makes more sense. So why not just get them out of the way? You can do it. I know you can. You are awesome. You are awesome. You are awesome.

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Lather. Rinse. Repeat… 2,042 Times

The 97-Day Kanji Challenge follows a six-step process. The first five steps only take a few minutes. Actually, step six only takes a few minutes also… but then you need to repeat it a couple thousand times.

1. Download Anki

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2. Buy Remembering the Kanji

Again, if you haven’t already done so. You can get it here:

http://goo.gl/qe50C

Once you buy it, be sure to read the introduction. This book is meant as a guide, but we'll be using it as more of a reference.

3. Download the Heisig Deck on Anki

There is a shared deck on Anki, as luck would have it, that already has all of the Remembering the Kanji characters in it, along with links to each of them on Reviewing the Kanji. I cannot express in words how much time this is going to save you, so I won’t even try. Just know that today the world should look a little more beautiful to you, because of how much time and pain this has saved you from wasting.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Anki, click the “Get Shared” link down at the bottom of the decks page. You can see my mouse pointing to it in this image:

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Click on (you guessed it) Japanese!

On the next page, type “Heisig” in the search bar. You’re looking for a deck titled “Heisig's Remember the Kanji (RTK) 1+3.” Be careful, as there are similar decks that aren’t as good. It should be relatively easy to spot, as it has the most downloads. As of the time of this writing, it’s the third item down on the page. Click the Info button next to it:

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This will bring you to the deck’s information page. Scroll to the bottom and click “Download:”

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Now, I have my deck downloaded and named something I want. Next, I’m going to…

4. Set Up Anki Preferences

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the world more important than doing every single card due for review. Every day.

There will be days when you don’t feel like studying. Days when you don’t have time or feel sick or have to go to a wedding or party or class or pretty much anywhere you can think of. On such days, you may not have a lot of time to study, and you might not have any time to learn new cards. But you must, must, must, must review the cards that are due that day.

Once upon a time, I missed about a week of doing my cards that were due for review, and I got overwhelmed by the cards that piled up, causing me to miss even more that were due for review… and before I knew it, I had about 4,000 cards due to be reviewed on a single day.

One way we’ll avoid this is by having our new cards always show after our review cards.

To do this, go to Tools  Preferences. Then under the Basic tab, make sure that you’ve selected “Show new cards after reviews:”

Then click close.

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You also want to make sure that Anki is always showing you every card that is due for a given day. So, next, click on the Settings icon next to your deck on the Decks page and click Options. Click on the Reviews tab and change the “Maximum reviews/day” to 9999:

Change Card Formatting

This one is really up to preference. I just don’t like the default font size for this Anki deck. To change it, open up your new kanji deck and click “Study Now.”

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I prefer to change the font size on the Back Template to 50px instead of 150px, as I think 150px is just a little overwhelming, because it’s so big, and I want room for my story to show. Really, it’s up to you, though, how you’d like your cards to look.

Most importantly, you will want to make sure that you add the {{Story}} field somewhere in your Back Template. I put mine between the character and stroke counts, so my entire Back Template is as follows:

{{FrontSide}} <hr id=answer>

{{Kanji}}

{{Story}}

画数: {{Stroke count}}, Nr: {{Heisig number}} With that, the cards are set up to show the Story during review. Which means… Congratulations! Your Anki program is maximized for Kanji learning.

Now we just need to set some goals…

5. Change New Card Quota

This is a tough one, because, really, it depends on the person. While this deck has over 3,000 cards, we’re only going to make it our priority to learn the first 2,042 of them. That would have us learn every one of

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the Joyo Kanji up until they added 196 additional ones in 2010.

The 196 additional kanji are spread throughout the remaining cards between 2,043 and 3,007. I think that you should still learn all of the kanji between 2,043 and 3,007, but maybe just save it for later on in the year, or after you’ve finished this 1-year mastery plan.

That said, we have some decisions to make. We need to learn 2,042 flashcards in as little time as possible… without getting burned out or overburdening ourselves.

To follow the challenge and get through them all in 97 days, we’d need to learn 22 kanji per day. That means we would set our New Card Quota to 22. To do so, we click the Setting icon, then for “New cards/day” we would enter “22:”

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4. Learn the kanji

And all of that can take quite a while to do… especially when you have to do it over 2,000 times! If it helps, let’s walk through an example…

6. Learn New Kanji

The biggest flaw with Heisig, for me, was that he makes you write so many of the stories yourself. And I’m just not creative enough to write 2,000 stories that are good or help me remember. Inevitably, I would end up rushing through the creation of a story… meaning my story would suck… meaning I wouldn’t remember the kanji.

This is why Reviewing the Kanji is such a helpful site, because other people have already written great stories and pointed out which ones are better than others. So all I need to do is click the link on one of the new cards that shows up while I’m studying:

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I can then scroll down and pick the story that, to me, is easiest to remember:

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I then paste the chosen story into the “Story” field. I like to also write the primitives above the story. If you don’t know the primitives, just check your Remembering the Kanji book. I put primitives in italics and kanji meanings in bold:

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If your answer card does not show the Story, then you probably haven’t edited the card formatting right, which I showed you how to do back in Step #4.

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Well, there are a few keys to this:

Take It 1 Kanji at a Time

You’re not learning 2,000 kanji all at once. You’re only learning 22 kanji a day. And maybe you’re busy, and you only average something like 10 new kanji a day. That’s fine, too. It just means that it’ll take you a little bit longer to learn all of the kanji… and that’s not a big deal. If you miss adding new kanji one day, then it will just take one extra day to learn all of them. So what? It takes most people years and years to learn all of them. It’s not like one extra day is going to be the end of the world.

But!

Not reviewing cards that are due for review IS the end of the world.

Never Miss Your Cards Due for Review

I cannot stress this enough.

It’s not a big deal if you don’t learn any new kanji on a given day. But it is a big deal if you don’t review the cards that Anki tells you are due on a given day. Because it’s just too easy to miss two days… then three days… then a week, and pretty soon, you don’t remember any of the hundreds of kanji that you’ve spent all that time learning!

I’m serious. This has happened to me, and it SUCKED.

I always review my cards first thing in the morning. A lot of the time, I’ll review them on my phone before I even get out of bed. It’s been about six months since I missed a day reviewing my flashcards… and some of those days I was pretty absent-minded, and reviewing probably didn’t do me all that good anyways, but I at least have the peace of mind in knowing that (1) I’m making progress and (2) I’m staying on track.

Review the cards that are due EVERY DAY.

Find Your Perfect Mnemonic Style

It took me a long, long time to realize that a lot of the stories that Heisig wrote in his book did not help me at all. I think that, overall, this is because his stories are written for visual learners, but I’m not a visual learner. I remember word-play, jokes, etc.

Maybe you do need to draw a picture in your head every time you put down a story, though. Whatever works! It might take a long time to find out what kind of mnemonic is easiest for you to remember. So don’t fret about it. But ask yourself, as you continue through the kanji, why you remember some stories so easily while you forget others every time you read them. Do they strike up vivid images in your mind? Do they remind you of something that happened in your life? Do they make you laugh, cry or inspire other emotions?

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Watch the Clock

When studying kanji, it’s really easy to get distracted and start doing something else. I, for one, have a particularly hard time focusing when I’m studying kanji, so I often find myself dazing while I’m learning new ones, or getting carried away with finding the perfect mnemonic and spending 30 minutes on one story! It’s going to take hundreds of hours to learn all of these kanji. And it will take hundreds more if you don’t watch the clock.

Keep Swimming

Just keep at it. I thought that learning all of the Joyo kanji seemed impossible. Even when I was up to 1,800 or so, I still thought it seemed impossible. Whether I had 1,000 left to learn or 200 left to learn, it just seemed impossible.

So I had to keep my head down. I had to take it one story at a time and remember that great

accomplishments only come from persistent efforts. When I finally lifted my head up, at the end of it all, it was a feeling of joy—relief—that I’ve never been able to adequately describe to anyone before. You won’t regret it. And yes, you can do this.

The Hardest 97 Days of Your Life

Right? But we’re in this together! Don’t give up! Maybe this will help:

8 Reasons Knowing the Kanji Will Be Awesome

1. You’ll practically know Chinese.

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2. You’ll be able to read ads in Japan.

3. And signs warning you not to be a pervert.

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And, perhaps most important…

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Phase #2 - Checklist

 Learn to Pronounce Japanese  Learn Hiragana

 Learn Katakana  Learn 2,042 Kanji

o Download Anki

o Buy Remembering the Kanji o Download the Heisig Deck o Set Up Anki Preferences o Change New Card Quota o Learn New Kanji

 Learn up to Kanji #22 (Day #1)  Learn up to Kanji #154 (Week #1)  Learn up to Kanji #308 (Week #2)  Learn up to Kanji #462 (Week #3)  Learn up to Kanji #616 (Week #4)  Learn up to Kanji #924 (Week #5)  Learn up to Kanji #1,078 (Week #6)  Learn up to Kanji #1,232 (Week #7)  Learn up to Kanji #1,386 (Week #8)  Learn up to Kanji #1,540 (Week #9)  Learn up to Kanji #1,694 (Week #10)  Learn up to Kanji #1,848 (Week #11)  Learn up to Kanji #2,002 (Week #12)

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 Learn up to Kanji #2,042 (Week #13)  Learn up to Kanji #2,042 (Week #14)

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Phase #3 – Lay Your Fluency

Foundation

The main purpose of Phase #2 was to prepare you for Phase #3. This phase will take up the bulk of your first year’s Japanese studies. Assuming you’ve made it through Phase #2, you’ve already learned all of the kanji and are an amazing all-around person. You’ve already switched out all of your music and TV shows for Japanese podcasts. You’ve already set up your computer to avoid distractions and help you learn Japanese. You’ve already got a stack of grammar study materials just waiting for you to dive into them. You’ve already laid all the groundwork necessary in order for you to become fluent in Japanese at an incredible rate.

I’m just going to warn you now: Like Phase #2, it will be incredibly hard to make it through Phase #3 without hitting any major speed bumps. It’s difficult, because it’s going to require that you study—and

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complete—certain items every single day. No weekends off. No holidays. No exceptions.

It will require an enormous amount of discipline. Because of this, you may want to adjust the daily goals that I’ve set out here to match what you feel comfortable doing. Only you know how much time you can truly dedicate to your Japanese studies on a day-to-day basis. I can tell you one thing, though, a principle that is underlying every page of this book: No one becomes fluent in a language by studying

intermittently.

The Almighty Study Chain

Phase #3—actually, this entire mastery plan—utilizes the ‘don’t break the chain’ system. Here’s an article about how this system works:

Don’t Break the Chain Article

http://goo.gl/g4y9a

The general idea is that you buy or print a monthly calendar, and each day you have a few recurring tasks that you must do. And if you manage to complete all of the required tasks for day, then you put a big X over that day in your calendar. If you only complete 2 out of 3 tasks, then you’re not allowed to put an X, and your calendar will have an ugly gap in its chain of X’s. Instead, you want a calendar that looks something like this:

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And you would keep putting X’s for every day that you completed your daily ‘chain items.’

I like to think of the ‘don’t break the chain,’ of Phase #3, as a kind of reward system. Each day’s small amount of studying is building to something grand and magnificent: Total fluency. But it’s hard to keep that vision in mind. We humans are weak creatures, prone to favoring immediate wants over future wants. I’m going to start studying tomorrow. I’m going to start losing weight on New Year’s Day. Goals like these are fun, because we get to imagine ourselves achieving them without actually doing anything right now. Then, a year later, we end up in the same spot we were in before… and it sucks!

We can beat this by rewarding ourselves with those X’s on our calendar, by building a chain.

For the duration of Phase #3, our ‘chain’ has 3 items:

1) Flashcards (vocab and Kanji) 2) Listening practice

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I’ll get into more detail on each one in just a second, but I’ll warn you that this chain will require a minimum of 1 hour per day. Probably more like 1.5-2 hours per day if you take your time studying. First, I’ll tell you more about what each chain item entails, then we’ll work on your strategy for achieving this plan. Let’s get started!

Chain Item #1 – Flashcards

This is by far the most important item in the chain. Actually, this is the most important item in this entire study plan. For your flashcards, you’ll always have to do two things: study and build.

‘Building’ refers to adding new words, grammar concepts, and example sentences to your Anki flashcard deck.

‘Studying’ refers to memorizing those cards by using Anki. There are two kinds of cards that you can study in an Anki deck: (1) new cards and (2) cards due for review.

The reason I say that these flashcards are so important to focus on in your studies is, first and foremost, that they can help you retain words and kanji at an extremely accelerated rate. However, there is also another reason we need to focus on them: It’s very easy to fall behind on your Anki flashcards. You pick an ambitious number of new cards to study each day. You keep up just fine, but then you start having a hard time keeping up with all the cards that Anki is telling you are due for review on a daily basis, and before you know it you have 5,000 cards due for review today, a number you’ll never reach, and you’ve removed the intelligence from your ‘intelligent flashcards.’ Do not fall behind on your Anki flashcards. If you fall behind on your Anki flashcards, you will not learn Japanese in 1 year. So, if you notice you’re starting to fall behind on these, you’ll need to make it your #1 priority to get caught up at whatever means necessary. That probably means you stop adding new cards, temporarily.

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You will probably fall behind on them, at least at some point during the year. One time, when I had just moved back from Japan, I let my flashcards get away from me, and before I knew it, Anki told me I had over 4,000 cards due one day. Ouch. It took me months to catch up on those, and it’s something I don’t ever want to let happen again. So, keep all of this in mind when you lay out your daily flashcard goals, as you read the standard goals I’ve laid out for this mastery plan, especially if you plan to increase my suggested flashcard numbers.

Creating a New Anki Deck

You may be tempted to simply download one of the shared decks on Anki. After all, people have already gone to all of the work of adding thousands of items to those decks. This is an option for you, but, personally, I don’t think it’s the best idea.

If you have your own deck, then over time you’ll gain a sense of accomplishment when you see the number of cards inside of it growing and growing. You’ll feel that you really are making progress on what often seems to be an insurmountable hurdle: learning Japanese. So, I like to create my own deck. I also do this because of the value of…

Creating Your Own Study Cards

I like to add my own cards, because that means that I review cards that I just learned. Maybe I should explain.

On most days, after I’m done reviewing, I’ll then study every new card that’s in my deck. Typically, every new card just means all of the new cards I created the day before. So my daily goal is to get my deck’s new cards down to zero.

Having zero new cards in your deck at the end of each days means that when you add new cards that you’d like to learn, you’ll get to review them soon thereafter. If, instead, you had a deck with thousands of new cards, and you added some new ones that you wanted to learn, you might not learn those cards you added for months—not until Anki told you they were due for review.

Does that make sense? I hope so.

(By the way, this study plan assumes that you’ve set up your Anki preferences so that new cards always show after cards due for review. For how to do this, check out Step #4 of the 97-Day Kanji Challenge. Also, if you want to take the approach where you try to clear your new cards at the end of the day, make sure that your deck is set up to show 9999 Maximum Cards/Day for both Reviews and New Cards.)

Managing Multiple Decks

You may have caught on that, if you’re starting a vocab deck, you now have two decks: Kanji and Vocab. Eventually, you’ll probably want to merge these decks into one. At least, that’s what I like to do. The only problem with that is that you can’t do that until you’ve learned every card in the kanji deck. And even if you’ve passed Phase #2 with flying colors, you still have about 1,000 cards in that deck which you haven’t learned yet.

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So, for the time being we’ll just have to have two decks. You might want to lower your new card quota on the kanji deck in order to make time for your vocab deck (maybe only something like 5 new kanji per day—really, it’s up to you).

Once you learn every card in the kanji deck, then you can merge the two decks into one.

Building Your Anki Deck

You won’t have any flashcards to study unless you are regularly adding more to your Anki flashcard deck. Every time you come across a new vocab word or phrase, you must add it to your flashcard deck. You should never come across a Japanese word and not know its meaning more than one time. Yikes.

Actually, that depends on the person. And it depends on your goals. If you want to translate Japanese one day, if you want to pass JLPT N1 and read Japanese novels and political essays—whatever—then you should never come across a Japanese word and not know its meaning more than one time.

If, however, you just want to be functionally fluent, if you just want to speak Japanese well and get around and understand anime, then you can be more sparing in deciding which words you will add to your deck as you come across them.

Yes, the Japanese word for “maternity leave” (育児休暇) is in my deck. No, I’ve never used it before. Not yet! But I’m glad it’s in there for a couple of reasons:

1. If Japanese is really going to be a part of my life for an extended period of time, then I will absolutely come across this word again. One day, maybe even years down the line.

2. It helps me remember the words that it’s built on, words that I do come across: 育児 (“childcare”) and 休暇 (“holiday; day off”).

Studying New Cards

There are two concerns when we finally decide how many new cards we are going to see each day in our Anki deck: (1) how much can we handle on a daily basis, and (2) how much do we want to learn by the end of Year #1?

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Month # New Words per Day New Words per Month (est.) Total Words Learned 1 Kanji only Kanji only Kanji only 2 Kanji only Kanji only Kanji only 3 Kanji only Kanji only Kanji only 4 Kanji only Kanji only Kanji only

5 15 454 454 6 15 454 908 7 15 454 1,362 8 15 454 1,816 9 15 454 2,270 10 15 454 2,724 11 15 454 3,178 12 15 454 3,632

Wait, I thought you said 3,000 words. That’s 3,600!

Ya, well, we’re human, and I thought I’d leave some room for procrastination, missing days of new cards, etc. You may also notice that I don’t have any new vocab being added until month #5, but you should actually be done learning all of the kanji within the first 3.5 months. This is all just so you have some room to breathe.

Anyways, according to this chart, in Month #5 we begin Phase #3 and start making vocab flashcards. Keep in mind that these are not numbers for how many flashcards you will study each day/month. I’m simply saying that you should be adding at least this many vocab words to your deck each day if you want to be sure that your flashcard deck grows at a sufficient pace for you to learn, according to this plan, 3,000+ vocab words within 1 year of studying. If that’s confusing, hang in there, because it should become clearer once I explain your New Cards Study Quota.

New Cards Study Quota

We’ve decided how many words we need to learn each month if we’re going to learn 3,000+ vocab in Year 1. However, we still need to figure out how many new cards we’ll need to study in order to learn that many words.

Our vocab study plan has us learning 3,632 words by the end of Month #12. Because of this, we know that we’ll need to learn a minimum of 7,264 cards (3,632*2). We have to double the number of cards, because for each vocab word we need to have a card where we see the English meaning and guess the Japanese word (and its kanji!), and we need a card where we see the Japanese word and need to guess the English meaning. So, if we were going to make vocab cards for the word 単語 (tango), which is the Japanese word for “vocab,” we’ll go through the following process.

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By studying our vocab like this, in both directions, we’ll be able to increase our retention. Great! A couple things you may have noticed:

 I like to include an example sentence. It helps me remember! I usually just pull them off of Jisho.org.

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Your ‘Golden Time’ is the time of the day when you’re usually: 1. Thinking clearly.

2. Motivated to learn. 3. Free of distractions.

Finding your Golden Time is key, because that’s when you’re going to want to do your flashcards… every day. Try to make a routine, if you can.

My Golden Time happens to be first thing in the morning, usually at a coffee shop. If I don’t do my flashcards first thing in the morning, then I have a hard time getting through them all day. There are just too many distractions later on in the day. Things come up. And I have a hard time doing them at home, because there are so many distractions there, too. Family and friends mean well, but they are rarely conducive to productive studying.

So, every morning I try to go to a coffee shop and do my flashcards. Before work, school, anything. If I know I can’t go to a coffee shop on a given morning, I’ll do my flashcards before I even leave my room, before anyone even knows that I’m awake. That way, they won’t bug me!

Vocab Ninja, You Will Become

Just repeat that process about 3,000 times, and you’ll make it through the flashcard portion of Phase #3. Simple… but not easy. Mega-difficult, actually. (Please don’t hate me.)

Study your flashcards like this, and you will know a lot of Japanese by the end of Year 1. Make sure that you spend more time on going over this part of the book, along with the 97-Day Kanji Challenge, than any other. These flashcards will be the key to learning Japanese in 1 year. When you start your day’s studies, always start with your flashcards, particularly with the ones Anki says you must study that day. Everything else is second to your flashcards. Everything.

ガンバッテ！

Flashcard Checklist

Phase #1 (Week 1)

 Download Anki

 Get Remembering the Kanji  Bookmark Reviewing the Kanji Phase #2 (Months 1-4)

 Do All Cards For Review Every Day  Learn 22 New Kanji Per Day

Phase #3 (Months 5-12)