How Long It Takes to Learn Japanese (and how to make a study schedule)

How much Japanese should I know in six months? How can I speak Japanese fluently in three months? What should my

study

schedule

be like? Questions like this actually plague many new language

learn

ers, you may recognize what's wrong with these questions, but for many people it's not that obvious. I'll give you a timeline later in the video, but first we need to address those first two questions. This is a question impossible to answer on the show. Do they have 30 minutes a day to

study

four hours? What tools do they intend? to use Are you a student? mother?

Do you already speak three or four languages? There are a million reasons why no one can answer this question. Instead, you want to take a look at how many hours you have to work on Japanese every day. What are you doing? willing to sacrifice yourself, are you a League of Legends addict? I didn't even know you played video games. Sports, okay, anyway, are you willing to reduce consumption? Yeah, I'm not going to talk to you anyway, if so, no, that's fine, but if you're playing. flirt for four hours every day after work you're not going to get very far in Japanese in six months or six years and that's okay, you don't have to, but what you do have to do is be honest with yourself, what do you want?

learn

and what you are willing to sacrifice, let's take a look at the Japanese language proficiency test and how many hours on average of study and exposure it

takes

for someone to pass each level of the test.

The levels ranging from N5 at the lowest level to N1 at the highest is not a perfect test by any means, but the numbers in this graph from the Koto Academy website perfectly illustrate the point I am trying to

make

. I'll link the blog it came from in the description to get past the lowest level of jlpt. Your average student who doesn't know Chinese characters has to study Japanese for 462 hours, yes, but what are you complaining about? You can now read Japanese, hmm, so 462 hours, that means that with 30 minutes a day it will take you 924 days or 2.5 years.

To pass this level of Japanese, you will have difficulty doing almost anything in Japanese. To pass N3, which is a level of Japanese where you start to really be able to understand and communicate, if you have practiced speaking, you would need 1,325 hours. average, which according to this chart is almost the time it

takes

to become a licensed architect in Japan, abroad, anyway, it will take you seven years to pass the N3 with 30 minutes of Japanese per day. Now keep in mind that this is study and exposure if you could do three hours a day you could pass the M3 in just over a year, that means studying watching anime reading playing video games in Japanese practicing speaking etc. for three hours a day, so it doesn't have to be boring studying textbooks three hours a day would also be enough to pass N5 in less than six months, so three hours a day that's what they could achieve in six months, regardless of the details of your study method.

Now I can hear some of you shouting, “just dive in and honestly.” We're a bit annoying and need to work a little on your debate approach. I think we should have this immersion in conversation in the modern sense of the word, it simply means getting input, getting a lot of input by listening, reading, etc., and that's an important part of language learning. That said, those who do immersion do too. They are studying regardless of what they say, they simply do not do specific studies, they look up what they do not know in dictionaries and reconstruct it from there, they spend hours making flash cards based on their contributions. material and study them, so no, they are not just immersed and those who just listen without looking things up or studying kanji will take a lot more than 1325 hours to get somewhere with Japanese that might work well for other languages ​​that use the same script as you. native language, but you won't learn Japanese kanji just by watching anime.

I promise it doesn't

make

much difference if you learn a bunch of words and grammar before jumping into native content and reading material or if you do it on the fly, except jumping into native material when you have a foundation is easier and less frustrating for most people in my experience, at least in fact, most people I hear shout only Steamers studied grammar and vocabulary at first. post-dip and then completely discarded all their previous studies, you even see major influencers in the space pretending they never studied their target language before diving in and pretending the study had no effect on how fun they found the inputs when they finally started , anyway, it's much easier. and fun to spend five hours watching a TV show in your native language than reading a textbook for five hours, which is why I think doing a little of both is important even at the beginning, it's not faster to just dive in, it's just more easy Do it for

long

er periods of time because it's fun when you start to understand things in Japanese, but if you only have 30 minutes a day and just dive in, it will still take you seven years to reach a quote and three level points, since you need to spend .

A lot of time with the language and if you want to improve you have to sacrifice other things you like to do for a while. As simple as that. I wasn't talking to you. I'm sorry. Can't you speak English anymore? But you can understand me. No, hmm, short answer, you probably can't, but if you study and get a lot of information for eight hours a day, every day for three months, you can probably get to a jlptn 4-ish level, which is not bad, but not It's fluid. by any standard, the same answer why do you want to learn English anyway?

The study abroad

schedule

should be fun and also practical, no matter what anyone tells you, you must learn kanji, so you will have to decide how to do it. I talk about this. in many other videos that I will link in the description, so I won't do it here, although I will soon start a series about kanji on this channel, so subscribe if you are interested in that. like kanji 30 minutes to an hour a day of just kanji is probably enough if that's all you can do now, it might be the best place to push yourself until you have more time next time, studying some vocabulary and grammar will give you tools valuable for fun stuff make some vocabulary flashcards or something for 30 minutes a day or more to learn new vocabulary, then study one or two new grammar points each day, maybe 15 to 30 minutes, so now we're about an hour and a half. of daily Japanese, if you still have time to try watching a TV show or anime you like, read a rated reader story like the ones we have on tokenyandy.com, listen to a Japanese podcast or a YouTube video, whatever you want , as

long

as it is in Japanese have a little fun in Japanese over time you can spend more and more time on this type of information and even talk to people, but in the beginning at least learning some basics will help you a lot, the most important thing is that Play with this schedule yourself until you find a pattern you can do every day and then do it every day, don't be afraid to take a day off here and there, but for the most part do it every day, even if you feel like shit, commit to doing it even if it's just five minutes of flashcards or watching an anime, even on those days you might find that you have it in you to do the rest after all once you you start if you do this you will get there and if you like this video let me know.

Hit the like button and tell me about your experience so far with Japanese in the comments. You like that, yeah, I should have known. Watch this video to see some free Japanese learning tools.