How Long Does it Take to Learn Japanese?

[melissawijaya]

Ah.. sometimes I felt like giving up learning japanese, but then I remember how I learned English, it was definitely a long process too. years of textbook, years of practice.. there is no easy way to master a language.. so for everyone who is currently learning new language, I wish all of us the best!

[nakujpn]

In my opinion you never stop learning a language, you can become fluent in a few years but you will learn it almost all your life

[richardsonrichly]

Basically if you're gonna learn a language you have to incorporate and make it part of your daily life if you want to achieve atleast fluent understanding.
You can go the extra mile and use that language as your monologue voice so you can become more comfortable speaking the language

[WWEdeadman]

I mean, as somebody who is a German native speaker, like 90% of my English was learned because of YouTube, WWE, non-dubbed English shows and movies, and games. The English we learned in School was a good way to help with that, but that alone would have NEVER made me fluent. So the idea of learning a Language by using native media is absolutely not a foreign concept to me.

As for the little Japanese I have learned up until now, only a tiny bit is from using a language learning app. Most of what I understand comes from Anime, Japanese songs, and your videos. I would not claim any sort of fluency in Japanese, but just from what I do understand I sometimes pick up inaccuracies in subtitles, for instance, cause I understood what a character was saying, and then read the subs and thought, "Well, that's not really what they said." Little things like that are great for being motivated to keep learning.

And all that is with me not really putting tons of effort into learning Japanese, since starting to actually learn it about 3 years ago. Mostly cause I had hardly any energy or motivation to put into that during most of 2020/21 for reasons of the pandemic, and very little time last year, for reasons of starting a new job. I don't know whether already being bilungual or having German as a native language makes any difference in terms of time it takes to learn Japanese, but I'd assume if I had put in more time, and daily practicing, I'd probably be on a somewhat decent level by now. I've only just started to put more effort in now, so I guess we'll see how well I speak the language next year.

[gayluigi]

I spent two years of highschool taking japanese courses and in that time all i learned was how to read kana, introduce myself and ask what the time was. In the past month of simply just deliberately exposing myself to Japanese, ive managed to learn already how to express most of what I think/feel throughout the day by watching various anime and chatting with real japanese people online. It really doesnt feel like study 90% of the time

[Fafner]

About studying grammar I can confirm from experience. It's much more productive to study grammar while immersing at the same time in media in the language you are studying. I watched a great deal of anime before I actively started studying Japanese, and so when I began looking up grammar it was pretty easy to understand and remember because I had already encountered all these grammatical forms countless times before. It was almost like recalling things you already knew unconsciously rather than memorizing from scratch which made things much easier to learn. I really didn't have to force myself to remember anything, it just intuitively made sense because it was familiar.

Also for people who are on the opposite side and argue that immersion alone can make you fluent, that doesn't work either from my experience, because I've made so much progress in a short amount of time by reading about grammar and doing duolingo lessons, compared to the pace at which I was learning new things by passive immersion. But it wasn't useless either because I've familiarized myself with the sound system of the language and learned a great deal of vocabulary, which gave me a very solid basis to begin more serious studying. The key is to find the right balance between the two. I would also advice not to sweat over complicated grammatical rules or concepts, only read stuff you can understand and leave the rest to immersion. The more of the language you know the easier it is to understand difficult grammatical concepts, so it will come naturally with time. For example, one book I was studying (the excellent 80\20 Japanese by Richard Webb) advised not to try and memorize all the rules for verb conjugation, just to pay attention to the verb forms when they are used by native speakers until you become familiar with the different conjugations, just like people remember irregular verbs in English. Of course if you are good at memorizing grammar rules it can never hurt if you can remember all the rules, but if you dislike studying just don't worry about it.

[Ruwuri]

as someone who's been attending a language school in japan for over a year now i do have to agree, putting yourself out there, actually listening lots and lots is invaluable. textbooks will only get you so far. there are times when i think they would serve better as a supplement rather than anything

[satyakiray]

Took me 4 years to go from N5 to N2. I currently live and work in Japan

[lovelifeandcrafts]

I am learning Japanese myself and since using duolingo: my reading and texting is getting better using hiragana and katakana characters. I also have friends that I've known for years that I speak to in both English and Japanese. I'm a kinetic learner (learn by doing, watching/listening and reading). One thing I haven't improved is calligraphy and speaking (visually impaired and deaf). I do have a small amount of sight and have aids to hear. I don't let it stop me though 😊. I hope that one day I can use what I've learnt and already use in person rather than just online. I am also learning Turkish which I find is harder than learning Japanese lol. Hope you are well yuta-san. Leon 🇬🇧 xx

[gamble]

Big tip for beginners: childrens TV! I used to think you needed to study a lot, my son is 4- he doesn't do much "study" whatever study really means. We talk to him, read to him, he watches pre-school TV, he has pretend play where he enacts everyday situations he sees us engauge in and plays out the conversations, but he is always having fun! If you have childrden think about how they developed their ability to speak!
He is learning by using langauge and playing with it, he's 4 so he makes a lot of mistakes with grammar, conjugations and irregular verbs, but his progress is fast. Thing is that his priority is to prioritize what is either useful or interesting, which is what we adults neglect. He is interested in letters, numbers and reading, but he puts more energy into speaking and listening- which we also often forget is important, and he isn't concerned about learning to have perfect grammar, use tense and conjugation accurately or making mistakes, he describes things or makes up words (often compound-words) for things he doesn't know but wants to describe- if you have access to a native speaker, these are also good things to do- a four yearold can make their wishes known!
If you can speak like a 4 year old, you will be able to communicate to some degree and you will then get to build on it over time the way a child does, probably make you more fluent too as you will be imitating those around you, not learning from a rigid plan! I think we should do most of our learning as a child would and supplement with traditional study.

[DenisChangMusic]

2200 hours is a good figure. It took me one year to be able to speak 日常生活　Japanese. This happened especially when I moved to Japan in April 2022 (last year). Before that, I had been studying with teachers online, but because I live in Japan now and I force myself to only use Japanese, I’ve been pretty much practicing all day every day. From a tourist perspective, I have enough Japanese to enjoy what Japan has to offer. From the perspective of someone living in Japan and wanting to build a life here and integrate as much as possible, I still have a LOOOONG way to go!



thanks for your wonderful videos, I hope to cross paths with you one day in 新宿 or 渋谷！

[Tamaplus]

I totally agree with Yuta San.. one has to immerse oneself in different and various souces while studying a language.. the more sources are better is the chance of learning the language quickly.. I'm self studying Japanese and I couldn't emphasize more on this point how helpful it has been to catalyse my learning.. and Japanese is the 4th language that I am learning..

[Wulpul]

Something people tend to forget when asking "How long does it take to learn x language" is that it also really depends on your own ability to learn a new language. If you've spoken only one language for your entire life, chances are it'll be be pretty rough and quite time consuming. I consider myself lucky enough to be trilingual from a very early age, and I tend to pick up new languages very easily, even if they're totally different from the ones that I know. But one thing is true for everyone learning a new language, and that is that with enough work, practice and patience, you can master a new language! So to everyone out there who feels like they're stuck sometimes or feel like they can't improve: It's okay! Take a break, and return to it the next day! You got this 💪!!

[roadtripwarrior]

THANK YOU. I hate when people say you cant use anime to learn Japanese. It feels like Gatekeeping. But I learned most of my Japanese from watching anime and Japanese streamers mixed with actual studying.

[dawsy]

I just started your email lessons. So much good info and I never expected to laugh as much as I did. You're a very funny dude.

[zeemon]

I never understood why it has to be all or nothing for so many. The one thing I learned about studying languages is that making it fun for yourself is what really helps the most. It just makes you naturally engage with the language and in what way you do that doesn't matter too much. Getting input of almost any kind is valuable.

Of course watching [FAMILY FRIENDLY ANIME] without subtitles without understanding any Japanese is likely not going to help much but there is a rather wide margin of what types of materials are useful and the only thing that matters is that you do something.

[amarug]

I started learning Japanese about 3 years ago. I have to say, that I tend to be a quite fast learner in general - but still, although I can pretty much speak about most topics and have fun times over extended periods of time with my Japanese friends, I still have the feeling I make a lot of mistakes and use really unnatural expressions at times. I am just "good enough" to understand pretty well how to express myself in a manner that others understand me. So to say, I have somewhat "mastery over my unnaturalness and mistakes", as it basically never happens that I am not understood. I guess I should be happy with that. :P

[JohnDoe-ronf]

For comparison, it takes about 2400 hours to max in Old School Runescape. Thought that was interesting. You can do it sub 2000, but you need to use high intensity methods.

[MsBrooklyn]

Off topic, but I see that you are a Chainsaw Man fan with the Pochita stuffed animal on your desk. I love Chainsaw Man and it is ❤‍🔥

[spiele_maus]

I an learning Japanese for nearly half a year now but only like 10-25 min a day, so I am not than far into it (yet) but I totally agree with everything you said cuz that’s literally the way I learned English.
I am German school I learned English and French. However my French is shit. In real life environments like conversations/movies etc. I miss like half on the context and are rarely lost sometimes. With English however, it’s the opposite. I mean my grammar isn’t that good and I still make mistakes, however I never had any problem with reading/understanding and unlike in French, I can just start talking and have a conversation in English just like I would do in German, in French however I can’t just casually talk cuz every time I want to say something I first need to think of how I could say it.
And the reason for this is that like 40% of my day is in English, since many games, movies, and overall most things I do on the internet are…well you guessed it…in English. And that’s also how a learned a lot of the „casual“ English, I never learned in school.
That you can simply say/write cause or cuz instead of „because“, you can say „gonna“ instead of „going to“, and overall how to talk a bit more casually. The English in school was (in my opinion) way to formal, with French I never had any experience outside of school, so that’s probably the reason why I am so bad in it.

With Japanese it isn’t that extreme as with English. However I would say that my day consists of like 5-8% Japanese (and it increases a bit every week) so I hope that my Japanese will turn out like my English and not like my French xD