Maybe its because of some heart-moving anime,music, movie or manga… The unique culture… The beautiful landscape of Japan… One way or another, one day you decided to learn Japanese…
But where should you start?
This page is written for the people who doesn’t know where to start learning, so if you already know what you need, you can skip it to the next part or pick a subject from the index page~
Japanese have a specific curriculum for foreigner who wants to learn their language. Its called Japanese Language Proficiency Test or JLPT for short and there are 5 level in JLPT with level N5 as the easiest and level N1 as the hardest.
To achieve N5 means that you will be able to travel within the country easier and understand the overall structure of Japanese language. It creates a good foundation to get ready for the next step.
To achieve N3, you will be able to start enjoying simple Japanese material for children.
And to work in Japan you will need to achieve level N2 / N1.
JLPT only test you in language comprehension (audio & visual). There’s no writing skills needed, so you will be able to pass N1 without able to write any kanji (wheeeww! What a very good news!!) But even without the writing aspect, N1 is still a very hard test to pass…
With that in mind, personally i would say, it’s best to use JLPT material as a guidance to learn Japanese… (there’s a reason why they make the curriculums). But before going on to review material of JLPT, you would like to master the Japanese alphabet first, Hiragana.
Click here to review more of the Japanese writing system or here to directly go on your way to master Hiragana-The Japanese alphabet
Unless you have a lot of free time… like in RPG games, you may want to focus your skill mastery to just the one you need to make the journey more effective.
So you need to examine your purpose of learning Japanese…
Traveling
This is one of the most common reason to learn Japanese…
Travel only requires very basic common words, basic counting, and some useful set-phrase. It would also good to be able to read the basic Japanese alphabet – hiragana, especially since you could master it for as little as a few days using our guide here! .
Now… its not necessary, but If you able to master N5 curriculum (you don’t need to pass the real test) , it will make you able to travel a lot more easier by yourself. Since in Japan, there’s very little people who can speak English well~
You won’t believe how far can you get in Japan with just N5 skill + a phone dictionary + google ヾ(@°▽°@)ノ
Enjoying Japanese Entertainment
If you’d like to enjoy some amazing game/anime/manga which only being published within the country or just would like to enjoy it in the native language…
You’d want to start from N5 and moving toward N3. The shortest time to master it is around 3 – 4 months. By the time you master the N3, you will be able to enjoy a simple children material and able to read native material such as game/manga. You will need to use dictionary intensively though~
And depending on which media you’d like to enjoy, you might want to focus the skill mastery either to read stuff (manga/game) or to hear stuff (anime/movie).
Serious stuff
If you learn Japanese so that you can study/do some serious business there, you will need a more intensive guidance and practice. It would also be best to join a specific organization/course that focus on preparing you on any serious stuff you’re going to do in Japan.
Now that you have examined the purpose of your learning, the first step you need to take for this journey will be to understand the Japanese writing system, so let’s get started!
Next: The Japanese Writing System
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