The ancient method I used to achieve fluency in Japanese in 12 months

If you’re reading this post, it means you’ve met or know me in person, and at some point you asked me how I became fluent in Japanese in such a short period of time, and how you (or someone you know) could do the same.

I apologize if I gave you a rambling monologue on the spot, or gave you a high-level answer that probably went along the lines of, “I read and listened to a lot of Japanese content that I was interested in.”

But simply saying that often begs more questions than it answers.

For context, I did a one year challenge to become fluent in Japanese back in 2022-2023, and blogged about the whole journey. If you go to this link, you can find all those articles.

This article is the most complete, STEP BY STEP guide to fluency in Japanese, condensing all my experience. It describes what I would do if I could go back in time.

I will cover:

• What it actually takes to make rapid progress in Japanese
• How to do the method in the easiest and most sustainable way
• How to know where you stand in your language journey at any given time, so that you know exactly what’s going on and what kind of action is needed, and can coach yourself to keep succeeding
• Common mistakes and misconceptions that cause people to get stuck, give up, and basically just waste time chasing their own tail

Of course, there are many ways to learn a language. I’m also sure that someone out there has a better and faster method than mine, and if you find it, more power to you. But I do believe doing it this way (which wasn’t invented or discovered by me; it has been used for thousands of years by scholars and polyglots) has some distinct benefits that I haven’t found in any other methods:

1. You won’t need to constantly “translate” things in your brain. You will acquire Japanese in such an organic way that you’ll start “thinking” in Japanese very soon. It will be like a separate extra language in your mind. This is the essence of fluency — being able to directly produce the target language, without any intermediate steps trying to do translation.
2. Your Japanese will sound much more natural and with a native-like accent, than people who learn through years of “studying” with books and classroom lessons. I often get told by people that my Japanese is very kirei and often doesn’t sound like a foreigner’s at all.
3. You will learn as an adult much faster than as a child. It’s not even a contest. In the same number of hours invested, you will make faster progress this way than you made as a child in your native language.

However, it’s not all roses and rainbows. There’s also a negative side-effect:

If you don’t care about actual fluency in Japanese and just want to prepare for the JLPT or some other language test, I’m not sure this method will help you. It might or might not, but I don’t know because I haven’t taken any such tests.

Before we begin, let’s start with some ground rules.

And before I begin with the rules, here’s what NOT to do:

Don’t use Duolingo or Babbel or any other apps that feel like games or interactive digital courses. I admire these companies and the folks who work there, but if you could become fluent in a foreign language from simply having a 500 day Duolingo streak, you already would have, and so would all your friends.

Another thing:

I will go out on a limb and predict that 99% of people who read this post will not follow these instructions anyway. It’s the same thing with anything in life that’s HARD — working out, eating healthy, etc. People will say “I should probably do that.” And then they don’t, because of excuse A or excuse B. But if you’re the 1 out of 100 people who decides to actually follow the advice in this post, consider me your friend on this journey and feel free to ask me questions via email. I love to help those who help themselves.

Rule 1: Make it a real project

Nobody gets better at Japanese by accident.

If it’s important to you, you will have to make it a serious project in your life.

The worst thing you can do is to go into it without a strong interest or motivation or dedication to spend the time necessary.

Be honest with yourself.

The best way to learn Japanese (especially with this method) is to spend time daily. Don’t break the daily chain, even if you only spend 15 minutes on a given day at midnight before sleep.

Language learning is like trying to fill a leaky bucket over a period of time, by adding water at regular intervals. The more often you skip adding water when it’s time to do so, the more it would have leaked out and you will have regressed, causing you to spend most of your time catching up or chasing your own tail rather than moving ahead.

If you keep breaking the daily chain, it will take several times longer (i.e. many more years)to make the same amount of progress. When it comes to speed of making progress in the long run, this is probably the #1 tip I can give you.

Making time for anything requires a certain level of obsession and commitment. That is the ONE thing I can’t give you. If you give yourself ten years to learn Japanese no matter how hard it gets, you are much more likely to achieve your goals within one year. Because that’s the kind of patience you need to actually take the daily actions without sabotaging yourself.

Rule 2: Don’t focus on “output” — i.e. speaking and writing

This is probably the most counter-intuitive opinion you’ll find in this article. People who espouse learning a language by lots of speaking / conversation practice and writing have one thing in common — none of them are actually fluent. And if they are, they didn’t get there by doing lots of output, even if they say they did.

I know you want to practice talking. You can totally do so, but IT SHALL NOT BE YOUR MAIN LEARNING ACTIVITY. It shouldn’t count towards your study time.

I’ve been down that road multiple times and I have seen what lies ahead.

Here’s the simple reason:

You can’t produce words if you haven’t heard or read them somewhere.

You learn new words by reading or hearing them somewhere, and have some understanding of what they mean. We call it “comprehensible input.” Let me explain how it works.

Say you read the word “fromage” in French.

There are the only three ways for you to learn that “fromage” means “cheese”:

One, you can simply look it up, and see that it means cheese.

Or, you repeatedly see the word “fromage” being used in a context where you strongly suspect it means cheese.

Or someone says “fromage” and directly points their finger at a picture of cheese.

The second and third options are how babies acquire their first language.

But you can probably see how they are the slowest and most frustrating ways to learn a language, which makes sense, because most children aren’t “fluent” the way you would like to be, until they’re at least 6-10 years old, and many have issues expressing themselves properly.

If you’re simply talking to someone, either the key words will go over your head completely, or you will pause them every 5 seconds to tell you what each word means. Both of these are a terrible waste of time and annoy the other person.

It should be common sense, but somehow it is such a pervasive misconception.

The method being discussed in this article makes use of the FIRST way (i.e. read a word, look it up with a single click, and move on). It is TEN TIMES faster than the other two methods combined, and it works beautifully for adults.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m not telling you to refrain from speaking at all. If you meet a Japanese person, go ahead and try to use however much of the language you need and mime and struggle together to communicate. You can make some beautiful memories this way.

Speaking is a great way to refine your Japanese over time (when you say something unnatural or wrong, and the other person corrects you). Just don’t think of it as your main learning activity.

Do lots of reading and listening. That is what will move the needle on your Japanese fluency.

Now let’s begin with the actual method.

Step 1: Hiragana and Katakana

Time: 2 weeks

Difficulty: medium / hard

Learn Hiragana and Katakana, the two major alphabet systems in Japanese.

Even if you’re really busy, it should take you around one week to learn Hiragana, and another week to learn Katakana. There are multiple ways to do so and lots of free resources online.

I recommend trying the “mnemonics” method (just google it) at first, and if it doesn’t work for you, don’t sweat it. I personally did it the old fashioned way in the end:

Good old memorization, writing each one by hand.

The first day I did a-e-i-o-u, the next day I did ka-ke-ki-ko-ku, and so on.

Every day when you sit down to learn:

1. Try to write down ALL the characters you’ve learned so far, from memory (okay to make mistakes)
2. Learn the new characters of the day by writing each one at least 5 times etc (you know how it goes)
3. At the end you should again write ALL the characters you’ve learned so far in sequence, including the new ones. Don’t sweat the mistakes, just correct yourself.

Doing it this way in every study session will give you a sense of accumulated progress and momentum, which is good for morale.

Step 2: Crash course in Japanese

Time: 2-3 weeks MAX

Difficulty: easy / medium

Go to youtube and find a free introductory Japanese course or playlist. I recommend a channel called Cure Dolly for this, where she goes through the first few pages of Alice in Wonderland in Japanese. But whatever floats your boat.

The goal of this phase is to simply binge videos as quickly as possible and get an elementary-level familiarity with how the Japanese language is structured, so that when you go into the next phase (Step 3), where you start reading and listening, you can recognize some of what’s going on.

Caution:

1. A big mistake here is to spend more than 2-3 weeks on these structured courses. I know, because I made this mistake. These courses can be fun and comfortable, and they may give you a feeling of progress and achievement, but it’s a trap. Set a deadline for 3 weeks, do as much as you can, and then whether you feel ready for the next stage or not, just stop and move on.
2. Towards the end, look up concepts like onyomi and kunyomi, and informal and formal japanese (if you missed them), just so that they’re not completely foreign to you.

Why don’t we spend more time learning “grammar”? Because nobody speaks a language by learning grammar. It was created by linguists and academics as a way to describe and preserve a language.

It has an academic purpose, but it’s not for you.

Step 3: Reading and listening to authentic content

This is the core of the method. It takes care of learning kanji, vocabulary, and “grammar” all in parallel, organically.

It is divided into sub-steps. I will introduce the concepts of learning “gears.” (Yes, like gears in a car)

Gear 1

Time: 2-3 months

Difficulty: REALLY HARD

Gear 2

Time: 1-2 months

Difficulty: medium / hard

Gear 3 and above

Time: forever

Difficulty: the sweet spot; keeps getting easier month after month

Here’s what I will ask you to do:

1. Find a reading and listening tool that enables you to look up words and phrases with a single click. I used LingQ and over time have become friends with some of the people who work there, and can highly recommend it, though their free plan is very limited imo. I have also heard good things about Readlang. I think Migaku also fits into this category but I’m not sure.
2. Find content in Japanese that you are really interested in — regardless of genre or type. I was interested in anime and TV shows. Ideally the content should be something you can LISTEN to, and also read the transcript.
3. If it’s video content, consume it casually first with English subtitles or by using a translation as reference, so that you know what’s going on. Then, go back to the beginning, and start reading the script line by line, looking up each word or phrase. Listen to the audio of that sentence too. Once you understand what that sentence is trying to say, move to the next one. And the next one. Repeat.

Here are some additional instructions:

1. The goal while reading is ONLY to understand what is being said, and how it is pronounced. The goal is NOT to memorize anything. Do not force yourself to memorize a word. The way you will memorize words and phrases is by coming across them again and again over time, naturally. Just like how you learned your native language. The most frequent ones will enter into your long term memory first, followed by others in a smooth progression.
2. When you read stuff, you naturally repeat the words back to yourself in your mind. Listening to the same audio will help you self-correct the pronunciation you had in your mind, and slowly, over time, you will organically drill the language and the standard accent into your brain. You can try to mimic the audio too if that helps.

Mistakes to avoid:

1. Picking content just because it is beginner-focused, rather than what is interesting / enjoyable to you. This is the fastest way to find yourself quitting at some point and losing all momentum. Stop reading children’s stories about harry and sally going up the hill because you’re afraid to approach content that is “outside your level.” JUST STOP! Find real content that you enjoy, maybe in its translated / subtitled versions, and then challenge yourself to understand the original Japanese behind it.
2. I also recommend reading content that was originally in Japanese, rather than the Japanese translation of Harry Potter or something that was in your native language. Learning a language is as much about acquiring the culture and the context in which it is spoken, and many things people say in England are not said in Japan, and vice-versa. In Australia, calling someone a “sick cunt” is the highest of compliments. I believe this doesn’t translate well over to other languages. However if you don’t have any interest in Japanese content in the first place, maybe this advice doesn’t apply to you — just consume whatever you find most palatable.
3. It is very unlikely that you’ll do this, but the reverse is also true: picking obscure literary / academic / heavily stylized Japanese content that does not resemble everyday language at all. A lot of popular anime and fantasy content like Naruto and One Piece unfortunately also falls into this category — the characters speak in a funny way to be entertaining to kids. If you choose content, choose something that is set in late 20th or 21st century Japan.

Now, let’s talk about language learning GEARS. The activities you perform at any gear are the exact same, but this is to give you a sense of what to expect, so that you don’t quit or change directions prematurely.

The key principle is that right now, you don’t understand how the language works, AND you don’t know much vocabulary either. You’re trying to learn both at the same time, which is incredibly cognitively demanding and slow.

Over time, you will get very familiar with how the language works (there are only so many sentence patterns, and keep repeating), and you will also have learned the most common words and patterns that make up 80% of the language. That’s when your efforts will instead go mostly towards the remaining 20% of vocabulary and phrases. This phase is much smoother.

Slow and cognitively demanding in the beginning, but it gets faster and easier over time. Remember that.

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The Gears in Detail

Gear 1

This is the first stage. It’s where you’re making the most effort, but you also feel like you’re making the least progress. It will feel excrutiatingly slow despite spending so much energy.

Initially, you might barely get through a single paragraph of text after maybe even an hour of intense reading in the above fashion.

IT IS NORMAL and IT IS ESSENTIAL to go through this phase.

You may feel demoralized, you may feel overwhelmed with how much there is to learn and you may keep constantly forgetting what you just learned. It’s not unusual — stay on the path! Don’t change strategies! You are building the foundation — just stick with it.

Most people quit here. They try to switch vehicles, looking for some other easy or smart hack. These people never become fluent until they come back and pay their dues on Gear 1.

For me, it was frustrating too, but it I look back on it fondly — every time I read a new line in Japanese that made sense to me in Japanese, it gave me a feeling of accomplishment. I had read and listened to something in Japanese and now I understood what it meant completely! It gave me enough joy to carry me to the next sentence, and that was all I needed.

If you get really perplexed by a word pattern (eg: -te-morau, -chau, -ya-gatte etc), just stop, look it up on YouTube or ask AI to explain it, and once you understand what was being said, move on.

For kanji, I’m still not 100% confident about what is the most effective way to learn them, but if I could go back in time, I’d just learn the most common 500 or so from a deck of flashcards or something FIRST, and then learn the rest from just reading.

Basically, whenever you encounter a kanji while reading, spend a minute writing it down, see the onyomi and kunyomi pronounciations, and move on without trying to memorize anything. Learning a kanji within context is way more powerful than learning it from a flashcard.

I believe some people have had good results from the Heisig method as well (spaced repetition flashcard method for the entire deck of 2200 kanji, but in a weird academic order). I’m skeptical, but if that works for you, you do you.

Personally speaking, the hundreds of hours I spent on Anki flashcards were a big waste of time. I wouldn’t bother with the Heisig method if I was starting out again, unless you had a few months to study Japanese full-time by yourself.

Gear 2 and above

This is when you find that you’ve built enough of a foundation in the language that most everyday patterns are very natural to you, cemented in your brain through natural repetition, and the language is activating in your brain. This stage might come after 2 months, or 3 months. But this is where you’ll understand 80-90% of a sentence, minus just the vocabulary or kanji you don’t know about.

This is enjoyable and very rewarding, and you should ideally start setting goals for yourself in terms of how much content you consume. For me the goal was to finish reading and listening to the scripts of all 75 episodes (3 seasons of 25 episodes each) of Bakuman.

At this stage, again, just keep consuming content, and consider also passive listening to content you’ve already read.

Keep learning Kanji by simply writing down what comes up (use the stroke order) and moving on. Don’t try to memorize. They will enter your memory on their own, if you just keep up your daily streak and keep reading.

I’ll end this article here because I’ve already given you everything you need. Now it’s up to you to go out and succeed.