Why 2021 is the best time to learn Japanese

There has never been a better time to learn Japanese. There is an embarressment of riches of native material available, and self directed study has moved from being a relatively new idea a few years ago to a well established route to fluency.

What do we mean when we say ‘learn Japanese?’ Not to attend classes, but learn through a combination of targeted, optimized self study (using SRS, spaced repetition software to do the heavy lifting) and a wide diet of real Japanese native media and materials. This second part was always tricky to achieve easily if you weren’t living in Japan, but is getting better and better, and the current situation was almost unthinkable 10 years ago.

The bad old days

In the not very distant past, it was difficult and expensive to get Japanese native materials. Some old guy (cough) remembers bittorrenting whatever TV shows were available - and you’d really have to take whatever you could get, which would mainly be either variety shows featuring popular singers and actors, or a very limited selection of doramas. If this didn’t float your boat you were mainly out of luck.

If you wanted to stick to western entertainment and just add Japanese dubs or subs in, it was very difficult to get Japanese audio or subtitles to keep your immersion going - normally importing DVDs from Amazon JP at much higher cost than you would pay for the originals locally.

Similarly, for books and magazines, you were mainly reliant on local book importers. One great source that has been around for a long time was Amazon JP, but even that was fairly pricey for delivery and you’d frequently get hit with additional taxes not included at checkout before you could recieve your delivery.

We’ve come a long long way together

All of these situations have almost completely reversed. On all the major streaming services: Netflix, Apple TV+, and to a lesser extend Amazon Prime, there is by default a decent selection of Japanese TV. Ghibli movies becoming available on Netflix in 2020 (HBO Max in the US) seemed an incredible win. (The only sad exception is Disney+, who have gone with a different direction in Japan.) Add a decent VPN subscription, and you can have access to all the additional shows on Netflix Japan, as well the domestic TV platforms like TVer and Gyao. For someone who was used to the situation before, it’s hard to believe things are so good.

Also, platforms like Netflix and Apple TV+ seem to be treating Japan as an Extremely Serious market, which is fantastic as it means there are also high quality Japanese dubs and subs for these platforms’ produced content, so you don’t have to miss out on their latest hit to study Japanese. Disney always used to have high quality dubs for their movies, but it was very hit or miss with other shows (I was always sad at the relative low quality of the Simpsons dubs.) But Netflix and AppleTV+ in particular really have pushed out the boat to make top quality dubs and subs - to the point that for a number of shows I actually prefer the Japanese dub. (Special mention to Central Park, Apple’s musical cartoon, which even has all the songs translated and rerecorded in Japanese.)

Kindle is now amazing for getting Japanese books. Most every book from one of the last big holdouts, Haruki Murakami, is now available, and you pay the same price as you would in Japan, and can benefit from the inbuilt dictionary on the Kindle. Kindle Unlimited is insane value for the amount of magazines that are available.

There are a huge amount of Japanese accounts to follow on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram - the exact same platforms you would be wasting time on anyway. There’s recently been a big push for us to examine and have control over the amount of time we spend on these platforms, with movies like 監視資本主義　デジタル社会がもたらす光と影 (The Social Dilemma) (which doesn’t have a Japanese dub but does have subs) and tools like Apple’s Screen Time, both with noble purposes. An alternative is to let the algorithms have their way with you, but only for what you want: populate your Twitter feed with Japanese accounts, don’t use Youtube’s recommendations but only look at videos from accounts you follow (which happen to be Japanese), etc. Some of the best minds of this generation are spending their careers trying to get you to look at their site on your phone. Why not give in, but make them teach you Japanese along the way?

Amazon JP is still going strong for physical books and magazines, with improved shipping costs (although still a touch painful in the wallet), much faster shipping (probably due to the pandemic meaning cargo planes are higher priority? Who knows), and taxes included at payment time (at least to the UK.)

What about study tho

So far, so good. Native Japanese media flows like water. Abundance upon abundance. But through media consumption alone one (probably) cannot learn Japanese. So what about study methods?

Well, if you were to start out today, you are in luck. Teaching yourself through focussed self study is by now a well proven method for success.

History lesson - BC & AD: Before C(Kh)atzumoto and After Dat guy

I think of Japanese study as pre and post AJATT (All Japanese All The Time), it’s as simple as that. If you don’t know, the tl;dr is that there was is a chap called (at least on the internet) Khatzumoto, who taught himself Japanese from scratch in ~18 months through a combination of lots of input (native materials) and SRS (spaced repetition software - flashcards with intelligent scheduling to make the material stick.) It sounds simple to say it, and is widely accepted now, but it really was radical at the time - from the outright rejection of class based learning (where you would just hear other’s beginners mistakes - a waste of time), to the almost religious dedication to immersion (headphones for sleeping - don’t miss a chance to get Japanese into your head.) The internet as a delivery mechanism for content was basically here (but nowhere near as established as today, especially in Japan), but he saw what was possible with it, paired it with SRS and through dedication willed what is now a common method into existence. (There were also a bunch of myths around children being better learners, Japanese being especially hard, etc, that he exploded along the way.)

You will see descriptions of him as ‘polarizing’ but I’ve never bought this, he has a direct way of writing which may or may not be to your taste (it is to mine), but you cannot minimise the effect he had on the Japanese learning community. You will see a suprising number of Japanese blogs that are effectively just parroting pure AJATT more than 10 years later without giving any credit for the ideas. There is pretty much everything you need to learn Japanese on that site from a methodology point of view.

The one difference is that Khatzumoto did not develop his ideas in the age of abundance that we are now in for native materials and so some of the talk of practicalities are different. I believe that these days it’s not necessary to be quite as strict. (In fact I never was as strict as him and I would say it took me more like 3 years to be anywhere near approaching fluency - from where I tread water thanks to native materials.) Khatzumoto is also well worth checking out on Twitter, mainly quotes and ideas to motivate and inspire you to study Japanese. It’s a fitting tribute to what he’s done for Japanese learning that the problem has shifted from how to practically do it, to making the method so straightforward that the main problem is one of any habit (motivation/consistency/showing up).

Fine, totally fine

So overall most things are great for the Japanese learner in 2021. In addition to access to media, the underlying study methods for grammar have always been fairly solid whichever method you choose. I’ve alway been a fan of Tae Kim, but there are lots of great books to pair with SRS study, and this has never been a problem area. (Note I say books not apps - none of the grammar apps I’ve looked at have really lived up to the promise of simplifying study.)

Oh but kanji

One thing I think still isn’t amazing is kanji study methods. AJATT espouses RTK (Remembering the Kanji) which I have never been a massive fan of as it feels too distanced from actual usage.

I learned kanji by using Basic Kanji Book 1&2, followed by Intermediate Kanji Book 1 & 2, which take you through around 1000 kanji in total. (They now have an app but oh my goodness it is bad.) This worked fine as each kanji was taught in the context of most common words and with example sentences could be entered into Anki to make flashcards. After this I patched together the remaining 1000 odd kanji with a mix of JLPT and other random study books. The thing about kanji is that there are only a certain amount you need to learn. That amount is large, yes, but once you get to the right level you can keep yourself there just through enjoying reading. If you put in the effort to any half decent method you should be able to get there - it’s just none of them feel very efficient to get a holistic understanding of the characters/vocab/readings.

I recently looked at what are the most useful kanji learning methods currently, as my wife expressed an interest in learning, and in my opinion there still isn’t a really good one.

There are now some apps that will help you learn, WaniKani seems like it should be a decent method, and I hope it’s useful for some people, but for me the extra UX and bells and whistles somehow seem to have created more work rather than taking it away. None of them feel simple and efficient.

So for me kanji is the only unsolved problem. And it’s a big one, because everybody who has gotten to a decent level of fluency in Japanese can tell you that it’s like a valley you have to pass through, and at the moment there isn’t a great method to carry you over, so that part still requires a lot of slightly inefficient blood sweat and tears.

But apart from that one remaining issue, 2021 is a great time to be a Japanese learner looking for materials to enjoy. Hopefully this year more Japanese companies, looking at the outcomes of things like Netflix’s big budget Japanese doramas and Ghibli’s success overseas, will release even more great media abroad, and next year I can write about how naive I was to think 2021 was great given everything that has happened since.