Learning Japanese

Last updated Jul 11, 2019

(This collection of notes is based on an article I wrote a couple years ago)

Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn1. This collection of articles provides an overview of the language and links resources that I found useful. I’m not an expert,2 but I have studied the language since 2014 and passed the JLPT N1 in December of 2015.

relevant yojijukugo:
下学上達 (kagaku jōtatsu) starting from the basics but eventually standing atop a distant pillar of knowledge


  1. The US Foreign Service Institute considers Japanese, Arabic, Korean, Cantonese, and Mandarin to be the five most difficult languages for English speakers to learn. See this page (scroll to the bottom). ↩︎

  2. You are taking advice from someone who spent more than three thousand hours studying a complex language spoken on a distant volcanic archipelago in order to watch cartoons more effectively. ↩︎