The Road To N5

In my personal experience I’ve found that several roads have to be walked all together at the same time in order to maximise results when comes to Japanese self-study.

First the foundations, which include: grammar, rules and basic structure.

This means sitting down whenever you can and deeply going through your favourite grammar textbook or guide.

There are already so many of these, just make sure to pick the right one for you.

Then there’s practice or real life if you may.

Which means literally putting out all the processed information in the form of a conversation, or by trying to decipher what someone next to you just said.

Ask where is the exit or what the time is. Anything works when comes to practice, even the slightest and simplest sentence.

There’s also the abundant world of the written language, all over the place.

On the streets, in the books, in the newspaper, on the white goods, on the wrapping of almost every consumable, and on social media thanks to 2024.

That’s how I mostly move through.

At least at the beginning, I went straight into grammar to understand how to build a simple sentence or a simple question and then started iterating with different nouns, verbs, adjectives, time conjugations and slowly expanding my approach.

personal note: It was frustrating at the beginning. The pace I was at while studying took over the pace I had at understanding the real world.

In other words, I was making more and more progress on the paper, moving into new sections and topics, new vocabulary, new rules, one, two, three text notebooks completely filled with notes, new variations of this and that, but, on the real world, when came to talk, ask, hear, solve real problems, I was not yet able to make any significant progress.

The rhythm at which I was absorbing information heavily surpassed the rhythm at which I was processing such information.

You can read 20 pages of grammar in one day, but in order to successfully incorporate every concept you need to go out and practice over and over all that content, and that takes surely longer than what it took you to read those 20 pages.

I realised that later on the journey.

So now I’m confidently putting more practice out there and sometimes getting back to the good old grammar rules, which are extremely important by the way.

With this being said I’d like to get down to a tool I developed myself in order to enforce one pillar I was really not seeing any progress so far.

You’ll see.

Most of the language requires practice and repetition and when you are starting you can easily get fenced in a cluster of basic and repetitive words that surely will sort yourself out on the daily activities but still will keep you stuck in terms of expansion.

I realised that I needed to incorporate new vocabulary, but the methods I was utilising were not providing progress on this.

As much as I was listening, and trying to talk, and trying to read and write, I was still stuck when came to manifest ideas or express questions.

My vocabulary was not increasing the same way my understanding of all other stuff was doing.

So I focused exclusively on solving this problem.

Even after watching hundreds of YouTube videos on the matter, I went back to basics.

The same way toddlers learn at the kinder-garden I realised that there was a method that I was not utilising at all. A method that had actually proved successful when I had first learnt hiragana and katakana.

I encourage you to take a look at this simple but effective handbook and get your journey started!