Study plans and JLPT
Practical guides on speaking, grammar, pronunciation, listening, and study planning, written for learners who want to use Japanese in real life.
Study plans and JLPT · Page 18
Learning Japanese as a Filipino Speaker
If your first language is Filipino, Japanese sounds are closer to your mouth than most learners can hope for, and the politeness habit you learned with po and opo has a direct use. This guide shows what to borrow, what to unlearn, and how to spend your first month speaking.
19 min readLearning Japanese as a Spanish Speaker: Easy Sounds, New Grammar
If Spanish is your first language, most Japanese sounds are already in your mouth. The work is in the length of vowels, the order of the sentence, and the script.
14 min readLearning Japanese as a Portuguese Speaker
If Portuguese is your first language, you already own a handful of Japanese words and most of its sounds. The work is in the grammar that runs backwards, the kanji, and a short list of sounds your ear has been trained to ignore.
16 min readLearning Japanese as a Hindi Speaker: A Familiar Word Order
If Hindi is your first language, Japanese sentence structure will feel oddly familiar from the first lesson. The real work is in the sounds and the scripts, and this guide shows you where to spend your effort.
14 min readLearning Japanese as an English Speaker: What Is Actually Hard
Japanese has a fearsome reputation among English speakers, and part of it is deserved. The useful question is which parts, because the difficulty is very unevenly spread.
13 min readJapanese Learning Games That Actually Work for Adults
Adults do not quit Japanese games because games are childish. They quit because most language games waste the ten minutes they were prepared to give.
12 min readGamified Japanese Learning: What Works and What Does Not
Points, streaks and timers are tools, not a method. Used well they get you to open the app and retrieve words hundreds of times; used badly they train you to protect a number instead of learning to speak.
13 min readLearn Japanese by Playing: A Daily Plan That Sticks
Twenty-one minutes a day is enough to make real progress in Japanese if every minute has a job. This plan uses short games to load words into your head and a live conversation to get them out of your mouth.
15 min readJapanese Vocabulary Games for JLPT N5 to N1 Preparation
JLPT vocabulary is a closed list tested by recognition, which makes it the best-suited material in Japanese for game drilling. It is also the material most learners can recognise on paper and still not say.
17 min readJapanese Texting and LINE Etiquette for Learners
Most of the Japanese you exchange with real people will be typed into a messaging app, not spoken across a table. The grammar is simpler than in speech, but the etiquette is stricter than it looks.
14 min readHow to Write a Japanese Email to a Friend or Acquaintance
Somewhere between a one-line LINE message and a business email with its fixed formulas sits the email you send to a friend's parents, a former teacher, or a colleague who has become a friend. This is how to write it.
14 min readJapanese Birthday and Congratulations Messages
A Japanese congratulations message has a fixed first line that everyone sends and a second line that only you can write. This guide gives you both, for birthdays, new jobs, weddings, babies, exams and new homes.
15 min readPractical guides
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