Japanese Study Techniques to Achieve Your Goals

Having a goal is key to long-term language study. Progressing towards that goal keeps you motivated and gives you something to strive for and measure your progress.

Common goals amongst Japanese learners include reading manga or light novels, messaging friends online, and speaking with natives when visiting Japan. But how do you work towards achieving these goals?

Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced learner, here are some tips that can help you succeed in your own personal language goal.

Don’t Stop Studying

Whatever your goal, you should always combine studying your vocabulary, grammar, and kanji with practicing the language through other methods.

If you’re a complete beginner check out this Ultimate Guide to studying Japanese for suggestions on how to best learn the fundamentals.

If you’re an intermediate learner guidebooks for tests like the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) N3 or textbooks like とびら are great ways to study intermediate vocabulary and grammar.

Continual studying of Japanese helps build a stronger foundation and basic understanding of the language, making more advanced aspects easier to pick up. You can’t build a strong house on a weak foundation!

Saying that, it also helps to practice Japanese in ways that further your goals. Combining active study with practice is how you get good at Japanese fast.

So here are some helpful goal-oriented practice exercises.

Studying Japanese to Be Able to Read Manga and Novels

This is a little obvious, but if you want to be able to read manga, light novels, or novels, then you need to focus on your reading comprehension skills.

To do this, combine your studying (of vocabulary, grammar, and kanji in the context of vocabulary) with reading practice.

Pick Material That’s at or Slightly Above Your Level

It’s tempting to just grab your favorite manga or light novel and dive right in, but this might actually be detrimental.

Some genres (especially fantasy and sci-fi) are prone to contain more complex or esoteric vocabulary and grammar. Choosing books that are high above your current Japanese level results in you spending more time looking up words and less time reading.

Ideally you want to find material that’s at or slightly above your level. This helps reinforce what you’ve studied while also teaching you new things without being overwhelming.

Where to Find The Right Reading Materials

If you’re a beginner or low-intermediate learner (N5-N3), graded readers are great tools to help you become more familiar with reading in Japanese.

Satori Reader and YomuYomu are two great sources (that don’t use gen AI) of short stories aimed at people learning Japanese. You can find a wide variety of stories at different levels as well as additional study tools that make it easy to look up the vocabulary and grammar you encounter while reading.

LearnNatively is another great resource, allowing you to check if a manga or novel is a good level for you.

And you can find reviews and recommendations for novels and light novels on Japanese Talk Online:

Improving Reading Comprehension

You can’t improve your reading comprehension without reading!

It will be slow and difficult at first, but I promise the more you read, the better you’ll get. Combine it with structured studying and you’ll get better even faster.

But sometimes there are sections that just seem too difficult. Time to break down the sentences and pick out the bones. Teasing out the meaning can be the breakthrough to the next level of understanding. But if you’re encountering a lot these difficult sections the text might not be the right fit. Time to head back to the last section to find something closer to your current level.

In How to Improve Japanese Reading Comprehension I explain a number of techniques you can use in more detail.

Re-Read Books/Articles

A great exercise to improve reading is to re-read books you’ve already read.

Go find a favorite you haven’t touched for a while and give it another go. You might find you understand the text a lot better than before and pick up new words you didn’t the first time.

Studying Japanese to Be Able to Watch Anime and Videos

Studying Japanese to be able to watch anime, TV, movies, or videos is like studying for reading now the focus is on listening comprehension.

Continuing to expand your vocabulary and grammar is still a must, but there’s less pressure to learn kanji, unless you’re using Japanese subtitles.

Watch Anime/Drama/Videos for Your Level

It’s difficult to find anime and videos that are good for beginners. There are no “graded anime” or “graded videos” made specifically for lower-level learners and most anime uses casual and sometimes slangy Japanese which often comes later in most lesson plans.

Thankfully, LearnNatively is back to save the day. They rank anime, movies, and drama by difficulty to make it easier to find videos that will match your skill level.

If you are a beginner (N5/N4 level) start training your listening comprehension with graded podcasts. Recommended Podcasts for Japanese Learners has a list of all the podcasts I could find for beginner and intermediate learners.

Watch With Japanese Subtitles

If you’re watching anime, drama, or videos and struggle to understand what’s being said, it can help to turn on the Japanese subtitles.

Subtitles give a visual reference and make it easier to look up new words and grammar.

Japanese YouTube videos almost always have subtitles, either as an option in the Closed Captioning menu or rendered in the video itself.

Anime is a little more difficult as many popular foreign streaming sites don’t provide Japanese subtitles. However, they are available on Netflix and Hulu (may need a VPN). As well as through web extensions like LanguageReactor.

Watch Multiple Times

Watching the same video repeatedly is a great way to train your ear and help cement new words in your vocabulary.

Don’t worry about picking up every new word, constant pausing and rewinding can disrupt the flow and hinder improving your reading comprehension. Just keep an ear out for a few new words and add them to your vocabulary studies.

And just like reading, going back and watching a show you’re familiar will give you opportunities to see how you’ve improved and to pick out new words and phrases that you may have skipped the last time.

How to Teach Yourself Japanese Through Anime and Manga has some more tips for watching anime and reading manga to learn Japanese, but these can also be applied to other videos.

Studying Japanese to Be Able to Talk or Write to People

Another common goal is wanting to talk when visiting Japan, or writing to friends online in their native tongue.

These are similar goals because you’re focusing on outputting the language through speaking or writing, instead of inputting with reading and listening. Improving your reading and listening comprehension is a must, but you should also focus on your speaking and writing skills as well.

Talk to Yourself

Having a teacher or language partner to practice with is a great way to improve your speaking skills, but you can also boost your skills by practicing by yourself.

Reading out loud is a great exercise which combines reading and speaking. Read a segment of text multiple times to improve your speed and get your mouth used to making Japanese sounds.

To build confidence in speaking without looking at notes, prompt yourself with the English word and say the Japanese. Do this with a few words at a time and try to be able to say them quickly in Japanese without any mistakes.

Another useful technique is to talk to yourself. Narrate what you’re doing in Japanese, or try to come up with sentences using the Japanese you’ve been learning.

Write a Diary or Social Media Posts

Most Japanese lessons include writing exercises for homework, which the teacher will then correct for you. But if you’re studying on your own it can be a little trickier to get feedback on your writing.

Practice writing a diary (by hand and/or typing) and posting entries on sites like HelloTalk where native speakers will help by correcting any mistakes.

Social media is another good way to practice writing, but it’s more public and you’re less likely to get corrections unless you ask.

Studying Japanese for Your Goal

Whatever your reason for learning Japanese, be it manga, anime, novels, vtubers, traveling or whatever else, it’s always best to practice and engage with your goal alongside actively studying the language. Just make sure you do so in a way that supports your learning efforts, rather than hinders them.

Keep learning Japanese vocabulary, grammar, and kanji through textbooks and teachers, but also focus on improving the skills you want to improve to achieve your goals; reading comprehension for reading, and listening comprehension for listening.

Engaging with content that’s at or just above your level is more efficient than something too difficult, letting you have fun while learning new things without being overwhelmed.