Hi, I came the other way. Air Force baby who spent most of her younger years speaking Japanese and eventually got English happening.

So many people have asked me if they can learn Japanese, and my answer is the same: it’s a whole-ass language that takes many years to be good at, to use for communication. Most people realize they’re not going to be good at a language in three weeks and they bail.

Don’t use a language for just one thing (unless that one thing is to communicate with a society).

I committed myself to learning English because my family and I live in America now, and I needed to communicate with a society in it. (And I think my English is pretty good now but it’s not without a lot of trying, even now. I actually have to fight to maintain my Japanese, by reading books and watching movies and TV!)

Ayyy fellow Canto speaker on the same boat

I don’t really watch anime but I want to read Japanese text. I’m currently 2 months in following the Tofugu guide. I spent about a week on memorizing Hiragana and Katakana, and have been grinding Kanjis and vocabularies on Anki since then. At some point I also read the Japanese sentence structure guide from 8020japanese out of curiosity. This combination allows me to learn Japanese much faster at my own rate than pre-designed methods like Duolingo.

Since I’m a native Cantonese speaker, learning Kanji is rather trivial, so I mostly spend my time learning both Onyomi (Chinese pronunciation) and Kunyomi (Japanese pronunciation).

I am at a point where I can read some simple sentences and guess some words base on Kanji (for example はじめる means “start” on my Japanese Wii), but I definitely still have a long way to go before I can do anything fluent. If you watch a decent amount of anime, chances are you can probably learn faster than me.

I tried this during my weeb phase some 20 years ago.

I stumbled across a video lecture series om some torrent site, and despite being very old (from the 70s or 80s) it was actually pretty good for teaching everyday conversational japanese.

I never progressed beyond the very basics due to life happening, but it got me far enough that I could at least grasp the general topic at hand. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a decent understanding of the language if I had kept at it.

Japanese is a fairly simple language with easy grammar. From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart that knowing one probably won’t help you much with the other, although I may be mistaken.

Hey I actually did that in my uni years because I wanted to experience manga in the original way. I guess it depends on how fast you absorb stuff like vocab but if you’re already used to listening to Japanese convo, it could take a few months to master the grammar (that’s the easy part imho). Then the hard part would be the writing (which you could avoid entirely since you’re focused on anime but I don’t think it’s a good idea in the long run since there’s a lot of written stuff in anime as well) and vocab. If you study a little every day (say 1 hour), it would take 6 month to understand basic stuff (like teenage shonen) and then a few years for more advanced stuff. That’s just my two cents In my case, took me 2-3 years to actually read shonen manga but I still struggle with furigana-less manga

I had a friend who was a computer science student and did an additional major in Japanese just so he could read manga in original language. It can be done but requires a lot of dedication.

If you are a native English speaker, then learning Germanic and Romance languages will be easy because they have much in common. With Japanese, there’s no real evolutionary commonality so you really have to just learn a whole new system that doesn’t match your expectations–and from scratch. Example:

1,352

English: one-thousand three-hundred fifty-two Japanese: one thousands place, three hundreds place, five tens place, two

Just the conception of how numbers work is different. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to do this, it would be fantastic. Just know that you have to develop a lot of new intuitions.

Dunno if this will be helpful or not, but I’ve seen this game getting rave reviews, and apparently it can really help you learn Japanese:

https://opencritic.com/game/18105/shujinkou

An RPG that simultaneously teaches you Japanese.

A perspective from an European here with nativeness and alike in several latin-related languages and long lasting interest in Japanese language and related culture since the 2000s.

Certainly for written Japanese it will help you your Chinese knowledge (after a learning curve of false-friend associations), I heard that many technical/modern words have been imported in Chinese also from Japanese adaptations (only the characters implied, not the sounds, as is common in indoeuropean language imports), as a return kind voyage, since Japanese writing was first imported from old Chinese and then evolved in today’s system (kanjis and two silabaries). Also many English words have been imported into Japanese, but highly phonetically distorted in the adaptation. Foreign words are easy to spot in written text, and I often chuckle when I understand the word by realising about the original one after backtracing the intended pronunciation.

As a consequence of Chinese influence in the writing system, most of the kanjis have two pronunciations, one(or-more-alike) of Japanese origin and another(or-more-alike) of Chinese origin, which in many cases will resemble to current Chinese ones, but I have heard that phonetic changes will throw away potential direct understanding (also rules about which pronunciation is used when in Japanese are not rock solid or straightforward always) specially since grammar is notably different also. I found that proficiency in two similar related languages (e.g. between roman-latin languages, between germanic languages, etc) develop certain ability in spontaneous word recognition across phonetic variations, but I found this in indoerupean languages with “long” words with “long” roots (not one “syllable” per “word”), not sure how much would work between Mandarin and Cantones and a phonetic adaptation from old Chinese into Japanese, which would be just a part of it.

I am far from fluent in Japanese, but the most basic interactions, grammar recognition, etc and the learned nuances add a wonderful experience to OVS watching (love for those sub volunteers that explain the cultural context of many situations), and since most of my consume is Japanese culturaly rooted (e.g. not sci-fi, western fantasy, etc) I am not interested in dubbed material at all. I think fluency requires a serious investment, even for Chinese background, user abilities and environment may vary this a lot also, so the gain must be worth it: for careless plain consumption of works not rooted in Japanese culture I doubt is worth it, for the rest I find worth the effort to read subs most of the time and appreciate recognise the nuances hard/impossible to translate.

I had zero regrets of all what I invested in Japanese understanding up today, even if is not enough for general understanding, but I also find such cultural travel worthy on each step. I am attempting something alike with Chinese nowadays, let’s see how far I arrive…

Good luck!

I suspect this will depend somewhat on your level of knowledge in those other languages. Japanese is broadly considered a very difficult language for native English speakers, and it’s pretty substantially different in many ways from English. Learning it is indeed possible, but takes a long time and a substantial commitment of energy. However, those with a decent fluency in Chinese (I use this rather than Cantonese/Mandarin because I don’t understand the nuances well enough to speak intelligently as to their relation to Japanese-learning) or Korean (and probably many other languages) will have a much easier time with the transition compared to those with a primarily-English background. Additionally, Japanese Kanji have a relationship with Chinese characters, and so learning the Kanji is easier for one with a meaningful Chinese background who has had to learn those characters already.

For some context, one can attend Language School in Japan, which is a half-time (~20-25hr/wk) course load taught with full immersion learning. That is to say, the course is taught almost entirely in Japanese itself, but doesn’t require any knowledge of the language to participate, as you’ll work up from a near-zero understanding. In many of these classes, the first few weeks might lean a small amount on English to explain certain concepts, but the complexity of English required is very low. It takes about 2 years of these courses in order to reach a “basic” fluency. Many who take the 2-year course take the JLPT (Japanese-Language Proficiency Test) and study up for the exam can test into the N2 category, which is what you’d minimally need in order to attend school or seek a job in Japan.

Learning on your own, I’d probably say you should expect either to spend many hours a day on study, and/or to spend multiple years before you’d reach the point of being able to understand a significant amount of the anime you consume. Learning the grammar and vocabulary are one thing, but actually consuming content in the language is an important part of learning, and jumping from nothing to full-on anime is a HELL of a jump in complexity.

As to how to go about it, there are tons of excellent resources available online for paths to take. Most will point you to various textbooks to work through, which is a pretty decent strategy IMO. The Genki series is one that is often recommended for those not working from a class, since it discusses the material in English.

https://youtu.be/7fvCb5_Nzq4

TL;DW: keep listening to Japanese media for a couple of hours a day. Watch anime in Japanese with no subs, listen to Japanese podcasts or audiobooks in Japanese while you’re working or doing something else, etc. Try to find something you know a bit about because it will help keep you engaged and help with context.

There’s a chapter about tolerating ambiguity which means they in the beginning you won’t understand anything and it will be very frustrating but you need to accept it and keep feeding your brain Japanese inputs. You’ll learn the sentence structure and vocabulary as well as learning pronunciation, this is basically how babies learn. You’re brain is really good at pattern recognition so just give it enough inputs and eventually it will start to click

Start doing Anki cards which will supplement all the inputs. Don’t go overboard, just learn the alphabets and then some common vocab and keep listening to other media. After about a year, start reading and writing a lot. Read manga, read books, and start writing notes and stuff in Japanese.

That’s basically it. You can use study materials if you want but feeding your brain more inputs is key. In addition to being really effective it has the benefit of being way more fun than studying grammar and whatnot