Introduction

I've been teaching myself Japanese for more than a year by now. Despite the alienness of the language to most westerners, resources available on the net and in the literature are vast, and not least due to the immense output of the Japanese entertainment industry, plenty of audio material is also available. So the basic grammar, vocabulary, listening skills can be acquired through perseverence and patience. However, there is no replacement for conversation with native speakers for improving your verbal skills. This is the area where people not living in Japan (like me) will be most seriously lacking.

As with the vastness of resources on the net, there are many strategy recommendations for self-study of Japanese. I will not refer to them here and just present my own method. Note that I did not work on my studies full-time, but besides completing my master's and without setting any fixed goals. So if you're more ambitious and have more time at your disposal, you should extend this list.

Learning to Read and Write Japanese

Before learning the language itself, certain reading / writing skills should be acquired, as counter-intuitive as it sounds. Any Japanese material written for native speakers will be written in the hiragana ひらがな / katakana カタカナ syllabaries, as well as Chinese characters or kanji 漢字.

Reading and writing of kana can be basically learned in a week. There are 46 characters in each alphabet, associated with the same set of 46 syllables, plus some modifications. Fluency in reading / writing will materialize in several months, assisted by your further studies.

It's a different story with kanji, though. Japanese schoolchildren learn to read and write ~2000 characters in grade and middle school, and you could stumble upon any of these when trying to read e.g. a newspaper. Without kanji, you're basically stuck with children's books. Each of these characters is associated with a wider and narrower field of meaning and one or several pronunciations (which can be written in kana).

Learning to Write: The Heisig Method

The approach of the books by James Heisig is to learn the meanings and the writing first, and the pronunciations later — when you know enough grammar and vocab to formulate your own Japanese sentences. Each kanji gets a keyword in your language (there are English, German, … editions). As for writing, each character consists of a number of strokes, which are more ore less straight horizontal, vertical, diagonal (with a hook and curl here or there). Some handwriting styles are so fleeting that you need to know the exact stroke order to make any sense of it — of course, if you want to be able to write kanji yourselves (highly recommended), you have to learn the order anyway.

Now how do you memorize a kanji's meaning, according to the Heisig method?

1. Break it down into its primitive elements. These "primitives" (also known as "radicals") are a rather well-arranged set of forms which are regularly repeated. The very large majority of kanji are just a combination of several of these elements.

2. Remember the keyword associated with each primitive. These are given in Heisig's book as well and usually have something to do with the visual form of the rpimitive.

3. Build and memorize a story or mnemonic which connects the keywords of the component primitives with the kanji meaning.

Hey presto. Still sounds rather incomprehensible and doubtful?

Here's an example. This kanji appears in the Japanese verb meaning "to doubt". At first, it looks like a mess of strokes, more random than anything:

At a second glance, it can be broken down into a combination of 4 rather simple primitives which you will have recognized and written countless times when you have finished the book.

It should be noted that above kanji is definitely one of the more complex ones you will encounter. The majority will consist of two, max three primitive elements and need less than a dozen strokes.

So get yourself a copy of "Remembering the Kanji, Volume 1" or look at the downloadable sample chapter. Characters should be written when learned, and written when recalled from memory. Best use a SRS (spaced repetition software) or "flashcard tool" for this. For RtK, there's the website "Reviewing the Kanji", which is also a great resource for mnemonics to associate with your kanji keywords. Or better, make yourself familiar with the software Anki, which is a great tool for creating and repeating flashcards and comes with downloadable card decks for RtK.

Completing RtK volume 1 is still a rather tedious effort and takes its time. Some finish all >2000 characters in 3-4 months, some take one or more years. The most important thing is not to give up, as it's worth the effort in the long run. This might sound dubious: at that point, you have invested lots of study time without learning any real Japanese. Well, I'm not the first to say this, but the thing is: it makes the rest so much easier. Some reasons:

• If you start studying vocab / grammar afterwards, you can work with sentences in real written Japanese, and you can concentrate on the vocab / grammar point to be learned, instead of being distracted by the indecipherable "hieroglyphs".

• And even if you don't know the actual meaning and pronunciation of some kanji, you can make a good first guess based on your associated Heisig keyword. This is especially useful when confronted with billboards / signposts / legends / headlines etc.

• From time to time, you will stumble over a new kanji, not included in Heisig's first book. Most Japanese know and use more than the ~2000 characters used in school. It's the same as with gradually learning the irregular spelling of personal or place names and specialized vocabulary in your mother language. (It's not really necessary to study these kanji systematically, as the list will ever be non-exhaustive. If you want to anyway, consider volume 3 of the Heisig Kanji books.)

  Anyway, if you stumble over such an unknown kanji, it will be much easier for you to recognize and write it, as you already know the "building blocks" of the characters, which are generally the same as with the general-use kanji.

In short, anything you learn after RtK will be immediately useful stuff for speaking / writing and understanding Japanese, as you've already passed the most difficult hurdle - the access to written Japanese.

Author's note: This page is incomplete yet. I will try to document my further steps in self-studying Japanese (grammar, vocab, listening, speaking) in the future.