How difficult is it to learn Japanese by yourself?

By this I mean no paid in person or in video classes. How far will one go by just using podcasts, textbooks, all the stuff thats in resources?

9 comments
  1. I’ve been learning entirely on my own for 6 years. I think I can say anything I’d ever want to and have no real issue reading anything I come across on the internet. I still have to look up words and forget the readings of some pretty basic words all the time though.

  2. Not very far. At least not very quickly.

    No lessons means no chance for consistent, useful feedback, meaning that output isn’t going to be that viable. Which is a problem, because the output-feedback loop is by far one of the more effective styles of learning.

    Is it doable? Probably. Somewhat. But it’s going to take a lot longer and be more expensive.

    Yes, that’s right. More expensive. Because by doing it this way, you’re not spending your money on it, but you are going to spend *a lot*, an *insane* amount more time to make the same amount of progress. And time, is a lot more valuable than money.

    edit: apologies, it’s late at night here and I misread the OP slightly.

  3. The biggest variables here are your own resilience, discipline and patience.

    **resilience:** As youre not having professionals teaching you, and you neither have a professional taking care of your needs, you will much often have situation where you just are not able to comprehend a certain grammar point, sentence, pattern or whatsoever, this can get quite frustrating, depending on what kind of a person you are.

    **discipline:** You can do what you want if youre not bound to a person you are paying, but this often results in people skipping or ignoring things, if you have classes/teacher, you not only have a person taking care of your studying, but also you will most likely get a study plan/homework/tests , which also helps staying disciplined(is this even a word?).

    **patience:** This is kinda self explanatory, having professionals teaching you will obv. be way faster than learning on your own, so you have to be prepared to be needing much more time.

    All of these 3 influence the biggest variable, **motivation**, if you can keep beeing motivated, you will most likly be more patient, disciplined and resilient whilst learning, as you are more likely to “endure” these things because you are motivated.

  4. I got n2 by 2 years studying by myself and right now is in japanese uni. the hardest part is to study consistently since motivation is quite important if you want to self-study anything.

  5. Honestly, I’d say it’s pretty tough. You can reach a high-level of comprehension through lots of immersion, but turning all that input into a working knowledge of the language is really tough unless you have a great tutor to practice with or have the opportunity to go to Japan.

    Just think about how much time you’ve spent learning English. You’ve probably been immersing and speaking 24/7 for decades. Learning Japanese on your own, you only get a small fraction of that experience. So yeah, although everyone goes through a period where they think “Japanese ain’t too bad after all!” it still requires serious effort, I think.

    Don’t let that scare you though. Just have fun with it.

  6. Someone recently told me that learning on your own is actually very simple. But they followed up by saying that “simple” does not mean “easy.” I think about that a lot.

  7. It tough, but not really hard, but you need good motivation when self study, and discipline too.

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