What does your study schedule look like?

19 comments

1. I don’t have a strict schedule because I can only study in my free time and that varies a lot from day to day

   Usually though my number 1 priority will be vocabulary and at least a couple of items from Genki; that usually takes a bit less than an hour! After that if I can then I’ll listen to roughly 15 minutes of content or read for the same amount of time, making sure I sentence mine for unknown vocabulary

   If I have more time then I simply increase the amount of items I work through in Genki and the amount of reading/listening I do

2. Right now and since I’m sharing my daily time with French and Italian, my schedule only consists of

   listening (no subs) to one episode of either anime or Jdrama. Sometimes I may just listen to an N2 or N1 podcast on LingQ

   Read about 15 pages of a light novel or just go through a few chapters of manga

   (Right now I don’t really use Anki anymore as I don’t have much need for it)

   Back in the day (about a year ago lol) this is what it looked like

   4 hours of kanji – 5 new kanji daily, review through SRS and review separately writing through anki using a 原稿用紙…each new kanji I would write it 20 times while repeating meanings and readings. If I get any anki kanji witing review wrong even if it was just stroke order issues I would treat it as new kanji

   1 hour of grammar – 30 mins of new grammar, 30 of reviewing old grammar points through anki

   1 hour of reading usually light novels but sometimes manga…I would add unknown words…every single word….to anki usually about 50 new cards daily

   1 hour of listening comprehensively without subs

   About 250-500 anki card reviews

   Comparing my old schedule to my current one I think it worked out very well for me even though it was a bit crazy 😭

3. * 30 min: anki

   * 90 min: read

4. I’ve had strict schedules before. Most importantly ya just gotta keep moving and if a tight schedule forms it is more of an eye if a storm than anything else – it’ll subside.

5. My priority is reading. I do vocab & kanji with Anki & WK when I get home from work for 1.5 hours until I have to leave again. When I get back I have a rough 5 hours to just read and do look-ups. I’m going the VN route so I do get *some* listening in.

   I like my schedule because it’s consistent every single day at the exact same times. It’s become habitual although there’s also the matter of how much my job tires me out each day. So some days I don’t do a full evening of reading but I feel like I have made good progress. The story sure is going somewhere.

6. I don’t learn consistently so I don’t have a strict schedule, currently I’m focusing on improving my reading since I’m pretty behined so I aim for 1 hour of reading each day, I do Anki randomly and watch youtube videos + listen to podcasts randomly, it’s not ideal but it works

7. I’ve been studying Japanese for 6 years, and I never really had a “schedule” so to speak. Over the years the way I interacted with the language have changed so I’ll just go with a few examples of what I’ve done.

   First 2 years (2017-2018):

   – Tried to do an anki core deck for a month (about 30 minutes a day), eventually stopped due to burn out
   – Read maybe 30-40 minutes of manga and watched some anime (no subtitles) every day. Didn’t understand much, had no knowledge of grammar, only looked up a few words here and there if I was totally lost.

   Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this because in 2 years, while I learned a bit, I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I would have if I had actually studied.

   Then, in late 2019:

   – Started anki again with sentence mining, about 40 minutes a day of reviews
   – Started [looping](https://morg.systems/58465ab9) on the fundamentals, maybe 30 minutes/1 hour a day on just reading things related to grammar
   – Started doing 3 hours of Japanese lessons with a tutor a week (two 1.5h sessions)
   – Every single moment of free time I’d just read manga, play videogames, watch anime in 100% Japanese. I stopped consuming English media altogether.

   Between 2020-2022:

   – Started doing an anki deck for kanji, initially my anki time went up to like 1 hour a day, but I eventually reduced the amount of new cards and slowed down mining so it became only 20 minutes at most
   – Also started doing some bunpro reviews for grammar SRS (max 2 minutes a day)
   – Continued with 3hr/week of JP lessons
   – I also started reading light novels. Again, **any** amount of free time I had, I just did stuff in Japanese. (In 2022 I had [more than 1200 tracked hours of immersion](https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/zzhrjq/my_japanese_immersion_report_of_2022_2022_in/))

   Now (2023):

   – Reduced my anki workload **by a lot**, I’m mostly just adding new kanji every once in a while and stopped mining almost completely. About 5-10 minutes of anki a day at best
   – No more Japanese lessons
   – Literally just doing anything I want with Japanese

   Maybe this isn’t super useful because I’ve never really been very “methodical” in how I approach studying. I just wanted to do stuff in Japanese, and that’s pretty much what I did, since day 1.

   Disclaimer: I mention “Japanese lessons” with my tutor but for the most part these lessons were either me reading out loud and getting corrections/cultural explanations from a Japanese native, or just us having normal/casual conversation about all kinds of topics as conversation practice. While we used textbooks for reading material, it was mostly just as a prompt to start conversations. They weren’t really “lessons” in a school sense.

8. I’ve been doing at least an hour a day if I can. Anki/vocab is always priority. I try and get an even balance of reading/listening after that, depending on the day, plus some grammar review. I’ve technically finished Tobira, but my level is not quite matched, so I’m just spending time getting more comfortable with my comprehension.

   So after 15-30 minutes of Anki learning 20 new words, I’ll do about 15 minutes of grammar review from Genki 1, 2, or Tobira, writing down something that I may have missed, or small aspects of grammar points I forgot about.

   The rest is some sort of mish-mash of listening/reading for 30-45 mins.

   -Reading/listening to Todai easy news/NHK Easy News

   -Rewatching Shirokuma Cafe with JP subs on

   -Listening to Sayuri Saying podcast

   -I started reading AoT and Your Name on kindle, and it was actually pretty pleasant, but I think I wanna try and get my vocab up a bit more before continuing. AoT was easier than I expected. Your Name was harder than I expected, interestingly.

9. Duolingo for 3 hours a day

   It’s been really effective, I’ve been learning Japanese for about 4 years now and thanks to Duolingo I can now read some of the more complicated manges like yotsuba.

10. Right now im a mega beginner… i have about an hour and a half before work for srs (vocab, kanji, and grammer) 7 days a week. If ive worked through my scheduled review in that time then ill learn new and add it to my srs.. if i have any free time before bed and im not wiped, then ill watch anime for listening practise, and id like to eventually add reading durring this time but im not there yet..

11. Daily: Wanikani, anki, a few other drilling things, about an hour usually. 2 episodes of anime, but subbed because I’m watching with someone who doesn’t know Japanese at all, so it’s listening, but super lazy. Some manga (working my way through Natsume Yuujinchou and FMA).

    2x/week: private tutoring sessions, an hour each.

    A few times a week, these get switched up: new grammar with Bunpro, some doujinshi, anime with Japanese subs.

    I spend 2-3 hours a day on active studying, usually. (Doesn’t include the daily anime, that’s not focused enough.)

12. At my busiest (when I first started studying), I used to do anki, wanikani, and grammar study for about 30 minutes each everyday. That was all of the actual studying which was always combined with a lot of immersion. I made sure to read manga/light novels/novels everyday for at least 2 hours. Then, for listening, I had podcasts playing walking around campus at college or eating my meals. This probably doesn’t count, but I listened to mainly Japanese music during my workouts as well. Though I improved really quickly, I don’t recommend this to almost everyone. It’s not a realistic way to study which will lead to burnout really quick.

    Nowadays, I’m taking it easy. 30 minutes of anki with no new cards except for a deck I started to practice handwriting kanji. That’s it. Any immersion is me playing video games in Japanese, watching anime, or reading novels in Japanese during my downtime. Basically, whenever I feel like having some fun in a language besides my native one. I also have the occasional iTalki lesson or wanting to write a composition (the length varies from a short diary entry to a mini essay).

    I’m quite happy with the level I’ve gotten to now as I can read, speak and write to a more than satisfiable degree. That’s probably why I don’t feel the need to study as much as I used to. But yeah, I think the best studying schedule is whatever allows you to be consistent. I’m definitely more happy with how I’m currently studying. More time for things other than Japanese. For anyone that wants to improve as much as possible, though, the more hardcore schedule is really effective.

13. My current schedule sort of looks like this:

    tl;dr: About 2 hours a day on weekdays. 15 minutes in bed at start + end of day, my lunch hour, then the remaining 30+ minutes scattered throughout the day in pieces as availability permits. Weekend usually goes more like 3 hours/day. Heavy on vocab+grammar+reading. I don’t focus on specific skills at specific times or days. I don’t have kids and work from home.

    Things I try to do every day:

    – Use JPDB for learning vocabulary and kanji. 20 new cards a day, sometimes more if the new cards are easy (usually when they’re an obvious combination of previously known words like kagi wo kakeru or something like katakana for english loanwords). This is the bulk of my work, and takes about 45-60 minutes for the day. Usually a review session in bed at the start and end of the day that takes around 15 minutes each, then the rest is scattered throughout the day when I have a spare couple of minutes.
    – Use Ringotan for kanji writing practice. ~10-15 minutes, usually do this while watching TV.
    – Do a couple Duolingo lessons, and a Mango Languages lesson. ~10-15 minutes total throughout the day.
    – Spend some time reading tadoku graded readers. This probably only happens 50% of the time because it’s hard and I get tired.

    Things I do over the course of approximately one week, almost every day, but don’t get a specific daily allotment:

    – Read a genki chapter and complete its exercises on https://sethclydesdale.github.io/genki-study-resources/lessons-3rd/ . Hard to say exactly how long this takes, but I’d say it’s probably about 3-4 hours. Each exercise only takes 2-3 minutes so I scatter these throughout the day, and go heavier on weekends when I have more time. The vocabulary, grammar, and kanji part of the chapters is covered by my use of JPDB. I’ve seen estimates of 6-8 hours per chapter, and that’s probably correct as a whole, but since I’m using JPDB for some of the materials I only specifically dedicate maybe 3-4 hours for reading and exercises.
    – Watch the corresponding Tokini Andy video during lunch one day

    Things I toss in every so often if I still have a surplus of time and motivation:

    – Pimsleur lessons (only done ~15 so far)
    – Podcast listening (Slow Japanese)
    – Try to read NHK easy news (not very well)
    – Listen to some Japanese news youtube channels
    – Play FlicKuma! on my phone
    – Watch a Cure Dolly video or read an Imabi article

    I’ve been doing this pretty consistently since the start of the year. The least amount I’ve done on any day is doing my JPDB reviews and keeping my Duolingo streak alive, and that’s only because I was on vacation. I feel like it’s been successful enough to make me feel good about my progress. According to JPDB my vocabulary is 997 words and 720 kanji and I’m up to Genki chapter 10. I can bumble through the L1 Tadoku graded readers with a reasonable amount of lookups. I don’t have hard stats but it feels like my reading speed and accuracy is much better than when I had only just learned the kana alphabets, and I’m seeing that what I’m reading is becoming closer to actual stories rather than completely forced constructions for absolute beginners. I like that when I end up learning new vocabulary it’s with the kanji , so those 997 words represent “real” words and not something I’ll need to re-learn later. “Knowing” a kanji means the general meaning and strokes, but not the readings.

    If I had to give myself a review, I’d say this is a 7/10 plan overall for me. It’s obvious that I’m super heavy on vocab + reading, and way lighter on listening and practically zero on speaking. I’d say I also lack a bit of focus being scattered over so many apps and resources and am *probably* wasting time on things like Duolingo and Mango, although I do find them really nice when I want to fit something into a tiny crack of time and give my brain a different type of work. My use of some resources like Imabi or Youtube isn’t based on any specific goals but more to just do *something* easy when I get tired of the other stuff. Apps like Ringotan would probably be useless for most people, but I have an interest in physical writing and want to get into calligraphy so for me it’s worth it to spend the time now. This isn’t a plan I’d stick to forever because of the imbalance, but in general I think as a total beginner with no specific goals other than to learn Japanese it’s good enough not to make any major tweaks to it yet.

    I think I’m going to continue with approximately this schedule for the next 3-4 months, or however long it takes me to get through Genki II since I already have the book and am enjoying Genki and it should be enough time to also get through the core 2.3k deck. At that point I’ll need to re-evaluate where I am and what I want to do next and where to focus my efforts. I’ll probably continue with a textbook, consider getting an iTalki tutor for speaking practice, and add more focused listening practice and native material consumption into the rotation somewhere.

14. i’ve only been studying for 6 months and currently my schedule is just

    +/-20 min of anki
    20-40 min of grammar
    so like 1 hour of vocab/kanji + grammar, i don’t feel like spending too much time in those since i assume i’ll see them being used in native content which will be more helpful to me
    and then i spend the rest of the consuming media

    reading – i spend about 1-2 hours with manga, light novels, news articles and visual novels
    listening – also about 1-2 hours, i listen to podcasts (though its normally passive because i can’t concentrate), anime, and random native youtubers

    i recently started sentence mining words that i think are useful based on the content i consume. about writing and speaking, i only write things about my day or random thoughts i had but i don’t really dedicate my time to either since I don’t think it’s necessary based on my current goals, though i plan to start writing more
    i don’t know if my method is efficient and sometimes im worried that im wasting time when i could do a more productive schedule but i understand more today than i did last week so im ok with it

15. Schedule? Maybe do 3-4 minute random vocabulary review every few days if I feel like it. And type a lot when I get bored

16. Learn kanji, cry, repeat

17. I suck at vocabs. Anyone got a site or free app that helped you go with it?

18. 30mins a day and 1 hr max since my childhoodm i never go over 1 hrs since i hate studying. If u r talking about what do i study first and what comes next, i just pick up and do what i feels like it.

19. 30 minutes to an hour of anki, depending on the number of new words and reviews. Everything else is random. One day I would read for 4 hours straight or watch half an anime season and another I might struggle doing a full 30 minutes of immersion. It all depends on how busy I am.