There are many Japanese learners who ask themselves this question: is it really possible to self-study Japanese?, don’t worry, you’re not alone. My first thought was that it was insane to think that anyone could learn one of the hardest languages in the world without real teachers.

It was only after graduating college that I decided to challenge myself with this challenging goal, and I did successfully achieve it (in some sense). The Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level N2 has been passed after 1 year of full-time self-study, but I realized it wasn’t THAT big of an achievement. Later, I’ll discuss that in more detail, but let me tell you a few things about how I learned Japanese by myself and passed the JLPT N2 with a score of 97 / 180.

The hard part is to learn 2000 Kanji characters besides remembering hiragana and katakana. During the first month of my 1-year journal, I decided to just temporarily skip learning Kanji because it just gave me headaches. Why don’t Japanese people use only hiragana like Koreans do? Everyone would be much happier if we did that. Although I hated Kanji at first, I soon fell in love with it.

The famous book Remembering the Kanji by Heisig may be familiar to you. For Japanese learners who are interested in saving time and effort, this is a must-have book. Using your imagination, it teaches you how not to forget the characters. Even though there is no guarantee that this book will work for everyone or that you will become an expert at learning Chinese characters after reading it, it certainly is the most effective of the hundreds of books available.

It is unfortunate that this book doesn’t provide on and kun readings for every character. It seems the author wants to emphasize the most effective way to remember the characters because he knows that we can learn to read them elsewhere easily. A serious learner shouldn’t have much trouble going online and finding the on and kun readings of each character.

Practicing writing as many sentences and short essays as you can will help you to remember how to write the Kanji. zing may take you a few times to remember a word after using it in various sentences. If you are not confident in your ability to write properly, you should type your sentences to a computer and ask someone to fix your grammatical mistakes.

You can find thousands of lessons in audio, video, and pdf formats on their website. Probably no other site offers more Japanese lessons than this one. There are four main groups of lessons: absolute beginners, beginners, intermediates, and advanced students. There are several seasons within each category, each containing more than 20 lessons. Alternatively, you can download the pdf and MP3 files to learn offline from the website.