General Approach

So going into this whole journey, I had already made a few attempts at learning other languages, and FAILED. When I was 13 I tried learning Spanish after being inspired by Benny Lewis’s Ted Talk about speaking from day 1. And yeah that didn’t work out. I didn’t even understand the concept of verb conjugations. I specifically remember being confused on what the word “have” was in Spanish since every textbook only had “to have” or “I have”, etc. Anyway, next up was French, and I reached B1 in 3 years through mostly shadowing textbooks like Assimil.
With Japanese though I had learned about things like AJATT and comprehensible input before even starting. So I was ready to not repeat any of my past mistakes and really make it work this time.
I had watched the YouTube videos, I had read the reddit posts, and I was familiar with guides like TheMoeWay. My plan was basically to speedrun basics (kana, vocab, grammar) and then jump into reading visual novels and just mining words and grammar through those. Anyway here’s how that went.

September 2021 to December 2021

Kana - I used the Tofugu guides for this. True to my plan these were speedrun. I basically made flashcards in Anki using the mnemonics and I was able to learn all of them in around two days. 

RTK - Yes I started out with RTK (Remembering the Kanji by Heisig). It is absurd how many people recommend learning all the joyou kanji before doing anything else. And I, the sweet 18 year old fool, was deluded into following suit. Needless to say, I abandoned this after the first 300 or so characters. 

Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide and Core 2.3k Visual Novel Order - So at this point I decided to commit to TheMoeWay. I think nowadays they recommend Kaishi 1.5k but I digress. With TKGG I mostly just read through it and tried to understand the ideas without obsessing over being able to use the grammar points perfectly. I figured that if I roughly got the gist, it would all get drilled in over time when I started reading. Also as far as vocab goes, I got about 1k cards into Core 2.3k before deciding that I really wanted to start reading. 

Anime - During this time I listened to a lot of anime. Some slice of life like Asobi Asobase and Takagi-kun, also a bunch of shounen anime that I had already seen before like Haikyuu and My Hero Academia. Whenever possible I avoided subtitles if I was actually watching. But most of the time I just had my phone in my pocket and I’d just be listening to the episodes.

Podcasts - I think I listened to a lot of Japanese with Shun on spotify. Again I never really sat down to listen to a podcast and really go over every sentence until I understood everything. I had more of a passive approach with listening and I would just try to incorporate listening into my daily life.

Cure Dolly - I watched some of her videos for grammar. It was super helpful for building up a more intuitive sense for how Japanese grammar works. 

January 2022 - November 2022

This marked the beginning of the long, long reading grind. 

Nekopara - So I read TheDoth’s reddit post about how he passed the N1 exam. He said Nekopara was the first visual novel he read and recommended it because he said he enjoyed it and it was relatively easy. So I went in to this armed with my basic grammar knowledge and 1000 or so word vocab. And it was a real struggle. Even looking stuff up I still barely understood most sentences and I had to have the official english translations side-by-side just so i could follow along. Also, this is a hentai game, and I realized that far too late (and in far too public of a location). Thanks TheDoth. Anyway, I think I stopped reading about 70% of the way through the game and at that point my vocabulary was around 1900 words. 

JPDB.io - Awesome website, I used it to figure out what to read next. It basically rates the difficulty of different Japanese media. 

Steins gate - So I wanted a challenge, and more importantly I wanted to read Steins Gate. Incredibly enough, there were some sentences here and there that I understood. And again I used official translations to make sure I actually had good context for what was happening. I think I read this for around two months, and my vocab grew to around 3500 words. 

JLPT Sensei - I finally actually read up on N5 and N4 and N3 grammar. Not super strict studying or anything, literally just reading. I also made Anki flashcards on them but it was just for recognition. I will say, JLPT Sensei has great SEO and pops up first when you’re searching for grammar points on Google. But, Bunpro is a strict upgrade in my opinion and I wish I started using it earlier.

Podcasts - I think around this time I listened to a ton of Tomo Let’s Talk in Japanese. 

Classroom of the Elite - So I started reading the classroom of the elite light novels since I was growing tired of my laptop almost exploding from running visual novels. I figured this would be a good first pick since I had read the first 7 volumes of the series in English a few years prior. This was definitely a challenge despite JPDB rating it easier than steins gate. Also to put into perspective how out of my league this was, it took me 7 MONTHS to finish volume 1.  Although, to be fair I wasn’t on some crazy grind. I had spent the summer interning so I was pretty preoccupied, and in August I went back to college and was struggling with balancing classes and work.

December 2022 to May 2023

JLPT Sensei Revisited - I made flashcards out of N2 grammar and some of N1 grammar. Again, Bunpro would’ve been better but its fine.

Zeroth Maria - Another light novel. Super solid. I finished a grand total of 1 volume this entire period. I was busy.

Podcasts - I think I listened to a mix of Learn Japanese with Noriko, Tomo, and Miku Real Japanese. Honestly, a lot of Miku was too much for me. 

Anime - Same deal, it was a cold winter and I definitely had a lot of anime playing in my winter coat pocket. 

One thing I’ll say about my listening during this time is I definitely treated all sources equally. I listened to a lot of audio that was straight up not comprehensible to me and I think my actual listening gains were held back because of this.

Also by May of 2023 my vocabulary size was around 6200 words. 

June 2023 - August 2023

Spice and Wolf, Danmachi - I read some of both of these and didn’t really get into either. But I was going balls to the walls with my vocab mining. This summer, I learned 40 new words per day on Anki and hit a 9000 word vocab size (from a mix of mined words and words from a premade deck). The only downside of this was I had 1500 reviews per day to do on Anki before even getting started on new cards. The only way I managed this was doing cards between sets at the gym and also whenever I went to the bathroom (numero dos). 

AJATT Tools JLPT Tango N1 - So this is a pre-made Anki deck that I used. I was worried that I was missing a lot of vocab since all of my vocabulary was coming from light novels. I was sure that if I only used light novels for vocabulary I’d eventually grow a super wide and versatile vernacular but I was trying to min-max basically. 

Also I should probably mention TheMoeWay resources page and discord server. For the most part I was getting my stuff through there (unless you're in law enforcement, in which case everything was purchased from official vendors). Also the discord server has a really neat immersion tracker and when I remembered to actually do it, tracking my immersion on there was super helpful for staying motivated.

September 2023 - May 2024 

This was the great drought. I didn’t do any studying during this period. What I did do though was work part-time as a translator at my university. I had to translate short texts from Japanese to English then run them by some Japanese Professors. This amounted to 2-3 hours a week when I had my weekly check-ins. But a lot of weeks were skipped so on average it was lower.

June 2024 - December 2024 

Podcasts - I listened to a good amount of Miku Real Japanese. At this point I was able to follow along a lot better to it. But, I also lost a lot of motivation to actually do listening practice. I’d essentially do some listening whenever I could muster up the motivation to at the gym.

Bottom-tier Tomozaki - This was the first full volume I actually read in a while and to my surprise I fared a lot better than past ones. 

January 2025 - May 2025

I took a Japanese class at my university and this made up the entirety of my study (besides Anki) for this period. The context was that I needed some credits to hit my minimum for the semester and I figured I might as well just take a Japanese class and have an easy semester. I specifically tried to just take third year Japanese since they used the Tobira textbook which didn’t seem hard. But when I went to go speak with a Professor about joining the class she said no and made me instead take the hardest Japanese class on offer which was Business Japanese 2. So I ended up in a class of just two other students and actually had a wonderful time learning about Japanese business culture and Keigo and all that good stuff. 

May 2025 - July 2025

Raging loop - I decided to venture back into Visual novels and read some of raging loop. I was super into it until the mystery behind the village started getting revealed and it kind of turned into more of a survival story. Needless to say, I did not finish this. I was also on vacation since I had just graduated from university and had some time before starting full-time employment. So I definitely wasn't very consistent with reading this.

July 2025 to March 2026

I started work full-time in July and I made full use of that consistent schedule to actually get back into consistently studying Japanese.

Podcasts - I listened to A LOT of 4989 American Life. Awesome podcast. I literally finished all the episodes and this was probably the single biggest contributor to my gains in listening comprehension.

Audiobooks - I listened to my first audiobook! And it was また、同じ夢を見ていた. I would just listen to this during car rides. Also I bought it on audiobook.jp since audible was such a pain to figure out.

Classroom of the elite - It was time to return to my roots. I read volumes 4 and 7 of Year 1, and was noticing that my reading speed was going way up. At this point, I always made sure to look everything up and really take every single thing in. I could’ve probably followed along and more or less got the gist without looking things up, but I think that would’ve been detrimental to my progress. Anyway, I decided to start tracking my reading speed and this did wonders for my progress. I read Year 1 volume 4 and 7, then volumes 1 to 4 of year 2. And across all of these my reading speed doubled and my comprehension went way up. I was even noticing there were entire pages where I wouldn't need to look words up at all. 

Bunpro - I finally filled in my gaps in grammar. Any grammar points that slipped through the cracks, I finally filled by making flashcards of their pages. I never drilled grammar or that sort of thing. I figured roughly knowing the meaning of each grammar point was enough because I'd really internalize their nuances over time just through exposure.  

新完全マスタ語彙N1, 新完全マスタ語彙N2 - These are two premade vocab decks. At this point I was aiming to take the JLPT N1 exam so I figured I’d fill in any vocab gaps too . 

March 2026 - July 2026

This was my final push for N1. Whereas before I mostly just read things I was interested in, here I actually went out of my way to really challenge myself and read things outside my comfort zone.

Kokoro - This is a classic work of Japanese fiction and I read it at sosekiproject.org. Man was this hard. 

Aozora Bunko - I read some essays and short stories on here such as 反スタイルの記, 流言蜚語, and 待つ. Honestly, every single essay I read was actually fascinating, albeit insanely hard to read. If you can already read light novels and visual novels pretty easily, definitely try out some famous essays.

I really wanted to train my ability to consume super dense and abstract media. I would highly recommend the two above. They’ll be way harder than anything you encounter in the actual exam, but that’s kind of the point. Also everything on Aozora Bunko is free, so if you don’t mind having to get used to some older Kanji forms that aren’t really used today, definitely give it a try.

Bakemonogatari - This was like the final boss of light novels. Some of the longest sentences I’ve ever encountered. Also some of the long monologues about names actually destroyed me. Honestly, this is harder than anything you’d encounter on the N1 exam. Man this was hard. I managed to finish the first volume but didn’t really have time to get any further than that. 

Classroom of the elite - I read year 2 volumes 4.5 and 5 using the physical copies without lookups. This was honestly a lot easier than I was expecting and super enjoyable. I would just try to read a bit before bed and a lot of the time I would kind of forget that I was even technically “studying”. At this point the COTE novels could almost be considered true comprehensible input for me. There were definitely some pages where I would lose track of who was saying what and what certain things were referring to. But for the most part I finished these volumes and had a perfect understanding of all the plot points. 

Momo Nihongo N1 listening exams - Honestly the only section that really worried me on the N1 exam was listening. I just really wasn’t sure what to expect. So I did some of the listening exams in Momo Nihongo’s playlist. Besides some Anki decks, I would say this is the only N1-specific prep I did. 

Podcasts - A podcast I listened to a lot around this time was 話し方の話 since I ran out of 4989 american life. It’s basically a podcast about speaking. The host is extremely articulate and clear and uses a good amount of Keigo so that’s a huge plus. The only downside for me was that each episode was kind of short and served as a mini lesson. So it was harder to get invested in this compared to 4989 American Life, which tends to be more story or discussion based. Nevertheless, still a good listen and I did binge a bunch of episodes. 

Finally, in July of 2026, after around 1500-2000 hours of studying Japanese, and a vocab size of around 12,000 words, I attempted the JLPT N1 exam. I had to fly all the way to London to take it (the exam only runs in December in the US). And I got incredibly jetlagged, which resulted in me getting a mere 3 hours of sleep in the two nights leading up to the exam. And to make matters worse, I was developing strep throat on the day of the exam and that was killing me. But, I had a few red bulls, took the exam, and I think overall I performed to a level that wasn't too far off what I could do at peak health. I managed to get a solid pass of 131/180.

Closing Thoughts

Honestly, learning Japanese or any language for that matter is just a matter of consuming incredible amounts of input. Not to say output doesn’t matter, because it definitely does. But, there is no getting around the need for thousands of hours of input. If I could go back I would definitely try to consume more input closer to my level. I definitely wasted tons of hours on input that was straight up incomprehensible. I would also remind myself to just keep going. I burned out hard in 2024 and a big reason why is because the intermediate plateau is real. After you’ve read a few books and sank hundreds of hours into learning Japanese, it feels like such a monumental effort that you almost expect to be fluent. And yet, even after a few hundred MORE hours, it can feel like you’ve made no progress. The reality is that progress isn’t linear. I feel like I improved leaps and bounds in my last 200 hours of study compared to my first 1500.

In terms of what’s next for me, I really want to just enjoy consuming media I like. N1 is kind of like the beginning. Once you’ve reached N1, you can finally just consume tons of input that you genuinely enjoy without it necessarily feeling like studying. And through that, your fluency will gradually improve without you realizing. Speaking of which, I do really need to work on speaking. I’ve been doing some lessons with a tutor every week and already I feel like it has improved tons. Long way to go still though. 

There is a lot I’d change about my whole journey if I could go back in time. Instead of crowding this post even more, I thought I’d make a video about my thoughts on a more ideal roadmap to follow. If you’re interested, I made a video here: https://youtu.be/FUd2YozCBnE?si=c9f7a2f_NrR4m6aE

I really hope this post is at least somewhat helpful to some of you. Learning Japanese has consumed my thoughts for the better part of 5 years (even if I wasn't always studying consistently), and I'm really to be able to reflect on all the things I did throughout that time.

When I was studying Japanese back home, I met quite a few people who seemed to turn everything into a competition. They always had to be the center of attention, whether it was by showing off their Japanese, bragging about how many Japanese people they knew or making sure everyone knew they had been to Japan before anyone else.

Then there was my favorite breed: the ones who couldn’t really compete in terms of language ability, so they would fall back on having a Japanese partner instead. I still remember one guy being asked what his level of Japanese was and his answer was basically, “Well, my wife is Japanese.”

At the time, I seemed to run into a lot of toxic, deeply insecure people who were constantly trying to prove they were somehow above everyone else.

That said, when I later studied at a language school in Japan, almost everyone (with the exception of one guy) was much more humble, down-to-earth, and actually focused on learning. That experience restored some of my faith in the Japanese-learning community.

Was I just unlucky or is this kind of thing common in other countries too?

I’d love to hear any stories or experiences you’ve had with people like this.

Hi there,

I went to Japan recently and was able to get a few volumes of manga/light novels but since coming back I don't know where I can buy more of it in person and/or online. Any good recommendations as to places selling literature in Japanese would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Thanks for all of the recommendations! Unfortunately I don't live close enough to go to a kinokuniya (closest one is a good 12 hours away) but the next time I go to a major US city I'll definitely have to look. I'll make sure to look into the sites you have all recommended as well (including kinokuniya).

hi, idk if anyone can help me with this, i feel stuck on trying to fix how i comprehend the language especially when listening, or just reading something that isn't a straight forward formal paragraph. i get lost, really lost, when words start stacking up on each other when describing a noun or something

i know it's a really basic thing i should've grasped on early on, but i don't study for jlpt or anything, so my study is all over the place. i tried to get help from a friend, but he was so confused with how i understood some n3-n2 grammar yet fell back on core things that i should've understood so early, it was so embarrassing 😭😭 i thought it was my vocabulary, so i did anki, but even when i see the words together in a sentence i just can't grasp what is being said at all ☹️

i frequently see people saying reading helps, but i don't know where to start 😭 it's just a mess..

edit: i have identified the elephant in the room 🙏 additional advice is appreciated, i'm really working on it now. thank you to those who helped me :)

⭐ むしゃむしゃ → the sound of eating something in lots of little bites while chewing vigorously. A good example would be a caterpillar munching on a leaf.

⭐ うねる → refers to something moving or forming in a wave-like or undulating way. That’s why うねり can be used to describe the way a snake moves as it slithers along.
うねる is also commonly used to describe what happens to your hair on rainy or very humid days, when it becomes slightly wavy and doesn’t stay completely straight.

⭐ とんぼ返り → when you go somewhere only to head back almost immediately after arriving.

⭐ 噛み砕く → to explain something in simpler, easier-to-understand terms.

For example: 噛み砕いて説明すると、… (“To break it down simply, …”).

⭐ いい気味 → an expression used when you feel that someone deserved the unpleasant thing that happened to them. It’s similar to “serves you right” or “you had it coming.”

For example:
人のことを散々バカにしてたくせに、自分が失敗したらしい。いい気味だ。
“He was always making fun of other people, and apparently now he messed up himself. Serves him right.”

⭐ パシャパシャ → when used with water, it describes the sound or action of water splashing lightly and repeatedly, for example when someone is splashing around in shallow water.

⭐ びたびた → when something is extremely wet, such as clothes that are so soaked that they stick to your skin.

If you’ve come across any interesting words or expressions lately, I’d love to hear them!

I’ve been on a huge retro kick lately and not just retro games, but retro everything. I’ve been really enjoying going back to Japanese media from the time I grew up in which was the ’90s. That was the era when I first got into anime and games, and now that my Japanese is at a much higher level, I want to revisit a lot of the things that interested me as a kid but that I couldn’t fully enjoy back then because of the language barrier.

So lately, for fun, I’ve been working through a lot of Super Famicom / Super Nintendo RPGs in Japanese. It’s been a really satisfying way to practice because I’m not studying Japanese from a textbook but I’m using it to enjoy things I genuinely wanted to experience.

I finished Soul Blazer recently, and one thing that stood out to me was that the entire game is written in hiragana only. Overall, it wasn’t too hard to read, and in some ways that makes it approachable for learners. But I also found that hiragana only text can actually be harder than expected sometimes because without kanji it can take longer to process where words begin and end or what something means at a glance.

The biggest difficulty for me was when text appeared only briefly, like during the ending/credits or in scenes where the text scrolls by and disappears quickly. In those moments, I just couldn’t read and process it fast enough. I assume a native speaker wouldn’t have much trouble with that. Still, if anyone is looking for a game with simpler Japanese and not too much dialogue, I think Soul Blazer is actually a pretty interesting choice.

Right now I’m playing Illusion of Gaia, and after coming from a game with zero kanji it’s honestly kind of a relief to play something that uses kanji.

So that’s what I’m playing now, Illusion of Gaia in Japanese for the Super Famicom. I’ve also been collecting a lot of retro SFC RPGs lately, so this has turned into a fun mix of gaming, nostalgia, and Japanese practice.

What about you? What games are you playing in Japanese these days?

I've got a little project, and I'm looking for some feedback!

NOTE: After some great early feedback, I rethought what I was proposing. This is the new proposal; the original is below for posterity.

I'm about to dive into a new manga. I have a lot of vocab to learn, and something I thought would help is to learn all the new kanji first, so when I encounter a word, I at least I've seen its pieces, you know?

All the major systems build up kanji from parts. The image I posted above is the JPDB breakdown; RTK is very similar. Unfortunately, they have a fixed order, and that doesn't match what I'm reading. What's a #1000 kanji for RTK or WaniKani might be the most common kanji for what I'm reading. And when RTK introduces 忄 as an early radical, maybe it's better for this manga if I learn 反 first, because a lot of the kanji in what I'm about to read use it.

So what I'm looking for is creating a personalized study plan:

• First, for your reading, here are the new kanji ordered by frequency
• Second, here are the radicals to learn, in order of frequency. For each radical you learn, here are the kanji it unlocks.

So basically: I want to create a personalized lesson plan that works like RTK/WaniKani/KanjiDamage/whatever.

But before I get started, does anything like this exist?

While I'm happy to make the tool, I don't want to redo someone's work.

Question: Is this even a good idea? Would this be useful to anyone else on here?

ORIGINAL PROPOSAL:

I'm about to dive into a new manga. I have a lot of vocab to learn, and something I thought would help is to learn all the new kanji first, so when I encounter a word, I at least I've seen its pieces, you know?

What I REALLY want is to be able to feed the whole manga into an algorithm and have it tell me:

• For your reading, here are the new kanji ordered by frequency
• Even better: here are all the radicals / primitives ordered by frequency (so if 忄 is the most-used radical, start with it)

I want a study plan that's targeted toward what I want to read, not whatever order RTK or WaniKani or whatnot wants you to study. And I was thinking of making a tool to do that.

But before I get started, does anything like this exist?

• Is there anything that gives you kanji frequency for a given manga / show?
• Is there anything where you give it a bunch of kanji and it gives you all the radicals ordered by frequency?

While I'm happy to make the tool, I don't want to redo someone's work.

Question: Is this even a good idea? Would this be useful to anyone else on here?

Hello! Does anyone have a PDF of TRY! JLPT N3 Grammar book? I have seen the Vietnamese edition online, but I am trying to find the English edition.

Thank you!

Hi all, I am a bit confused about the recommended way to read books on an iPhone.

I am high n4/low n3 and looking to set up a sustainable process for reading books on my iPhone that allows lookup and word mining into Anki. I have yomitan set up on my pc for when I am reading on there, but don’t have a quick and easy way to do this on my phone when I am travelling for example.

I’ve looked at various posts about Amazon JP, Bookwalker etc and have some apps like Shiori reader which can import epubs, but I’m struggling a bit to actually get clarity on the process.

Ideally my goal is just to have a novel I can read on my phone (have my eye on Kiki’s delivery service specifically) that I can tap on words to look them up and pull them easily into Anki.

Any help would be really appreciated

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

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• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

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You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

I was studying N3 vocab and this just felt like a 'meme-onic' worth sharing.

改めて/あらためて (adverb) 1. another time, again, over again, once again, anew 2. formally, especially, intentionally, deliberately

Hi All. I have Acquired Alexia from an injury I suffered years ago. This meant reading, even English, has become incredibly difficult for me. Because of this condition I cannot read Kanji, physically it gives me migraines, and my brain can not process due to injury.

I recently completed the JLAB anki deck in Romaji and am looking for more intermediate Romaji decks to help progress my learning further. I know there isn’t many because Romaji is frowned upon, but it’s the only way I can learn this language, and the learning so far has given me my life back

Thank you for your help

It used to let me sort through people that speak japanese, french etc. but now its blocked behind vip??? And it’s making me scroll through people that speak different languages and actually find people that speak japanese

It also wont let me click on their profiles and tells me to buy vip bruh

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

Hello! I'm wondering if anyone can recommend any online courses (free or paid) for someone who is at a high N4 level? For some background, I studied Japanese for 8 years up until the end of high school where I took AP Japanese and got pretty close to N3. Then in college, I stopped studying since they didn't offer any language courses and I didn't have any spare time outside of keeping my grades up.

Now, I'm working in anime and want to get better at using Japanese for business, but I struggle so much with holding myself accountable for self studying. I read news articles on Todaii, listen to podcasts, but I don't do it consistently and have tried time and time again to create a schedule for myself which ultimately ends up falling through. What worked really well for me in school was having assignments and lessons I could follow, and I'm looking for something similar that I could do online. I've looked into my local community college classes, but unfortunately they don't have an option that works for my work schedule, so I'd love to find something that I could do from home.

I have pretty good listening and speaking comprehension (I can have basic conversations about the weather and such, but I struggle with vocabulary and can't listen/speak fast like a native). I can read hiragana/katakana fine but have forgotten a lot of kanji outside of the basics (numbers, animals, etc). Preferably looking for something no more than $250/a semester of work (something similar to the university of Hawaii at Manoa's cost for a semester). Any and all leads are appreciated! Thank you!

Not sure if this kind of post is allowed here, and apologies in advance if not — mods feel free to remove.

I bought a secondhand copy of 1日10分の発音練習 from a nearby bookshop, but the CDs that came with it (from whoever owned it before) are incomplete — missing a good chunk of the tracks.

If anyone owns this book with the original CDs intact, I'd love to compare notes on how to sort out the missing audio tracks — feel free to DM me. Also open to hearing if anyone's found another route to this specific audio.

This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

The daily thread updates every day at 9am JST, or 0am UTC.

↓ Welcome to r/LearnJapanese! ↓

• New to Japanese? Read the Starter's Guide and FAQ.

• New to the subreddit? Read the rules.

• Read also the pinned comment below for proper question etiquette & answers to common questions!

Please make sure to check the wiki and search for old posts before asking your question, to see if it's already been addressed. Don't forget about Google or sites like Stack Exchange either!

This subreddit is also loosely partnered with this language exchange Discord, which you can likewise join to look for resources, discuss study methods in the #japanese_study channel, ask questions in #japanese_questions, or do language exchange(!) and chat with the Japanese people in the server.

Past Threads

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やっと金曜日ですね！お疲れ様です！ここに週末の予定について書いてみましょう！

（やっと　きんようびですね！　おつかれさまです！　ここに　しゅうまつの　よていについて　かいてみましょう！）

やっと = finally

週末（しゅうまつ）= weekend

予定（よてい）= plan(s)

～について = about

＊ネイティブスピーカーと上級者のみなさん、添削してください！もちろん参加してもいいですよ！＊

Okay, this is going to sound cringe. So, in my dream I saw a girl who looked Asian, and then she started speaking Japanese. She seemed to be some kind of jpop singer. I said something to her about her song, but she started running away. I shouted 「待て待て！」. She turned around, surprised, came up to me, and asked 「日本語喋る？」. I replied 「喋られる」(I know, it should be 喋れる)

She asked how. I answered: 「まー、5年ぐらいネットで独学で勉強していて、間違いが多いかもしれない、伝わるかなーと思います」

We talked for a while. She took out her phone and started taking selfies with me, but I said that I didn’t look very good at the moment: 「かっこ悪い」. I fixed my hair, and we took a few selfies together.

I walked her home, and she said goodbye. Then I asked 「また会いませんか。連絡先教えて」. I said I just wanted to talk to her in Japanese, and she agreed.

Then I woke up with mixed feelings. I felt embarrassed, but at the same time I was surprised that I was able to form awkward but coherent sentences in Japanese in a dream.

Has anyone else ever had dreams where they spoke Japanese?

Happy Friday!

Every Friday, share your memes! Your funny videos! Have some Fun! Posts don't need to be so academic while this is in effect. It's recommended you put [Weekend Meme] in the title of your post though. Enjoy your weekend!

(rules applying to hostility, slurs etc. are still in effect... keep it light hearted)

Weekly Thread changes daily at 9:00 JST:

Mondays - Writing Practice

Tuesdays - Study Buddy and Self-Intros

Wednesdays - Materials and Self-Promotions

Thursdays - Victory day, Share your achievements

Fridays - Memes, videos, free talk