Hi guys, I'll be taking Japanese classes in a few weeks time(weekly classes) but I've also just entered Poly and is afraid that learning would be too stressful.

I would like to know what is the recommended hours to study a day while learning Japanese. I'll be starting together with two other friends so we can practice together.

Thank you.

As long as you keep it daily, it doesn't really matter. Consistency is the key. Try to do your daily objective, whatever it may be.

On average I spend about 1 hour actively learning (srs + new cards + misc. stuff), and I try to cram as much reading (manga, books) / listening (audio tapes / podcasts / tv / music) throughout the day as I can afford to. I have a few japanese friends with whom I practice writing over emails too.

Bottom line being, I don't have a planning. I just do my srs everyday (review + adding a few new cards), and the rest is bonus. So far, I haven't missed a single day despite a pretty hectic workload.

I don't think there's a reasonable answer to how much you should study per day. That depends on 1) how quickly you want to learn Japanese, and 2) how much time per day will make you lose that desire (i.e. burn out). If you're prone to losing interest/burning out, I'd recommend something very simple and relatively short 'core study' activity that you do ever day without fail, and then do other study on an as-you-feel-like-it basis.

My 'core activity' is the reviews of my subs2srs Anki deck, which would normally take 20-45 minutes. Adding cards takes 10-20 minutes. Plus reading and watching stuff, which isn't really study.

If you're a less half-arsed person than me, well, I'm sure someone with a 10 hour/day study schedule will come along to tell you about it soon enough. Unsurprisingly, those people have progressed faster than me. So, yeah, it's up to you.

I don't see it as something I set aside and do each day or anything like that, it's just what I'm always doing because I enjoy spending time in Japanese more than anything else. I don't think I've ever taken a 'break' since I started. There's always more to do, and I like that.

I agree with some of the above posters. At least up to a certain point, it helps to set aside a certain block of time or chunk of material each day to Japanese (I discovered the same thing works well with RTK). It doesnt have to be long/large, but it should be enough to get something done. It can be something like learning new vocabulary, or drilling in a new grammar point until it sticks, for example. After that, just do stuff like reading/watching anime all day, you'd be surprised at how helpful that can be after a while. At first it's all just babbling, but then you go back after 6-12 months and you get one of those "Hey, I get what they are talking about" moments. If you want to make it feel more like studying you can take out a notepad and jot down any interesting words you here and then look them up/add them to Anki later (I do this a lot with songs).

Frequency of practice/review/study is more important than explicit length of time. 3 hours once a week is objectively worse than 25 minutes every day of the week.

I spend about an hour per day reviewing old material, and then extra time if I'm trying to learn new material. I read Japanese books/play Japanese video games to unwind in the evening, but I don't consider that study since I never look up any words while I'm doing that.

The key is just to make it something you do every day. Over time you'll become more efficient with it.

I wouldn't say I study all day but I do things in Japanese basically all day.

As far as studying goes, I actively study until it gets boring. Usually that's 1 or 2 hours, but I've basically made it impossible to get away from Japanese at this point, my games are mostly in Japanese, my youtube (although I don't always follow through with this one), my homepage, etc.

Any progress is good progress. If you learned 1 word today, that's progress, and if you just keep it up on a day-to-day basis, you will eventually learn Japanese (Not saying that learning Japanese is a finite thing, but you get the idea).

I've average like 2-4 hours of Japanese study per day for the last 3 years. But a few months ago I decided to cut myself off from my usual timesinks (reddit and youtube) and substitute it with Japanese in book or game form. Basically 100% of my free time has been Japanese since, so maybe 5-10 hours per day.

Thanks for the reply guys! Seems like we'll be alright

erlog Wrote:The key is just to make it something you do every day. Over time you'll become more efficient with it.

He's absolutely right - there's nothing more important than doing SOMETHING every single day. Every abandoned language project starts with "just one day off" haha

At most 4 hours a day (maybe 1~5% of the time), at least 20 mins a day (roughly 50% of the time). Average is probably closer to 1h than 30mins per day.

1 hour reps, 1 hour adding, however long I want doing anything else. Sometimes it's nothing, sometimes it's 10+ hours.

egoplant Wrote:1 hour reps, 1 hour adding, however long I want doing anything else. Sometimes it's nothing, sometimes it's 10+ hours.

I agree with this. Flexible time is really important for the days where you do have more time. Have a kind of shorter minimum you know you can do every single day, and then have other Japanese activities like watching anime w/o subs, reading manga, or playing Japanese games. These are things that you can do to practice your skills, but not necessarily explicitly study.

Yeah, sometimes I spend 45 mins polishing off some reviews, and call it a day.

Other times I spend 3-4 hours of actual study time ( after I remove all the wasted time spent on forums, chatting, fbing at the same time )

I only make sure I do the minimum, and try my best to do SOMETHING new each day, but 10% of the time am ok with just reviews.

I don't study as much as I want/should...

I agree that consistency is the key.. as long as you do something each day, or every other day you'll do fine

As everybody says, it really depends on what your goals are. But if you want to make steady progress, it really is wise to spend at least 1 to 2 hours a day, every day for a few years to get into it. Consistency is the key.

The good news is that there are lots of great learning tools and apps online to help you out, as well as plenty of free content in the language to engage with. It is a good idea to start enjoying material in the language as soon as possible (even if you cant understand very well). Exposure is fun and can be sustained for increasingly larger lengths of time, unlike study.

+1 for consistency.

1 hour/ day won't get you there fast, but you'll get there eventually. As far as I can tell, if you study smart, it is a math game so studying 2 hours/day will get you there twice as fast, but it's the same destination. The state department estimates 2500 hours of study to 'learn' Japanese, so you're looking at almost 6.8 years by studying 1hr.

I'm 18 months into that plan and I still can't keep up with full speed conversations or follow Japanese TV, but I know it will come some day. Ganbaru.

I average 2 hours a day, dipping down to 1 hour when I'm really busy or traveling for work. I do my Subs2SRS deck come hell or high water, then spend the rest of the time reading and leisure-watching. I also do three hours of iTalki lessons weekly.

I definitely agree that consistency over the long run (years) is key. I've especially seen the difference it's made in my speaking ability. I'm also a big believer in "casual Japanese" - e.g., reading the Japanese version of a technical document I need to read for work anyway, or casually reading NHK News, Rocket News, HuffPo JP or other news sites during work breaks. I've subscribed to a number of newsletters and Liked a number of Japanese sites on FB to increase the incidence of casual reading.

On an average work day : I try to finish my anki cards for that day. I'll throw in some grammar studying if I have time. ( Maybe 1 - 1 1/2 hours)

On days I have off : Anki cards, Grammar learning, and using the language. ( Which is NHK easy news , reading a visual novel, playing a 3DS game, or trying to watch a variety show. ) ( This is through out my day off, so a few hours of active + passive learning. )

Right now I am reviewing my hand-made kanji flashcards (of which I created for all the 2200 kanji in RTK1) and do this for 1-2 hours a day, either while I am watching TV or as a standalone activity. I completed memorizing all the English meanings and am now in the process of reviewing the on-yomi, which I wrote onto all the flashcards. I no longer have daily goals other than improving in some way each day. My longer term goal is to master the on-yomi by August, and to be deep into the kun-yomi by the end of August when I start school again.

I usually do my review's and learn ~25 new cards a day which takes up like 1 hour.
As for grammar I don't like to study it, so I'm not doing it every day, but when I do it's like 1 hour.

And then I watch YouTube video's in Japanese and am reading things I'm interested in (1-4 hours a day)

2-5 hours, excluding 50% of Saturdays and 100% of Sundays, during which I am too drunk to do much. However, I might be able to count all the drunken conversations I have in Japanese as practice, as half the people I speak with don't speak any English. But if I do that, then I might as well throw in another 4-5 hours of speaking listening practice at work, as I teach in a small juku and the medium of instruction is Japanese.

So let's just say 2-5 hours of Anki and 4-5 hours of listening/speaking on a normal weekday.

I've kept up this pace for about 8 months, but I started studying 18 months ago with half an hour every other day in Rosetta Stone. Half an hour every other day turned into half an hour a day turned into 45 minutes a day turned into an hour turned into etc.

I saw my first massive leaps and bounds after starting Core2k 8 months ago. One year ago I could not speak Japanese at all. Now I am fairly comfortable with the language. JLPT2 practice tests feel about right, 1 is still a bit hard.

As others have said - consistency is key. Hours per day only matters if you want to learn in an certain amount of time. The Foreign Language Institute estimates 2200 hours of class time for [url=Professional Working proficiency (S-3)]Professional Working proficiency (S-3)[/url] and they expect you to spend an equal amount of self-study time.

Personally I study just over an hour every day because that's all the time I have. But it'll take me something like 8 years to become proficient.

As someone who has been studying every day for the last 380 days, at least six hours a day, I don't think putting a number on how many hours you should study to get to x level of proficiency is realistic. There's a few factors that add into this, including your age, native language, and motivation just to name a few. English speakers start from absolutely zero when learning Japanese (no, 和製英語 isn't as helpful as you think it is). I'm currently 25, meaning my ability to learn a new language compared to someone still in high school is poor. The only advantage I have is that I know Spanish already, so I know what works for me in terms of study-practices.

I've worked through Genki 1 and 2, Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication, Japanese Demystified, Tobira, A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and a ton of other resources. To date, I've accumulated 160,344 reviews on anki, which is 531 hours, worked up to level 31 of Wanikani (I switched to other resources, such as RTK), and completed the Iknow Japanese 2000 course (which again, I switched for other resources.) Right now I'm using Read Real Japanese and Reading Japanese with a Smile in conjunction with anki; I literally photocopy everything and make individual word lists with example sentences from online resources. I'm also halfway through Nihongo Through Japanese Newspaper Articles...and of course there's more,--including close to 15,000 physical flashcards I've written--which I could fill an entire page with.

So what can I do after a year and some change? I can read newspapers without having to use a dictionary much, thanks mostly to Kanji in Context. I can understand most every day conversations (not shit just limited to buying a cheeseburger at McDonalds), but I still suck at speaking because I'm only working on input, not output. I can also get the gist of most anime, so long as it's not too hard-core science fiction. That said, I still struggle with a lot and always have a dictionary at hand when I'm reading novels. I have probably the worst personality for learning a language because I'm a perfectionist, which is also probably why my speaking isn't up to par with my comprehension.

Do I recommend going my route? Hell no. I've been so demotivated the last couple of months that I can't even begin to express the level of frustration I feel. If you don't have a time limit, like say needing to pass the JLPT or getting into a Japanese University in less than two years, then take your time. Language learning should be fun, not just some mundane repetition of flash cards and listening drills. There is such thing as studying too much.

If you go into it expecting to be at x proficiency in y amount of time, you're just going to be disappointed. Set goals, sure, but don't make them too lofty, and pretty much ignore all the bs you hear on the internet about how long it takes to become proficient in Japanese. But whatever it is you do, like other posters have said, just make sure you do it consistently and you should be fine.

Will365 Wrote:I'm currently 25, meaning my ability to learn a new language compared to someone still in high school is poor

The amount of study hours you have done in such a relatively short period of time is awesome!

However, I strongly suggest that you also read about the "too old to learn a language" myth. Believing that kind of nonsense may slow down your progress.

"But children learn.." No. For example, my son has been learning his first language for four years, practicing listening and speaking for 6-10 hours a day. He often can't conjugate words properly, he has a very limited vocabulary and so on. After ~10 000 hours of study he speaks like a four year old and can't even write!

"Young people have an amazing ability to learn new words just by hearing them!" But only a couple of words per day. We "old people" have no trouble learning 20-40 words a day with SRS. That being said, if there is a difference between young kids' and adults' learning efficiency, its because of the difference in their methods, not in their brain. And it's for the good of the adult learner.

Sorry for being more or less mad about this subject.

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