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Learning Japanese in Tokyo after JLPT N2: my daily routine.

No magic bullet to learn a language. Anki, WaniKani and Bunpro: the three tools I use daily to keep progressing in Japanese from Tokyo, on top of the private lessons Abbeal offers me.

5 min

We often think that to learn a new language, you need this textbook or that teacher. Yet after passing the JLPT N2, I don't think there's any magic bullet for learning a foreign language: it's a matter of discipline and practice.

I'm lucky enough to get private lessons once a week thanks to Abbeal, my company, and I'd like to share today the tools I use daily to complement those lessons.

Anki is a flashcard software based on the spaced repetition principle. It lets me review the vocabulary I learn in class or on other tools. I created custom cards: Japanese kanji on the front, and on the back the pronunciation in hiragana (one of the Japanese syllabaries), the translation and, optionally, a few notes.

Every day, I spend 5 to 10 minutes clearing the day's review pile. It lets me revisit newly learned words or older ones I might have forgotten.

WaniKani is a web platform for learning Japanese vocabulary. It teaches you first the radicals, then the kanji built from these radicals, and finally the words made from these kanji — all with plenty of mnemonics that are quite funny.

This three-step learning makes memorizing kanji and words extremely easy — so much so that my teacher has already been surprised I could read some complicated words. The app is very colorful and full of humor, which makes the thirty minutes I spend on it daily really pleasant. As a bonus, every word learned on this app gets registered into Anki — creating real complementarity between the two tools.

Bunpro is an app and web platform dedicated to learning Japanese grammar. There's also a vocabulary section but, since it duplicates WaniKani, I don't use it.

The principle is simple: you learn a new grammatical concept through long explanations packed with examples and notes, then you review it several times by filling in gap-fill exercises that use the grammar you just learned. Just like Anki and WaniKani, these exercises come back several times a week, then increasingly spaced out — always on the spaced-repetition principle. The fill-in is fairly long and clearing the daily review pack takes me a good twenty minutes — but it lets me, once again, revisit what I learned in class and get familiar with Japanese grammar.

All of this comes, of course, on top of an actual Japanese class, which Abbeal offers me.

If you too feel like learning Japanese and going on an adventure in Japan, don't hesitate to try joining our team in Tokyo!

— Marie Nuellas, engineer at Abbeal Tokyo

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