The US military rates Japanese as one of the harder languages to learn, with its internal course taking 64 weeks. As others have said, it will probably take you years to learn even with some knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin.

I am learning Japanese since almost 3 years now. It’s a life’s goal of mine to be able to understand the language well.

I sometimes watch anime, I really like music by Ado, and I come across Japanese often.

I don’t really have a concrete reason for having started. A friend of mine learned Japanese in middle school seriously which gave me the idea the first time.

It’s safe to say that it’s a tremendous effort. You need to work on it for many years, especially if you have phases where you can’t or don’t want to learn, or work full time, etc.

If it’s just to watch anime, probably not worth it, unless you’re a total ween maybe. I’m my case, I started learning for the sake of it because it’s kind of fun and I found more interests in Japanese after starting to understand a few things.

Ressource wise, I’d recommend taking a look at the tofu guide to learning Japanese, that covers it much better than I could.

Some more resources that I use and really like:

• Wanikani (for studying the thousands of Kanji and some vocabulary with SRS)
• Bunpro (for studying grammar and how to actually use words with SRS)
• the Genki Textbooks (very well guided lessons, especially for Grammar. This can also be used as a basis for bunpro)
• TokiniAndk videos (Japanese teacher, has many videos going over genki too).

You got to be in it for the long run to be able to see any success.

A perspective from an European here with nativeness and alike in several latin-related languages and long lasting interest in Japanese language and related culture since the 2000s.

Certainly for written Japanese it will help you your Chinese knowledge (after a learning curve of false-friend associations), I heard that many technical/modern words have been imported in Chinese also from Japanese adaptations (only the characters implied, not the sounds, as is common in indoeuropean language imports), as a return kind voyage, since Japanese writing was first imported from old Chinese and then evolved in today’s system (kanjis and two silabaries). Also many English words have been imported into Japanese, but highly phonetically distorted in the adaptation. Foreign words are easy to spot in written text, and I often chuckle when I understand the word by realising about the original one after backtracing the intended pronunciation.

As a consequence of Chinese influence in the writing system, most of the kanjis have two pronunciations, one(or-more-alike) of Japanese origin and another(or-more-alike) of Chinese origin, which in many cases will resemble to current Chinese ones, but I have heard that phonetic changes will throw away potential direct understanding (also rules about which pronunciation is used when in Japanese are not rock solid or straightforward always) specially since grammar is notably different also. I found that proficiency in two similar related languages (e.g. between roman-latin languages, between germanic languages, etc) develop certain ability in spontaneous word recognition across phonetic variations, but I found this in indoerupean languages with “long” words with “long” roots (not one “syllable” per “word”), not sure how much would work between Mandarin and Cantones and a phonetic adaptation from old Chinese into Japanese, which would be just a part of it.

I am far from fluent in Japanese, but the most basic interactions, grammar recognition, etc and the learned nuances add a wonderful experience to OVS watching (love for those sub volunteers that explain the cultural context of many situations), and since most of my consume is Japanese culturaly rooted (e.g. not sci-fi, western fantasy, etc) I am not interested in dubbed material at all. I think fluency requires a serious investment, even for Chinese background, user abilities and environment may vary this a lot also, so the gain must be worth it: for careless plain consumption of works not rooted in Japanese culture I doubt is worth it, for the rest I find worth the effort to read subs most of the time and appreciate recognise the nuances hard/impossible to translate.

I had zero regrets of all what I invested in Japanese understanding up today, even if is not enough for general understanding, but I also find such cultural travel worthy on each step. I am attempting something alike with Chinese nowadays, let’s see how far I arrive…

Good luck!

Consuming media is a great way to supplement your language-learning, but be careful not to confuse the dialog used in anime with actual conversational Japanese. Just like how nobody actually talks like a Western cartoon character does, Japanese people don’t talk like anime characters. Anime dialog is largely dramatized.

Also for what it’s worth; depending on what you’re watching, the English dubs have gotten way better in recent years. There’s a lot of good talent in the dub scene these days, and Japanese directors are getting better at trusting the performance of western voice actors, instead of demanding that the actor sounds the way they think it should sound in English. In my experience, most dubs post-2010 are generally pretty good. Generally.

Hey I actually did that in my uni years because I wanted to experience manga in the original way. I guess it depends on how fast you absorb stuff like vocab but if you’re already used to listening to Japanese convo, it could take a few months to master the grammar (that’s the easy part imho). Then the hard part would be the writing (which you could avoid entirely since you’re focused on anime but I don’t think it’s a good idea in the long run since there’s a lot of written stuff in anime as well) and vocab. If you study a little every day (say 1 hour), it would take 6 month to understand basic stuff (like teenage shonen) and then a few years for more advanced stuff. That’s just my two cents In my case, took me 2-3 years to actually read shonen manga but I still struggle with furigana-less manga

My experience trying to learn other languages has been that it’s a lifelong process.

Japan’s writing system is rather complex. It has three primary forms and mixed together. Your familiarity with Cantonese & Mandarin may help with kanji (but also be a source of confusion, as they share some similarities).

However, their speech has regional dialects and some of their phrases requires an understanding of their history and culture.

The monogatari series has been cited as extremely dense to understand for foreigners, but would be an excellent candidate for practicing your comprehension skills.

Side thought: How do you feel about the dub of this series? It’s often credited as being very high quality.

https://anilist.co/anime/849/Suzumiya-Haruhi-no-Yuuutsu

Hi, I came the other way. Air Force baby who spent most of her younger years speaking Japanese and eventually got English happening.

So many people have asked me if they can learn Japanese, and my answer is the same: it’s a whole-ass language that takes many years to be good at, to use for communication. Most people realize they’re not going to be good at a language in three weeks and they bail.

Don’t use a language for just one thing (unless that one thing is to communicate with a society).

I committed myself to learning English because my family and I live in America now, and I needed to communicate with a society in it. (And I think my English is pretty good now but it’s not without a lot of trying, even now. I actually have to fight to maintain my Japanese, by reading books and watching movies and TV!)

I had a friend who was a computer science student and did an additional major in Japanese just so he could read manga in original language. It can be done but requires a lot of dedication.

If you are a native English speaker, then learning Germanic and Romance languages will be easy because they have much in common. With Japanese, there’s no real evolutionary commonality so you really have to just learn a whole new system that doesn’t match your expectations–and from scratch. Example:

1,352

English: one-thousand three-hundred fifty-two Japanese: one thousands place, three hundreds place, five tens place, two

Just the conception of how numbers work is different. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to do this, it would be fantastic. Just know that you have to develop a lot of new intuitions.

My weeb ass: My time has come.

I did it, and for the record my native language has absolutely nothing in common with Japanese. I started with Duolingo and kept at it until I could power through easy manga, at which point and I started doing that. The good news is that if you can power through the early bits, your entertainment (assuming it’s in Japanese) will supplement and eventually replace your studying. Here are the things I think I did right:

1. Be willing to invest serious time into studying and/or consuming comprehensible material (also known as immersion). At what point it becomes “not worth it” is up to you, but I’d aim for at least an hour a day.

2. Watch anime often and attempt to understand what you’re hearing (this is separate from studying). You’ll fail most of the time at first, but this keeps your ear open so you improve your listening without doing much if any extra work. It also helps you keep track of your progress, since the better you get the more you’ll understand. I took a half-year break and when I came back I found my Japanese had improved at least in part because I was watching anime in the interim.

3. Don’t fall for the studying trap. At some point, and probably earlier than you expect, you’ll have to drop actual studying material and focus your efforts on immersion. I started by reading a manga called Yotsubato after getting to conditionals on Duolingo, but really any manga with furigana works. If you find something other than manga you like better then go for that, but you need something and it needs to at least keep you on your toes language-wise and still be ultimately comprehensible. Humans learn language by recognizing patterns within copious volumes of content, not by rationally analyzing those patterns; that latter stuff is for linguists.

4. Keep challenging yourself. It’s easy to think you’re not ready to advance to the next level, but you should accept that the transition will be painful anyway and often try your hand at more advanced material (meaning immersion material here, as I said don’t bother with advanced studying material). In my case, I thought my Japanese was plateauing after sticking with one thing for too long, but after I read my first light novel I improved ridiculously fast. We’re talking serious improvement in a matter of weeks here. You’re likely to underestimate the level of material you can digest, so you should take that into account when making decisions.

Note regarding your native language: I speak basic Chinese and Chinese and Japanese are different enough that you’ll be almost no better than an English native speaker when it comes to fundamentally understanding the language. However, the writing system and the prevalence of Sino-Japanese words mean that you’ll have a leg up in guessing the meaning of words you don’t know when reading, especially after you learn to reverse engineer character simplifications. For example, you’ll see something like 解説 and be like “oh that’s just 解说.” At least coming from the other direction this is super convenient, but it’s obviously no substitute for actually learning the language and it won’t help you at all when it comes to listening (this is the case for Mandarin, but apparently Sino-Japanese words are pronounced reasonably close to their Cantonese counterparts). You also get the joy of seeing exactly how the Japanese butchered Chinese words, so… uh… good luck. You’ll have fun with 样/様. On the plus side you won’t be like “what the hell is this” when you run into counters, but the counting system still has “fun” stuff for you. So to directly answer your questions:

YMMV, but I don’t think it’s hard at all. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s no more or less difficult than English.

If you can commit then no, but obviously yes if you give up in three weeks.

This isn’t as important a decision as you’d expect, but Duolingo will do fine.

PS: There’s more and more anime with good dubs these days.

Ayyy fellow Canto speaker on the same boat

I don’t really watch anime but I want to read Japanese text. I’m currently 2 months in following the Tofugu guide. I spent about a week on memorizing Hiragana and Katakana, and have been grinding Kanjis and vocabularies on Anki since then. At some point I also read the Japanese sentence structure guide from 8020japanese out of curiosity. This combination allows me to learn Japanese much faster at my own rate than pre-designed methods like Duolingo.

Since I’m a native Cantonese speaker, learning Kanji is rather trivial, so I mostly spend my time learning both Onyomi (Chinese pronunciation) and Kunyomi (Japanese pronunciation).

I am at a point where I can read some simple sentences and guess some words base on Kanji (for example はじめる means “start” on my Japanese Wii), but I definitely still have a long way to go before I can do anything fluent. If you watch a decent amount of anime, chances are you can probably learn faster than me.

I tried this during my weeb phase some 20 years ago.

I stumbled across a video lecture series om some torrent site, and despite being very old (from the 70s or 80s) it was actually pretty good for teaching everyday conversational japanese.

I never progressed beyond the very basics due to life happening, but it got me far enough that I could at least grasp the general topic at hand. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a decent understanding of the language if I had kept at it.

Japanese is a fairly simple language with easy grammar. From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart that knowing one probably won’t help you much with the other, although I may be mistaken.

I attempted this. I enrolled on an evening course and followed it for a year, doing all the exercises and so on. After one year, I had a rudimentary understanding of the simplest symbols (no kanji) and could do a minimal baby talk. From there, there is a lot of vocabulary. I abandoned. It’s not an easy path, but maybe missing other languages in the same family helps. For me, Japanese was my first non-European language. Fascinating but haaaaard!

Japanese is considered to be the most alien of languages to native English speakers, and vice versa. That said, it has been done, and it doesn’t exactly take a rocket scientist to learn Japanese as a native English speaker. What it takes is time and dedication.

I actually know a few dozen words in Japanese, but I don’t know Japanese.

As for dubs, I prefer some anime dubbed in Japanese and some anime dubbed in English. Generally English is more accessible in that I don’t have to read as well as listen, but there are some animes I don’t want to be distracted by subtitles.

Anyway, it’s a common misconception in anime that “the language I don’t understand has better voice acting.” It’s because you don’t understand it. If you understood it, you’d likely come to the conclusion that some actors are just better than others, in either dub. The difference is, English dubs pay more and they have a wider pool of talent. But as you learn Japanese, you’ll find the same is true in Japanese dubbing, some of the actors are actually good, and others are just phoning it in, same as anywhere.

I do feel like if you’re familiar with Chinese languages, you probably know that Japanese evolved from Chinese (I’m not sure on the specifics here), like how they have the same numbers. So it’s a good starting point. You can probably read the symbols, or at least know what they sound like. I can read romaji passably enough. But the symbols? Haha nope.

has anyone else attempted this.

Yes. Every Western Weeb for starters.

Me and my GF are currently doing this. Some recommendations from personal experience:

• Pimsleur is really nice for getting from 0 to being able to speak and understand some amount. It’s very much less overwhelming than jumping head-first into grammar. You can find torrents for it. It’s also a really good way to learn to listen to and speak Japanese out loud, something most other resources lack.
• everyone recommends Genki, and I concurr; it’s a good book series on grammar, with plenty exercises. Will really help filling in the gaps where you have gotten a feeling for things with Pimsleur, but are not able to grasp the underlying concepts intuitively.
• don’t shy away from Hiragana and Katakana. They are easy to learn (seriously, spend an afternoon on each and then do kana.pro for a week and never look back). Ignoring this will prevent you from using most learning resources.
• use Anki; again, everyone says this, because it’s true. You can download a pre-made pack for Genki. 10-15 cards a day are a good leisurely pace, allowing you to tackle a new chapter in Genki approximately every 7-10 days.
• don’t fall in the rabbithole of watching YouTube videos on learning Japanese. Just study instead. If there’s a concrete thing you struggle with, look for a Video on that topic. Most of the geberal advice videos seem to come from English-speaking folks for whom Japanese is their first foreign language (which is great! Don’t get me wrong!), and the resulting information ranges from obvious to questionable.
• decide if you want to learn Kanji (if you don’t know them anyways, given your stated experience). I’d recommend it. It’s actually quite fun, and if you want to watch Anime in Japanese, there’s a good chance you’ll have to use Japanese subs for a while to help along anyways…
• most people online seem to suggest only learning to read Kanji, because “you never need to handwrite things today anyways”. I call bullshit. It’s marginal additional effort, can actually help you with recognition, and if you ever end up needing / wanting to write by hand, you’d have to start all over otherwise.

Lastly, no, it is not a waste of time. Apart from anime, a new language means new ways of thinking, of challenging yourself, of being able to experience people and culture through a new lense, and potentially increasing job opportunities.

Plus if you ever end up visiting Japan, it really comes in handy.

Feel free to ask any followup things that I’ve forgotten about…

Edit: I forgot to mention: I am nowhere near fluent yet, and do not claim the suggestions above as “ultimate Japanese learner advice” or anything like that.

Also, very quickly you’ll start noticing phrases, words, topics when watching anime or japanese videos or music, even if you can’t follow the full conversation. That’s what really motivated and kept me going early on.