How Long Does it Take to Learn Japanese on Average? With consistent studying and speaking, for about 30 minutes to an hour a day, you could speak at a conversational level in Japanese in about 3 months.
Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for English natives to master. This is because it does not have a lot of likeness in structure to English. Approximately it will take 88 weeks, or 2200 hours of studying, to become fluent.
Let's get one thing clear: You won't become fluent in a month. (Unless you're some foreign language genius.) But you can absolutely learn what you need to get by with a month of studying. It's all about finding what resources are best for you.
It will take around 2-6 months to get through most beginner Japanese textbooks. Though, this does depend on how much time you have to spend on your studies and what grammar method you choose. You can even go through a couple different textbooks at the same time, if you want.
In fact, Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn for a native English speaker. If you want to speak enough Japanese to make friends in Japan and carry on simple conversations, you can master casual Japanese in under a year, especially if you are skipping over hiragana and katakana.
3 months of good study habits will get you to very basic conversational level (JLPT N5, maybe N4 if you have a natural aptitude for language learning). I moved to Japan with almost zero Japanese and was thrown into a fully Japanese environment.
Depending on how many hours per day you can study Japanese, attaining a basic level of fluency can take between six months and one year. Once you've reached a basic level of Japanese fluency, you should be able to: Ask for and understand directions.
However, many experts believe it takes between 4 to 6 months of dedicated study to reach a beginner level. On the other hand, you can expect to spend at least 3 years studying to become fluent in Japanese with near-native level accuracy.
You must learn all 2136 常用漢字 (jōyō kanji, the most commonly used kanji in Japanese) compared to the roughly 1000 kanji required for N2. In total it took me two-and-a-half years to pass N1, and one-and-a-half years to get from N2 to N1. As you may imagine, it is hard to know where to begin studying.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
If your goal is to learn Japanese, there is no better way to do that than by watching some of your favorite Japanese anime! Listening to the dialogues and following the storyline will help you to become familiar with the fluency, the phonetics, the tone, and the rhythm of the language, all while enjoying yourself.
In the end, Duolingo is great for extra review, preview, practice, and vocabulary building, rather than primary learning. And if you're interested in studying Japanese efficiently, don't forget to check out our free 55-page guide with time-tested tips and tricks!
However, it's a useful exercise to learn basic Japanese words and phrases, sentence structures, and pronunciation. Actively watching and listening to anime (without subtitles, or with Japanese subtitles) lets you mix up your learning with a short, fun and engaging session.
Because the consonants above are pronounced in the same place, this is what allows native Japanese speakers to speak so fast. The front part of the tongue barely has to move between these consonants compared to English words which have far more consonants and places of pronunciation (AKA places of articulation).
The Japanese language is considered one of the most difficult to learn by many English speakers. With three separate writing systems, an opposite sentence structure to English, and a complicated hierarchy of politeness, it's decidedly complex.
The JLPT has five levels: N1, N2, N3, N4 and N5. The easiest level is N5 and the most difficult level is N1.
YES AND NO depending on person with determination and how much time they gonna study ! I did N3 AND N4 in 6 months ! Even after not devoting all my time to it! Get your self a good book,study material, little motivation (yeah it's hard to find but you will surely if you are determined) .
In summary, levels N5, N4 are the beginner levels which is good for measuring your language proficiency but no more. N3 is the middle ground that serves as a good indicator that you have enough Japanese skills to survive in Japan on a day-to-day basis.
If you are keen on learning Japanese, one thing you should know is that the journey won't be easy. Japanese is difficult to grasp and even more difficult to become fluent in. While it may take you only a year to become fluent in Korean, you can expect a commitment of 3 years or more for Japanese.
For starters, Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Kanji includes over 50,000 different characters, however, you only need to know about 2,000 of them to be considered fluent. You also only need to know about 5,000 Japanese vocabulary words to be considered fluent as well.
For the past 5 years of studying Japanese, I can say that 2 hours a day is more than enough to get you where you want. To give you a perspective on the matter, I would only study around one hour a day—every other day. If by 'fluent' you mean to hold a conversation, then around a couple of years.
Below you can find each JLPT level and the estimated study time for each. N5 with kanji knowledge took between 250-450 hours, while with no prior kanji knowledge it took between 325-600 hours.
There are more than 10,000 characters listed as kanji, which can be discouraging when thinking about learning Japanese. Yet in reality only around 2,000 kanji are used in everyday life.