About

Nihongo Journey is dedicated to making the journey to Japanese language fluency easier. Interested in advancing your Japanese language skills, but not sure how to get to the next level? You’ve come to the right place. Join me on the journey, and I’ll help shoulder the most frustrating burdens on your trek to fluency.

My Nihongo Journey

I started this site to create support and tools to help me on my journey from intermediate to advanced Japanese language fluency. Yes, it’s true—I made this website to help myself. Selfish as that may seem, that’s good news for you. I’m user numero uno, and because I’ll be using this tool every day, you can be sure that I will be dedicated to making sure the site is working well.

On the other hand, you might be questioning why you should even keep reading. Who is this 両津, and why should I trust this chump who hasn’t even verified that his method works? Well, don’t take it from me. I’m just following in the footsteps of others. Mostly. 😬

After spending years (it’s been a full decade 🤫) experimenting with different language learning programs, I hit upon a pretty effective method a few years back for improving language skills that works even for the resource-constrained learner. I call this method Immersive Repetition™ (fancy, no?). At its core the method is just reading native Japanese content while accumulating/reviewing vocabulary with Anki each day.

Note: For those of you in the know, my method is just an application of Khatzumoto’s 10,000 sentence approach; for those of you not familiar with Khatzumoto’s AJATT (All Japanese All The Time) method, a good one-minute summary explained by Matt vs Japan is found here.

Also Note: For the Refold/MIA community, this method is a hack for getting through the slog of Stage 2

Why Nihongo Journey?

Despite my excitement in finding this effective way to build Japanese language skills, I’ve also found that the tools and advice available today are a little wanting. Despite the immense amount of support that exists for learning Japanese at an introductory level, it’s pretty darn hard to find any decent path to get from a level of moderate proficiency to native fluency.

It’s all well and good to say “Immerse Yourself” and “Use Anki,” but where’s the easy button? Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for the advice and support I’ve found on AJATT. But is it too much to ask to be spoonfed the things I need to do? Honestly, how’s a guy supposed to reach native fluency without living in Japan or without significant time and/or money to can dedicate to hobbies?

The point is, there has been no method for truly spoonfeeding the AJATT-approach to learning Japanese for the common working person. At least not in a way that is user-friendly and free. So, I decided to make just that: a site + associated tools to make the journey from intermediate to advanced fluency as easy as opening your email every morning. I’ll do this by attacking the three major points of friction for Immersive Repetition: finding native content, getting translations, and adding/reviewing vocabulary.

Yup, I learned app development, created this site, and decided to support an entire ecosystem of similarly situated Japanese language learning enthusiasts just to fix this problem. Ok, perhaps I do have a siginficant amount of time to dedicate on hobbies…

Who is this site for?

As you might have gathered from above, this site is NOT dedicated to beginners. Sorry, I’m just not that interested in helping beginners learn the ropes of Japanese, and honestly you should thank me for it. I’m not a patient teacher and there are a lot of better and 🎉FREE🎉 resources out there. Don’t be coming around the Nihongo Journey Twitter page asking me for support to learn ひらがな or カタカナ. I’ll just point you to Duolingo. Looking to learn some basic 漢字? Go check out Wanikani. Need to learn the basics of grammar? Tae Kim’s got you covered.

Note: I don’t get paid for any of the references that I’ve make on this website to other study options out there. I only recommend those that I’ve tried using and have found to be pretty helpful. If I don’t recommend something that you’ve found to be useful, it’s not because it’s bad, but because I didn’t use it 🤷‍♂️.

For absolute beginners, I recommend completing all the levels in Duolingo before coming here. It’s way more fun and easier than textbook learning, and should get you up to speed. For those with the basics, you might be fine just by looking things up that you don’t know, as long as it doesn’t bother you. This is the only part of this site that isn’t おまかせ: you have to find the level of difficulty that you can handle before starting.

Personally, I found it very frustrating to look up vocabulary and 漢字 that I didn’t know, so I “learned” the most common 2200 漢字 and the most common 6000 vocabulary words before launching into reading native content. Right now, the best way to do that is on Anki, with some of the public decks. At some point in the future I’ll provide decks to cover basic 漢字 and vocab essentials to you, but that will be coming down the road.

Get Started

To learn more about how to use this site, click here. To signup for the SRS app and weekly content, click here. Glad to have you join the Nihongo Journey!