How many hours should i learn a day?

As many hours as you can possibly use to study.

2 hours a day sounds good enough if you study consistently. The Foreign Service Institute estimates 2200 hours average for an English speaker to learn Japanese, so that would take about 3 years to learn the language. Of course it’s just an estimative, but it’s a decent enough general idea of the effort it will take.

I have never calculated how many hours I use to study everyday, but it’s something around 1-2 hours total of WaniKani, 1 hour of bunpro (grammar, 3 new topics everyday), 1 hour of anki (mostly learning to handwrite kanji, then I review some mined vocab), at least 2 hours of reading light novels, and some more leisure extra time with native material (mostly manga, games, or youtube videos). Though I have a feeling I might need way, way more than 2200 hours to learn this language…

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Feels like I need 10,000 hours not 2,000 T^T

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I don’t know if these are the same figures, but the sources I have read are for full time studies for a diplomat learning the language

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It’s up to you to decide how much you want to study. But I will warn that sometimes longer sessions can be less efficient than a shorter study. Sure, you may learn more, but that’s more to forget. Food for thought.

Good luck on your studying!

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what novels would you recommend me to read as a beginner or should i read something else in Japanese maybe some mangas or child books for the beginning?

Graded Readers would be best to start out with as they will use simple grammar and will often be accompanied by pictures to help you in guessing the context of sentences for things you don’t know.

This thread is a good source for reading materials:

If you want to dip your toes into graded readers without having to pay the weight-in-gold price commanded by some companies this is a good source:

They won’t be as fancy as the professionally written and illustrated ones, but can give you a good start.

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I don’t know if these are the same figures, but the sources I have read are for full time studies for a diplomat learning the language

Indeed, sounds like it might be the case. I saw the information on wikibooks which didn’t specify anything, but it really feels like 2200 hours aren’t enough for the average person not studying full time. Too bad there aren’t many other reliable estimatives, I think.

what novels would you recommend me to read as a beginner or should i read something else in Japanese maybe some mangas or child books for the beginning?

The first story I read in Japanese was 銀河鉄道の夜 online while using a mouseover dictionary, so it was an easier first experience, though maybe the book itself might be a bit hard for a beginner. Honestly, anything that interests you that you can read online with a tool like yomichan is a good place to start.

My first physical light novel was キノの旅 which is very easy to read and I recommend to anyone starting (that has enough patience to look a lot of words up in a dictionary). I have also read うちの魔女しりませんか?, which has a very straightforward grammar, though it might have some uncommon vocab. I have heard 俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない and この素晴らしい世界に祝福を are also easy to read but I haven’t attempted those yet.

Any manga for teens might be a good start as well, especially the ones with furigana. Slice of life and/or 4koma tend to be easier to read too (ご注文はうさぎですか, ゆるキャン, 苺ましまろ are some I have started reading that are easy enough).

I personally think children’s books are bad for practice, since most of them don’t even have kanji.

It might be better to follow athomasm’s suggestion first since my methods of heavily using a dictionary might not be the best/it can get pretty frustrating at first, though.

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it depends, usually i dont study for more than an hour a day or else my brain will feel fried and the next day it’ll be tough to study.

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Well, yes, that, but also, there’s such a thing as doing SRS systems too slow. It’s not a total time thing, though, it’s more of a frequency. If you’re supposed to do a review in 4 hours and you wait a week, you’re probably back at square one again.

2 hours a day should be plenty to keep up with WaniKani.

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It’s not about how much time you spend studying, it’s about how you spend your time studying. A good place to start: 1/3 of your time should be spent speaking and listening, 1/3 learning and practicing new grammar (written is probably best here), 1/3 on kanji and vocab. What often happens is that people studying the Japanese language become quite literate (can read and write), but hardly fluent (can speak and listen in real time). Nowadays literacy has been lumped in with fluency, but this isn’t quite true in practice. There are people on this planet that are absolutely fluent in their mother tongue but never learned to read or write (they are illiterate). We have somehow fallen into the habit of becoming the opposite. We spend a lot of time reading and writing / typing Japanese, but neglect to practice listening and speaking in real time, which is actually the foundation of learning any language properly.

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sudden realization of spent time struck hard, after looking at pure numbers.
for past ~4 months, wanikani asked to do 39k reviews.
that’s ~300 reviews/day. every review takes typically 10-20 seconds in average.

その…えっっと… calculating…
just doing WK reviews eats upto 2 hours. :cold_sweat:
not mentioning that it needs to get grammar, train stubborn ones by writing on paper, reading some webnovels for practice, listening some videos (well, videos are done during commuting to/from any remote destination).

life/work/sleep? what’s that, tasty?

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It should’ve been 40 hours a day

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@Oshin is perspiring imagining how @FlamySerpent does all this.

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How can you be so close and not say 42?

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I’m already level 42, I don’t need any more answers in my life

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Honestly, consistency and the quality of your studying is more important than how much time you spend. Five minutes per day is better than studying for six hours twice per week. Learn actively instead of passively watching something or flipping though notecards. In my opinion, fifteen minutes of writing in Japanese by hand is a more effective method of learning than passively flipping through notecards for an hour.

As others said, that’s up to you and what you’re comfortable with. I try to study for at least an hour a day if I can help it, both with doing lessons here and other resources/games/apps I have on the side. However, sometimes I have days where I’m too zapped to do a whole lot besides go over some old kanji or radicals for 15 minutes before I call it quits. Every little bit helps - even if you’re just trying to learn through podcasts and movies.

I just recently quit my job to spend more time learning 日本語. I have some other things to do during the day, so I wanted to spend about 3-4+ hours learning Japanese, and I found that about 3 of those hours is spent doing WK.

The other time is spent reading NHK easy news, listing to 日本語の勉強 podcasts, and taking Japanese lessons.

Good luck to everyone on their 言語の習い journeys!

To be honest I think you will make more progress if you spend 1 hour a day on WaniKani and the rest of your time on other things (non-kanji vocab, grammar, listening, whatever). Going fast on WaniKani is great but at some point you get diminishing returns IMO