EDIT Jul. 9: The intensive pace is now included in the first reply.
Classic University Pacing and Structure
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tl;dr - if you want to make a study routine for yourself based on the pace that university classes use, here you go
Hello, all. If you’ve ever stumbled across my study log, you might know that I am taking Japanese classes as part of my university program. As I approach the end of my classroom-Japanese tenure, I’m starting to feel the looming dread of knowing I’ll need to become a self-studier once again after completion. I wanted to record what my current classroom learning routines look like so I can recreate them on my own in the future.
I’ve dabbled in self-studying Japanese before, but I was never able to make very much progress because I didn’t know how to create a routine for myself. I tried watching videos in the past about “How to Study Japanese” to get a taste of how others structured their studies, but those videos mostly just featured B-roll of someone flipping through a crisp unused Genki I, saying things like “watch anime <3” but not really offering any specifics on the routines they used to structure a study plan.
If you struggle with ways to structure your own language learning, I welcome you to glance at what a university class structure looks like and use it to guide the creation of your own routine. And if your current routine works great, feel free to read and chuckle if you’d like.
Some Preface Notes
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The classes I base this schedule on have exclusively used the Genki II text and workbook, and the schedule is paced by Genki chapters which have 5-8 new grammar points each. Though the five-day learning loop can easily fit with other resources, I encourage you to tweak and switch items if you prefer to use other textbooks.
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The regular semester-based schedule uses 1-hour daily classes to move students at a general one-N-level per year pace. If you wish to reach N5-N3 more quickly, feel free to double-up on daily lessons. However, I don’t recommend sacrificing the practice exercises or “homework” in lieu of reaching the next grammar point faster. Sacrificing the essential practice gets you to the next item at a superficial level, but you haven’t “learned” the previous item as well as you could have.
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The classroom method relies on
excessive verbal usage to activate language memory. This is reading aloud, answering aloud, and generally using your voice before you use your pen to write. Dubbed the “production effect,” studies determined that the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself has the most beneficial impact on memory. There are tons of studies on this, but the crux of the matter is that you will understand and retain information better if you engage with the material aloud. In class, the room is never silent - there are always students reading under their breath, repeating videos, repeating the professor, practicing the pitch accent on various vocab words. To get the most from your learning, get used to using your voice as you study. -
The 1-hour session in a classroom includes calling on students to answer the questions that you, at home, will be answering on your own. Without this aspect, it’s very likely that the schedule I outline below will take far less than an hour. Feel free to add items if desired.
How to Use This Information
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The most important item that everyone forgets to consider is that teachers never walk into a classroom without having an exact idea of what they’re about to teach. If you have one hour to study Japanese, you can only get the most out of that hour by already having your resources and goals prepared ahead. I say this in the Intensive Pacing Guide below as well, but you want to start a session of ANY pace by having:
✓ Your goals for day listed out (what grammar are you studying? how many pages of the text?)
✓ All relevant websites/videos already pulled up in your browser ready to use
✓ Distractions closed out or removed entirely -
As my professors always say, “Save your questions until the end, please!” If any questions arise (What are the exceptions for this conjugation type? Can I mix this grammar with that grammar?) save them for the end. Write a note for yourself to look the question up later but DO NOT pursue it until the “class” is over. It is far too easy to flush fifteen minutes of your hour down the drain by getting caught in the rabbit hole of your curiosity. Once your study time is up, search the questions you’ve jotted down as a cool-down afterward.
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Your goals are not the same as those of the person next to you. That is to say, use this information in whatever way you wish. Move around the day-schedule, do two hours on some days and thirty minutes on other days, whatever fits your world best is what you SHOULD do. This university routine is like the sample cover letter that you customize for yourself. If anything is not working for you, it’s a routine problem, not a You problem! Always be patient with yourself and change your routine whenever needed.
University Japanese Learning Schedule
Quick Notes: 1 hour per day, 5 days a week, 2-4 new grammar points per week, chapter finished every 2-2.5 weeks, 月水金 are practice-focused, 火木 are learning-focused
| Five-Day Learning Loop | ||
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| 月 | |
Monday is mostly review - if you’re using this guideline, the first day would be Tuesday. Verbally practice last week’s grammar points, finish any incomplete textbook grammar exercises, quiz yourself on grammar today if you wish to utilize tests, introduce 10 new vocab words |
| 火 | |
2 New grammar points*, use textbook example sentences as a guide to verbally make new easy sentences (use yesterday’s new vocab words whenever possible), write a few completely new easy sentences without examples guiding you, HW: WB |
| 水 | |
Use new grammar to verbally make many complex sentences and combine grammar, answer more textbook exercises aloud and then on paper, 10 new vocab words |
| 木 | |
Practice Tuesday’s grammar briefly, begin next new grammar, again using textbook examples to guide easy sentences aloud, write easy new sentences with all new vocab from the week, HW: WB |
| 金 | |
Use yesterday’s new grammar to make complex combined sentences, do textbook exercises for Thursday’s grammar aloud and then on paper, quiz yourself on vocab/kanji today if you wish |
* “New grammar points”: For this, we will read the textbook grammar lesson aloud and also watch one or two videos specific to that grammar point. Learning a new item doesn’t stop at the textbook explanation.
Example:
・New grammar: させる
・Easy sentence practice: 母は私に野菜を食べさせました。(Straightforward usage)
・Complex sentence practice: 高校生のころ、私の成績が悪かったので、父は毎日四時間に勉強させてしまいました。(Combines with other recent grammar to practice using in context)
This learning loop fits into a larger chapter-long schedule that is specific to the setup of the Genki textbook. It looks something like this:
Chapter Introduction → Five-Day Loop (until all grammar + exercises are complete) → Reading Passage → Chapter Test → (New Chapter)
Tips for Home-Study
- When answering textbook exercise questions aloud, try recording yourself so you can identify mistakes and also die from embarrassment
- Give a few extra minutes to an exercise by answering the same question with different perspectives to stretch your vocabulary memory.
(Q: “If you were a teacher…” Try answering as a nice teacher, a mean teacher, a hungover substitute, etc.)
Homework
We have homework nearly every night, excluding Fridays and Saturdays, which each take about an hour to complete. Homework will be directly related to the most recent grammar and vocabulary from the day.
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Workbook: The Genki companion workbooks provide approximately two pages per grammar point. These pages include sentence translation, general questions, dialogue completion, and multi-sentence writing prompts. Two grammar points per week will usually mean about 4 workbook pages coinciding with them. There are also kanji practice worksheets in the back of the workbooks, which we are expected to complete for handwriting purposes, though you may choose to skip these.
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Conjugation: This is a homework type when nearing the end of the chapter. The assignment is to conjugate every verb from the vocab list into all known conjugation forms at the time. For example, midway through Genki II, you might conjugate Chapter 17 verbs into て-form, present negative, casual positive past, potential, volitional, and そう-form. There are usually 15-20 verbs per chapter. You can do this by hand or in a Word document and search for the corrections after completion.
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Listening Comprehension: In the Genki series, each chapter begins with a two- or three-part dialogue scene. Since the dialogue is at the start of the chapter, this is an assignment we will be given the night before reading the dialogue in class. Our homework is to listen to the official audio for the dialogue on the OTO Navi app (this is free and has audio for every single Genki chapter) without the aid of the script. Our task is to summarize the dialogue based solely on what we listened to, then read the script while listening once more and red-pen mark anything in our summary that was wrong or missing.
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Reading Comprehension: Genki books have a lengthy passage in the back section (where the kanji is) for every chapter which includes grammar and vocab from the lesson, and also has 5-10 comprehension questions to be answered afterward. The passage is read and dissected for its content in class after the five-day loop has ended, and then the comprehension questions are completed as homework.
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Writing Projects: After every two chapters we type one full-page essay on a broad personal topic (favorite childhood moment, your hometown, future plans, family history, etc.) and use as much of the new grammar, in as complex of sentences, as possible. We write drafts and exchange them for feedback before writing the finished versions, so this would be a good chance to connect with a proofreading buddy.
Tests
The most recurring tests we take are vocabulary and kanji tests. As you likely use WaniKani, neither of these is particularly necessary unless you want more of a challenge. Seth’s Genki Exercises Website offers mini-quizzes for each chapter’s vocab/kanji/grammar that you can try.
Conclusion
This schedule is entirely based on time spent learning new items - it doesn’t include the general immersion (reading books, listening to music, watching anime) that you engage in outside of your learning time.
→ Two to four grammar points per week
→ Read everything aloud, answer everything aloud
→ Do red-pen corrections on written work whenever possible - track your mistakes
→ Stretch your vocabulary by answering more than once with variations
→ Save your questions for the end
With one hour of class and one hour of “homework,” you’ve already given yourself two full hours of language practice without yet dipping into immersion. With weekends, holidays, and the occasional day off, this schedule will have you finishing Genki II in roughly 8 months. It may be more or less, depending on varying textbooks you use.
↓ Zoom down to three sample routines using this schedule in Genki II
So this is what my learning routine looked like as a university student in Second-Year Japanese class. As I mentioned earlier, my goal was to record this instructor-led schedule so I could use it as a guideline when I eventually end up self-studying again.
If this helps you, I’m so glad! Study routines are always one of those mysteries that are difficult to find as many people seem to either make it up as they go, or are so set into their routine that it seems too boring to explain to others.
If you have more items that you add to your own schedule, I would love to learn about them! I’ve heard of people who study Japanese for 8 hours per day - WOW! What I would give to know what that learning routine looks like. (Edit from the future: I ended up having to do this [see next post] and it didn’t end well lol)
For an ultra authentic classroom experience, make sure you stumble over your words in front of a group of 30 people who are all better speakers than you. Use the grammar incorrectly and forget three key vocab words. Answer the wrong question. Have a friend sternly call your name to answer aloud but you were jotting down a note in the four seconds that a question was asked so you don’t know what the question was but the entire room is now completely silent as everyone waits to listen to your answer. 
). But generally try to read the passages split in a way that you’ll be finished after four days, with the fifth day of the week given to the kaiwa pages. So if your reading passages has 100 lines, it’d be a good split to do 20 pages per day.
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