We get a lot of questions in the forum about this textbook, so I thought it would be useful to have a thread with some advice and resources for using Minna no Nihongo!
Disclaimer: My experiences with the textbook are not universal, and there might be objectively better strategies for working through it, but I have successfully completed Minna no Nihongo Shokyu I and II, and I thought I might as well share what I learned. Feel free to chime in with additional tips!
What is Minna no Nihongo?
Minna no Nihongo, or みんなの日本語, is one of the most popular beginning Japanese textbooks, especially in Japan. Here is Tofugu’s review of it. It is frequently used in Japanese classes and many Japanese tutors are familiar with it, so there are a lot of existing resources out there for it. If English is not your native language, the grammar/translation text is also available in other languages, which makes it more accessible than many other textbooks.
Having the main textbook be entirely in Japanese sounds difficult/frustrating
The way MNN is set up is not for everyone, but I personally really liked the structure because it encouraged me to try to use the book exclusively in Japanese as much as possible, and I got used to reading in Japanese without having English translations to fall back on for everything. For the most part, I would read the English explanations and then set the book aside and work exclusively with the Japanese text.
I found that I actually prefer having two separate books compared to how Tobira (for example) does it, because it’s a lot easier to reference the grammar information if it’s contained in a (much slimmer) separate volume that you can have open at the same time without having to do so much flipping back and forth within a single book.
Minna no Nihongo is designed for classroom use, so it isn’t any good for self-study, right?
You can use it for self-study just fine! I did not have any problems with it. It’s better designed for self-study than Tobira is, for example.
Don’t you need to use Minna no Nihongo with a teacher/tutor?
I have never taken a Japanese class or had a Japanese tutor, and I used the textbook entirely on my own and did not have any difficulties navigating the text or understanding the material.
How does it combine with WaniKani?
It combines pretty well, actually! MNN has kanji workbooks, which I did not buy and have not really looked at, so I can’t speak to how WK combines with those, but it’s pretty easy to do WK and the standard MNN textbook in tandem, since the textbook alone does not teach any kanji.
The main issue is that the order that WK teaches kanji does not really match the order that they show up in MNN at all. So if you do WK and MNN in tandem, you will have to learn words which contain kanji that you don’t yet know. The entire textbook has furigana, so it’s not a problem if you can’t recognize all of the kanji, but it means a bit of repeated work, since you will learn some words in the textbook and then learn those same words again in WK down the line.
While I was working through the beginner’s series of MNN, I kept an ongoing spreadsheet of all of the kanji which appeared in the words taught in the vocab lists for each lesson, matching them up with their WK level (the list does not include kanji that were not included in the vocab lists, such as kanji in character names). Feel free to consult that document as a reference, though keep in mind that it might not reflect current WK content, since the WK team is constantly moving items around and occasionally adds and removes items, and I am not planning on updating the spreadsheet.
What WaniKani level should I reach before starting Minna no Nihongo?
Tofugu advises waiting until level 10 to start studying grammar, but I personally disagree with this advice, and recommend starting earlier. I started MNN at level 7, and probably could have started even earlier.
If you look at the spreadsheet linked above, you can see the percentage of the kanji introduced in MNN that you will be able to read at specific WK levels. This number represents unique kanji, not the total percentage of all kanji in the textbook. It may be tempting to wait until a higher level to start (at level 37, you will know 90% of the unique kanji in the book), but you will get more out of both WK and MNN if you do them in tandem, since the textbook will help reinforce a lot of what you’re learning on WK.
Which Minna no Nihongo workbooks should I buy?
I only purchased two of them myself, so these are the only two workbooks I can speak to:
書いて覚える 文型練習帳
This workbook focuses on sentence patterns, and it’s my favorite of the two workbooks that I own! Each lesson gets several pages of exercises, and they aren’t too difficult if you’ve read the lesson and completed 練習 A-C in the main textbook already. I like this workbook because it really makes you practice things like different counters, numbers, conjugations, that sort of thing. The main textbook doesn’t spend a lot of time drilling these.
This workbook also has a fair amount of production exercises where it asks you questions, or asks you to write your own questions, and your responses can be fairly freeform. Usually it gives an example answer in the back that you can use as sort of a guide to make sure that you understood what the book was asking you to write. These exercises might be less useful without someone to check your work, but I appreciate having the opportunity to start attempting to formulate sentences in Japanese in a very low stakes environment.
Usually, I would do this workbook after completing the 練習 exercises in the textbook. After I finished it, I picked up the other workbook.
標準問題集
I believe this is the “standard workbook”? It’s a pretty short book. The pages are perforated, so they can be removed. Each lesson gets a tight two pages, and that’s it. Additionally, there are a few review sections that cover multiple chapters, and I think one final review at the end.
This is, in my opinion, the hardest of the three books. I saved it until nearly last. The only thing I did after it is the 問題 section in the main textbook, since I was better at the listening exercises the more practice I had.
I’m not sure exactly how to pin down why this book is harder than the core textbook or the sentence pattern workbook. I think maybe it’s because the exercises really ask you to synthesize everything you’ve been learning, so you really have to think when answering the questions (most of the exercises in the other books ask you to do just one thing at a time).
I sort of treated it like a practice test at the end of the lesson, with the 問題 section in the textbook serving as the final review to determine if I truly knew the material before moving on.
What does the actual process of working through the textbook look like?
This was my personal strategy for completing each lesson:
- Pre-learn the vocab first. I found a premade deck on Anki and downloaded that, though I needed to check all of the cards before adding them into circulation because some of them had errors, and I needed to add audio to the deck manually (the Forvo pronunciation downloader Anki addon is very helpful for this).
- Then I would spend several days just running through the flash cards until I felt comfortable with it. When I started out, I would also learn to write all of the unfamiliar kanji, but I eventually ran out of time to do this.
- After learning the vocab, I would read the grammar info for the chapter, then put down the translation book and attempt to work entirely from the Japanese-only main text as much as I can. I would read the lesson, then do all of the exercises, except for the last set.
- At this point, I would do the exercises for that lesson in my two workbooks. I started with 書いて覚える 文型練習帳, then did the excercises in 標準問題集 after. If there were any additional review sections in the workbooks after the lesson, I did those, too.
- When I finished the workbooks, I went back and did the last section in the textbook, as well as any further review sections.
- Before moving on to the next lesson, I would add all of the grammar information from the lesson to my (physical) notes. This step is optional, but I felt like keeping a physical notebook helped me synthesize everything I was learning.
How do you motivate yourself to work on the textbook without having the structure and external pressure of a class?
I strongly recommend forming regular, consistent habits if possible. Treat it like a marathon, not a sprint. Think about it in terms of what you can get done each day without too much strain and let that inform your pace.
I tried to complete at least one new MNN lesson each WK level. I could go a little faster if I pushed myself (by starting to learn the vocab for the next chapter before finishing the previous one), but that increased the SRS strain, so I tended to avoid doing that. My pace was about two weeks per WK level, so I completed one MNN lesson about every two weeks. That might seem a little slow, but I aimed for making consistent progress while still leaving room in my life to do other things, and I think it was a good call.
I tried to make at least some progress on MNN every day. Some days this meant more work than others! No matter what else I had going on, though, I always made sure I at least cleared my Anki reviews.
I also found it helpful having a public study log on this forum to hold me accountable. I updated my study log every time I leveled up on WK, so I constantly pushed myself with MNN so that I could report having finished another lesson in my study log updates because I didn’t want to admit that I had failed. Using my WK level-ups as a deadline was very effective when combined with the public pressure.
What about intermediate study? After finishing Minna no Nihongo Shokyu I and 2, should I pick up Minna no Nihongo Chukyu, or choose a different intermediate textbook?
I struggled with this for a while, but ultimately ended up choosing Tobira instead of continuing with the Minna no Nihongo series past the beginner level. I heard mixed reviews on the Chukyu books, and opted to try my luck with Tobira instead because I knew a lot of people who had used it successfully. I can say that I haven’t had any trouble transitioning from MNN to Tobira, though I was already reading quite a bit of native Japanese media, and Tobira was a lot easier in comparison to that 
.
Don’t let that stop you from trying MNN Chukyu if you really want to, though! I would be interested to hear more from people who successfully used it for self-study, since I couldn’t find enough information on that to feel comfortable attempting it.
