After reading tons of sites on tips to learn Japanese, and downloading more than 20 apps and looking at the needless costs of tuition, I think I can recommend some tips to learn this language for free (on a basic Android smartphone and your internet connection’s cost) (not completely free… but cheap).

If you are a student who goes to school for eight hours and then tuitions on the weekends and needs to self-study the rest of the time, then you don’t have the time for one more set of tuitions on Learning Japanese. You should also cut it out of your list. But if you do, then a quick internet search and find some local institutes that teach Japanese. I was surprised to see there a quite a number of institutes near my locality.

So how have I started Learning Japanese?

Let’s start at the roots. The Japanese writing system is divided into three:

·       Hiragana

·       Katakana

·       Kanji

I started with learning Hiragana and completely avoided Katakana due to its lack of usage in basic Japanese.

How to learn Hiragana?

I did download apps to study this and figured out nothing retained after some time. The best way is to actually sit down with pen and paper and write it out while pronouncing it. Everyday just write it once. I was done with learning it after writing it out with perfect stroke orders in just about 4 times.

After you’ve learnt it, to retain that information you must test yourself. For this purpose the apps I recommend are:

·       Hiragana Pro by Gerson Luca

·       Tae Kim’s Learning Japanese (the Hiragana test sheets shall give you practice)

A fun task is to see those Doraemon and Shinchan episodes and read a few of the headings (this is due to my smaller sister that watches these cartoons). You can spell outしずか (Shizuka) andしんちゃん (Shinchan) in pretty Japanese letters, but maybe not your name exactly;) but that shouldn’t stop you from making up your own cool Japanese name. My name is あまやちゃん! (Amayachan)

Ciao for now!