Brendon Bigley, my co-host on NPC: Next Portable Console, is getting married soon and planning a honeymoon to Japan. Before leaving, he and his partner decided to learn Japanese together. In doing so, Brendon has done a ton of research, quizzing friends who have learned the language, and trying a long list of resources, which he’s published on Wavelengths.

I love the idea that one of the biggest steps in learning Japanese is to learn how to learn Japanese:

So there are about one million different ways to go from here, and because every person is different it means you’ll need to try a few different things to get going. Many people say the first step of learning Japanese is to learn how to learn Japanese, and I’d say that’s almost correct. The first step, once again, is to learn hiragana and katakana… second is learning how to learn Japanese.

The reason things get so wild here is that people will say that you need to start learning kanji, vocab, and grammar simultaneously and it’s not not true. Learning even the most basic grammar helps make sense of sentence structure, which enables you to discern kanji and vocab words in the context of real written language. Conversely, the more kanji and vocab you learn the easier it will become to intuitively parse new grammatical rules as they’re introduced.

Learning how to learn something is a crucial step to any new and complicated undertaking but often gets overlooked. That’s because, as Brendon points out, everyone’s path to expertise in anything is different. It pays to listen to the advice of people you trust, as he did, but it’s just as important to listen to yourself and understand how you learn.

Brendon’s story has great advice for learning anything, but in particular, it’s packed with resources for learning Japanese. There are Mac and iOS apps, web apps, Android apps, textbooks, and more. As someone who has a kid traveling around Tokyo and Kyoto right now, I immediately sent him the link. It’s a great one to file away if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Maybe I’ll try to learn Japanese some day.”