Avoiding misdirections in Japanese learning

Note: this page reflects its author's opinion. Although it is a relatively popular one, the arguments made count more than the conclusions.
For example, Read The Kanji takes a different approach, adequate for people who want to track their progress with metrics.

Pitfall 1: Learning all the kanji first

Many languages use a pretty limited set of squiggles for writing. Japanese uses quite an extensive one!

Japanese actually has two sets of squiggles:

A double set of ≈46+46 syllables: the hiragana and the katakana.
If you frowned on “double”, just remember that this text you are reading right now uses a double set of 26+26 letters: the lowercase and the capital letters.
Characters imported from China, and customised in places: the kanji.

In writing, Japanese uses a mix of both. Hiragana get used notably in word endings for conjugation, and for connector words, while kanji are very often used for word roots.

This takes us to the point: when starting with Japanese, learning the few dozen characters of the syllabary is useful, but consider not putting all the kanji in the same category. The closest thing in English would probably be morphemes in etymology. Here's an example:

Omniscient is composed of omni (Latin for “all”), and scient (from “scientia”, Latin for “knowledge”). The word is declined as an adjective.
Japanese uses the exact same etymology in 全知.

You can consider “learning all kanji” in Japanese as the equivalent to “learning all morphemes” in English.
You commonly study the etymology of words you come to know of, not the other way around.
Likewise, you should probably consider studying the kanji of words you come to know of, and not the other way around.

So when you read that the average high-schooler should recognize 2136 kanji, and that some literate people can read more than 3000… don't panic.
You probably know more than 25000 English words yourself, comprising thousands of morphemes!

Bonus: Interesting side-effect: Japanese does not require explicit conversion of morphemes to sound to be able to write them. For instance, 経緯 could be pronounced いきさつ or けいい, but it's not really important that the word has two readings. It can be read and understood without needing to pick a pronunciation for it.

Pitfall 1 reversed: I don't need to learn Japanese writing, I can just use rōmaji!

If you read the previous paragraph, which I encourage you to do, you already know that kanji can often be mapped to the morphemes forming the words.

Add to this that Japanese does not have many possible sounds. This has the consequence that there are many, many, many “homophones”: words that mean completely different things, but that you write the same way when using a phonetic writing method.

At first you don't know too many words, so it remains manageable.
But as your vocabulary grows, you'll experience more and more difficulty in distinguishing homophones, especially among the 漢語.
This particular category of words will make your learning a living hell if you base yourself on a phonetic writing method such as rōmaji.
As an example, しょうじょう, which you can write as shoujou or shōjō depending on your romanization scheme, can be one of the following (list not exhaustive):

症状, symptoms
清浄, pure/purity
猩々, orangutang
召状, letter of invitation
商状, market conditions
霄壌, heaven and earth

Let's make this clear: with rōmaji and kango, you're screwed for good.

Next, you need to know that in speaking, two homophones can often be distinguished by the pitch accent that Japanese has.
This means that rōmaji, unless you add pitch accent markers on it, does not actually represent spoken Japanese accurately.
Be my guest and write 帰る “↑ka↓eru” and 蛙 “ka↑eru”, but that implies you know which writing is implied behind that… why not just learn the actual writing?

Last nail in the coffin: pitch accent for various words differs depending on the province in Japan. So you'd have to specify for which province you're writing your rōmaji.

Rōmaji are a crutch; their use cases are to bootstrap learning kana, and with a ワープロ scheme for your IME.
The actual Japanese writing (including kanji), actually makes comprehension easier, not harder.
Like 125 million Japanese people, you should aim to read Japanese in the form it's normally written.

Pitfall 2: Flash cards are the Holy Grail

To begin with, a spaced repetition learning system will not teach you Japanese on its own.
A SRS is a tool which, like any tool, has specific use cases in which it excels.

SRS are the perfect fit for e.g.:

Cramming vocabulary lists for your upcoming vocabulary exam
Rehearsing fill-in-the-blanks tests

However, if you try to learn Japanese from vocabulary flash cards alone, you will likely find yourself short of:

An understanding and feeling of the appropriate context(s) where a word can be used, and with which implications and nuances
Content for your flash cards, with all the explanations to try to make up for everything you're missing

Reading a book or a manga can prove more beneficial for intermediate learners, since those develop topics over entire chapters. Authors get the occasion to use a broad range of words and expressions relevant to a topic, which is a good occasion to acquire some fluency in it, and perhaps make your own flash cards, based on your discoveries. It will work when it's done in this order.

Pitfall 3: With this method, I can learn Japanese in three months!

Many have tried, but trying to cut corners simply won't get you there.

This is not an ode to discouragement, but rather a warning that you probably shouldn't take up Japanese studies if you count on being done with it any time soon.
If you enjoy studying, or rather, discovering Japanese, rejoice: you have many years of daily discoveries ahead!

To give more concrete numbers, unless talking about Daniel Tammet, it is generally observed that people who get seriously interested in Japanese material start to be able to e.g. read their manga properly in 5 years' time, give or take a few.

If you're going to ask why, here is an attempt to describe rational reasons for this:

Though Japanese has a simple structure (see pitfall 5), its idioms cannot be tackled with rules, lest they be plagued with an endless string of exceptions.
You will be better off getting acquainted with speech/sentence patterns and their meanings. It's lots of fun, but of course it takes time.
Producing English calques of Japanese sentences, even as a crutch, will often cause more confusion than understanding.
You will have to wrap your head not only around new words, but also around new types of words, which have no English equivalent.
Most often, the natural way to word something in English and Japanese will differ greatly.
If you are currently using English for thinking, you will be faced with a challenge: separating your wording ability from your language ability.
This is crucial to be able to come off as natural one day.

Pitfall 4: I will learn vocabulary, then kanji, then grammar

Although some hints are sprinkled over the previous paragraph, debunking this one cannot hurt.

In Japanese, everything is linked, so you cannot decide of an order to take things in.

In some cases, the only way to tell how to read a word is to deduce that information from context, after you have understood the grammar of the sentence around it.
A good example of this is 開く, which can be read ひらく or あく depending on what sort of motion we appear to be talking about.
As a rule of thumb, it will be the former if the motion can be described as spreading, such as that of a hand or flower. The latter will apply for openings that create a gap, like sliding doors, but these can also ひらく.
It can get tricky; honing your intuition on examples will be the only way to tell in certain cases.

Trying to cut up the “problem” in arbitrary ways would only result in additional difficulty.

Experience showed that the easiest way to go about understanding Japanese is to study all aspects of the sentences you examine, one at a time.
If you approach it that way, you will make the most out of your material from the very start.

Pitfall 5: Let's use Occidental textbooks for grammar

Here's bad news. Occidental textbooks (guidetojapanese.org, genki, minna no nihongo and so many others) attempt to describe Japanese with a grammar that is only a good fit for European languages.

Nice! Reusing our existing knowledge to save time?
Well, the reuse of your preexisting knowledge is really the only appeal of this overwhelmingly widespread approach.
It is so widespread in fact, that hardly anyone imagines an alternative could exist, like… using a Japanese grammar to study Japanese, maybe?

The Occidental approach kind of works at first, but puts you in a dead end.
You then have to extricate yourself from it through immersion to make any further progress. Many people give up before that.
The issue here, is that European grammar does not fit the Japanese language well, and will leave many questions unanswered. It will even leave you clueless facing certain sentences, as it didn't provide the tools to parse them.

Example: the crucial が particle, which is often portrayed as a "subject" particle.
But Japanese grammar has no notion of a subject, despite Meiji period scholars wanting it to have one, to rival English: how could Japanese lack a feature English has? Preposterous!

Indeed it can indicate the actor of an action, but the main keys to cracking it are:

For the rough baseline, が is a suffix for the core of the information you're delivering. E.g. who will be doing something: that's where the pretense of a "subject particle" comes from, but it's rather that without naming the person, the sentence is useless.
While at it, let's mention は recalls something we already know about: it specifies what we're talking about, also contrasting with what we're not talking about.
You might have read "ga emphasises what comes before it, and wa emphasises what comes after it", but that's an incomplete description.
For parsing the structure of complex sentences, you have to know that が used to be (and still fundamentally is) the pure possessive in Japanese.
One such example is 秋葉原 in Tokyo, which used to be 秋葉ヶ原, where this little ヶ is actually a が. The best way to think of this if you are a beginner, is to just replace it with の, which is the genitive in Japanese (a much broader concept than possessive): 秋葉ヶ原 is the "field of autumn leaves".
の can actually do more (nominalizer), but most often matches "of" in English, as in "a table of wood", "the dog of John", and so on. But enough digressing.
To see が as a possessive also helps get away from considering it a "subject particle": you can think of it as designating the owner of an action, though that's a narrow view.

What do, then?

Okay, so textbooks are all wrong, trying to use European grammar concepts on Japanese. So what can we do?
Well, there's someone called Cure Dolly who, setting aside her debatable graphic design and bad voice filter (thankfully there are subtitles), gets this straight.
If you're not completely unfamiliar with Japanese, check these out:

This method has also now acquired comprehensive resources:

A playlist, Japanese from scratch: the game-changing course in organic Japanese and their transcript on Google Docs
A fan-made textbook from the videos, snapshotted here as a PDF, and getting touchups on Google Docs

Resources that don't have good grammar models and theory remain excellent sources for the meaning and usage of words and expressions.
Just don't pay attention to their explanation of grammar when using them:

Tae Kim's guide to learning Japanese, for its examples of how to express things in Japanese;
IMABI for even more in-depth studies on examples. (the title is an intentionally worng reading of 今日)

Initially written 2017-08-19 - this content is in the public domain.