Just depends on how much time and effort you put into learning, if you’re willing to study for 3 hours a day you’ll probably pick it up in a couple years, if you do 5 minutes on duolingo a day probably not going to progress very far

I have friends who learned japanese quite easily. Granted, they where living in japan so that’s way easier being deep into easy practice and daily exposure.

But grammar is quite easy, as well as phonetics (that actually depends on your mother language, for us it is at least).

Of course don’t learn the traditional symbols, or don’t learn how to write it at all, since that would be useless to your goal. If that is even possible I don’t know.

Disclaimer: I didn’t study japanese

has anyone else attempted this.

Yes. Every Western Weeb for starters.

I attempted this. I enrolled on an evening course and followed it for a year, doing all the exercises and so on. After one year, I had a rudimentary understanding of the simplest symbols (no kanji) and could do a minimal baby talk. From there, there is a lot of vocabulary. I abandoned. It’s not an easy path, but maybe missing other languages in the same family helps. For me, Japanese was my first non-European language. Fascinating but haaaaard!

No, no one has ever done this :P

Japanese can be difficult to native english speakers from what I hear but I don’t personally have experience enough with the language to tell you.

Generally I would say learning an entire language for the sake of consuming a specific media, especially a language not widely spoken outside of its country of origin, is a waste of time yes. At the very least, it is not usually motivating enough to get you to stick to learning that language long term.

However, I don’t mean to discourage you. Language learning is still fun and teaches you a lot about its culture of origin and their values. In my experience language learning apps like duolingo (especially duolingo these days) are not the way to go. Buy some textbooks, there are tons of japanese language learning youtubers who can point you to good ones, then go on some chat sites and practice what you are learning. Don’t just watch anime, listen to japanese music too, try to pick out what they are saying as you listen. Good luck 👍

It depends on your age and determination. The younger you are the less effort it will take

It’s not an easy language to master even if you lived full-time in Japan. Everything about the language is needlessly complicated. The grammar, the writing system, the social conventions that influence word choices. Anime Japanese is its own kettle of fish. Overly colloquial or stylized samurai talk - neither of which you’ll get taught in most language courses.

Now, you could be a savant who picks it up in no time. More likely you’ll be in it for a couple of weeks and give up - or life. It’s not a bad hobby. Even beyond Duolingo you’ll find plenty of resources online and lots of it free.

If you have any fluency in Chinese, Japanese will be a little easier. Language learning difficulty; https://blog.rosettastone.com/the-complete-list-of-language-difficulty-rankings/ https://www.ecinnovations.com/blog/top-10-most-difficult-languages-in-the-world/

Hi, I came the other way. Air Force baby who spent most of her younger years speaking Japanese and eventually got English happening.

So many people have asked me if they can learn Japanese, and my answer is the same: it’s a whole-ass language that takes many years to be good at, to use for communication. Most people realize they’re not going to be good at a language in three weeks and they bail.

Don’t use a language for just one thing (unless that one thing is to communicate with a society).

I committed myself to learning English because my family and I live in America now, and I needed to communicate with a society in it. (And I think my English is pretty good now but it’s not without a lot of trying, even now. I actually have to fight to maintain my Japanese, by reading books and watching movies and TV!)

I suspect this will depend somewhat on your level of knowledge in those other languages. Japanese is broadly considered a very difficult language for native English speakers, and it’s pretty substantially different in many ways from English. Learning it is indeed possible, but takes a long time and a substantial commitment of energy. However, those with a decent fluency in Chinese (I use this rather than Cantonese/Mandarin because I don’t understand the nuances well enough to speak intelligently as to their relation to Japanese-learning) or Korean (and probably many other languages) will have a much easier time with the transition compared to those with a primarily-English background. Additionally, Japanese Kanji have a relationship with Chinese characters, and so learning the Kanji is easier for one with a meaningful Chinese background who has had to learn those characters already.

For some context, one can attend Language School in Japan, which is a half-time (~20-25hr/wk) course load taught with full immersion learning. That is to say, the course is taught almost entirely in Japanese itself, but doesn’t require any knowledge of the language to participate, as you’ll work up from a near-zero understanding. In many of these classes, the first few weeks might lean a small amount on English to explain certain concepts, but the complexity of English required is very low. It takes about 2 years of these courses in order to reach a “basic” fluency. Many who take the 2-year course take the JLPT (Japanese-Language Proficiency Test) and study up for the exam can test into the N2 category, which is what you’d minimally need in order to attend school or seek a job in Japan.

Learning on your own, I’d probably say you should expect either to spend many hours a day on study, and/or to spend multiple years before you’d reach the point of being able to understand a significant amount of the anime you consume. Learning the grammar and vocabulary are one thing, but actually consuming content in the language is an important part of learning, and jumping from nothing to full-on anime is a HELL of a jump in complexity.

As to how to go about it, there are tons of excellent resources available online for paths to take. Most will point you to various textbooks to work through, which is a pretty decent strategy IMO. The Genki series is one that is often recommended for those not working from a class, since it discusses the material in English.

I went to Japan for my honeymoon and so did the obligatory ‘learn the basics’ that I try to do before any trip to a new country.

Getting to a polite level so you can order food, find a train station and so on is relatively easy - probably a week’s effort if you really go for it.

Getting to a conversational level is a whole extra jump from there, however. Definitely a bigger leap than the equivalent in Spanish, for example. Based on this, I’d think that getting to a level where you can follow native speakers doing the exaggerated anime over-acting dialogue would be a hell of a slog and a very commendable achievement.

As everyone else is saying, the written language is very hard to learn, especially if you’re new to non-Latin alphabets. Japanese has three of the damned things and they mix and match seemingly at random (to the eye of the uneducated).

Edit: forgot to say - I like Duolingo for ease of access and I also bought a little phrase book.

My opinion: if you have an interest and an excuse, go for it! Learning more is never the wrong answer.

I tried this during my weeb phase some 20 years ago.

I stumbled across a video lecture series om some torrent site, and despite being very old (from the 70s or 80s) it was actually pretty good for teaching everyday conversational japanese.

I never progressed beyond the very basics due to life happening, but it got me far enough that I could at least grasp the general topic at hand. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a decent understanding of the language if I had kept at it.

Japanese is a fairly simple language with easy grammar. From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart that knowing one probably won’t help you much with the other, although I may be mistaken.

Me and my GF are currently doing this. Some recommendations from personal experience:

• Pimsleur is really nice for getting from 0 to being able to speak and understand some amount. It’s very much less overwhelming than jumping head-first into grammar. You can find torrents for it. It’s also a really good way to learn to listen to and speak Japanese out loud, something most other resources lack.
• everyone recommends Genki, and I concurr; it’s a good book series on grammar, with plenty exercises. Will really help filling in the gaps where you have gotten a feeling for things with Pimsleur, but are not able to grasp the underlying concepts intuitively.
• don’t shy away from Hiragana and Katakana. They are easy to learn (seriously, spend an afternoon on each and then do kana.pro for a week and never look back). Ignoring this will prevent you from using most learning resources.
• use Anki; again, everyone says this, because it’s true. You can download a pre-made pack for Genki. 10-15 cards a day are a good leisurely pace, allowing you to tackle a new chapter in Genki approximately every 7-10 days.
• don’t fall in the rabbithole of watching YouTube videos on learning Japanese. Just study instead. If there’s a concrete thing you struggle with, look for a Video on that topic. Most of the geberal advice videos seem to come from English-speaking folks for whom Japanese is their first foreign language (which is great! Don’t get me wrong!), and the resulting information ranges from obvious to questionable.
• decide if you want to learn Kanji (if you don’t know them anyways, given your stated experience). I’d recommend it. It’s actually quite fun, and if you want to watch Anime in Japanese, there’s a good chance you’ll have to use Japanese subs for a while to help along anyways…
• most people online seem to suggest only learning to read Kanji, because “you never need to handwrite things today anyways”. I call bullshit. It’s marginal additional effort, can actually help you with recognition, and if you ever end up needing / wanting to write by hand, you’d have to start all over otherwise.

Lastly, no, it is not a waste of time. Apart from anime, a new language means new ways of thinking, of challenging yourself, of being able to experience people and culture through a new lense, and potentially increasing job opportunities.

Plus if you ever end up visiting Japan, it really comes in handy.

Feel free to ask any followup things that I’ve forgotten about…

Edit: I forgot to mention: I am nowhere near fluent yet, and do not claim the suggestions above as “ultimate Japanese learner advice” or anything like that.

Also, very quickly you’ll start noticing phrases, words, topics when watching anime or japanese videos or music, even if you can’t follow the full conversation. That’s what really motivated and kept me going early on.

I don’t know shit about Cantonese and the only mandarin I know is the most basic of phrases and stuff to refer to food (so essentially nothing) so I can’t speak to that

Japanese is hard, but so is any language. You get out what you put in. I wasted about a year with “studying” half assed for like 10-15 minutes a day with duolingo. It was good that I had a consistent routine but at the end of 1 year I had very little to show for my effort. Learn from my mistake.

After that I switched things up. I didn’t put in a ton more time but I changed approach. Pretty standard but boring stuff: Anki, Assimil, and some other more targeted apps later on (renshuu, Benkyō, and most recently kanji dojo have been helpful). Setting up language exchange calls via apps like hello talk and discord have been far more helpful as things have progressed. This is more of a significant time investment and requires me to teach English a bit but I am happy to do it for free Japanese instruction. Joining group chats on line, watching YouTubers and vtubers, anime and dramas, etc also is helpful but the hard part was determining when to make the jump to not use subtitles and finding content that was digestible at my level. I’m not the kind of weeb that watches precure and little kid shows but for a minute I did just to watch stuff without subs. It sucked.

After about 5 years I got decent enough to have solid conversations via phone and text. Then DeepL came out and made it all pointless haha

No one actually provided good immersion material Check iroironanihongo on Youtube.

Check specifically for the playlist named: [BEGINNER] いろいろなアニメ