Learning a Language in 2025 & The Problem with Textbooks

Hi there!

I'm Suikacider. I've spent the last 10 years learning languages, have passed the highest-level Japanese proficiency test, and also wrote Google's top-ranking review of Japanese textbooks. If you're here, it's probably because you came from there.

I was able to write that post because I went through a stupid amount of textbooks as a learner trying to get my foot in the door with Japanese. At least fifteen. Maybe more. I lost count. At that time in my life I lived next to a half-priced bookstore and I binged, baby. Binged.

So, what's kind of awkward about calling that blog post "the 'best' Japanese textbooks for beginners" is that I never actually found a "best" one. Many were better or worse in certain ways, and I reflected that honestly, but they all suffered from a handful of fundamental problems that were deal breakers for me.

This post is about the problems I have with textbooks as a medium, and the issues you'll need to overcome if you buy one. Alas:

What phonographs, floppy disks, and textbooks have in common

Before we get too far along, take a second and look at this thing for me:

This is a (modern) phonograph.

When it was originally invented in 1877, it was monumental. Earth-shattering, if you ask me. It took music from being something you could only hear in a concert hall and turned it into something you could just casually flip on when you got home from work in the evening.

Nobody uses them anymore because an iPhone fits in your pocket and does much more than play music.

Here's another technological revolution.

Floppy disks made it possible for individuals to save files, install software, and move data between computers. They boasted anywhere from a whopping 100 kilobytes of storage space to 1.44 megabytes, and computing as we know it wouldn't exist without them.

Nobody needs floppy disks anymore now that the cheapest iPhone comes with 64 gigabytes of storage space and does much more than store information.

And now I want to talk about textbooks.

It's hard to put into words what a quantum leap textbooks must have represented for education, way back when.

Like—think about it. You know Tchaikovsky? He wrote a textbook about music. You can read it for free. It gives you direct access to the thoughts of one of the greatest musicians in history... despite the fact that he's no longer alive, and despite the fact that you couldn't afford to have him tutor you even if he was.

That's mind boggling.

But now I have a question for you:

If phonographs gave way to mp3 players and floppy disks gave way to CDs and now everybody just uses iPhones...

Why do we still see textbooks as the go-to way to learn a language?

Why textbooks should go the way of the phonograph and floppy disk

So, obviously, I'm not saying that textbooks suck.

Textbooks are a freaking incredible piece of technology.

They're just... well... a little outdated. A stepping stone that, for some reason, we decided not to move beyond.

I think it's time to take that step.

So does Bill Gates:

I read more than my share of textbooks. But it’s a pretty limited way to learn something. Even the best text can’t figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with. It certainly can’t tell your teacher how well you grasped last night’s assigned reading.

This random guy from YouTube is ready to move on, too:

Even teachers and professors talk about how to teach despite textbooks.

So, anyway—this isn't a fringe opinion or some marketing conspiracy.

Textbooks have some pretty obvious limitations.

The thing is, given the technology we have today, I don't think we should tolerate those limitations.

To give a few examples:

1. They're structured... but probably not with your needs in mind

Here's the vocabulary taught in the first chapter of Genki I. Skim through it. As you do so, think about who these words would be useful for:

What jumps out to me are things like:

It's obvious that the vocabulary words you see here were picked solely because they seemed like they might be useful for students studying Japanese in a university classroom.

What's crazy about this is that there should be no doubt about which words a beginner should learn. Literally heaps of data about how often Japanese words do and don't get used is publicly available. For example, here's a list of over 100,000 Japanese words organized by how commonly they show up in Netflix subtitles.

Behold:

If you start from the top, you'll need to scroll through over 27,000 words before you get to 人類学 (jinruigaku, "anthropology"). It's just patently absurd to teach this word to a beginner. To put how ridiculous it is into perspective—to follow 80% of Netflix, you only need to know the most common 1,442 Japanese vocabulary words. Why the hell does Genki teach you anthropology instead of one of those objectively useful words?

I can't help but feel that a big part of the reason people think languages are hard to learn is that most textbooks and traditional resources are terribly organized.

It's 2025, man.

At Migaku, we believe that if learners put their time, money, and trust into the resource they end up buying, they should be able to trust that their efforts will be put to good use.

As such, we designed the Migaku Japanese Academy around teaching you the hyper-common ~1,700 words that data says you need to know to begin consuming Japanese media.

Problem 1

Textbooks contain what a professor or some educational body thinks a typical student ought to learn. These things may not overlap with the things you need to learn in order to do the things you want to do in Japanese.

2. They're made of paper, and there's only so much you can do with paper

Nobody expects a jumpscare in a blog post, but I've got something terrifying to show you:

See that?

Humans forget.

Constantly.

It doesn't matter how smart, motivated, or dedicated you are.

Within just hours of learning something, you're going to forget a massive chunk of it. Thankfully, this curse of forgetting has an easy cure: review. If you make a point to review the things you learn periodically, you'll eventually root them in your long-term memory.

The below chart blew my mind when I first saw it in my third year of college:

We've known this since the late 1800s.

Unfortunately, textbooks don't prompt you to practice good memory hygiene. They drop a massive list of vocabulary words on you (such as the one in the above section) or a dense grammatical explanation (such as the one in the next section) and say figure it by the quiz next Tuesday, bro.

Now, I'm an ex-teacher. Let me tell you: if that's how I approached my lessons, I'd be choosing to fail my students. I'd be rightfully accused of negligence.

The thing is, a textbook is just a few hundred sheets of paper bound together. It can't build a review plan for you.

The fact that you need one does not change.

Which again leads me to say:

It's 2025, man.

While sheets of paper can't curate a personalized review schedule for you, this is trivial work for an algorithm.

Migaku will keep track of every single word you learn and how well you remember them. We'll periodically nudge you to review each one. You'll spend more time reviewing the stuff you struggle with and less time reviewing the stuff you've got down.

Put differently: All you have to do to learn Japanese with Migaku is open the app each day and click study. We'll handle the rest.

Problem 2

Textbooks give you a list of stuff and say figure this out somehow . A lot of learners never do. Textbooks can organize information, but they can't learn or remember it for you.

3. They assume you have a teacher to make sense of things for you

Here's the beginning of the third chapter of Genki:

That right there is a bona fide wall of text. It drops terms like:

And they aren't expecting your average Angus to know what all that stuff means. They've crammed it all into two pages because they're expecting you have a teacher who will break it down into digestible chunks and guide you through it.

This assumption is made more obvious in the workbook, shown below:

The workbook is separate purchase from the textbook... and it doesn't contain an answer key. Why? Because Genki expects that you have a teacher who will check your homework and tell you if you're doing things right or not.

I'm being facetious, but come on: Our explanations may not make sense to our target audience, and they have no way to check their understanding... but that's OK. Somebody will explain our explanations for us.

It's just a terrible design decision. As educators, we can and should do better.

It's 2025, man.

Here's our promise: You'll be able to succeed with the Migaku Japanese Academy even if you're a total beginner, learning by yourself, and know literally nothing about linguistics or learning psychology.

To make sure we live up to that expectation, we open ourselves to criticism in our Discord community. Anyone going through our courses can leave public feedback. We take that criticism, confusion, and praise to heart... and we're better for it.

Our explanations make sense because they've been stress tested by thousands of learners—not a roomful of people with PhDs who have forgotten what makes Japanese confusing.

Problem 3

Textbook explanations are often dense and unintuitive. At best, they're designed to be unpacked and broken down by an expert, not to be intuitive to a beginner. At worst, they were published without being tested on beginners at all.

4. ... They're boring

I've included several screenshots from Genki. Here's one more:

They're black, white, and bland.

And of course they are.

Genki is a textbook. Textbooks aren't fun. Nobody learns Japanese because they're itching to get their hands on Genki. They put up with Genki because they hope it'll enable them to do fun things in Japanese later on.

But, again, I just can't help feeling like:

It's 2025, man!

And, sure. Sure. I get it. The primary goal of any learning activity isn't to entertain, so it's never going to be as fun as watching a movie or playing a video game.

But that doesn't mean that the learning process needs to suck.

Case and point:

It's not that difficult to make the learning process just a little more enjoyable.

All of us here at Migaku are normal people who happen to be successful language learners, not professors. As normal people, we appreciate that fun is good. It makes it easier to remember stuff, and it makes it easier to keep consistent.

To us, in addition to being effective, a good resource should make you smile once in a while, too.

Problem 4

Textbooks don't make you excited to wake up and spend time with Japanese. They make learning Japanese feel like work.

5. They don't actually prepare you for real Japanese media

Part of the reason I'm so bitter about this is that I did well in school. I liked learning, I got A's, and I saw homework as being something like my moral obligation as a student. I went every extra mile that my teachers put in front of me.

I tested out of a class or two, so when I finished the last CoM book in what was the fourth semester of Japanese studies for me, I was actually preparing to go into a seventh-semester Japanese class.

So, anyway—I did what I was supposed to do as a student.

If textbooks were going to work for somebody, they would have worked for me.

It was about that time that I decided to try reading a book in Japanese. I picked a collection of short stories aimed at young adults—Zoo 1 by Otsuichi.

Guess what?

I didn't understand a freaking thing.

Ok, that's somewhat hyperbolic, but:

I'd reached the end of my "formal" Japanese education, but I still couldn't do anything I wanted to do in Japanese.

One last time:

It's 2025, man.

The entire next section is a follow up to this point, so, real quick:

Problem 5

Textbooks give you information, but don't prepare you to use that information to do meaningful things in Japanese.

How I eventually "actually" learned Japanese

Three sentence recap in case you skipped to this section:

And that hit me pretty hard. I love reading, and I was apparently going to go home after two years unable to read a book for young adults in Japanese. I felt like I had completely wasted my time.

I confided in a friend, who was better at Japanese than me, and he gave me what ended up being life-changing advice:

"The library has a book called Read Real Japanese. Go check it out. It's great."

They actually had two.

They look like this:

And I still love these books, man.

The essays book contains a collection of essays, and the fiction book contains several short stories. They're not boring graded readers: they're a compilation of stories and essays written by prominent Japanese authors, for Japanese people, and selected because of their accessibility.

But they had a few features that were way ahead of their time for 2008. Just take a look:

I still remember finishing the first short story. It was a fireworks moment. The furigana made it easy to look up new words, and the grammar dictionary in particular was great. It introduced me to many "literary" grammar points I wasn't familiar with, and it contrasted similar grammar points as they came up.

It turned out that, with a bit of support, I actually could read cool stuff in Japanese

By the time I finished these two books, I'd built my confidence back up, and I was ready to try Otsuichi again.

I bought three books, actually:

... and it wasn't actually that much easier, but now having gone through several Japanese stories and seeing that I could do it, I decided to keep at it.

When I restarted Zoo 1, I was moving along at the blazing speed of about half an hour per page. My mobile dictionary didn't have a "scribble the kanji and we'll guess what you mean" feature, so I had to look up characters I didn't know the "traditional" way—I'd select "search by radical", enter one component at a time, hope it was the kanji's radical (main component), and then scroll until I found it or gave up. If I didn't know at least one way to pronounce a character (thus enabling me to type it), it'd take a solid minute to look it up—and many Japanese words contain 2+ kanji. It was as tiring and miserable as it sounds.

But as I read more, three important things happened:

By the time I finished 暗黒あんこく 童話どうわ my average reading speed had improved to "just" several minutes per page, and I went on to improve that by choosing not to read books if the first 10 pages contained an average of more than 4 unknown words per page.

... and then I just kept reading.

I bought a better dictionary and developed a system: if I looked up a word and found it useful, I would handwrite it and its definition in the margin of the book. After finishing the book, I'd skim through the pages one more time. If I had forgotten the word in the course of reading the book, and I still thought it was useful, I'd make a simple Anki flashcard out of it: Japanese word on the front, example sentence and Japanese definition on the back.

I read everything by Otsuichi, and then I read pretty much everything Murakami Haruki wrote, and then I went on to read about 100 novels and light novels.

Pro Tip

When you're just starting out, stick within a single genre or even author. You'll get used to the genre's key terminology and the author's style, and your life will become much easier.

I went on to pass the JLPT N1, the highest level of the Japanese Proficiency Test, about six years later (~eight years into my Japanese learning journey).

I could (should) have done that faster, but a few things held me back:

And that brings us to what you're really here for:

How I recommend you learn Japanese

On the off chance you just skipped right to this section, there have been three main takeaways so far:

And that sucked, but it makes sense in hindsight.

Textbooks are written to help millions of people get started with Japanese as reliably as possible, not to help one specific person start consuming specific types of Japanese content as effectively as possible.

Put differently: a pair of shoes designed to fit everyone is going to comfortably fit no one.

So, if there's something specific you want to do in Japanese, and you don't want to waste years of your life getting there, then I have two specific pieces of advice for you:

And now let's take a closer look at each of those things.

Step 1: Crash through a course that teaches you the basics of Japanese

Migaku has been built expressly for this purpose, but:

Learn hiragana and katakana

If you're a complete beginner, start off by doing the Migaku Japanese Fundamentals course. It covers everything you need to reliably read and correctly pronounce both hiragana and katakana.

It'll take about an hour per day (~23 flashcards per day), but you can actually finish this course during your 10-day free trial of Migaku.

Learn high-frequency Japanese vocabulary words and grammar points

Next, work through our Migaku Japanese Academy 1 course. This spoonfeeds you the ~1,700 common vocabulary words you need to follow 80% of the subtitles on Netflix and the ~400 grammar points you need to string those words together.

The course can be done entirely via your phone, and is organized in an A:B format:

To ensure you actually remember those words, sentences, and grammar points, Migaku will build a personalized review schedule for you. You can read about how we do that here, but the basic idea is that (a) we'll periodically ask you to review the things you learn and (b) we'll arrange these sessions so more of your practice time goes to things you struggle with and less is wasted on things you know well.

If you learn 10 new words per day (~30 minute time commitment), this step will take you just about 6 months. It took me four semesters at a university in Japan.

Step 2: If you like to read, start reading stuff!

I know that not everybody is a bookworm, so I'll keep this short and sweet.

Basically, just boot up a webpage you're interested in reading:

Alternatively, you can use an OCR software (instructions here) to scan manga online or on your computer. Migaku will automatically detect that your system clipboard has been updated and paste its contents into the Migaku Clipboard, enabling you to read manga via Migaku:

You can do the same thing with an e-reader application like Kindle to transfer the content of an ebook page into Migaku. This takes half a second or so per page. if you click the big orange button in the bottom-right corner of the screen, Migaku will use a human-like text-to-speech service to narrate your text to you:

You can even use our mobile app to take a picture of a physical book (or menu, or sign, etc) and then read it with Migaku:

... and then just read stuff!

It's hard to put into words how much of an improvement this represents for readers.

Whereas I had to spend a solid minute looking up each word I didn't know manually, you can just click on it and get your answer within a second.

Back up in the "how I learned Japanese section" I said that the Read Real Japanese books were worth their weight in gold. Well, Migaku lets you turn every single book—physical or digital—into a Read Real Japanese style resource... but one that you have complete control over. It's incredible, frankly.

With Migaku, you can start reading real Japanese books and manga even if you're a a beginner who only knows several hundred basic words. That's how powerful it is.

Step 2: Or, if you want to watch watch TV/drama/anime/etc, start watching stuff!

If you're more of a watcher than a reader, you're in luck: Migaku extends the exact same capabilities we talked about above to the subtitles of shows from places like YouTube and Netflix.

So, boot up a YouTube video you want to watch on your phone:

Our Chrome extension is even more powerful, giving you a significant amount of control over your subtitles. Here, the YouTube video I wanted to watch didn't have subtitles, so Migaku generated them.

Then, I'm currently working on my listening comprehension, so I've set my subtitles to "recall" mode—subtitles are hidden while the video is playing, but the video pauses after each line of dialogue and displays the subtitles. This enables me to get immediate feedback on whether I heard the dialogue correctly or not, and to check anything I didn't hear clearly.

We also let you display two sets of subtitles at once. Below, I've configured Netflix so that Japanese subtitles are always displayed... but then, if a line of dialogue contains a word I don't know, to also show English subtitles.

Again, it's hard to put how convenient this is into words. The ability to click on words in subtitles and immediately see what they mean makes video content much more accessible—so accessible, in fact, that you can start watching and understanding Japanese content even as a beginner.

(As an aside, we've actually got an entire blog post on how to learn Japanese with Netflix.)

Step 3: Make flashcards out of the useful words you encounter while watching or reading

The ability to immediately look up unknown words is convenient, but, ideally, you want to go further than that: you want to reach a point where you don't need to look up words anymore.

This means that you need to be learning vocabulary words... and that means that you need to be doing flashcards. Here's why and how.

Anyway—Migaku makes this really simple. Say that you're watching Violet Evergarden on Netflix and stumbled into a word you don't know:

If you click that orange button in the top-right corner of the dictionary entry, the word you've looked up will be sent to Migaku's Card Creator:

We automatically fetch a variety of data, such as a snippet of the audio for your line of dialogue, and send this to the card creator. You can manually tweak things to your liking—or you can pre-configure which information Migaku should take, then entirely skip this step.

The result is a flashcard like this, which can be reviewed on desktop or on our mobile apps:

As mentioned earlier, Migaku is actually a spaced repetition system. You can read about how it works here, but the basic idea is that we will periodically ask you to review flashcards you create, and the amount of time you go between reviews will gradually get larger. These intervals are calculated separately for each card, creating a filtering process in which you review difficult things more often and easy things less often.

Skipping the complex discussion—this basically means that Migaku will schedule a few new things for you to learn and several old things for you to review each day. So long as you stay consistent, everything that makes its way into Migaku Memory will also make its way into your long-term memory.

It's 2025, man. The next quantum leap in language learning is here.

While learning Japanese isn't easy, the whole process is actually very simple:

If you consume Japanese media you enjoy, and you understand the sentences and messages within that media, you will make progress. Period.

Migaku makes this process super streamlined.

It's kinda beautiful.

And that's why I can't recommend Genki, Minna no Nihongo, or any other textbook in good faith.

The future is here.

You've stuck with me for like 5,000 words at this point, and Migaku is totally free for ten days... so go ahead and click that button. You don't need to give us your credit card information or anything like that. Just download the app, boot up a show on YouTube or Netflix, and see how much Japanese you can understand with a bit of support.

The only possibilities are that nothing happens... or your life changes.

Personally, we're pretty confident that your life will be changed.