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Keep a Schedule in Japan

Maddie, a Canadian living in Japan, treats beginner Japanese as another thing to make: writing systems, books, then a protected slot on the calendar.

An editorial illustration of a small apartment desk in Japan with a textbook, kanji cards, and a wall calendar.

Maddie is a Canadian living in Japan who loves to draw and make things. Her channel is for hobbies: DIYs, drawing challenges, anime, café reviews, travel. Japanese study shows up in it after the move to Japan; it is not the channel's main topic.

The video for this series is *How To Start Learning Japanese For Beginners | Self Study Resources*. Viewers have asked how she learned, how to study, and where to start for fluency, or for manga and anime. She answers by listing the resources she says she used. Affiliate links are disclosed, and she presents them as tools she used, not as a sponsored package.

The video is chaptered: writing systems; vocabulary and grammar; listening and speaking; reading; keep a schedule.

She starts with the writing systems. This chapter is the longest of the early ones, from about a minute in to nearly six minutes, covering hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The timestamps put about five minutes on the scripts before the later tools. Anime and cafés do not bypass the scripts; they do not work like English spelling.

Next: vocabulary and grammar. She names JLPT N5 and N4 Tango books, Anki, Memrise, and for grammar, a list on JapaneseTest4U plus the Genki 1 textbook and workbook. She says she used them; she does not give years. Listening and speaking come later in the video; the speaking resource she lists is italki, with a native-teacher line. Reading has its own tools: Rikaikun in the browser and *Remembering the Kanji* in two volumes. The list is a self-study list, not listening only.

"Keep a schedule" is the last named how-to chapter. Maddie, who otherwise films drawing and cafés, closes the how-to on scheduling, not on talent, and not on living in Japan. She treats a regular slot as what makes the list usable.

The channel also has a video on her experience studying at a Japanese language school, so the self-study video is not her only Japanese-study record on the channel. This piece covers only the beginner self-study video.

"Many of you may be wondering how I learned," she writes. It reads as a reply to repeated questions, not as a teacher opening a course. She answers with a resource list rather than "just move to Japan": in the beginner video, living in Japan does not replace Genki.

Story details

  • Series: *multi-lingual and their ways of learning*
  • Article date: 2026-08-16
  • Keywords: language learning; multilingual learning; polyglot; self-study Japanese; kanji; language study schedule

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