How to Self-Study the Genki Textbooks

1. Vocabulary

When encountering vocabulary in Genki, you should do the following:

1. Read through the vocabulary used in the current lesson
   • If there is audio, read through the vocabulary while listening to the audio
2. Quiz yourself on the vocabulary

Each Genki lesson begins with a dialogue. But before you try to read and listen to the dialogue, it’s beneficial to read through and review all the vocabulary that the lesson will use. You’ll find the listing of the chapter’s vocabulary directly after the dialogue section:

Go through this vocabulary while playing the audio. This will often be your first exposure to these words, and the goal of this initial read-through is to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary.

After your read-through, quick yourself on the vocab. The best way to do this is with the review tools on Seth Clydesdale’s website. I recommend using the drag-and-drop mode for vocabulary review, which will only end once you drag all of the correct English definitions to the correct vocabulary words.

Take your time and don’t worry about your grade—if you complete each of the vocabulary exercises, you’ve done all the review you need at this point. You’ll review this vocabulary plenty of times just by working through the lesson exercises and the dialogue.

If there is additional vocabulary, after you complete your quizzes on the main vocabulary, move to this section. Review and quiz yourself on the additional vocabulary the same way you did with the main vocabulary section.

You will also encounter vocabulary introduced before certain textbook exercises. You’ll know you have hit a new set of vocabulary because you’ll find words grouped inside a box right after the section break for the exercise.

When you encounter these additional vocabulary sections, read through the vocabulary and quiz yourself on it before attempting the textbook exercise.

If audio is not available for the additional vocabulary section, just read through the vocabulary before quizzing yourself. You’ll know if audio is not available when there is only 1 audio file provided for the exercise.

This exercise has audio for the vocabulary because it has 2 audio files:

But this exercise only has 1 audio file for the exercise:

2. Dialogue

When encountering dialogue in Genki, you should do the following:

1. Read the dialogue. Do NOT reference English translation.
2. Read the dialogue again, but this time while listening to the audio file.
3. Check the English translation.

Each lesson in Genki begins with a dialogue:

Your goal with the dialogue section is to get familiar with the new grammar you’ll be learning before it is explained to you. By struggling to understand the dialogue, you will get 2 benefits:

1. When the grammar is formally introduced to you, you’ll be learning about something you’ve already encountered. This means you can focus entirely on how it works instead of having to first learn that this grammar construct even exists and what it can be used for. This will make the grammar easier to grasp and retain.
2. Struggling to understand something before it is taught to you will help you gain confidence in your ability to figure things out just by looking up what you don’t know. Building this skill and mindset will pay dividends when you start reading manga, because so much will initially be unknown to you.

When you first go through the dialogue, your goal is to try and understand what each sentence is saying. This means you’ll need to look up every word you don’t know.

This is why you should work through the lesson’s vocabulary before attempting the dialogue. Because the dialogue will introduce both new grammar and new vocabulary, familiarity with the vocabulary will make this part easier and allow you to focus on the grammar. It will also be a useful first review of the vocabulary you just practiced.

To get the most out of the dialogue, first try to understand the sentences just by reading. Take your time and look up what you don’t know, going sentence by sentence. After you’ve read through each sentence and looked up all the words you don’t know, go through the dialogue again from the top, but this time have the audio playing.

The audio will help you in a couple of ways: First, audio adds context, helping you understand from tone when something is a question, and the kind of emotion behind the response. Second, audio will correct any errors you made while reading. And finally, audio will help you see the dialogue as a whole, not just disconnected sentences. This will help you better intuit how the grammar is functioning.

Only after you have gone through the audio should you go read the English translation. Take time to review the translation for the parts of the dialogue you didn’t get. If these points relate to grammar you haven’t learned yet, don’t worry about it—you’ll get a deeper explanation soon. But if a point you struggled with only involves grammar you previously learned, make sure you understand the point before moving on.

3. Grammar Introduction – Video

Before you work learn grammar points in the Genki textbook, it’s best to have someone else explain the grammar to you. Normally you would rely on your Japanese teacher to go through the grammar points in class. But with the internet, the next best thing is YouTube.

In particular, Tokini Andy has created high-quality videos that go through the grammar taught in each Genki lesson.

I recommend going through each Tokini Andy video without stopping on your first pass. If any parts of the video confused you, review them again. And if you still don’t get them, don’t worry. Working through the grammar in the textbook will help you get it.

4. Grammar Introduction – Text

Once you’ve gone through the video explanation of the Lesson’s grammar, it’s time to read through the grammar explanation in Genki. Grammar explanations use a combination of Japanese example sentences and commentary in English.

Take your time with these explanations and make sure you understand the examples before moving on. This means you may need to look up vocabulary words you’ve forgotten.

But don’t be too focused on trying to memorize the grammar points. You’ll be reinforcing the grammar with textbook and workbook exercises. And if you forget the grammar point, just go back to this section and review.

The grammar introduction often contains some extra information labeled as “Expression Notes” or “Culture Notes.”

You should read through these sections and do the associated exercises on Seth Clydesdale’s website, if available.

5. Grammar Practice – Textbook

Once you have been introduced to the Lesson’s grammar, now it’s time to start trying to put it into practice. You’ll start with the textbook’s practices section, which involves a variety of exercises. Most of the exercises can be completed as independent study, and you should go through each that can. For instance, here is the first textbook grammar practice for Lesson 1:

While traditionally you would have had to try these practice exercises out by hand and then reference the Answer Key to figure out if you got it right, today you can use the wonderful website Seth Clydesdale has put together to both practice and check each textbook grammar lesson.

I recommend using the multiple choice option for each practice, as this will require you to read more, which is the skill you need to develop the most for reading manga. You’ll see the option each time you try to launch an exercise.

If tables are involved, these are reproduced in the online exercises, which means you will not need to reference the textbook to complete the exercises. This is extremely convenient, especially considering most of these exercises can be done on your phone when you find yourself with just a few minutes of break

After you complete each exercise, you’ll immediately see the answers you got right or wrong.

Don’t worry if you get answers wrong—again, this isn’t school, and your goal is not to get a perfect score on every quiz. Your goal is to make sure you understand what you are learning. This means you should take the time to understand why you got each wrong answer before moving on. And if that means you should reference the grammar explanations from the textbook or the Tokini Andy video as needed.

Once you complete an exercise, you should listen to the audio for that corresponding exercise if available. You’ll know if audio is available because of the small audio icon.

These audio files go through the exercise and give you a moment’s pause to figure out the answer. Your goal is to anticipate what the speaker will be saying before the answer is given. This will help reinforce what you practiced, and also help correct any reading errors you may have made (the kana can be tricky early on!).

You will then repeat this approach for the rest of the textbook grammar section: doing the online practice exercise, then reviewing with the audio.

However, some of the textbook exercises are NOT well suited to independent self-study. These are frequently the grammar exercises listed as “pair work” or “group work.”

You will skip these exercises whenever you encounter these sections. If you want extra reading practice, go ahead and read the Japanese in these sections, but don’t spend more time on them than that.

If you are concerned that skipping these exercises means you are not going to get the material down as you would in a true classroom environment, don’t worry. Even in college, no teacher goes through every single exercise for every single lesson. In fact, you may be doing even more exercises than a college class would require!

The way to figure out whether you need to skip an exercise or not it by checking Seth Clydesdale’s website for a corresponding exercise. If there is no practice exercise on his website, then you should skip it.

6. Grammar Practice – Workbook

The grammar practice exercises in the Genki workbooks are very similar to the textbook practice exercises. The main difference is that there are no class or group activities. This means you can just go through each of the practice exercises on Seth Clydesdale’s site, because each practice exercise is designed for self-study.

Because Seth’s site covers all the exercises, this means that you don’t need to have the Genki workbook at all. Just go through the exercises online and you are good.

The only major difference is that many of the workbook exercises require you to input Japanese instead of multiple-choice or drag-and-drop options.

Helpfully, Seth has a link to help you type in Japanese if you are using a keyboard.

But if you are doing these exercises on your phone, you’ll need to set up kana input. Here is a guide on how to set up the Japanese kana input on your iPhone.

The iPhone also provides an option for romaji input. Romaji input may be easier to start with, but I recommend getting used to kana input as this will be faster and pay dividends in the long run. So don’t add the romaji keyboard!

7. Reading and Writing Practice – Textbook

Each lesson in Genki includes reading and writing practice. Because reading is the skill you are trying to develop, you will be doing all of the reading exercises. Fortunately, you can rely on Seth Clydesdale’s website entirely for this, because reading is a self-study activity.

Each reading exercise involves a passage and questions that test your reading comprehension.

Initially, these passages will start with the kana, but as you progress through Genki the reading exercises will include kanji. Words that use kanji will always include furigana—hiragana that tells you how to pronounce the word.

Be sure to look up any words you don’t know, and reference the grammar lessons as needed to try and understand the sentence. If you get really stuck, you can always copy a sentence and paste in Google Translate. But only do this as a last resort after you have tried struggling with the sentences. For vocab though, don’t worry about looking things up—your goal is to understand how to read Japanese sentences, not memorize words.

Genki also includes writing practice in each lesson. Lesson 1 reviews hiragana, and Lesson 2 reviews katakana.

You should do these exercises, as reinforcing your kana knowledge is helpful at this early stage.

But after the first two lessons in Genki I, writing practice is focused on learning kanji. I do not recommend using Genki to learn kanji, so you will be skipping textbook writing practice by Lesson 3. If you’re really set on learning kanji, please check out Step 3.

8. Reading and Writing Practice – Workbook

Calling these workbook section exercises “Reading and Writing Practice” is a bit of a misnomer—the only practice here is writing. Generally, the exercises follow the same format: practice writing kanji, then practice recalling which kanji to use for certain words.

Kanji Writing Practice

Practice Using Kanji

Again, I do not recommend using Genki to learn kanji, so you will be skipping workbook writing practice in general. If you’re really set on learning kanji, please check out Step 3.

That said, the first 2 chapters of Genki I cover hiragana and katakana writing practice. I recommend going through these exercises to learn how to type the kana using kana input on your phone. If you already can use kana input with ease, feel free to skip these exercises.

Select the “Written” option for each of these exercises to practice kana input.

You will then be prompted to type each kana multiple times. I recommend going column by column. Switching between kana will give you more experience in trying to remember how to use kana input.

And that’s it—after you’ve gone to Lesson 3 of Genki, you will be skipping this section.

9. Video Review

The last part of your study plan for each lesson is to review the material at native speaking speed. Your goal is to reinforce the grammar you learned throughout the lesson while also improving your listening skills.

The first video to review will be the live-action enactment of the Lesson’s dialogue. This was the very first thing you read and listened to in the Lesson when you didn’t know anything about the grammar point. Now that you’ve studied the grammar point, your goal is to follow along and understand the dialogue.

These enactments are put together by the publishers of Genki and are pretty amusing—who said textbooks couldn’t be a little fun? All the dialogue videos are found here. You’ll need to click on the video to start it.

The live-action dialogue videos will provide context, but no subtitles for the actual conversation.

Watch the video without stopping, even if you don’t understand everything. If you felt like you missed a lot, read through the dialogue at the beginning of the Lesson and then watch the video one more time. If you still didn’t pick everything up, still move on. Don’t worry—the next chapters will reinforce the grammar points, and you’ll have a lot more listening practice.

Once you complete the dialogue video, go through the remaining videos created by Genki to reinforce each Lesson’s grammar points. These additional live-action videos review some of the grammar points from each Lesson.

Each video provides the grammar point along with an English translation while the Japanese is voiced over before the live-action video begins.

The live-action then illustrates the grammar point with subtitles in case you need them.

Your goal with each video will be to understand the full conversation.

Watch the video without stopping, even if you don’t understand everything. If you felt like you missed a lot, replay the video and pause when you run into something you don’t understand. Use a dictionary to look up words you don’t know, or reference the grammar from the Lesson in case you forgot the point. But for the most part, these videos provide enough context for you to figure things out.

Once you finish the final video, you’re done with the Lesson! Congrats! Take a break to celebrate, then get ready to start the next Lesson once the new week begins.