How to Learn Japanese having ADHD or Dyslexia
How to learn in a country that largely is unaware of the existence of Dyslexia and ADHD.
For those who live in the West, ADHD in particular seems like a common occurrence and almost everyone is at least aware of the concept of Dyslexia with many famous people like Albert Einstein, and Stephen Spielberg being Dyslexic.
In a recent NHK segment about Dyslexia and ADHD, they reported that about 8% of people in Japan are affected by one or the other disabilities, but if you talk to the average person, and certainly ask teachers, almost nobody knows about either term. Dyslexia still has the stigma of being a disease of stupidity, and ADHD is something that only perhaps shut-in gaming nerds have. This attitude, in combination with a generally rote-based school system is a minefield for a neurodivergent student and there are almost no resources locally to help.
I spent months reading books and watching YouTube videos in English about how to better learn with both these afflictions and found many helpful tips for latin languages. My simplified conclusion after all of it is that Dyslexia is a disconnected system between recognizing shapes or letters and their corresponding sounds and ADHD makes the speed and recall of most of it slower or less possible. In practice, this simple sounding restriction results in innumerable problems that all need a solution.
While there are well-documented solutions for English etc., Japanese is especially problematic for a variety of linguistic and social reasons. Worse off, there are almost no YouTube videos in Japanese discussing the problem or potential solutions, so I present here my recommendations of what I’ve found can help.
THE PROBLEM
In English, for example, someone with Dyslexia can have a variety of problems matching the shapes of letters to the sounds, remembering the order of letters, writing them from memory etc. The standard remedial methods to help with this involve things like physically making the letter shapes out of plasticine so they have a finite existence in a physical form or drawing small story pictures around each letter to associate, for example, the word “snake” with an intertwined snake. These things work, and I remember doing them in early grade school to learn all the alphabet and how the sounds change when put together in words.
However, when it comes to Japanese, there is an exponentially bigger problem:
There are 3 written languages:
Hiragana (Phonetic characters for every major sound in Japanese). These phonemes do not change when combined with others so words always are read as each character. For example あ (Ah) and め (Mei) is read as あめ (AhMei), or in romanized letters Ame. In the word めあき, it’s similarly MeiAhKi, romanized as meaki. But look at Ame as a word in English and you can easily know that it could be read as AhMei, or AeMei, Or Eh-m. So, as a purely phonetic language with only 48 characters to remember, Hiragana is pretty easy even for a dyslexic. One character, one sound, no changes in combinations with other characters. If Japanese stopped here it would probably be better than English. But, there are problems in Hiragana alone, and big problems when combined with the other 2 alphabets.
Katakana (Phonetic characters for every major sound NOT in Japanese, and quite a few Japanese words that are arbitrarily written in this language because of modern convention). Like Hiragana, there are the same 48 characters each representing a phoneme. The problem here is many of the characters look like their Hiragana counterparts but not for the same sounds! せ(Sei) さ(Sa) セ(Sei) サ(Sa). Even if you don’t have Dyslexia, you’re probably realizing that those 4 letters (especially when handwritten) are going to trip you up when reading. Also, certainly as a beginning learner, you won’t know from the sound alone which of the two alphabets the word is written in so it’s very difficult to visually remember the letters that correspond to the word’s sound.
Kanji (Pictograms representing words which are built from smaller pictograms called radicals) For example the word for “rain” is あめ in Hiragana, アメ in Katakana, although in is never written in Katakana, and in Kanji is 雨. If you have Dyslexia or ADHD, you can see already that there are 3 ways to write a sound you hear, not one. It gets way worse when you start to dive into Kanji themselves and the variety of sounds each Kanji can make. Worse, the radicals inside the Kanji are not always consistent in meaning so even if you remember what they mean generally in one Kanji they might have no meaning or a different meaning in another, plus a different overall sound to the Kanji.
SCHOOL
Dyslexics and ADHD people have no easy time in Western schools but it’s way worse in a Japanese language school because of the aforementioned unawareness or disbelief that either disabilities exist. You are very unlikely to get any accommodation for the simple reason that the curriculum is usually set in stone day-to-day and hour-to-hour. It’s a sink-or-swim mentality that reminds me of the 1980s. The sooner you get over the feeling of it not being fair or trying to ask for alternate explanations, examples, pictures or reasons, the better. Google “Dyslexic school” or “tutor” in Japanese and there is almost nothing.
There will be copious repetition, tests, fill in the blanks, multiple choice, and almost no visual aids. Some schools have more emphasis on speaking and listening, while others are almost 100% textbook and test based. Although it is counterintuitive, I recommend finding the school with the most slackers in it and the roughest appearance simply so you can avoid the rigid routines and concentrate on learning your own way. Especially if you are in a 2 year student visa program there is no way to escape going to school every day and your future depends on your marks and your attendance. Ironically, if you go to a “good” school and you’re a smart person, the faculty will assume that you are being disruptive and failing your tests because of an attitude problem despite it actually being a learning difficulty. They simply cannot comprehend the gap between practical intelligence and inability to read, write and memorize.
As well, since everything is choreographed in the curriculum you will likely be able to predict the exact questions and formats of all the tests while knowing none of the meaning of the answers. This can be ok for getting a paper grade for future employment but “gaming” the system even as a means of catching your breath or not going insane will ultimately mean you don’t learn Japanese so I’d recommend not falling into that rut despite times of utter despair.
TEXTBOOKS
There are 4 or 5 common textbooks that most schools or self-learners use. For Dyslexics or ADHD people I think they are all terrible. The central reason is they all teach “Grammar Points” which are essentially catchphrases and none of them actually teach grammar with identified nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. There is an incredible Youtube channel called CureDolly which any neurodivergent person will likely greatly appreciate the further they get in Japanese Learning. While she doesn’t teach basic grammar outright she explains why all the grammar points are taught wrong so you can at least understand why they make no sense to you and then points you in the direction of the real meaning or origin. In most cases, your hunch about a particular grammar point is probably well-founded—its real literal meaning is likely not a bastardized English phrase but a set of words that evolved for a very particular reason in native Japanese.
APPS
Duolingo is the most popular language app and the Japanese version is actually ok for learning Hiragana and Katakana but it is wholly useless for anything beyond that. It’s slow, badly ordered and has no focus on the actual structure of the language. It’s mainly useful for tourists who want to have very basic conversations for a short amount of time. Anki and the various other flashcard apps are moderately helpful in the beginning for similar reasons, but unlike regular people who can remember words quickly and easily without associated cues, these apps quickly become a stack of undifferentiated meaningless cards for neurodivergent people. The problem is there is no physicality nor location in time to pin a meaning to a sound or word shape. They’re kind of the opposite of Memory Palaces if you know what those are. Wholly useless.
The best apps are ones that have a strong visual structure that is directly tied to the meaning of each word. For example, you need to be able to say “I learned that word in the purple deck about 2 months ago along side this other word I already know, and it’s not that character at the beginning that means horse so it must be this one… I got it, it’s study” If that kind of thinking rings a bell, keep reading for my recommendations at the end.
ANIME/MANGA
I think anime and manga are great ways to help learn if you can find something you’re interested in. Unfortunately most of these series are very narrow in topics and if you don’t have accurate subtitles while it’s good to learn vocabulary and perhaps questionable speech patterns, it is not exactly the best for reading and speaking. Regular people, especially fans, certainly can jump ahead this way but since Dyslexia is largely a reading/sound problem it isn’t really the shortest path to the solution at least not at the beginning. Manga is a little better in one way because it has the text alongside the photos, although the text is usually jumbled in odd places so it can be a little distracting without putting in lots of effort. I think kids books are far better for beginners, and poetry or other short stores are better for more advanced learners. It’s more active and there’s a wider range of content.
RECOMMENDATIONS
After all the preamble, I hope that these recommendations make a little more sense:
Physically write all the Hiragana and Katakana and say them as you write them. Say them individually as your read them. Trace them in the air with your finger. Mold them out of clay or other flexible material. Use a large brush and disappearing ink paper that they sell at Daiso so that your larger body is involved in internalizing the movement. Especially for Hiragana that look similar such as ちさら etc. if you don’t get these shapes internalized in your body from the beginning they will ALWAYS create problems 1, 2, 10 years later. Don’t skip this critical first step. You must be perfect with writing, reading and saying all the Hiragana and Katakana.
Learn Kanji through Radicals. There are 214 of them which sounds like a lot, but compared to the the 2,136 common kanji it’s comparatively easy to learn the meanings of the radicals and then notice them in all the kanji in the future than to try to straightaway remember 2000 kanji with no reference points. Radicals are the little building blocks in each kanji that you can use to tell a story about the kanji itself. Without a visual image or movie that automatically plays back in your head, you will not be able to remember the meanings of the shapes and their corresponding sounds. As with Hiragana and Katakana, write in ways that engage you physically and emotionally. If you don’t care about each kanji and word, you won’t internalize it. Make it into something that matters to you.
Use WaniKani (with Tsurukame app on iOS). WaniKani is the best Kanji app for Dyslexics and ADHDers. It has a good mix of structure, pacing, colour and progression, but most importantly it builds off radicals into Kanji using a unique story for each one. Often the stories are ridiculous but especially for words you may not care about at all, having something that stands out to you can help immensely in remembering that shape and sound later.
Don’t read anything with Furigana.
You’re going to see Furigana in just about every book unfortunately. For regular people they can quickly learn the sound of the Kanji below and then transition to ignoring the Furigana. For Dyslexics or ADHDers I think you’ll find your eye and your brain constantly drawn up and down like a pogo-stick when reading, constantly screwing up your flow and effectively eliminating your learning of Kanji by reading. Cover it all up with a ruler to force yourself to look at each Kanji shape and struggle to find the sound and meaning.
It is painful and slow but it is better to internalize at the beginning to than to waste months or years relying on the crutch. If you are writing notes yourself, write the Furigana BELOW the word so you always see the Kanji first. My teachers are always amazed when I can read a line of Hiragana or even Hiragana mixed with Kanji I know as fast as a regular person, but introduce just a few Kanji with Furigana (even ones I know!) and my speed drops 50%. The eyes and the brain can’t cope with the movement up and down. It’s like two different modes of reading - one for understanding and one for mindless sound retrieval.
Stop using Hiragana as soon as possible. Switch entirely to Kanji. Yes, Hiragana is used daily by all Japanese people but there is a huge problem with it for Dyslexics who go beyond basic vocabulary. As alluded to above, combining different Hiragana in different orders never changes the sound of words. This is great if you have only a few hundred words, but with infinite words, you have to reuse the same 48 sounds over and over which means that there are 3000 words that have the sound “shu” in them and mean totally different things and if you write those words in hiragana they all look the same. So as a Dyslexic you will hear words all the time that you think you know but they just sound like one of the other 3000 unless you can put a PICTURE to them. That’s what Kanji are. They’re the picture you need to remember the sound.
Learn the rules for onyomi and kunyomi right away. These aren’t hard and fast but even after learning the shape of the Kanji and the sounds of a few words they’re in, you’ll realize that some Kanji have upwards of 5-7 totally different sounds based on whether they came from Chinese or Japanese words originally. Whether they are in the middle of a word or at the beginning or a single character dictates what sound to use. Having a system takes a lot of frustration when the teacher corrects you for saying the wrong word for a Kanji you learned yesterday because it has a totally different sound in the word you learned today. They’ll just say “that’s the way it is…” which is true, but it’s also not the whole story. There are tricks and rules to give you a hint of which one it’s going to be.
Use coloured pens for differentiating all parts of grammar etc. You need a colour system to help your brain remember the context and use of a word in a sentence. For example, make all particles red, conjunctions green and verbs blue or something. That way you can at a glance know what a word is doing. There is nothing worse than reading a poorly formatted page of unknown words all in black. Add in even just the red particles and the sentences begin to take on a meaning based in space and time in relation to the other words. The same goes for mandatory memorized tests. If you break up the sentences into colours then you can remember the shapes of the sentences and where everything is in your mind so when it comes time to mindlessly recite it you have a picture map to go off. It doesn’t help in ultimately learning the function of the parts when memorizing but it sure helps in remembering the meaning of the adjacent words.
Picture non-thing words in a story or as objects in your mind. There are many many words in Japanese that have vague or non-physical meanings and they often seem like particles or verbs but they are really nouns. It is essential to make a little visual story in your mind when you first encounter these “nothing” words or you will never learn them. There are famously 217 or so “nothing” words in English that trip up Dyslexics. Words like “any”. It is not a thing or a verb, yet it is used countless times daily with unconscious understanding by regular people. Dyslexics need mind-images for these kind of words in order to quickly use them.
Choose one verb and one noun to use your entire Japanese learning career. For all the confusing elements of the words and alphabets, we haven’t even touched on grammar. Grammar is impossible to internalize for a Dyslexic or ADHDer without a good set of vocabulary to impart stories to. From the beginning, choose a verb and noun that you love that you can use to try all the new grammar. For me it is 食べる and 昼ご飯. Then, no matter how boring the grammar point is, at least I can think about it in terms of lunch.
Buy and read the entirety of the Japan Times Dictionary of Japanese Grammar. These are much much more than a dictionary. They are simply the finest textbooks ever written about Japanese and if you are a self-starter and have a structural mind you will not need to go to school if you have these books. Absolutely indispensable for all the grammar and rules with full concise explanations of the reasoning and counterexamples of how they shouldn’t be used.
Learn the concept of existence/non-existence, jidoshi/tadoshi, ishi/muishi from the start. Almost all of Japanese grammar and verb cases are based on this duality. If you know French it’s a bit like the verbs “to have” and “to be” resulting in different conjugations but in Japanese it extends into every single sentence you will use and which type of verb or structure to choose. Japanese is based on what action is being done by the hearer and what by the listener, and whether that is automatic or of one’s will. They don’t usually teach this concept at all, or perhaps only after a couple years of school will they have to admit that there are couplets of grammar for almost all use cases. For the Dyslexic learner, knowing the structure can be half the battle to filling in the pieces. Having a reason why there are two different verbs for “drop” and “drop” depending on who and what is doing the dropping eliminates a huge amount of confusion when there is a simple rule to remember which one to use. In school they just say “memorize the pairs of these 1000 verbs” without an explanation of why, and even in memorizing them there is a way to get 70% of them categorized by the sound of the verbs after you know there are two categories and why the categories exist.
When reading, figure out if you are a left-right reader or a right-left reader. I watched one series of videos on reading direction and the origin of symmetrical letter shapes. Supposedly as many as 50% of people’s eyes do not scan left to right which is why many ancient and Asian languages favour vertical writing. You can check examples online and see which way your eyes read most quickly. It won’t save you from most printed text because there’s no way to reformat it, but you can scan the line from the end backwards if you are a right-left reader and have a good idea of what words and how long the sentence will be before you get there. Dyslexics already have a tendency to have to chop up each word into saying each single letter, so having a little map in advance of what’s coming is extremely helpful. It won’t be noticeable to the listener if you take an extra second or two after each period to start the next sentence as you’re doing your scanning.
Read content that has the same Kanji as your WaniKani or current flashcards. The one great point about my school’s textbook and reading material was that they synced up the new Kanji across each of the books so you’d see a kanji you learned yesterday or the day before many times in today’s reading story. Having a full-length visual story to solidify the boring vocabulary lists is a lifechanger. There is an app called Todai which gives current news and you can filter the writing based on your Kanji level. I highly recommend using it because there are very few interesting reading materials where you can truly tailor the Kanji to your knowledge base.
Talk to native speakers using the words you learned today. Most Dyslexics and ADHDers have serious memory problems. If we don’t feel a pressing need to keep something in our brains, our brain will quickly dispose of it. Force yourself to talk to people using the grammar you learned today so that you have a real life bodily experience of using it. In all cases, this is the key to building memory. It has to come with the aid of the 5 senses and preferably a story you can hang the words off of.
Don’t memorize anything. Memorizing is just repeating things without understanding. Regular people seem to be able to learn this way. It just sticks in there. But for Dyslexics and ADHDers it has the opposite effect. Memorizing eats up cognitive power that could be used for deep internalizing using stories, visuals, or anything that makes a personal meaning for that word or grammar. We have only limited amount of energy each day. Don’t waste it on short-term memorization. Your teachers may be happy you pass the daily memorization quiz but a month or two down the road when you’ve forgotten literally 90% of everything nobody will be happy.
Shadowing and Overlapping is harmful. A key strategy schools use to teach oral japanese is to play a dialogue and have you repeat it either at the same time or 1 or 2 seconds behind. Normal people seem to be able to do this much the same way as they can memorize things unconsciously, however for me it is the bane of my existence. It is a constant cacophony of noise. I can neither hear the original speaker clearly because there are other people saying similar or dissimilar words at the same time or slightly delayed and I cannot repeat words that I can’t hear, or worse don’t know. It simply drains your daily resilience and reduces the time you could be using to learn the meanings to new words through your own stories. Sure, you can read out loud, or repeat phrases after you know the words, or even try using new unknown words in sentences where you know the rest of the meaning. All are better uses of time. The worst thing you can do as a dyslexic or ADHDer is to force in new sounds or phrases to your short term memory without understanding. They will displace other similar or previously learned words to the overall detriment of your vocabulary.
Design your own systems and find resources outside of existing channels. As I said at the beginning, the system is made contrary to what you need. If you try to fit in to “keep up” you will fail because we just don’t have the same abilities that others have. Contrary, you’ll probably find that with the right resources and allowing yourself the freedom to learn on your schedule that you will understand far far more than the average person. Even native speakers largely do not know the grammar or stories behind radicals and oftentimes they will be amazed at a linkage you will be able to make between two words, or between a grammar point and the origin of the kanji it came from.
Japanese is the world’s most logical language. Don’t let anybody try to obfuscate it because they don’t know the basis for the logic. If you’ve ever programmed or worked with math you will see obvious parallels with Japanese. Everything, almost without exception is made the way it is for a reason. Even so-called “exceptions” which teachers will mention daily are simply words or phrases that are derived from other phrases in the same way that we changed from “cannot” to “can’t” in English. As mentioned before CureDolly explains a lot of this and her short book is more than enough to prove the point. So don’t give up when you see yet another incomprehensible grammar point that is abstracted from its original context and grammar. There is a comforting order to absolutely everything.
Use ChatGPT. Ever since 4o, ChatGPT has proven to be incredibly good at explaining all aspects of Japanese grammar. Now that it remembers your previous questions I don’t even need to write questions anymore. I can just type in a grammar point and it knows to give me the origin, the breakdown of what are nouns and verbs and a few example sentences using 食べる. I even use it to tell me stories to remember the radicals and meanings of each kanji. It’s an absolutely incredible resource.
Go Faster. Contrary to common sense, the reason most of us get tripped up reading or don’t care to remember things is because we are terminally bored by the mindless repetition or lack of context for the subject matter. Sometimes setting a 10x higher speed or learning goal engages our minds in a pivotal fashion so that we have enough challenge to make it interesting. Set silly challenges like “i’m going to learn these 10 kanji by the time I get in and out of the shower.” The key is not the method but the difficulty level. Engagement = success.
CONCLUSION
Japanese is frequently listed as the world’s 2nd hardest language to learn. For Dyslexics and ADHDers, this is compounded by the multiple alphabets and sounds for each kanji and the absolutely ineffective standard teaching methods. But don’t give up. The saving grace is the language itself. Completely logical and crafted like the greatest Michelangelo painting, it is a perfectly conceived and beautiful language that rewards you the more you learn about the structure. Free of all the infinite permutations of sounds and pollution of other language words that English developed, it is possible to learn in the true Japanese fashion. Surrender yourself to it. Learn the basics to perfection first, then practice the basics in real life to internalize the motions and emotions, and finally begin to craft your own unique meanings with other people. My most rewarding moments come in the Izakaya when I make a joke in Japanese and everybody laughs because it actually makes sense in Japanese. You’ll get there too!
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