You now know everything that lies between you and total Japanese mastery. This marks the close of the core NihongoShark.com study system. There is still a lot more content that I'm going to introduce, such as studying through media (specifically, books, DVDs, anime, and video games) and JLPT preparation guidance. Also, the Caveman Conversation Guide is at the end of this book. The core study system, however, is complete:

• Phase #1 – Prep Your Ninja Tools (Week #1)
• Phase #2 – Prep Your Ninja Brain (Months #1-4)
• Phase #3 – Lay Your Fluency Foundation (Months #5-12)
• Phase #4 – Go Jouzu! (Months 13+)

In this section, I'll give you some small bits of advice on diving into the practice of the study principles described above, a few motivational snippets, and then the rest will be up to you. I can't teach you Japanese. No one person can. I can only teach you how to learn Japanese.

The bad news? That means a lot of work for you.

The good news? There's nothing stopping you from progressing towards Japanese mastery!

Getting Organized

In the next sections, we have checklists for each phase and the daily study plan. I have also included a PDF of each.

There is so much information in this book that it can be very easy to get distracted thinking about Japanese, when really you need to be interacting with the language itself. Use these checklists and daily study plans as a guide and reminder for productive studying...