This is a tale of my experience learning Japanese and how you can make the best of it to enhance your own experience.
What makes me in the position to make such a bold statement as to how to learn Japanese?
I’ve started learning Japanese in the second year of high school. That was sometime between the end of 2001 and the start of 2002. In short, I could safely say I started learning Japanese on my 13th birthday in October, which means that at the time of writing this article, soon turning 22, I will have been learning Japanese for close to 9 years.
In all of those years, I have not mastered Japanese, a short way of meaning both that no learning solution has been adequate up to date, and that I have learned Japanese in a very slow-paced, organic fashion.
The reason I can make such a bold statement about learning Japanese is that I’ve tried, with both success and failure, probably all the ways one could think of for learning a language.
Within these, you’d find courses, text books, dictionaries, kanji books of all sorts, online interactive courses, Rosetta Stone, etc.
I’ve spent a significant amount of money on these solutions and I can say none is quite adequate as a complete solution. Read on to find out about the biggest traps and losses of time while learning Japanese.
You should learn Romaji, but not too much
If you dive in Japanese learning material, you’ll eventually meet some people that will tell you to never use romaji. In fact, they will straight on tell you learning romaji along with Japanese is just an inhibitor to your learning process.
While absolutely true, the reality is you still have to learn romaji anyway. Japanese written in our alphabet is called Romaji. The word Sushi is typical example of romaji used in daily English. The thing is, unlike the imported word Sushi, actual romaji, which can represent any Japanese content, is specifically pronounced in a Japanese way.
While learning romaji certainly won’t help you learn to pronounce Japanese, it’s used a primary way to input Japanese on computers. You would be depriving yourself of an easy way to write Japanese if you were to completely forgo learning romaji. Additionally, learning to pronounce Japanese in romaji can also help to learn pronouncing English the Japanese way, or the wrong way Japanese use for imported words. Considering the surprising amount of English-imported words in Japanese, nearly all new vocab since WW2, romaji will also help you get a fundamental understanding of how Japanese import English words in their language.
This could seem rather useless, but on the contrary, it will help you learn English-bound Japanese vocabulary faster, and it will help you understand Japanese people pronouncing foreing items in Japanese right in your home country. For example, I could not have guessed the sushi chef meant Carlton university when he asked me if I studied at Karuton university. It might seem like an easy thing to get, but it takes training to perceive such a word in fast regular native conversational speed, which is execeptionaly fast in comparison to the pace of English speech.
Don’t learn Japanese with romaji
While you should definitely learn romaji, one of the common pitfals of learning Japanese you should avoid like the pest is learning Japanese with romaji.
All this will do is hamper the speed at which you can learn actual written Japanese, which is composed of linguistic concepts simply impossible to represent in romaji. Many, many things are ambiguous in romaji and could lead you to learn bad pronunciations and ways to write a word in kana (the ensemble of Japanese scripts), further slowing your intake of the language.
Keep in mind you could always learn Japanese with romaji and only learn to speak, doing so won’t prevent you from learning Japanese but it will take you a lot more time to eventually learn all of Japanese. I should know, it’s the path I took and it’s a major stick in your wheel.
Avoid kanji books
Quite frankly, Kanji books, and practically all of their form, are just like dictionaries.
Trying to learn Kanji like that is like trying to learn French words one by one with no context other than a definition.
Kanji, in Japanese, aren’t just an alphabet and should not be learned by heart. They form literal vocabulary in context and learning them by heart is the most innefficient way to learn them.
Let me repeat myself here. Kanji are not an alphabet, no matter what people say to you, they are words and parts of words.
There are a few basic kanji you can remember that will help you understand and properly look at more complex kanji, but just like there is no trick in learning vocabulary other than to use it, there is no trick in learning Kanji.
The best way to learn kanji is to learn them via their primary function, a reading device.
The best textbooks you will find will gradually introduce kanji right in the text and tell you about them and their associated use in context, just like you would learn English by reading.
Additionally, Japanese is much easier to read with kanji, because they bring precision and structure to the text. Without kanji, Japanese would be an excessively ambiguous language to write. While learning Japanese, you’ll discover that reading without kanji is an extremely confusing and painfully structure-less experience.
Learn without translating
One of the most common mistake while learning languages is the act of translating.
For instance, learning words by comparing them with their equivalent in your own language is the most innefficient way to learn fluent speech.
What you have to do is learn to identify things and speak about things by thinking in Japanese. This is why reading is also so important in order to learn katakana and hiragana, Japanese’s two phonetic alphabets, because you have to memorize the sound they represent, and not the English romaji equivalent they represent. Reading will force you to do so because their is no other way to enhance your reading speed. You might read like a child at first, but regular practice will solidify your memory of these phonetics. The same goes for kanji and their meaning.
In the same regard, visual language learning solutions like Rosetta Stone provide an excellent way to learn many concepts in a native way, rather than by translating. By doing so, you’ll be learning to speak just like you learned as a child, breaking the oft said barrier to language learning that is adulthood.
However, Rosetta Stone and the such should not mean forgoing a good grammar study. Just like in any language, grammar is fundamental to mastering a language. Some people, notably Rosetta Stone, will try to sell you their lack of grammar tools by saying no child learns grammar to learn a language. That is correct, and grammar is in no way a natural aspect to language learning, so you shouldn’t go overboard with it, but literate people, including educated nations’ children, learn grammar.
Grammar is not a learning tool
Contrary to most beliefs, grammar will not help you learn to speak. The natural occurence of grammar does not exist. Languages are rather defined by a list of exceptions and accepted uses in varying contexts, which humans refer to as grammar.
Because grammar is so intricately unnatural by definition, learning it won’t really help you since languages don’t follow any given logic perfectly.
Rather, the best learning tool is context and use cases. Again, this stresses the importance of reading, which will provide you with an array of valid and often well written use cases of the language. Trying to understand the subtleties of a language’s grammar and structure won’t help you learn to speak fluently and write correctly.
As a proof of the preceding statement, ask yourself this question: have you ever thought about the grammar of what you were reading just now, or what gossip you were telling your friend over the phone yesterday?
Chances are you answered no, because the use of grammar is not a natural occurence of a language. It is simply humans’ attempt at defining our languages.
Every language has two grammars
When referring to grammar as the set of rules and exceptions defining a language, it’s observable that every language has two grammars.
One of them is the formal, correct, or written grammar, and the other is the incorrect, or spoken grammar. The problem with text books, or even Rosetta Stone, is that they only focus on correct grammar.
However, speaking remains an essential aspect of any language and forgoing learning the bad spoken grammar can mean you’ll never be able to understand spoken Japanese.
So, in your oh so important curriculum of reading practice, you should also add listening of spoken language, like Japanese television shows. If you’re an Anime fan, you could watch Anime and read Manga, although many manga use a speech-like grammar, so be aware that reading traditional texts is also essential here.
This will help you train your ear to the spoken language, as well as help your pronunciation greatly. Many university students I met who took Japanese courses were impossible to understand because of their thick accent and major pronunciation mistakes. Out of these students who happened to actually speak well, all of them actively watched Japanese anime and drama. Lots of them also listened and sang Japanese musics. In fact, if you’re into music, singing can be a really good way to learn to pronounce. Additionally, you will be exposed to faster speech and lots of native pronunciation variations by doing so.
In other words, if you don’t include a correctly spoken curriculum to your Japanese learning, you’ll always be a lousy speaker.
No, it’s not correct if you speak a language with an accent from another language. It just proves you didn’t learn the language as you should have.
I heed this warning especially to English speakers, who, because of the difference between Japanese and English sounds, will find a greater deal of difficulty to pronounce the language than say, a French speaker.
Also watch out for non-native university teachers teaching you the wrong pronounciation. Heck, native English teachers even make mistakes while teaching English, which explains the proliferation of such words like Template being pronounced as tem-pleyt instead of tem-plit.
Japanese luckily does not suffer from such ambiguities, so simply having a native speaker say it for you should be enough.
Conclusion
In the end, there’s nothing like practice and exposure to a language, but I hope my advice will help you choose the best material and avoid the worst.
As always, just remember exposure to real written and spoken Japanese material is your best bet at advancing your skills.
To help you in your quest, I advise you to pay a visit to jisho.org and smart.fm. Kodansha also makes excellent books like the Communicative English-Japanese Dictionary and Japanese for Busy People. Rosetta Stone is also a good place to start, and all the speech is from native Japanese, unlike many other audio-based solutions like Rocket Japanese and JapanesePod101, both of which you should avoid. You might also want to check the Rikkai-chan browser add-on which can help you read Japanese online, although it’s only useful if you’re already fairly comfortable with the language. Books like Japanese for Busy People, notably the kana version of the first tome, will be better as initial reading material.
None of these will provide a complete guide to the language. Instead, use them in conjunction along with native material like books and television shows and you’ll be on your way to speaking and reading fluent Japanese.
