Learning Japanese: Some basic suggestions
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
“I think I just told that guy to steal my car!”
We often get emails here at TG headquarters asking about our Japanese level and how much Japanese we read and speak, and also about the best way to learn about Japanese. To assure that we won’t have to answer anybody anymore you can put yourself in a position to learn and understand Japanese, we agreed to force the Japanese speaker closest to a computer to write a post all about it for you.
Pronounciation Basics
The GOOD news about Japanese is that it’s all based off five simple sounds: ah, ee, ooh, eh, oh.
These sounds are called boin, or “mother sounds.” Pretty much all of the sounds in Japanese are based off these basic five sounds or permutations thereof. If you really want to impress people, learn the kanji, or Chinese characters: 母音.
Once you get a hold of the basic pronunciation rules, you’re cleared to head onto the path of ‘repeating words endlessly so as to not alienate the counter staff at Wendy’s.’ It shouldn’t take you more than an afternoon to master most of the basic rules of Japanese pronunciation.
Getting your read on
Japanese is an odd language in the sense that it has THREE written components: hiragana, used mostly for Japanese words, katakana, usually reserved for foreign loan words, and kanji, which are taken from the Chinese and based off characters and sounds from the 5th century.
Hiragana and katakana are easy enough to distinguish from one another. Hiragana is squiggly and elegant. Katakana looks like a bunch of razors aligned along right angles.
Kanji, the Chinese beast with a million arms, could best be thought of as a system of pictograms that represent something not phonetically but pictorially. Imagine a drawing for everything. That’s it. Now imagine thousands of them, which leads to the inevitable:
“Dude, if I know hiragana, why do I need to know kanji?!?”
Well, kanji is useful because it requires LESS work than hiragana once you get your feet wet, and also because it takes care of all those annoying homonyms. Once you learn 2000 of them, you’re reading at an adult level. It also makes great conversation with people when you ask them about things like the kanji reading of their names or whatever. A lot of jokes from series like Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei or the lyrics from Dir En Grey are based on kanji wordplay, so you can jump on the culture train that much faster.
(I only learned them to read comics. How cool am I?)
An important note about reading: For the sake of not putting you in a predicament where you’d have to unlearn something, I COMMAND YOU to not learn Japanese using romanji, aka “the roman alphabet.” You will NOT know how to read, you will NOT know how to pronounce things, and you’ll probably just end up feeling alienated! I know those first few weeks are hard, but remember that you’re embarking on a long journey. It’s like running… after you get to the point where you can run five or so miles, it starts getting FUN. I didn’t believe it either.
Grammar
Grammar in Japanese is a tough row to hoe. It takes time and effort, but like any learning system you can take a lot of the painful and annoying stuff out of the picture by planning. You start with basic concepts, master them, and continue on slowly but surely while building upon your basics and reviewing them. Get a structured series going and build on the parts cohesively, like construction blocks.
Don’t get confused or discouraged: it’s a day-by-day, step-by-step journey. Luckily, the nature of ‘the media age’ has ushered forth a proliferation of great books, websites, and forums for Japanese study*. Since it’s beyond the scope of this article to thoroughly explain grammar, I’ll leave you a list of links in the resources section.
* = (Well, maybe not so much the forums, but I could only use second-rate books I found at half price a decade ago, so…)
“Enough jabbering! Well, in English… anyway how should I start?”
That’s what I like to see!! You maintain that attitude and you’ll be making fun of people for whispering about you on subway trains in no time!
Let’s go over some basic advice so you can start translating that Bleach manga you’ve been wanting to read in Japanese.
1. Find out HOW you learn and capitalize on it.
Your ultimately trying to learn, read, speak, and write again in a whole new language. You’ll also be doing a ton of memorizing. How should you go about it? Well, that depends on how you learn. Some folks are auditory learners, meaning they learn best through listening. Others are more visually oriented. Still others are tactile-kinesthetic, meaning they learn in a more physical way, like writing something over and over for instance. A lot of us are mixes of one or the other.
2. The ocean is only water. Jump and it let it surround you.
Once you figure out your favored learning method, you can capitalize on it to memorize and inculcate stuff faster. BUT you’ll only learn it if it’s around you… so get it around you!
Peter Payne once suggested that you surround yourself with Japanese culture, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right. I’m a walking salute to ADD, so I try my best to cluster up as much Japanese input as I can: I read blogs in Japanese, listen to music in Japanese (via Japanator and Zach Bentz, who rules!), read Golgo 13 in Japanese, and watch a ton of movies and TV shows in it to check my grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. It’s good passive learning, and actually allows me to still work on my Japanese without driving myself batty for 2-3 hours a day memorizing kanji on flash cards.
This is also very important in that it allows you to keep up with all facets of Japanese in a much less time-consuming or brain-draining manner. It’s like fighting a war on multiple fronts sometimes.
3. Speak, speak, speak.
Even if nobody’s around, try your best to practice your Japanese out loud. Perhaps there’s a local Japan-American Society around your city, or a college or University language club you could participate in? Hey, maybe even a martial arts group! The options are limitless, especially now with things like skype. Perhaps you could even find a speaking partner to practice with over the phone from overseas?
4. Do something every day.
I mentioned running earlier because my pops used to run marathons. He was a machine, constantly burning through shoes, smelling like a fish, and carrying around the satisfied gleam of a man who actually enjoyed running 26 miles.
But dad was no fool (as the doctoral degree and anger about me not being a lawyer will tell you), and he knew that it was important to know when to take it easy. He knew his legs were going to need time to heal so he took days off or did other things to take care of himself, but he never forgot running and never forgot about keeping his mind on course. He’d take long walks, play golf, or do something else that would keep his body moving but would lessen the stress so that he’d have endurance and a clear head. That way, his time off wasn’t debilitating, but energizing.
You don’t HAVE to do 8-10 hours a day in Japanese, but you need to do something every day. When you start taking days off, weeks off, and yes, months off from studying… well, it’s game over sooner than later.
5. Goals are good.
Aleister Crowley once said something along the lines of ‘man’s greatest failure is setting a goal he can reach.’
Aleister Crowley was also nuts.
Having a reachable goal is a great challenge. I set out to learn how to read comics in Japanese, and I was jumping-up-and-down happy when I learned how… especially after a disastrous and self-discipline-free stab at learning Japanese in high school. My next goal is moving on to the higher echelons of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) or the JETRO (Japanese External Trade Organization) business test.
Or marrying Masaki Itou. 
6. Have fun with it.
For a long time, my “hardline hardline hardline!” approach led to me missing out on a lot of cool experiences. As you get older you learn that you should smell the roses, and as I started getting out more and experiencing more things and meeting more people, I found that learning Japanese became a cultural reward in and of itself. I may still be confused about the intricacies of son-keigo and kenjyogo, but I made friends, dated people, read great books, played sports, and traveled around Asia while learning how to speak Japanese. In short, it paid off by giving me a sense of warmth and happiness that I can’t describe without sounding lame.
Beer helped too, of course, but that’s up to you.
7. Never give up.
Self-explanatory.
Resources
First off, this article was inspired by the great series that Peter Payne wrote on learning basic Japanese. It covers stuff you’d see during your first two years of study. Dig it here.
Peter rules. I hear he’s starting his own space program next week.
Another awesome resource would be the tutorial podcast mp3s available from the good people at Japanese Pod 101.com. I knew some people that knew some of the owners and he said they’re just as amusing in real life. I’ve listened to them for 3 years now and sometimes I find my thoughts coming out sounding more like Peter’s than my own. Come to think of it, what’s with dudes named “Peter” and Japanese language skills?!?
My favorite online dictionary and grammar resource is still Jim Breen’s online Japanese dictionary. You can even install buttons in your browser to check words and grammar while reading. I’d also suggest looking into rikai chan to browse kanji readings as well.
Book wise, there are a ton of options available. I suggest Japanese For Busy People. As I mentioned earlier, GRAB THE KANA VERSION. Starting with reading Japanese sooner than later is vital. Trust me, it’s an investment that always pays back.
Kanji-wise, you can start slow. I suggest the kanji cards from White Rabbit, which I didn’t discover until I was studying for 2 kyuu. They’re great and cover vocabulary as well.
If you’re looking for other books, I can suggest a lot of the books on this page. I’d stick to a basic textbook first and foremost before I started buying grammar guides… they’re just deadweight until you’re ready for them.
よし！ 始まりましょう！！！
