4 Ways to Make Learning Japanese Easier
Learning a language is the key to opening a door to a whole new world. It’s a mountain you have to climb to admire a new landscape. It’s an enriching experience that gives you a better understanding of a country and its culture. It makes it possible to create new bonds with people that have very unique life experiences.
‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.’ –Dr. Seuss
Of course, nowadays, with Google Translate or other applications of the sort, it’s possible to get around as a tourist in a foreign land. But these apps prevent the human connection.
And that’s what a language is all about. They were developed by us, for us humans to bond and connect over them, to communicate and share: a thought, an idea, an emotion.
Depending on your native language, there might be several other countries speaking and writing in a somewhat familiar way, due to common roots. Latin has evolved into French, Spanish, Italian, and more. The Sanskrit writing system has spread from South Asia over to Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.
But in this world, there are also very unique languages. Japanese is one of them.
I graduated from my Japanese Language School in Osaka yesterday. It’s been two years that I started learning this fascinating language, and I am still nowhere close to getting fluent. It’s an ongoing journey of which I don’t yet know where it will take me.
If you’re interested in learning Japanese, or any other language, here are 4 tips I would have given myself before I started. I hope that they will help you get ahead with your studies.
1. Focus on the basics
I mean it. It does sound very cliché, but unlike other languages, your mother tongue most likely won’t have any single commonality with Japanese.
Throughout my nearly two years at language school, one thing I struggled with, was the pace of studying. Every day we would learn something new. Two or three new grammar points, 15 to 20 new words, some new kanji, too, would join to the “to study list”.
At that time, I never had an opportunity to process it all. Without giving my brain time to assimilate this novelty, I have come to still make a lot of mistakes today with very basic grammar structures. I misread some easy kanji, or forget some basic vocabulary.
If you take the time to solidify your basics, it will make the study process much more fun down the road.
Why? Because once you have the basics, you can move on to study without the textbook. If you like Japanese anime, you can go ahead and watch those with Japanese subtitles. You can learn new words as well as sentence structures this way. If you like reading, you can pick up some manga in Japanese, or novels that you know and that have Japanese translations.
For example, I have been reading Harry Potter in Japanese for a few weeks now. Of course, there are plenty of words I don’t know, and some grammatical structures I don’t understand. However, I know the story quite well, having read them in my language before. I can always guess what is happening at a given moment. This helps me to deduce the meaning of words, which I can confirm with a quick translation.
Seeing words and grammar in action is the best way to remember them.
2. Trust your own method
At language school, I have studied Japanese with students from many different countries. My classmates came from Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Holland, England, USA and more.
Among all these students, not two had the same learning method. Everyone went about it their own way. And most of us would pass our exams and move on to the upper levels. For those that didn’t, they would succeed at their second try without a doubt.
There is no right way to learn Japanese or any other language. A method is a tool. It’s your tool. Nobody is going to do the learning for you, so you might as well do it your way.
‘Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.’ –George Evans
Whether you like to have clean notebooks with many different colors, or like to highlight and underline things. Whether you like to listen to recordings or write the vocabulary list over and over again on a piece of paper. Develop your learning tool.
Any way that suits you, will get you a step closer to your goal. People have all kinds of motivation for learning a language. Some want to find work, others get a better understanding of a culture. Some might want to study at a higher education institution in Japan, others want to interact more with Japanese people while traveling.
Don’t compare yourself and your progress to that of another. It will leave you frustrated and discouraged in moving forward. Focus on the road ahead of you, and follow your path.
3. Break it down
When you start learning a language. Break your process down into small, easily foreseeable chunks. Forget the big picture for a while, it will only leave you discouraged.
Look at all the little bits and pieces the language is made off, and go at it one by one. If you put your attention to one task at the time, for example learning a new set of vocabulary about a specific topic like design, you have a very clear and reachable objective. Add to it a time component to motivate you to reach that goal, and you will swiftly progress.
Don’t do it all at once, it will only have you mix it up. If one day you study grammar that indicates the timing of an action, and the next you move on to grammar that focuses on point of view, you will have a hard time remembering what’s what.
At school, we followed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) textbook. With this method, we learned things related to a specific level of the Japanese language, but without any clear contexts. Examples were always random sentences about fictional characters made up for the book. It was hard to remember.
Put things into context. Make your own context. Start with a topic you like, maybe it is architecture, and learn some vocabulary about the subject. Move on to read about a Japanese architect whose work you like, and pick out the grammar used to write his biography for instance.
You will make your learning process more enjoyable this way.
4. Be patient
Learning a language takes time. You know this already because you are reading this article. Some languages, however, take more time than others to learn. Japanese is one of them. Even for Chinese students who use similar characters, or Korean students who are used to sentence structure, there are many challenges.
It’s a step by step process. Things need to be learned, unlearned and learned again for your brain to assimilate them.
I know how annoying it is to be told to be patient. But I’ve learned my lesson.
Arriving in Japan about 2 years ago, I thought I could storm through the Japanese language school. I thought that I would pick up the language like you pick up shells on the beach, and go out there talk to anyone and read Japanese novels as I pleased.
Of course, I was wrong.
You have to wait a whole year to see the sakura blooming for a short week.
Refusing to give myself more time, the learning process became frustrating. I would go to school, study at home, and always feel like I didn’t improve. It made me feel miserable at times. I wanted more. I wanted to understand, but I didn’t want to give myself the time to do so.
The periods where I have improved the most were between two school terms. Without classes, I would leisure about and read as I pleased. Travel, and engage with people I met on the road. Little by little, the language materialized on my tongue, and I realized that I was making progress.
Especially in these last few months. After an extended school closure due to the coronavirus, I finally took up the courage to read the Harry Potter book I mentioned earlier. It was on my shelf for way too long, but getting into it became enjoyable. I wasn’t only seeing the things I didn’t know anymore, but I felt happy that I could understand more than I thought.
Give yourself some time.
Concluding words
Focus on what you know. Reviewing things that you know, not as a means to review basics, but to see for yourself the way you’ve come so far, will motivate you to go further. Don’t keep starring at the long road ahead, give yourself some credit for what you’ve accomplished. There will always be something left for tomorrow.
‘That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.’ –Ralph Waldo Emerson
