How to learn Japanese my way
Learn to speak Japanese my way, . . . or your way. :) But at least, make use of my experiences, mistakes, and successes to learn Japanese faster, easier, and have more fun doing it.
How should I go about learning Japanese? Where should I start? What resources should I use? These were just some of the questions I had when I started. I was totally lost and bounced from method to method, trying them one-by-one until I finally found one that works, and works amazingly well. In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing what works, what doesn’t, and a little bit of why.
What works, of course, involves much more than just study methods or a textbook. It’s more importantly actions, attitudes, and beliefs.
There are always rumors going on about how Japanese is difficult, so I want to start off by getting rid of that idea: Why learning to speak Japanese is easy.
Do language, not math
I’ll be honest with you. I like math. I’m one of those strange people who think it’s interesting. So, I made a horrible mistake and tried to treat Japanese the same way. The textbooks worked nicely with that technique. I studied the all rules: grammar, the parts of speech, the system of writing. I knew the difference between an 已然形 and a 仮定形 verb, all the possible verb and adjective conjugations, I was learning a ton of words from the vocabulary lists in my textbook, and thought I was doing great. I wrote a Japanese proficiency test and scored well (not the JLPT, but about equivalent to the JLPT3). Then I had to speak . . .
It didn’t work. I had failed. Well, that’s how the painful 10 minutes of my first conversation felt. I knew all these things: vocabulary, grammar, structure, and they were all useless because I couldn’t actually speak Japanese, and I had to ask the other person to repeat himself time and time again before I could understand him. After this incident, I had to seriously think about how I was going to learn Japanese.
When all’s said and done, I wanted to be able to actually use Japanese: listen, speak, read, write. Whether I knew the rules or not was totally irrelevant. But, the way I was studying Japanese was just like the way you study math: you start with the rules. Unfortunately for me, Japanese is a language, not math.
Japanese vs. Math
When you solve a problem in math, you look at the problem, then you to break it into simple parts using rules, you solve the small parts, put them back together, and finally write the answer. With Japanese, this is like taking sentences, breaking them down into their parts of speech, analyzing the meaning and creating a response, putting the response together using rules, and saying the resulting sentence. This technique works wonderfully for math, but Japanese isn’t math. It uses the wrong part of your brain and is far too slow for language.
After thinking about how I use English, I realized that language is much simpler than math. The part of your brain that you use for language is able to handle breaking things apart and putting them together all without you realizing anything’s happening. Of course, I studied English grammar in school too, but that was after I had already learned it naturally!
I decided that I could learn to speak Japanese the same way I learned English! I learned all the basics of English far before I had even heard of math or studying.
Preview
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing practical techniques and musings. In the mean time, have fun learning Japanese!
