Japanese My Way

There’s a great self-satire on learning Japanese that’s been around since before Christmas 2002, So You Want to Learn Japanese . . . Wrong! It’s a fun read, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you should take a look, but remember that it’s a satire.  And that leads into what I want to tell you today: why learning to speak Japanese is easy!  Even easier than English!

Japanese and English are fundamentally the same

One of the lies some people like to spread is “Japanese is so much more difficult than English, French, German, Swahili, or your other favorite language”.  Bull!  This is totally baseless.  Fundamentally, both Japanese and English or any, other language for that matter, use the same parts of your brain: they’re both human languages.

The only fair comparison is to look at an 8-year old Japanese child and see how well he speaks Japanese, look at an 8-year old American or Canadian and see how well he speaks English, and compare the two.  Surprise!  They both speak their respective language just as well.  You can try British or Australian children too, but with their accent, the Japanese child may be easier to understand.  Conversely, if you’re not from North America, you probably want to stay away from those crazy Americans and Canadians.

The point is virtually everyone learns his or her native language with equal ease.  You don’t need to be super intelligent, a genius, or a polyglot.  Whether you have three degrees or decided to leave school early, you’ve already learned one language!  You just need to do it again.

Japanese grammar is simple

Japanese grammar is extremely well structured with very few exceptions.

• Where English has hundreds of irregular verbs, Japanese has two.  That’s right, just 2.
• English has singular and plural; Japanese doesn’t.  Think about it.  You don’t even have to worry about whether there are three books on the table or just one.  Just use the same word, no changes necessary.
• English verbs conjugate for person and number.  Japanese verbs don’t.  Remember “to be, I am, you are, he is, we are, you are, they are”?  None of that matters in Japanese: it’s always the same.  Just like “to be, I be, you be, he be, we be, you be, they be”!
• You can omit more with Japanese.  My favorite example is, “I love you.”  In Japanese, you can say the same thing with just one word!  I’m speaking, and I’m talking to you, so I don’t need to explain me and you.

Of course, you can write Japanese that competes with the intertwined clauses and subclauses of Silentio’s translation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, but the beauty of it is, it’ll be easier to understand in Japanese.

Japanese pronunciation is simple

Unlike English, with its 30 some vowel sounds that can be combined with 20 or so consonant sounds to make hundreds and hundreds of syllables, Japanese only has about 100 syllables.  To make things simpler yet, the Japanese phonetic alphabets have one sound for one letter.  There’s nothing confusing like the ‘a’s in bat, balm, paw, fate, peat, barrow, boar, and mare, which are all slightly different.

This doesn’t mean they’re aren’t tongue twisters in Japanese, but you don’t walk around saying, “She sells sea shells . . .”, do you?

Learning to speak Japanese

I won’t lie to you.  Like any other language, learning Japanese will take some time.  Maybe even a little more time than a language more similar your, but by no means it is difficult.  So if you’re interested, dive in.  A great place to start and get help at is Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar.

Technorati Tags: How to learn Japanese, learn speak japanese

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!

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