Not only do I consider learning things one of my hobbies, but I also consider it a cornerstone of my career. Of the many things that I learn about every day, the one which garners the most interest from the widest variety of people is Japanese.
I believe that there are some relatable lessons that you can take away from this journey. And hope that given it is a language, and we all use some kind of language (even if not spoken), we can all relate.
I taught myself. But that does not tell the whole story.
Why did I learn Japanese?
The first attempt
Japan is a lovely place, and lots of other people think so too. My colleagues are always telling me about their trips, and asking for recommendations. (To which I usually give a vague answer of “you can’t really go wrong, so don’t worry”)
I first attempted to learn Japanese in 2014 in my first year of University. My motivation was simple, I liked Anime and Manga, and wanted more of it. I enrolled in JAPA 101 at Victoria University of Wellington. I don’t think I lasted two lessons before I dropped out.
I dropped out because during the first lesson, we were asked to pair up to the person next to ourselves and practice some phrases. This was the first moment where I realised
To learn Japanese, I would have to speak to other people. And this was not something that 18 year old Alex was ready to do yet.
My reason to try again
In 2017 when I graduated, my best friends and I planned a celebratory trip to Japan. Seems like a good enough reason to start learning properly. That was just a part of the puzzle though, I had lots of manga and light novels that I wanted to read, and did not want to wait for translations.
When people ask me in conversation, I usually summarise this all down to “I like Manga and Anime a lot”. This is the first major key on our journey. It’s a lot easier to learn something if you are interested in it.
The beginnings
I started learning by
- Memorising hiragana and katakana (Japanese phonetic characters) with flashcards
- Reading the famous Tae Kim’s grammar guide
- Getting stuck in
By getting stuck in, I mean I started to read ‘yotsubato!’ 「よつばと！」 A charming story about a single father raising his daughter, and the community around them.
This Manga is often recommended to beginners because it is largely centred around a preschool-aged child, and the adults around them dumb down their language for her. There are also a few community translation guides that you can use as a paring to the Manga you read along with it.
I describe what I then proceeded to do as brute force
I started reading. I had no idea what I was looking at, so if I read something, I would then look it up in either a dictionary (jisho.org), and/or in Tae Kim’s grammar guide.
The first page took me a good hour to read.
But before long, I started to pick up pace. You will too.
You have to start somewhere, and we are usually bad when we start. We need an environment where we can try, fail, and find out what it should have been.
Kanji (Chinese Characters)
Japanese has three alphabets, two unique to Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana) and Kanji.
Kanji is trickier for English language speakers (and probably lots of others too), because rather than writing down how the word sounds (I promise that’s what we maybe try to do in English, sorry), you draw a character representing a meaning you’d like to convey, and then you memorise how you read that in various contexts (because it changes). There are a lot of nuances there we could argue about, but this is a good enough introduction.
I woke up an hour earlier every day before leaving for work and I worked through some flashcards using the Anki app. I used the famous ‘Japanese Core 2000’ An ordered list of the most common 2000 “words” as they appear in news papers.
So I learnt Kanji not character by character, but as they are in words. That means sometimes learning two new ones at once, or them paired with hiragana. And my brain then fuzzes out the meaning based on shared words that I have seen them in.
Bootstrapped
As soon as I could, I tried to learn Japanese in Japanese. So if I did not understand something. I would google in Japanese for the answer.
This way I was bootstrapping my brain to think about Japanese, in Japanese. I did not want to have a translation layer. This was very intentional, and I believe very important to success.
I then basically just did this routine on repeat. I would wake up early, do flashcards to improve grammar. I would bring a book (either Manga or LN) with me to work, and read on my lunch break and on the train. I would watch Anime (no subs) and read more after work.
And I loved it. Repeat this every day for a few years, hours and hours of daily effort, and you too could get decent.
Fun
There are largely two categories of fun we can talk about. Type 1 fun which is fun while you are doing it. And type 2 fun which is fun looking back.
I am a bit type 2 fun person. But luckily for me, a lot of my study with Japanese combined the two.
I enjoyed both reading new books, watching movies etc. all while learning new words and grammar and ways of expressing one’s self.
The fun is what keeps me going, and keeps me coming back to learn more. Whenever I am asked for advice on language learning, this is one space I spent a lot of time talking about.
You need to have a goal which you are genuinely excited about and interested in doing well. You need to have a thing you want to do in the language which you are working towards, and you need to find a way to incrementally work towards it (start easier) You need to be able to find a way to enjoy the process of learning and getting there, rather than just the goal itself. Embrace type 2 fun.
Immersion
Immersion comes up a lot in these discussions. I am pro-immersion.
I changed my phone, my computer, everything I could to be in Japanese to expose myself as much as I could to the language.
I went to language exchange events, to practice speaking. And eventually at one of these events, I met the woman who is now my wife. Having a partner speaking the language you are working on is probably the ultimate immersion technique aside from moving to that country.
The never-ending lessons
In New Zealand, if you say dinner is “not bad”, it means it’s pretty good. My wife tells me if you say “not bad” in Japanese in response to your dinner what you really mean is “what is this garbage you have served me, I never want to eat this again but I’m too polite to tell you so please take my subtle hint”. These little cultural differences between interpretations of phrases is always hard.
How do you know what to say to somebody when somebody in their family has passed away? In English, the phrase “I’m sorry for your loss” can come across with varying meanings and weights depending on your cultural background (UK English vs. USA English, vs. NZ English).
No text book I read ever prepared me for what to say to my wife or her family when her father passed away.
This is another example when bootstrapping is really useful. There are a lot of great websites and YouTube videos out there explaining these courtesies and the phrases you will need to equip yourself with. But it does require some quick preparation, research, and the ability to remember things quickly. But it’s also an example of a problem which you may not be able to solve. And in these scenarios, it is important to fall back on first principals.
There have been many of these situations. A new social situation arises and I know the idea that I want to express, but I do not know the culturally correct way to express it for the given context. Japanese is particularly famous for this being a problem. If you don’t know what you want to say, just say you don’t know how to say it, and then describe the feeling or thought you wish to convey. A reasonable person will be pleased that you put so much thought and effort into trying to communicate with them. And it is not so worth worrying about what an unreasonable person may think.
Language and culture are fundamentally intertwined. And to truly understand a language, you need to try to understand the culture around it.
The things that I still have not learnt
That’s right, I “know Japanese”. But I don’t. I’m a big fat phoney.
I cannot write a single character. Not Hiragana, not Katakana, not Kanji.
I can type. But I cannot write. So does this count?
There is also a whole other sub-language, keigo, which I have never really had to use or learn. If I ever had to go speak with somebody important in Japan, I’d probably come off as a country bumpkin, or a disrespectful youth (both of which may be varying levels of true).
At the same time, a smile comes across my face every time I see a Kanji I cannot read, ask my Japanese born and raised wife what it says, and she says, “I don’t know”.
At the end, what does having learnt something really mean?
Learning
Learning Japanese taught me a lot about learning.
Whenever I set out to learn something I make sure I now have
- A goal, why am I learning this thing?
- An enjoyable way to practice the thing
- The time to do it
Ultimately, a lot of how I learnt Japanese was by throwing a lot of time at it, and I was able to do that thanks to having goals and enjoying the journey.