Author Archives: John

Your Japanese Doesn’t Have To Be 100% Perfect All The Time

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Learning Japanese has taught me a lot about the whole concept of language and how it is used to communicate.    Keep in mind that Japanese, just like English, is a living language.  It is constantly evolving.  Which kinda means that you can study all day every day, and you still won’t know everything.  While you are busy studying old Japanese grammar points to death, new, better, faster streamlined speech patterns are forming everyday.  Just like English!

The deeper you get into learning Japanese, you begin to realize that it is perfectly fine to be lazy and leave out particles, leave out certain syllables, smash two syllables together, etc.  Of course, you should still devote a bit of effort to learn formal Japanese, but in my particular case, the only time I will ever really need to use formal Japanese is if I ever find a Japanese girlfriend and I have to meet her parents.  I probably won’t ever work for a Japanese company or have to be super formal being a foreigner, so I spend most my time speaking casually.

My point is — make Japanese your own.  Don’t be afraid to spell or say things weird on purpose.  You probably butcher the English language everyday without even knowing it.  You could possibly be the most redneck, funky-sounding English speaker alive, but yet the people you talk to understand your English just fine.  See what I’m getting at?  Don’t be afraid to speak or write or type weird ass Japanese.  As long as you’re understood, nobody will bat an eye.  In fact, your Japanese may even sound more native the more you “play” with it.  Have fun with it.  Make it your own.  Be a Japanese “redneck”! YEEHAW!

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t SHOULD Learn Japanese

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Okay friends I believe I have a good post for today!  I want to talk about reasons why you SHOULD learn Japanese.

(This is in response to all the articles I’ve come across about reasons why you shouldn’t learn it.  There are valid reasons why you shouldn’t learn it, and reasons why you wouldn’t need to learn it, but they weren’t enough to convince me to quit learning.)

First of all, who cares why anyone decides to learn Japanese.  We all have our own reasons why we are drawn to the language.  No need to put others down for not sharing the same reasons.  For me, it’s like I’m a mosquito and Japanese is the headlight of a car speeding down a desert highway at night.  I have no idea why I’m drawn to the language but apparently I have no problem with letting it kill me.  I have this unexplainable underlying desire to master Japanese even though I’m pretty sure I will never get to that point.

During my years of learning Japanese, I’ve come across a few blog posts and YouTube videos from people who list reasons why you SHOULDN’T learn Japanese.  The two big reasons I seem to see/hear everywhere are:

1.) It’s going to take a really long time to reach any kind of fluency… Typically between 3-7 years.  In other words, prepare for the long haul if you really want it that bad, especially for “little to no return” on time invested.

I do agree with the above. It’s gonna take a long time.  And depending on what you expect from all the sweat, blood and tears you put into learning Japanese, you could very well be spending all that time “learning how to play the guitar and get women to have sex with you” as one blog post I read put it.  Look, studying Japanese doesn’t necessarily have to take your whole life away.  You just have to keep it fun so it never feels like you’re studying.  I mean, really, if I wanted to learn how to play guitar I could have very well picked up my electric guitar (that I bought and never use) to learn to play it at the same time I started learning Japanese.  Think of all that time you spend just being a lazy ass.  Well there you go, there’s your “guitar learning” time.

2.) Speaking Japanese will make you “less popular” with native Japanese people.

I also do agree with this second big reason why you might not want to spend so much time learning Japanese, especially if you plan on visiting or living in Japan.  I did sort of experience this while visiting.  When I first got there, I wanted to speak (or practice rather) Japanese all the time.  But by the 4th or 5th day and after a couple big mistakes I made while speaking, I realized its much better to speak English first and only use Japanese when absolutely necessary, or when it’s many times quicker to say something short in Japanese than it would be to say in English.  Just like Japanese sounds exotic to you, English sounds exotic to them.  I started to realize my interactions in Japan went much more pleasantly and smoothly after I developed this sort of English/Japanese hybrid way of speaking.  It was hard to get used to at first since I wanted to speak Japanese all the time, but after I realized “Hey, I can survive in Japan just fine with my current Japanese skills,” I began to let go a bit and not try so hard to speak Japanese.

So we’ve quickly just reviewed the two most common reasons “why you shouldn’t learn Japanese” that I’ve come across.  They aren’t necessarily meant to be discouraging, but they are definitely worth pondering and giving some thought.

Now for the meat of this post.  Here are five reasons (in no particular order) that I’ve come up with as to why you SHOULD learn Japanese:

#1 – Do it for yourself

Despite the fact that speaking Japanese will make you “less sensational” with native Japanese speakers, being able to enjoy your favorite Japanese media (TV, music, movies, anime, manga, video games) is well worth the time invested in my humble opinion.  I get a sense of accomplishment being able to “step into a different, completely foreign realm” so to speak and get the gist of what’s going on around me.  I realize I will never use my Japanese language skills to rule the world.  And I’m OK with that.

#2 – It’s like coming into contact with something exotic and beautiful, that gets even more beautiful the more you try to understand it

This reason might be a little subjective for some people.  What might be interesting to me about the Japanese culture might not be so interesting to you.  And also because there will be ups and downs during the whole process of trying to understand and learn Japanese and the culture.  But how can you enjoy the ups when there are no downs?  As I go along turning over each little stone that is Japanese, as I continue taking each little baby step to understanding just a little more, there have been countless times where I was thankful that I decided to study that day when I was so close to saying “Ahh, forget it I’ll do it tomorrow.”

#3 – It becomes a part of you

I really started to feel this way after I developed my English/Japanese hybrid speaking while in Japan.  Even though my Japanese skills are beginner-intermediate at best, being able to have fun conversations with random people at izakayas was one of the best feelings in the world.  Getting the gist of whats being said is all it takes to keep the conversation going, and trying to understand each other is part of the fun!  Lots of smiles and laughs to be had.  Being able to keep the conversation going at a Japanese pub gave me the sense that I was “half way up the hill” to ultimate mastery.  I started to see the payoff from all the time spent studying and it was a beautiful thing — and still continues to be so!  Eventually you’ll become so good that you won’t even notice you understand so much Japanese until you take a step back and realize you’re a freakin’ ninja with this shit.  The more you expose yourself to the language the more it becomes a part of you.  You’ll probably never be able to pinpoint the exact moment when you finally become “fluent” because it will just sort of happen.  But let’s save the whole notion of fluency for a future post.

#4 – Those “LEVEL UP” moments

You know what I’m talking about.  You can just be going about your day, mulling around life like a zombie.  And suddenly you decide to put on Pandora and listen to your favorite J-pop station.  And without even realizing it, one of your favorite songs comes on, and BAM.  You just totally, clearly understood something you never did before even though you’ve heard the song hundreds of times.  Yes!  You just leveled up my friend!  You literally feel yourself on a higher platform.  These level up moments come in different forms and seem to happen when you least expect them, every single time.  But you know it just happened right after it does happen.  Just go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back when it does.  You deserve it.

#5 – Studying the Japanese language and the culture will also teach you more about your own self

This might be another subjective reason for some, but for me, studying Japanese and the culture has taught me to be a little more considerate, courteous and patient.  Especially after visiting Japan.  Being able to witness first hand how Japanese are considerate, especially amongst themselves, almost left me feeling like the most arrogant American alive.  Even though I honestly feel like a pretty decent person!

So there you have it.  Five reasons why you SHOULD learn Japanese.  There are many other reasons why you should learn but they will vary from person to person.  All I can do from here is encourage you to discover those reasons for yourself.  They may even be reasons you can’t put into words.  You just feel them and they will feel right. ;)

Dou iu koto? (How I learned [or reviewed?] ~ KOTO GA / ~ KOTO GA DEKIMASU)

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Today I learned the correct way to say and mean DOU IU KOTO? which basically means “what do you mean?” or “what are you saying?”

I hear this a lot in Japanese. I’ve found myself having to say “what do you mean?” a lot (and also hear it often being said to me! :P) while chatting online with Japanese friends and others learning Japanese, so it was something I naturally adapted into my vocabulary pretty quickly.

However, I started saying it myself a good while before ever really knowing how to write it correctly, so I was actually saying it wrong. (I was saying “DOU YO KOTO?” which is incorrect.)

Here is a short story on what led me to correctly learning this phrase today:
Today I was watching a Japanese prank show and their target was some cute girl who I think was famous or something. Probably a singer, I have no idea. Anyhow they set up a fake interview in the evening in some kind of poorly-lit apartment, with the sliding balcony door in the background and they would fly a fake UFO across the sky behind her to make her think she was catching a real UFO out the corner of her eye. She takes the bait and they all head outside to the balcony. The pranksters proceed to put on a fake UFO landing about a half mile away to make her think she was witnessing something for real (even though you can totally tell it was fake! Haha). Anyways, long story short they eventually had a few guys dressed in alien suits bust through a paper wall to the side of her (Japanese seem to enjoy busting through paper walls :P) and replayed her reaction from about 3 or 4 different angles. She screamed as the aliens yelled a bunch of stuff to her and after they got done shouting whatever it was, she gave them a frightened and puzzled look and after a second of silence she said “dou iu koto?” They put in subtitles at the bottom when she said that and that’s when I instantly realized I was saying this phrase wrong this whole time!  But I think that what I was used to saying was close enough to where it sounded more correct than incorrect so maybe in retrospect I wasn’t sounding too stupid!  Hahaha.

Cool story bro…

So now that I know how to correctly write this phrase, naturally I wanted to find out exactly how this phrase was constructed and quickly got to searching Google. I learned it contains the verb IU (言う) which is “to say”.  Ah, I’m starting to see now how this phrase means “what are you saying?”!!!

So what about the DOU part?
I found this page where someone basically says DOU is kinda like the question form of SOU (sort of):
http://thejapanesepage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3850#p2749

Nice. Never knew that! Ok moving along.

What about KOTO?
After a minute or two of searching, I found this page where I’m given a good explanation of KOTO (as well as DEKIMASU):
http://ww8.tiki.ne.jp/~tmath/language/jpverbs/lesson31.htm

I think I’ve come across this page before maybe a year or two ago. I kind of remember reading through it and learning how KOTO turns a Japanese verb into a thing. Kind of how -ing in English works:

Read-ing YOMU KOTO / Drink-ing NOMU KOTO

I like reading.  YOMU KOTO GA SUKI DESU.
I like drinking water.  MIZU WO NOMU KOTO GA SUKI DESU.

Now to add a little bonus to my lesson today, I got some good examples on how to use the verb DEKIRU (can do).

I can read Japanese.  WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKIMASU.
I couldn’t drink beer yesterday.  KINOU WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKIMASEN DESHITA.

Here are the same two sentences above, but using the plain (casual) form of DEKIRU in both present and past tense and in both affirmative and negative ways:

I can read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKIRU.
I can’t read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKINAI.
I was able to read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKITA.
I wasn’t able to read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKINAKATTA.

I can drink beer. WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKIRU.
I can’t drink beer. WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKINAI.
I was able to drink beer yesterday. KINOU WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKITA.
I couldn’t drink beer yesterday. KINOU WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKINAKATTA.

Here is a good page on how to conjugate the verb DEKIRU in all tenses:
http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/Japanese/dekiru.html

やった！！

I think I’ve found a great way to get some good listening practice!

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By listening to Japanese TV without watching it!!! O______O

Especially when the dramas are on.  It’s almost like listening to a book on tape!  You get all the dramatic piano music in the background, sound effects, etc., and you start to notice that since you can’t see what’s happening, you start to hang on to every single word that’s being said in order to figure out what’s going on.  Effectively forcing you to paint a picture in your own head, even though you might only understand a few verbs, nouns and adjectives here and there.

I’m also having fun trying to figure out what products or services the commercials are advertising.

If you have a computer and internet access and you’re wondering where YOU can watch LIVE Japanese TV, I’ve found a GREAT website where someone (who goes by the name WilsonJJ?) has taken the time to stream live Japanese programming for everyone to enjoy!  You can find it here:

http://wilsonjj.me/jptv/

You will see the channel being changed from time to time, so there is a chance you might really start to get into an episode of some J-drama and then have the last ten minutes cut off on you due to WilsonJJ changing the channel, but I think its great that different networks are shown.  The channel isn’t just flipped on you at any random time thank goodness.  There is a “TV guide” you can check out on the site so you can get an idea of when certain programs will be shown, or about when the channel will be changed. ナイス！

I’ve tried different methods for listening practice in the past.  When I was first starting out a few years ago, I would just listen to random internet talk radio streams while washing dishes or something. At that time I could hardly make out any words.  All I really heard was sentences being started and finished, and a whole bunch of “random” syllables in between.  I knew something was being talked about, I just didn’t know what!  I was more or less mindlessly listening to a bunch of gibberish.  But in the back of my head, I knew eventually I would be able to make things out.  I just had to suck it up, make and take the time to get listening practice in.  Along the way, I found a post at All Japanese All The Time (AJATT), which basically suggested that I should get in 10,000 hours of listening practice in, in order to get good at listening.  I had already been taking the time to practice listening before finding this post, but kind of wanted to know how much listening practice I needed in order to notice any improvement.  10,000 hours is a really long time and Katz (the author of AJATT) suggests all sorts of ways to get that time in.  I’m not extreme enough to try every single one of his suggestions, but just to have that number 10,000 was good enough for me.  I knew that if I even got in 25-30% of 10,000 hours, I should definitely notice an improvement.

To be honest, the craziest I’ve gotten with trying to get the time in was playing Japanese radio from my iPhone (I use an app called Hot Radio JP) while taking a shower or placing the phone under my pillow so it goes into my ears while I’m sleeping.  I’ve tried other less-extreme methods in between, such as watching Japanese people’s live webcam streams on TwitCast (which is good for being exposed to and learning casual spoken Japanese, and maybe make some friends!) and also watching CrunchyRoll animes with paper taped to my screen to cover the subtitles.

I have no idea how many hours of listening practice I’ve put into my ears at this point.  A rough guesstimate would probably be in the low hundreds (200? 300 maybe?).  Nowhere near 10,000 I’m sure.  It may be a combination of all the studying, listening and chatting in Japanese I’ve done so far, but I can proudly say that I can more or less make out where words begin and end when I hear spoken Japanese and passively listening to it.  If I really try and focus on what I’m listening to, I can roughly get the gist of what’s going on.

For the past year or so, I’ve been randomly leaving the WilsonJJ J-TV stream on all night as I sleep, or I’ll put it on while I work.  I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, so I’ve been having to switch from browser tab to browser tab while the Japanese TV is still playing in one of the background browser tabs.  And so just a day or so ago, I’ve found myself multiple times completely frozen, staring blankly at some work-related webpage because I was listening to the audio from the J-TV and trying to imagining what was going on!  Hey wait a second, did I just find a way to boost my listening practice methods?!

As I am typing this post now, I have the J-TV playing in the background.  And I think I’m finding it way more interesting to “listen to” as opposed to listening to “radio” audio that is intended to only be listened to (and not watched).

Crazy, right??  Maybe this might be more fun for you as well!

You can thank me later. ;)

Today I made a pretty big decision for this website! D:

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I’ve decided to make the blog part of this site it’s main feature.

That is all!  There is no reason to keep reading this post beyond this point unless you want to read a pretty long boring explanation as to why I made this decision.

In the beginning, I had huge plans for this website.  I thought it was going to develop into a great “START HERE” point someone could use to begin their journey of learning Japanese.  Who knows, it might still have that kind of potential in the future, but in the beginning I had this notion that Japanese was going to be this easy, practically linear kind of learning experience.  I thought learning Japanese would be sort of like learning math where you start with the easy stuff first, and as you go along learning more and more, eventually everything would just start to “fit” like a huge puzzle — like something you can just “get through” if you sit down and put in the time and effort to do it.  I also thought learning Japanese would be something that I can just write out what I was studying as I go along like it would turn into some kind of “instruction manual” on how to become a master of the Japanese language.

WRONG.

Could I get any more arrogant/ignorant?! LOL.  If I could slap my past self right now I would.  Please learn from my hugely mistaken dumbass self.  The truth is, learning Japanese will be a never-ending journey.  But don’t let that discourage you!  I mean think about it for a sec.  Do you know every single word in the English language and how to use it??  Unless you’re some kind of super genius freak-of-nature, then no, you don’t.  English is a living language.  It has evolved over a large period of time and will continue to grow and change as time goes on.  Thanks to the internet’s ability to allow people to communicate at lightning speeds, new (particularly slang) words are being introduced into English at rates no one on Earth can keep up with.  It seems there is a new ridiculous word “everyone and their mom” is saying popping up every month, sometimes every week.  The latest slang word I’ve grown to hate is “bae” which short for “babe”, used to refer to someone’s girlfriend/boyfriend/hubby/wifey/bootycall etc…  I mean really, people, are we so lazy that we can’t say “babe” anymore?!  SMH.  My point is, technically, you as a (presumably) native English-speaker are still learning English!  Mind blowing, I know…  You’ve simply just learned and have used enough English in your life to be really really REALLY good at it.

Just like English, Japanese is also a living language.  If you continue to study, practice and use Japanese, eventually you will become proficient enough to communicate at a native-speaking level if that’s what your goal is.  If anything, you WILL learn enough to have fun.  At the very least, you will learn enough to impress your friends. :)

At the time of this blog posting, I am still a no0b.  I’ve been studying Japanese on and off for the past 4 and a half years or so.  Still way green, but I can confidently say that if I were to be dumped in Japan with nothing but the clothes on my back, I would totally survive.

Anyhow I am getting a little off-track here.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that, because there really is no point A to point B way of learning Japanese, I’ve decided to convert this site into more of a blog-based site.  I will now be using this site as a kind of journal in an effort to document my progress.  I will be posting things that I feel are working for me as an individual.  There are already tons and tons of great online resources out there for teaching yourself Japanese.  Absolutely no sense in trying to re-invent the wheel here.  Everyone’s journey into the Japanese language will be a different one.  But perhaps this site/blog could be used as a sort of “breadcrumbs path” that I myself can use to go back through later, or something that someone else could stumble upon and perhaps get some insight on what has been working for me.

I’ve found that my Japanese studying habits are pretty sporadic.  I try to keep it fun and sometimes whatever I’m doing to study can start to become boring, at which point I’ll take a break, stop for the day (or week, or month), or switch gears and move on to something else in order to keep things interesting and stay motivated.  So with that said, that’s pretty much what you’ll be seeing on this website from this point on.  Some posts may be quite informative, others may be less “educating” and more like “this is what I’m doing right now” or “look what I’ve found!”.

Hopefully this decision will be a beneficial one to both myself and the site, and also to anyone who finds it and perhaps maybe follows it. ;)

Cheers!

The fastest way to learn Kanji (in my opinion / a.k.a. what works for me)

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To skip my rambling and go directly to the point of this post click here, although it might still be worth reading to find out what brought me here!

皆さん、こんにちは！

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?? Sorry for being on such a long hiatus from FunWithJapanese.com. A lot has happened in my life since I last made an update of any kind to this website. I’ll spare you the boring details, but the point is I just sort of hit a plateau with my Japanese studies and with life happening at the same time, it was hard to get motivated again to pick it back up.

But I’m back!  Needless to say I have that 火 lit up under my ass again!  Better yet, how about a 大炎!  I think I finally found my fastest way to learn Kanji!

If you’re reading this blog post, chances are you’re at a similar level with your Japanese as I am.  You know your kanas, you know some Kanji and you can more or less make really small fluff talk with some cute J-chicks at http://twitcasting.tv.  But like me, you thirst for more.

You aren’t quite Japanese-literate enough to even express yourself quickly or efficiently, let alone even try to open your mouth to simply say, “today was a good day” (今日はいい日でした).  You’re sitting there watching all kinds of J-dramas, animes and mindlessly listening to Japanese radio but nothing seems to be progressing — even though you conveniently ignore the huge elephant in the room: THE DREADED 2,000+ KANJI that you wish you could just plug yourself into the Matrix and download to your brain in 2 seconds or take a pill like Bradley Cooper in the movie Limitless and learn them all in 30 minutes.

You know you should learn them if you ever plan on being good at this stuff.  But why is it so damn hard to even get started?!  Using Kanji flashcards??  No way.  I bought a set a couple years ago and never studied with them once.  Way too much cluttered info and way too confusing to absorb anything simple from them.  (I should throw them up on eBay now that I think about it.)  Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji??  Okay I won’t lie, I gave it a shot but I just felt that since I wasn’t learning any ONyomi or KUNyomi readings along with the mnemonics, I was creating extra work for myself down the road.  What’s the point of learning each Kanji’s meaning, but not learning how to pronounce them or even see them being used in compound words?!  To me it seemed like an ass-backwards way of learning.  No thanks, not for me!  I want to be able to read and think in Japanese by the time I’m finished tackling something extensive such as RTK.

So once again I hit up Google and searched “fastest way to learn Kanji” but this time had the genius idea of appending the word “readings” to this search…   And that’s when I stumbled across KANJIDAMAGE!  This is the gem I’ve been searching for!  This guy knows what he’s doing.  I really dig his approach when it comes to cramming so much info for each kanji into an easy-to-remember mnemonic.  It’s like RTK, but with yo’ mama jokes. (Literally.)

Two main features about KANJIDAMAGE that I found to be extremely helpful:

  1. The ONyomi (Chinese) reading is treated as a “sonic” (heard) radical and is included in the mnemonic.  Which leaves more brain room and takes less brain effort to remember the other KUNyomi readings if any.
  2. I realized that when it comes to remembering a kanji by its radicals, there essentially are no “rules” or “concrete” meanings for a radical — either use the mnemonic provided or use your wild imagination to make up your own mnemonic — whatever wacky story it takes to remember the meaning and readings!

I’ve always read about and have seen videos of people taking entries from RTK and one-by-one creating a new Anki flash card for their kanji studying decks, but never thought I could see myself taking the time for all that mess.  But thanks to my two favorite aspects of KANJIDAMAGE listed above, creating my very own kanji study deck for Anki now seems less of a chore and more of an adventure!

[ Even after creating my first 100 Anki cards, I was able to correctly read a few compound kanji I stumbled across! Example: 湖 (big lake; ONyomi: KO) + 水 (water; ONyomi: SUI) = 湖水 (KOSUI = lake)!!!  Okay, yeah both 湖 and 湖水 mean “lake”, but first reading 湖水 as “KOSUI” and then finding out afterwards it also means lake was actually a rewarding experience to be quite honest.  I can read Japanese kanji!!! ]

After spending some time now with KANJIDAMAGE, it’s starting to make sense why similar websites such as TextFugu are putting their own spin on how to learn Kanji with radicals and mnemonics.

At the rate I am going now, I should more or less know about 1,700 kanji in the next few weeks just by casually studying.  Soon enough, FunWithJapanese.com will have it’s own version of a 漢字辞書!

Stay tuned for a status report and detailed video on how I am studying my kanji!

The proper way to say こんにちは / Konnichiwa

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I found this video by fzsdjbncf2000 pretty helpful with the correct way to say konnichiwa. I myself have been guilty of pronouncing it like kon-NI-chi-wa (putting emphasis on the NI) but in fact, you do not put stress on any of the syllables in konnichiwa.

He also explains that you only usually use “konnichiwa” with your superiors, elders, or others older than you or those that you respect.  He explains that using “konnichiwa” is not normally used amongst friends or in other closer or intimate relationships.  A more common expression among friends would be “ohayoo”.

Check out the video!  Hopefully it helps with your pronunciation of konnichiwa!

Mainichikaasan / 毎日かあさん (Mom’s Life) Anime

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I recently discovered CrunchyRoll.com, and the first anime I decided to watch was Mainichikaasan, a cute and funny story about a 39-year-old manga-artist named Reiko.  A mom-of-two, Reiko works from home and is married to a beer-guzzling, Homer-Simpson-like, traveling photographer who is simply named Father.

Set in contemporary Japan, the events that take place in mom’s life are many times hectic and super-crazy with deadlines and juggling two three kids at once.  Father can sometimes act a little like a child himself, but loves his dear children Fumi and Bunji as well and does everything he can, usually while holding a can. :P

I seem to have taken a liking to this anime, probably because it sort of gives an insight on how life as a cartoonist-parent living in Japan would be like.  I kind of think of this anime as a laid-back Japanese version of the Simpsons, with focus on the everyday life of hard-working mom.

If Mainichikaasan seems like your kind of kick-back family fun anime, click here to check it out at CrunchyRoll.com!  I give it two thumbs up.  Definitely a little different from your typical super-power mecha-suit vampire-spells anime, but worth a gander.  But don’t take my word for it!

How I began learning Japanese

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はじめまして！　私はジョンです。Hajimemashite! Watashi-wa John-desu.  What’s up!  I’m John.  Welcome to the first of many (anticipated) posts on the Fun with Japanese blog.  Today I want to share with you the events that led me from being practically clueless about the Japanese language, to finally being able to understand how it works.

As of this (rather lengthy) blog post, I want to say that while I’m not yet fluent in Japanese, I can watch Japanese video and listen to Japanese audio, and more or less tell you what is being talked about.  In my own world, that is a HUGE accomplishment for only… :counts on fingers: 6 months of studying Japanese!  Wow, I didn’t realize its been half a year already!  This is actually pretty exciting to me, because it only makes me wonder how much better I’ll be another 6 months from now.  Man!  If I had only started SOONER!  Why I was so intimidated by Japanese, I have no idea!  Because to be honest, getting this far has been nothing but AWESOME!

Its easy to want to learn Japanese, but how hard is it to actually start learning?

If you’re anything like me, you don’t want to deal with silly audio tapes (or MP3′s?) pumping pre-constructed sentences and phrases into your skull (the Pimsleur approach).  If you’re anything like me, you don’t want to learn by associating pre-constructed sentences and phrases with colorful pictures (Rosetta Stone).  I’ll admit, I tried Rosetta Stone in the very beginning.  While it did help me learn maybe 10 vocabulary words using pictures in the first couple of chapters, it wasn’t necessarily teaching me the way I wanted to be taught.  If you’re like me, you want to see the nuts and bolts and gears of it all, a.k.a. GRAMMAR, a.k.a. the tools you need to put together any sentence you want in Japanese!

Anyhow, enough small talk…  Here is my story:

  1. The VERY first question I ever had about learning the Japanese language was: Is it easier to learn how to SPEAK Japanese, or is it easier to learn how to READ Japanese?  I was casually told by a Japanese native that learning to SPEAK it was easier than learning to READ it.  This sounded about right, because Japanese babies learned to speak it way before they learned to read it, just like you and I learned to speak English way before we learned how to read it.  But I realized that since I already know how to communicate by mouth, perhaps learning how to READ Japanese first is the way to go.  Because if I am able to READ it, I will automatically know how to SPEAK it.
  2. I learned that written Japanese consists of 3 sets of “alphabets” (or characters) — Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.  Faster than I could ask which one I should learn first, I was informed that Kanji contains thousands of characters!  Okay, got it, Kanji will be the LAST thing I will worry about!
  3. Then I learned that Hiragana and Katakana are “syllabaries”.  Each character in these two alphabets represents a certain “sound” or “syllable”.
    • Funny story: Before I REALLY understood how Hiragana and Katakana worked, I thought it was okay to use these syllabaries for normal English words — ex: the English word for “man” could be written in Japanese like まん.  This is simply not the case, as the word for man in Japanese would be おとこのひと or 男の人 (otokonohito).  Its funny to think how completely WRONG I was. But once I learned, Hiragana and Katakana made MUCH more sense to me.
  4. After understanding that Hiragana and Katakana were used for Japanese syllables (not English syllables! Don’t make the same goofy mistake I made), I noticed that Katakana had the *SAME EXACT* syllables/sounds as Hiragana did.  This kind of threw me for a tiny loop because I knew that Hiragana and Katakana (and Kanji) were all used in written Japanese, all at the same time.  How was I supposed to know which to use if I were to write it?  WHATS THE DIFFERENCE???
  5. It didn’t take me TOO long to figure out that:
    • Hiragana (ひらがな) is used ONLY for Japanese words and names ––
      ex: こんにちは (Konnichiwa), or たなか (Tanaka)
    • Katakana (カタカナ) is used ONLY for FOREIGN words and names ––
      ex: ハンバーガー (hanbāgā / hamburger), or ジョン (John)
      ** Basically, the Japanese needed a way to pronounce words that didn’t originate in Japan.  Words like “hamburger” or “chocolate”.  So they came up with Katakana.
    • As soon as I learned the difference between Hiragana and Katakana, I had my first big *click*!  AH!  So when I see Hiragana, I know that its a Japanese word.  When I see Katakana, I know that its a foreign word!
      (One of the neat things about the Japanese language is that a lot of Western-inspired words are starting to make their way into modern Japanese.  So, a lot of times when you read a Katakana word [that you don't know] out loud at a decent speed, you can almost immediately guess what the word is!  For example, チーズ [pronounced CHEE-ZU] is the Japanese word for “cheese”.  This Japanese stuff just became that much more awesome!)
  6. So after learning the true difference between Hiragana and Katakana, I took some time to start memorizing a few Hiragana characters.  It wasn’t long at all before I developed the craving to learn how to put sentences together, even if I didn’t necessarily know a lot of Japanese words.
  7. I started by learning the basic sentence structure: [ A ] は [ B ] です。 ( A-wa B-desu / A is B / This is a dog. )
  8. After getting the hang of that, I wanted to learn exactly HOW this basic sentence structure was put together.  I wanted to learn the grammar!  That’s when I discovered what particles were.  Particles look and sound like normal syllables —  but they are used in special ways to form proper sentences.  Particles are like the “glue” that hold nouns and verbs and everything else together.  I wanted to learn EVERYTHING about particles, so I went out and bought a book specifically about Japanese grammar.  I was able to follow it all. This certain particle did this to a word, and that certain particle did that. I’m starting to understand Japanese!!!  (I didn’t learn ALL the particles at once, but I understood enough about them to move on to something else.  I didn’t want to burn myself out!  Besides, I would be starting an actual Japanese language class soon, so all the rest of the grammar would come eventually.)
  9. Then came the “I’m going to spend every possible waking (and sleeping!) minute to listen to Japanese natives talk” phase.  Even if I didn’t understand a word of it, I still wanted to get used to hearing it.  I downloaded an app to my Android phone that played Japanese internet radio streams, and managed to find a couple Japanese websites with radio streams.  I would listen while doing dishes, while driving in the car, while doing work, before going to bed…  (I even completely stopped listening to rap and hip-hop I was so pumped up to learn Japanese!)  At first, I could only make out 1 or 2 words every 5 minutes or so.  Nowhere near enough to get any sort of idea what was being talked about.  But what kept me motivated was knowing that SOON, soon enough, I would be able to start making out actual words and sentences.  (I strongly recommend you start doing this as soon as possible, and as much as you can take.  Even if you don’t understand one bit.  It really will pay off in the end!  By listening to, or watching native Japanese talk at normal speed, you’ll slowly but surely start to condition yourself to actually hear it, rather than “just listen” to it.)
  10. After about 3 months of trying to teach myself Japanese in any way I could, I was able to put various basic sentences together, search for certain Japanese terms like コメディ (comedy) and アニメ (anime) on YouTube, and other cool things!  I still hadn’t memorized ALL the Hiragana and Katakana, but I knew I was well on my way to finally understanding Japanese, and I was learning at a much faster rate than I ever thought I would.  This is SO AWESOME!!!
  11. After the fourth month of self-teaching, I started my official Elementary Japanese class with my dear girlfriend, Brooke, at her college.  This class helped IMMENSELY with the memorization of Hiragana and Katakana, since we were going to be quizzed on them.  I went ahead and made index flash cards for Brooke and I, and we both practically mastered Hiragana and Katakana in a matter of weeks!

Which brings us to today.  As of this blog post, I am still attending class with Brooke and having a blast!  We are currently learning verbs, which are a little more challenging to learn than other types of words (with all the conjugation and such), but after learning how Japanese verbs work, its just a matter of memorizing new verbs.  My personal favorite method of learning these verbs is by drawing cartoons to go with them, which is how this website began!

And that’s my story on how Japanese went from “Huh???” to “A-HA!”

If you’ve always wanted to learn Japanese, but are still on the fence about whether or not to dive in, or perhaps just don’t know where to start (hint: http://funwithjapanese.com), I really hope this post helps you in some way or another!

Get started today!  It may very well change your life in more ways than one.  Not only can it feel like a huge life accomplishment, it can be a great confidence booster!  Who knows, it may even open some doors to new and better-paying career opportunities for you as well!  Not to mention you’ll be able to impress all your friends… :snicker: ;)

Thanks for reading!