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!

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