Nick Wood

I Think I'm Learning Japanese

· 21 Minute Read

...でも私の日本語はあまり上手ではありません

Me and my wife have been planning on going to Japan for our honeymoon for more than two years now. She had lived near Osaka for around a year back in 2011 when she was part of a foreign exchange program. We both love travel, and I've been to a few places, but east Asia has always been on my to-do list without any immediate plans.

The main reason for this is that I've never been comfortable with traveling to countries where English is not commonly spoken. Of course, speaking English natively is a privilege in and of itself, simply because English is currently the world's lingua franca. Most countries have at least some people who have to know some conversational English in their main cities either because they work in some industry that requires it (law, finance, business, etc...), or because there are lots of foreign tourists around, and the most convenient language available to be sure at least one random person in a random country can understand you is usually English[1].

Being able to speak English natively gives Americans a natural advantage when traveling abroad. Even so, I've still always had this nagging feeling that traveling to some random country without learning even a little bit of the language is poor form[2]. Friends who travel frequently tell me that with modern translation apps, this isn't really much of a problem. It still manifests in my mind as a bit of anxiety that people will think I'm an ugly American if I walk around expecting people to speak English to me, or if I immediately whip a phone out and make them talk to a computer translator for me. That's not necessarily true though. I've found that people are generally very nice and patient no matter where you are, but that's a hang-up I have. This is one big reason I decided to learn some Japanese before we traveled there.

The Difficulties of Speaking English in Japan

Adding to this is the fact that Japan is somewhat notorious for not having many people who can speak English by the standards of other industrialized countries. This is actually a common topic of discussion in Japanese society. Explanations for Japan's broadly defined struggle with English education range from the hesitency of Japanese culture to incorporate foreign influence[3], to the structure and style of Japan's education system.

Japanese society as a rule tends to only engage with other cultures on their own terms if possible, but there is a greater consensus that being successful in the context of Asian commerce and diplomacy requires at least some amount of people to have some level of proficiency with English, if only because everyone else in the region who isn't exclusively within China's sphere of influence[4] has decided that English is the lingua franca for business and diplomacy.

Because of this, there is a sizable demand in Japan for English speakers (mainly Americans) to come live and work in Japan as English tutors. If you're American like I am, and you know another American who has lived in Japan, and they weren't there because they're in the military, I can almost guarantee you they were able to do it because they joined an English tutor program[^5].

This is all my roundabout way of saying that Japan is, by all measures, a particularly difficult place to navigate if you're not willing to learn even a small amount of their language. Getting around in cities like Tokyo (especially Tokyo) might be a little easier, but if you're not planning on doing a pre-formatted tour, or want to travel outside cities, learning Japanese is a cultural expectation with which you simply cannot avoid contending at some point.

General Thoughts on Japanese (as a Complete Beginner)

I've been learning Japanese for a few months, and I have some thoughts about the language learning process, as well as the language itself.

Apps! Apps! Apps!

Like most people do these days, I have a Duolingo account, and I'm keeping my streak up. It has been generally good, assuming you stick with your routine. This is because Duolingo is, at its core, a spaced-repetition system with some of the more complex language learning techniques hidden behind a gamified user interface. One of the main things I've been finding useful is that my wife and some of my friends are on it. The "friend streak" feature is useful for motivating yourself to keep your learning streak going, even if you feel like you may be too tired to do your language learning routine.

I've used other paid language learning services such as Babel. What I've found is that they all do essentially the same thing; they're glorified flash card apps. Some of these other services try to position themselves as the app that works better than Duolingo, but I'm not convinced that this is true. You're probably going to have a pretty similar experience with both.

One other thing I've been doing alongside Duolingo is using Anki. If you've spent any time trying to learn a language, you've probably come across Anki. It is a flash-card app, much like Duolingo and Babel, and like both of those apps, it uses a spaced-repetition formula to optimize the efficiency with which you can learn things like facts and vocabulary.

I am not an expert at using Anki. There are people who have really complicated personalized setups that they swear by, but I haven't hit a wall with it yet. There are pre-built flash-card decks that are excellent, with which I've been having a decent-to-good experience.

One Anki-based resource I can recommend is Japanese Like a Breeze, which offers a few very good Anki decks with various nice features (such as slowly replacing latin writing with Kana characters in the examples). These decks also draw upon examples from Anime and Japanese TV, which helps a lot with getting context on real examples of Japanese dialog[5].

I also frequently use an online Japanese-English dictionary called Jisho, which is a fantastic way to look up Kanji characters and their various readings if you're trying to learn their meaning as an English speaker.

A Brief Note on Tae Kim

One other crucial resource that I've been using is Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. Tae Kim is a big name in the online Japanese language learning community, because of his website, which has lots of really great writing on Japanese grammar from the perspective of an English speaker. I've been greatly enjoying his work, and I find it to be well written, and generally helpful when I'm searching for context to better understand some difficult aspect of Japanese grammar.

Because his writing on Japanese is very accessible to English-speaking Japanese learners, you usually see Tae Kim used as a reference when people are talking about Japanese grammar and how to think about it, and I think that's okay.

That being said, my words of caution regarding Tae Kim are:

  1. It is generally not a good idea to get too hung-up on the mechanics of grammar before you have a good intuitive grasp on the language, and a decent vocabulary, so you shouldn't spend too much of your time trying to figure out grammar before that.
  2. Tae Kim is not a native Japanese speaker himself (I think he's Korean, but I'm not sure; he's a private person), so you should keep that in mind.

As always, you should do your own due-diligence when vetting educational resources online, and you should always find more than one source on anything before accepting it as fact.

日本語は簡単

Before I started learning Japanese, I thought of it as being one of the top-five most difficult languages to learn. I think this is both because you tend to see Japanese in popular articles on the Internet about which languages are the most difficult, and because the writing system is intimidatingly different from my own Latin-based writng system. The US Department of State also lists Japanese as a Category 4 language. This is its highest category, which corresponds to 88 weeks of continuous education, or the better part of two years.

While I do agree that becoming fully fluent in Japanese, at least to the point where I can watch Anime without subtitles, is definitely going to take me several years of effort, I've been pleasently surprised with how relatively simple certain parts of Japanese are. In particular, Japanese grammar is quite simple in abstract. The shortest possible grammatically correct sentence in Japanese is simply a verb by itself. This is because Japanese, for various reasons, is a language where you can infer context for nearly everything.

For example, if you wanted to tell someone you're eating, all you need to say is "食べる (ta-be-ru)", which means "eat", and it is assumed that you're talking about yourself in the present tense, and that this is a perfectly grammatically-correct way to express that. When you are a foreigner, it is usually fine to learn a bunch of common nouns and verbs. Like in most languages, you can get around by pointing and saying a word, and people can infer what you mean. In Japanese, more things are inferred from context than in most languages, so this isn't even a weird way to say certain things, at least if you're looking for the bathroom, or ordering off of a menu. Let's be honest, that's mostly what I'm going to be doing in Japan anyway.

Another thing I appreciate about Japanese is that it is not gendered. My least favorite thing about most non-English European languages is that they force you to memorize the gender of every noun in their vocabulary, and that with a few exceptions, there is no way to know what gender any given noun is without memorizing it. You also tend to have to memorize a table of conjugations to ensure you use the proper case of various words that correspond to whatever gender the noun you're using has. Japanese does not do this at all, and I like that[6].

One other cool aspect of Japanese is the concept of "particles", wherein you can communicate fairly complex grammatical structures by using one sound. An example is "ha (pronounced wa)", which specifies the topic of your sentence (私わ技師です, or "watashi-wa gishi desu": "I am an Engineer"). Other examples include, "o", which is the particle that communicates that something is being acted upon, "ni", which indicates a direction being taken (日本にリョコします, or "nihon-ni ryoko-shimasu": "I am visiting Japan".) etc... These particles always do the same thing, and while sometimes they are tricky to get right (see also: "ha" vs "ga", an eternal frustration among Japanese learners).

日本語は難しい

It's not all roses and sunshine, of course. There are a few aspects of Japanese that make it rather difficult for an English speaker to learn it, which is why the State Department ranks it so high on the language-learning difficulty chart.

M'Lord

First, Japanese has a very complex, heirarchical system of honorifics and styles of speaking with which you must comply. If you do not properly follow this system when speaking, it will make you sound rude.

The most important part of this system is honorifics. You must refer to your superiors, inferiors, peers, and even yourself using specific language.

For example, if I am a man, I have two options for referring to myself:

  1. 私わ技師です (wa-ta-shi-wa-gi-shi-de-su): "watashi" is the default polite way to refer to myself.
  2. 僕わ技師です (bo-ku-wa-gi-shi-de-su): "boku" is another generally polite way to refer to myself (as a man).
  3. 俺わ技師です (o-re-wa-gi-shi-de-su): "ore" is an informal way to refer to myself (also as a man).

Note here that first, "watashi" is what you should use in a setting where you always need to be as polite as possible, like at work, when talking to someone who has authority over you. Second, "boku", while still polite, is best used for slightly less formal settings. "Ore" is informal. You should not use it unless you're talking to friends or family. Also note that for women, you always refer to yourself as "watashi", because women have to use a more polite style of speech by default in proper Japanese.

There are lots of different examples of this sort of thing. I would refer to someone I'm very close to (usually siblings) as "chan" informally, as in "x-chan". I would refer to a younger sibling with "kun" as in "x-kun". This is more respectful, but still informal. Most peers, or siblings in a formal setting would be referred to as "san", as in "x-san"[7]. Your superiors, such as your manager, or a customer if you are in a customer-facing role, are always referred to as "sama" as in, "x-sama". You always need to keep this straight in your head when you're referring to someone else, because otherwise you will come off as being rude. Luckily, if you're a tourist, you can probably get away with referring to people as "san" if you happen to be in a situation where you need to use honorifics, because you're not likely to know anyone personally (and I would hope your friends would be polite enough to correct you if you get something wrong anyway).

In addition, there are whole categories of speech wherein you show more respect for people by adding in extra honorifics to your language. The main one is "keigo", but there are also sub-categories of keigo, which I haven't wrapped my head around at all yet.

For example, when telling someone I'm eating, and I know I can be casual, I can say "食べる" (ta-be-ru) as I said before. However, if I want to be more polite (and you usually do want to be polite), I should actually say ”食べます” (ta-be-ma-su) instead. This is the same word, except I've added "masu" at the end because that's more polite. In addition, there are three separate categories of Keigo that are reserved for speaking about someone in a direct position of power over you, and to refer to yourself when speaking to someone in a direct position of power over you, and these forms have entirely different vocabularies associated with them in addition to word endings like "masu".

If this seems extremely complicated, that's because it is. Again, the good news here is that unless you're trying to live and work in Japan, you're not likely to need the vast majority of this language. In my case, I'm probably just going to be asking whether I'm at the correct train platform, or asking where the bathroom is. Since I do want to learn Japanese at a higher level at some point, I will need to figure this out in more detail, and I know that's going to be hard.

The Section in Which Kanji Makes My Eyes Bleed

Easily the most intimidating aspect of Japanese is the writing system. Written Japanese makes heavy use of Chinese characters, along with Japan's phonetic alphabet. When used to represent Japanese, Chinese characters are referred to as "Kanji"[8]. Importantly, these characters are not (usually) read for their Chinese meaning, because Japanese and Chinese are completely different languages.

To understand why it works this way, you need some context. For most of its history, Japanese did not have its own writing system. At some point (around the 4th century AD), Japanese scholars started making use of Chinese characters to form a script for written Japanese. This was done because at the time China was the most important cultural and military power in east Asia. Japanese scholars and diplomats had to learn Chinese in order to exist in the greater Chinese cultural context they inhabited, but then they also had the need to read and write in Japanese. Since Chinese was the only script available at the time, these people used Chinese characters to represent Japanese words.

The main issue with using Chinese characters in this way is that Japanese and Chinese are entirely different languages with different sounds. Therefore, the way Japanese developed was by using certain chinese characters for their meanings, and other characters for the sounds they make. Later on, phonetic scripts (hiragana and katakana) were developed to directly represent sounds the way Latin and Greek characters do, and these are also used to add suffixes or particles to words. Since Japanese also never developed the concept of spacing to separate words from each other the way some other languages have. Instead, you start words with Kanji, and separate them with suffixes and particles (and also foreign words), which are written in kana. This separates parts of the sentence from each other[9]. Most nouns in Japanese make use of two Kanji, but there are exceptions to this rule.

The upshot of all of this is that in order to become literate in Japanese, you not only need to learn all the Kanji for various words, you need to know all the various readings for the kanji you're learning. This is due to the fact that Kanji were originally Chinese characters (and pre-simplification Chinese characters, at that), and are used for their sounds, and not their meanings in Chinese. Oh, and sometimes they are used for their meanings in Chinese, which you also need to learn... in Japanese, so have fun with that. Kanji can make different sounds depending on what word they're being used to represent.

I've only just started to scratch the surface with Kanji personally, but the hard truth of the matter is that you really do just need to memorize combinations of Kanji symbols for each word. There is no clever trick for inferring the meaning of new words, you just need to memorize it. I would like to do this, but I know it will take me a long time.

Your mind is more capable of keeping track of thousands of symbols and their meanings than you might think. Even in English and other phonetic-script languages, research suggests that the way your brain keeps track of writing is by grouping the "shapes" of words together. One way tihs copnect can be iltuaerlstd is toghruh snamblrcig the lertets in wdros, while keeipng the frist and lsat leterts cnsetnosit. You can raed tihs rhgit now beausce yuor biarn kpees tacrk of wrods as ditiscnt smyobls, and not iidnidavul lertets.

Thus, the process of learning Chinese characters, or even using Chinese characters to read Japanese is not at all an impossible task. Plenty of people have learned how to read and write both languages after all. It's just something that will certainly take more effort for an English speaker like myself than, for example, French or Spanish. I think this is the main reason the State Department has a special category of difficulty for Asian and Middle-Eastern languages. The writing system is just tough to learn, and that's just the way it is.

Luckily, the number of symbols one needs to learn to read Japanese is (mostly) finite. There is an official government approved list of 2,136 Kanji referred to as "jōyō" (here they are, have fun). These symbols were selected by the Ministry of Education, and there are rules that require government documentation to exclusively use these Kanji. It consists of all of the characters that you need to know to have what is considered a "baseline" level of literacy in Japanese. It isn't a comprehensive list of all characters used in Japanese, but if your goal is to be able to read any road-sign in Japan with no preparation, or to fill out government forms, or to read an average newspaper with no trouble, etc... this is the list of Kanji you need to know.

I have just started learning Japanese as of two or so months ago, and I am not an expert on language learning by any means, but I am optimistic that I've been making progress, and I'm hoping that when me and my wife do go to Japan this year, I'm going to be able to go around with her without either making a complete fool of myself, or feeling like I'm an eight-year-old being led around by the arm everywhere. Time will tell whether that's the case, but I'll probably have a lot more to write about afterward.

  1. One other interesting fact I've picked up is that a lot of non-native English speakers have picked up English passively just because they enjoy watching American TV. The classic examples of this are Friends and Seinfeld. One other interesting fact I've picked up is that a lot of non-native English speakers have picked up English More recently, younger people have started picking up English to use the Internet -- mainly social media and YouTube. A funny comment I've seen on Reddit is, "my phone taught me English on accident". ↩

  2. A positive thing about this which I've noticed is that most people in any country, while they'll rarely be mean to you for not being fluent, will almost always treat you like, 30 percent better if you make an effort to communicate with them in their language -- even if they end up speaking English to you. I imagine it's flattering, and shows a measure of respect that you're trying to be polite enough to make that effort on their behalf. ↩

  3. This is, of course, not something that is exclusive to Japan. The tendency of globalization to subsume and overtake local traditions and culture is a pretty common critique, even among commentators who think globalization is a generally good thing. ↩

  4. ...and let me tell you, there are very few things in the world Japan wants less than to be exclusively within China's sphere of influence. [^5] The other reason so many Americans work as English tutors is that Japan is also notorious for having a job market and work culture that is difficult for foreigners to navigate. In fact, living in Japan long-term as a non-Japanese person is very hard, from what I've heard. ↩

  5. A big point of caution here is that you should not consider TV and Anime to be a perfect example of real conversational Japanese, because Anime characters tend to speak in an overly dramatic, informal manner that is considered rude in normal conversation. ↩

  6. Japanese does have a fairly complex system of verb-cases, which you do need to memorize. I haven't started wrapping my head around this yet, but I'll probably write about it when I do. I'm assuming it's going to be difficult. ↩

  7. Japanese doesn't make a distinction between men and women here like English does, so you can also call someone "Mr. X" or "Ms/Mrs. X" by saying "X-san", where X is someone's surname. ↩

  8. He also told me jokingly that I should stop punishing myself with Kanji and just learn Chinese instead. ↩

  9. Japanese has developed certain punctuation marks, such as the period (which looks like this: 。), and quotation marks (「which look like this」) -- thank God. ↩