A Guide to Learning Japanese

So, I finally got my lazy ass down to the post office and mailed that letter to IDS! that had been lying around my room collecting dust for months. It is my first letter written completely in Japanese (excluding e-mails). On the way home, I started thinking about when I first learnt to write “あいうえお” nearly three years ago. I thought that it would make an interesting blog entry if I do a recap of my still on-going effort to learn Japanese and make it into a pseudo-guide for those of you who are thinking of taking up Japanese as a foreign language.

And no, this is not an attempt to copy a certain popular guide to the Japanese language. ;)

A-I-U-E-O: Introduction

First of all, a bit of self-introduction. I have studied Japanese for three years. I am ethnically Chinese and my mother tongue is Mandarin, which does help with Japanese. I will be taking JLPT 2 in about half a month’s time and hopefully level 1 next December. You can find me on irc.rizon.net under the nickname “ThePaper”. Just a small note for those who aren’t sure: There are four levels of JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) with level 4 being the most basic and level 1 being the most advanced. It is an internationally-recognized examination available in many countries around the world. Check with your local Japanese embassy/consulate for details.

Three years ago, like a deer caught in the headlights, I choose Japanese as my third language elective in school. I had almost never listened to or even seen Japanese before that, so “sayōnara” was about as advance as I went. Lessons are held twice a week for about two hours each. During the first lesson, we learnt the first five (or was it ten?) hiragana and some simple phrases like 「私は＿＿です」. The pace of the lessons was excruciatingly slow. We only managed to learn the hiragana table and some simple vocabulary and grammar for the entire semester. Katakana wasn’t even touched on until the second half of the year, though it eventually took only one week to cover. I missed those lessons, so I had to memorize the katakana table on my own and I was never really good at it until a year or so later.

Towards the end of the first semester, I started watching anime. By watching, I mean that my eyes were glued to my computer monitor the minute I reached home from school till bedtime. It was nice to watch anime in its original language, but at that time I still couldn’t understand 99.9% of the dialogues. Still, even though I had to rely on subtitles, it felt good that I could identify a few words at times.

As I continued to watch anime (and my other grades go down the drain), I started to pull ahead in my Japanese class. Throughout my first two years of studying Japanese, I had never actually studied. Sure, I looked through the vocabulary list before tests and I did some practice papers before taking JLPT 3, but other than that I always got through just by paying attention in class. My theory for this is that due to the sheer bulk of anime I was watching, I had been exposed to many different kinds of vocabulary and grammar, thus by the time my teacher taught it in class, I would already have had a rough idea of what the topic was about. School lessons became a sort of revision for me, sometimes helping to clear up some misconceptions I had.

Linguistic Advisory

This brings me to my first important advice (this is also supposed to be a (pseudo) guide, remember?), and that is whether you should take a structured course or learn the language on your own. I have this love-hate relationship with taking a course in school. Other than providing me with a foundation and getting me interested in the subject in the first place, I find that my school’s (or rather, the Ministry of Education’s) Japanese curriculum is very limited and actually slows down my learning later on. JLPT 3 syllabus is designed to be studied in less than two years, yet it is the highest level that most people manage to achieve after the four-year course. If you are interested in studying Japanese, I recommend that you do not do it through school-based programmes, because they are usually designed to pass people and not to teach the language. Since 60%~80% of every class will lose interest in learning very soon after looking at kanji for the first time, courses are usually taught very slowly in order to ensure an acceptable overall passing rate. What I would recommend is to take an external course at a commercial language center. Teachers there do not slow down to let those who are uninterested to catch up because those people are wasting their own money away by doing so. And if you have any questions, the teachers will explain them to you in great detail, because you are their paying customer. Lesson time is also spent more constructively, without those “fun-filled interactive activities” that seem to infest every realm of public education these days. I started attending external classes at the start of this year because school-based classes were no longer enough.

If you cannot afford a private course, then I recommend getting self-help books. I have met many people online who taught themselves up to around level 3 and then get more professional help as they hit more advance levels. Kinokuniya is the best source for Japanese-related publications, but if you do not live in those countries, then Amazon works too. Most beginners’ books up to JLPT 3 (which covers practically all the grammar you need) come with very detailed English explanations. Level 2 and beyond tend to come only in Japanese text. One important advice from me is to never buy any self-help book that uses rōmaji (Japanese transliterated using Roman alphabet) instead of Japanese characters. It may seem easier at first, but the switch later is worse if you get too comfortable with seeing transliterations.

The best option is actually to have a personal tutor or a very close Japanese friend teach you. But I guess if you have that then you wouldn’t have read this far.

No matter which path you take, a good dictionary is very important. Personally I usually use WWWJDIC when I’m at my PC out of convenience, but e-dicts are not the best options. If you can afford one, get a Japanese-made electronic wordtank when you get to around level 3. Wordtanks tend to be more comprehensive than their paper counterparts and of course more portable and convenient too. I use a Canon WordTank V80 and it has served my needs quite well. Functions like wildcard search and English/Chinese support are impossible to get from an online or printed dictionary.

And so the first year passed by in an instant. It was the December school holidays (this is Singapore, remember?) and that meant non-stop anime!

The First Click

Before I move on any further, I shall explain my little theory about the Four Clicks in learning Japanese (and probably all languages). Based on my experience, I concluded that there are four major steps that you will hit on the path to fluency. I will reveal the other three later, but the first one took place right at the end of my first year of studying ( + anime-addiction).

The “first click” is when you are able to understand spoken Japanese (at least the parts you have learnt) without first mentally translating it into your primary language. People who have just started learning a language have to do this intermediate step in order to understand what is being said. This translation takes place in your mind and it’s not really obvious, but it’s there. If you manage to achieve the first click, then it shows that you have reached a certain level of proficiency and familiarity with Japanese.

My first click took place in the December holidays of 2003. I was watching Gundam SEED (all fifty episodes) over the weekends when the magical moment took place. Well, “clicks” do not necessarily take place at a particular point in time, but my first one did. It was in the middle of the series when I suddenly realized that I had been listening to the dialogues instead of staring at the subtitles. I still took glances at the translation from time to time, but most of the dialogues just made sense all of a sudden. It’s as if a light switch was hit and the room suddenly turned bright (maybe I’m getting too metaphorical here…), and I no longer have to match each Japanese word to an English equivalent before arriving at the overall meaning.

The first click should come naturally with practice, and if you are reading this blog, I would assume that it most likely comes in the form of anime. However, once you reached this level, do not switch to watching raws immediately. Assuming the translations are good, subtitles are very useful for picking up new vocabulary and grammar. Try not to switch over to raws too soon because, personally, I find that I tend to take potshots at unfamiliar words when watching/reading raws, whereas a proper subtitle would’ve told me the correct meaning immediately. If you really want to watch raws, a good practice would be to watch the same episode twice, once with subtitles. Or at least rewatch the parts you didn’t catch instead of just taking guesses at everything.

After this stage, listening questions in examinations will also make sense all of a sudden. Once they do, it’s a smooth ride for the rest of the way (at least for listening). The examiners can’t really vary the difficulty levels of listening questions very much, so the only difference between advance and intermediate level questions is the vocabulary. Beginners’ questions tend to be read at a slower pace, though.

The Second Click

Okay, so now you can watch anime raw easy peasy, what’s the next “click”? Why, reading of course! I know it’s surprising, but I believe that the reading “click” actually comes later than the listening “click”. Well, at least that’s the way it was for me.

In the beginning, although it is certainly easier for you to comprehend a written statement than one spoken by a native speaker, this is only because you have a much longer time to read, flip through dictionaries and ponder over a sentence. But being able to read slowly is actually very, very, very different from being able to comprehend the meaning of the words directly. Similar to the way your brain needs to translate phrases into your primary language before your first click, your mind must also decipher the meaning of each written word before you are able to comprehend the overall sentence.

Perhaps it will be easier if I give an example. When you read English sentences, for example this one, you will not (and should not) pause mentally after each word and think “Oh, ‘read’ means this”, you just comprehend it directly. Similarly, when you reach this level with Japanese, then that is what I term the “second click”.

Unlike the first click, there wasn’t really a single moment of realization for my second click, but it happened sometime in the second half of the second year.

There are many ways to achieve the second click. I achieved it through a combination of games, song lyrics and manga. Let me elaborate.

First of all, games. The best type of games to practice Japanese with is actually, to put it in the pleasant term, bishōjo games. The reason for this is that they tend to be set in a real-life context (usually high school) and they have a more-or-less shared pool of vocabulary. Concentrating only on RPGs and Sci-Fi space/robot games tend to make you end up learning words that you will never have the opportunity to use in your lifetime, so those can come later. For bishōjo games, just make sure you stay the hell away from the deep stuff like Air, Kanon, Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night until really, really later on. Of course, some people feel uncomfortable playing, to put it more crudely, erogames and that is perfectly fine. (No, really.)

Then there’s lyrics memorization/translation. I started translating songs in around April of the second year. Songs are not the best study materials, as they frequently make no sense even in their original language, but nevertheless it was one of the things that really helped to build up my vocabulary. It took me quite a few hours of work for each song, but over time I got faster. Looking at the official lyrics and playing the song in the background, I can type out the song in rōmaji in a bit more than the time needed to play the song through (unless it’s KOTOKO). Translation of course takes longer, but it usually doesn’t exceed 40 minutes per song these days. However, 99% of all J-Pop songs contain the same set of words used over and over again, so don’t expect to be learning many new words after the first twenty songs or so.

And finally, manga. Manga is a bit of a special case, and looking back with hindsight, I will not recommend people reading them until after their second click. But nevertheless, it was what I did and so I will talk about it. The language used in manga is similar to that in bishōjo games and anime. However, unlike bishōjo games and anime, there aren’t any voiceovers in manga. This is actually more important than it sounds. Before your second click, you are going to need voiceovers because they help you associate the spoken words, which you are already familiar with, with the written words, which you are working towards. This means that if you haven’t reached your second click yet, you better be damn familiar with spoken Japanese before you start on manga. You need to know, for example, that 「んわけない」 is the same as 「そんなわけはない」 and that 「いこうじゃんか」 is the same as 「いこうじゃないか」 and all sorts of other contractions you don’t find in formal written Japanese. Manga is actually spoken Japanese printed on paper, which makes it twice as hard as, say, children storybooks with the same level of vocabulary. This is why I do not recommend manga until after the second click. But personally, I think I started with manga too early, so it was quite overwhelming at first.

Okay, at the stage either nearing or after the second click, you should already possess a wide range of vocabulary and nearly all grammar (contrary to popular belief, Japanese grammar is actually very simple). At this stage, one book that should be really helpful for clearing up any misconceptions you picked up along the way would be Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You (ISBN: 4-7700-2802-4). This book explains confusing topics like causative form, morau/kureru/ageru, wa/ga and -tekuru in a very simple and humourous manner.

Also, you have to continue reading regularly after the second click. If manga are starting to get too pictorial for your needs, then consider “light novels” (ライトノベル). These are novels that are between manga and full-length novel in terms of complexity and they are a very good stepping stone for moving on to real Japanese literature. Light novels are usually peppered with dialogues and read like anime in text form. Some popular anime series that started life as life novels include Kino no Tabi, Full Metal Panic!, Maburaho and Maria-sama ga Miteru. Adaptations also take place in the reverse directions, with stories based on popular game and anime franchises such as Gundam, Da Capo and Shuffle! being released in light novel format. The line between “light” and “normal” novel is quite undefined, but usually you can tell if the cover design looks anime-ish and the story sounds like something you just watched on your PC monitor. I’m not sure if the Seikai (Banner/Crest of the Stars) series and the Juuni Kokuki (Twelve Kingdoms) series can be considered “light”, but they are good for more advanced readers. (BTW, stay away from fantasy and sci-fi stories at first because they can kill)

The Third Click

The first two clicks are both about comprehension, but now it’s time for utilization. I define the third click as when you can write and communicate (in text form) in Japanese without having to formulate your sentences in your primary language first and then mentally translate them to Japanese.

Personally for me, the third click came at around the start of this year. Like the first one, it came at a specific moment. It was in #nipponsei on irc.rizon.net. Someone spoke to me in Japanese and I came up with a reply without thinking. It felt pretty good. ;) Soon after that, I was quite actively looking for people to converse with in Japanese and got my first (e-mail) penpal, Yuki-san, through Japan Guide.

Now, the third click is quite difficult to achieve if you do not take a proper long-term class. Classes force you to create sentences, to write compositions and to use the language actively, things you can’t really achieve on your own short of moving to Japan. You can read manga and watch anime alone, but what’s the fun in writing sentences without any purposes? As slow as the classes in school are, I have to say that this is one area that they really help with. (Thus the love-hate relationship)

And this is why I still recommend that you take a proper course even after self-teaching yourself to, say, level 3. And if you really don’t want to, then try to get a penpal and exchange e-mails regularly, or maybe chat regularly on Japanese BBS. Though if you chose the latter, be prepared for a hard time ahead…

By now your mastery of the language should get you through level 2 easily.

The Fourth Click

Frankly, I have yet to achieve the coveted fourth click. This is the stage where you are able to converse in Japanese without pausing and thinking about how you should structure the sentence. This is slightly different from the requirements for the third click, because speech, unlike typing, has a time limit for your replies. Not only do you have to form the sentence without going through an intermediate language, you have to do it quickly and make sure that the expression is not (too) awkward.

I guess that in order to reach this level, one has to practice speaking a lot. This is something that I sorely lack and I have yet to come up with a solution… Maybe Skype? Ahahaha… Well, tell me if you have any suggestions. ;)

Conclusion

The four-click progression is merely something I made up to gauge my own progress, so it’s very heavily influenced by my own experiences and learning style. I can easily see how the clicks may possibly take place in a different order, such as if you focus almost purely on reading or gaming at first. But I think it should apply to those who come into contact with Japanese mainly through anime fansubs and then progress from there. Whatever the case, the most important thing is to enjoy learning the language. ^^

On a parting note, a really good place to train your Japanese vocabulary or just to hang out and chat with other Japanese students is #LearnJapanese on irc.rizon.net. Again, my nickname there is “ThePaper”. ^^

P.S. I believe this has got to be the longest blog entry I have ever written… Holy shit! 6500+ words! I shall take a break from blogging for a bit.