Learning Japanese

2017 October 16

Since I began to teach myself Japanese, I have experimented with several workflows and resources in order to find a comfortable and efficient - if not optimal - self-teaching environment for myself. I have been fortunate to have a lot of time on my hands to dedicate to this endeavor, thanks in part to being between jobs and in part to having saved enough to float me for several months before dipping into my main chunk of savings. This gives me an opportunity to treat this time as if I were a full-time student and reap all the benefits of consistent exposure to a subject without paying any tuition.

The goal I have set for myself is pretty straightforward, but definitely challenging. I want to be well on my way to fluency in three months, with a slight preference for reading ability. What does this mean objectively? Well, I think of learning a language as developing on four fronts: reading, writing, listening/comprehension, and speaking. So I’ll try and list my objective goals for each.

Reading:

1) Learning the meanings of all 2136 常用漢字 (standard-use kanji), which is normally accomplished by the end of secondary school in Japan.

2) ~80% literacy when reading Japanese manga aimed at younger audiences.

3) ~65% literacy when reading the newspaper in Japanese.

Writing:

1) Learning how to correctly write - with proper stroke order - all 2136 standard-use kanji.

2) Be able to quickly use the 12-key keyboard layout for typing Japanese on my phone.

3) No hesitation writing katakana.

Listening/comprehension:

1) Little to no trouble distinguishing word boundaries during speech.

2) Understanding what is being said about everyday topics, in a work environment, requests, and most common phrases.

3) Understanding a fair amount of Japanese on a live action show aimed at young adults.

Speaking:

1) Confidence while speaking.

2) Working ability to describe things that I don’t know the words for in order to get my point across.

3) Correct pronunciation and timing.

4) No longer translate English sentence structure and ordering to Japanese before speaking.

5) Ability to read aloud a Japanese text without any loss in speed.

Again, these are rough guidelines for myself. My more simple, overarching goal is to learn as much as possible as efficiently as possible.

I am trying to develop on all of these fronts more or less equally, without lagging too far behind in any one of them at any given time. If I find myself feeling less comfortable with one, I’ll adapt my study habits to include that one more. So, what exactly is my daily routine?

I am learning 24 kanji per day using The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course. I cannot recommend this resource enough. The kanji are intended to be learned in sequential order from the first page to the last, which is easy for the reader, and the author has gone through the painstaking task of organizing everything to provide the most effective path toward fluency. The kanji are introduced with mnemonics that are designed to both elicit a sensory response that will quickly bind the meaning of the kanji to memory, and help the reader differentiate between similar looking kanji as the reader progresses through the book. I learn the new kanji in the evening just before going to sleep, and I use spaced-repetition software to test myself on the accumulated kanji every morning. By honestly giving feedback to the software about how well I was able to recall or produce the kanji, it will automatically schedule them to be reviewed again at some point in the future. The more often I get a certain kanji correct quickly, the further and further into the future the kanji is scheduled to be reviewed. All I have to do is do my scheduled reviews every day. I am already 12 days or 288 kanji in with a 99% success rate for both recalling the meanings from the kanji and producing the written form from the meanings.

I am learning grammar both through the discovery method and through reading Seichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui’s A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, which is another resource I cannot recommend enough. Every grammar dictionary should be written and organized like this one. I use it either as a rich resource with plenty of examples and explanations of why a piece of the grammar functions as it does, or I often pick it up and read it like a book. I am also using a grammar workbook and some other online resources such as Tae Kim’s online guide.

I am learning vocabulary by looking up words I don’t know, by working through my grammar and vocabulary workbook, and by reading some really basic manga and other material aimed at younger kids. If it doesn’t have lots of hiragana and katakana, and if the kanji doesn’t have furigana next to it, I put it down and pick up something else. Most importantly, I put all of the words I am learning into my spaced-repetition flashcards app. I started this journey by using duolingo, and I actually found that it was more useful as a habit forming device than as learning material. I still use it every day as a minor supplement to everything else and because I just have to finish the course now that I’ve started it.

I am learning to write by working through workbooks that emphasize language production - rather than exclusively fill-in-the-blanks, multiple choice questions, or rearranging words to form a grammatically correct sentence, though these are helpful for self-testing. Sometimes it is painful to write an essay because my writing is still slow, but I do it anyway because it will only get faster, and therefore more comfortable, the more I practice. I am also learning to type Japanese, both on the standard keyboard and the 12-key keyboard on mobile devices, primarily by chatting with my native Japanese friend in Japan. We both instantly provide each other with the correct way of writing something if we wrote something wrong, which has been amazingly helpful to both of us learning each other’s languages.

I am working on listening and comprehension in many ways. I downloaded a Japanese podcast app and found a few podcasts that are entirely spoken word or conversational and are good quality. Every day I listen to an episode - which are generally an hour to an hour and a half long - at any point where listening is not impeding my other studies. This might be while driving, exercising, or cooking a meal. At first, these podcasts sounded like a stream of very fast garble, but as I’ve kept it up I can detect word boundaries more clearly, which gives the impression that the speech is actually slower than when I first heard it. I can also start hearing the words and phrases and grammatical structures that I am studying materialize like magic, and when I recognize them it further pushes these words and phrases into long-term memory. I still don’t understand 98% of what is being said, but the purpose of these podcasts is to have some passive learning in my schedule, where my brain can do the processing without me, and to sharpen my ear for Japanese pronunciation and tone. In addition to these podcasts, I am also listening to simplified Japanese news through NHK, and watching live action Japanese shows on netflix or Japanese movies. I am a big fan of anime, but a lot of the dialogue in anime is heavy with slang and nuanced language that is hard to pick up or not useful to me as someone who wants to interact with people more politely in the real world. Some anime are better than others, but since it is hit or miss, I stick with shows with actors in real-world environments and scenarios because I’m looking for the most efficient - and still enjoyable - route to fluency.

And lastly, I am working on speaking by forcing myself to rethink English thoughts in Japanese, by saying things in both Japanese and English if I can, and by having weekly video conversations with my friend in Japan. We usually chat for a couple of hours, and we switch between English and Japanese throughout, always correcting each other on things that we do wrong.

The above are all things that I am doing, and it seems to be working quite well so far! The hardest thing I’ve found is finding reading material that is both sufficiently long to provide ample practice and also at the right level so that I am being challenged but not overwhelmed.

During this whole process, I have also stumbled upon things that I found to be counterproductive for my studies, and I think it’s important to talk about those too. Things that did not work for me:

1) Pay ANY attention at all to language advice from people I don’t know or don’t have good reason to respect.

This means, don’t google anything about how long it should take to learn X, Y, and Z. Don’t google how many kanji you should learn every day. Don’t google how difficult it is to complete something. Why? Because none of that matters! If your goal is to learn a language, that’s your own personal goal. If you really want to learn something, you will do it on your time and your terms and make it work in the way that’s best for you. If you’re wondering how many kanji you can effectively stick into your schedule per day without them falling right out of your memory, pick a number, experiment for a couple days, and revise that number if it’s too few or too many. Similarly, don’t waste time reading through forums of answers on how to unpack the grammar for a sentence one user was confused about. Language is complex, but at the earlier stages of learning a language, reading through a forum of debate about how a sentence should be written will only plant seeds of doubt in your mind and make you that much less confident when forming your own sentences. A lack of confidence is really something that can impede learning a language; so maintain your confidence, work through your books, and learn about your mistakes and the correct usages organically through discovery while reading or watching something, or through a friend fluent in the language who can help you out.

2) Spend time worrying about which resource is best to use, or downloading every app and checking out every book in the library.

Do your due diligence, and then commit. Decision fatigue is real, and there are probably more books on beginner Japanese than you could read if you only read those books for the rest of your life. Do a reasonable amount of up-front research about which books to get to cover the ground you’ll be exploring for the foreseeable future, get only those books, and commit to them. If a book is not working or not offering you what you need, swap it out for another. It’s hard to imagine having enough time to work through more than a single grammar/vocabulary book at once, especially if you want to leave time to practice the other fronts of the language. So pick one, and start working through it.

3) Give yourself cheat days

YMMV with this, but I have personally found that one of the most important aspects of learning a language is developing a habit. When you give yourself days off, you are not only breaking the immersion that is so formative for getting things to become familiar and stick to long-term memory, you are also making it much harder for a habit to form. One cheat day turns into two, and so on. If you find it particularly painful to study on one day, think about how you can still put in the time, but make the learning more passive rather than active. This might mean only doing half of the workbook chapter, or skipping the chapter altogether and substituting that time with a podcast or a Japanese show on netflix. At least that way you are still getting exposure to the language, and your brain will still pick up things even if you don’t want it to.

This all may sound a bit intense, but I believe in making the most of my time and charging full speed ahead on things that interest me, and so naturally this process is the one that makes the most sense in my mind. In the words of Roald Dahl: “I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life…. if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”