日本語

Learning Japanese

By Alan W — Last updated October 7, 2021

Getting Started

If you're a beginner to Japanese, you must do the following:

  • Learn to read/write kana (hiragana and katakana) as this will be very useful for learning new vocabulary.
  • Distinguish long/short vowels. When memorizing words, pay attention to this contrastive feature (can be used to differentiate Japanese words)
  • Memorize essential phrases for communication—purchasing a phrase book or using online resources should be sufficient for this. When consooming Japanese media, pay attention to when these are used. How do people act when they first meet? When they return home? When to leave a meeting/gathering?

After following the steps above, you will want to familiarize yourself with all the different kinds of forms you will see in Japanese. Nouns are easy. Noun forms are invariant—they always sound the same (unlike in a language like Latin or Russian which have grammatical case). What you will need to familiarize yourself with are the so-called "particles" of Japanese. Learn to recognize -wa, -de, -ga, -mo, -na and -ni in speech. Study how these are used to used to signify relationships between words in Japanese. Recognize nouns and then how these particles are added to those nouns to show their roles in sentences.

Learn the verb and adjective conjugations. Compared with those of European languages, they're quite consistent. With adjectives, you'll learn of (1) -i type adjectives and (2) -na type adjectives. Learn the rules for conjugating these. For verbs, you'll learn to distinguish between (1) ichidan and (2) godan verbs, as well as two irregulars: する suru (do) and 来る kuru (come). You'll see/hear these all over the place; just memorize them.

Don't mind writing too much—focus on hearing and memorizing words and observing how they fit into sentences. Know that children first know how to speak fluent Japanese and then they build up their vocabulary while learning writing. Given the relatively sparse grammar of Japanese, you can quickly acquire communicative competence.

Tacking Texts

Maybe your primary reason for learning Japanese is for the written language. For all its difficulties, I will admit it looks cool. How does one improve reading and writing in Japanese?

The statements above about the spoken language still hold, I think. The difficulties of written Japanese can be overcome if you have a good grasp of the spoken language. This is because if you know what sort of "thing" (i.e. "part of speech") some unknown string of characters is, you can look at the appropriate resources to get a correct reading.

Let me give you a concrete example which uses one of the most difficult things in written Japanese—names. I went onto the Japanese wikipedia page and clicked on one of the featured articles: 伊佐須美神社.

My knowledge of Japan and Japanese is such that I know that this article is about a 神社 (jinja), a type of temple/shrine but there are a lot of things I don't know how to read here. Fortunately, even Japanese people aren't expected to know how to read everything here. Here's the first sentence (accessed 2021年10月07日)

伊佐須美神社（いさすみじんじゃ）は、福島県大沼郡会津美里町宮林にある神社。

As you can see the Wikipedia article itself gives the reading for this long Kanji name. With experience and the appropriate resources you can further break down which syllables correspond to which characters. Namely, 伊（い）佐（さ）須（す）美（み）神社（じんじゃ）. Note that all these readings are on-yomi (aka 'Sino/Chinese' or 'sound' readings); this isn't arbitrary. This jinja inherits from Chinese religious/philosophical traditions. This same principle applies with lots of katakana names; most names/words that are spelled in katakana have Western roots. So looking at some word and knowing "that comes from Chinese stuff" versus "that comes from (native) Japanese stuff" versus that comes from Western stuff can be helpful in remembering how things are pronounced and how to use different words and written forms.

Next, we have a は. If you have studied even the basics of Japanese grammar and writing, you will recognize this as the subject marker and know that it is pronounced 'wa' even though this is the hiragana that is usually pronounced 'ha'. To learn stuff like this, you need to just study some materials targeted at beginners; it will surely be mentioned.

The final part of this sentence is "...福島県大沼郡会津美里町宮林にある神社". Here, if you have any experience living, working, and navigating in Japan, your knowledge of the political and geographic organization of Japan will be helpful. From largest to smallest geographic area in this name we have:

  • 福島県 Fukushima-ken "Fukushima prefecture"
  • 大沼郡 Ōnuma-gun "Ōnuma district"
  • 会津美里町 Aizumisato-machi "Aizumisato town"
  • 宮林 Miyabayashi (name)

...and then にある神社 -ni aru jinja is just "the jinja in [long place name we just analyzed].

If you are a foreigner/weaboo on the Internet, unpacking names like the ones above might be particularly difficult because lots of stuff you've looked at with Japan probably hasn't directly involved place names of real things. For instance, if you learned Japanese to enjoy anime and other media, you might know the names of many fictional characters but may not know much about Japanese geography. On the other hand, people who have lived in Japan for a long time gradually learn lots of names just by having to get around.

Seeing the same names again and again (e.g. because you actually have to use these names) is how you will learn these.