One issue with Japanese is that because it differs so much from English, you find yourself unable to express even basic phrases correctly. This can lead to reluctance to speak unless you are sure you know what you are saying is right. It stops people attending classes, even freeform conversation classes, as they are terrified or nervous about misspeaking.
This is a bad idea and what I tell anyone who mentions such sentiments, is to tell them that if they are waiting until they are better, they will NEVER reach that standard in their own mind and in the meantime have wasted so many good opportunities to actually improve. Good Japanese starts with mindlessly imitating good Japanese. When I was in Japan, I used to spend a lot of time rereading the same book, the first 2 or 3 readthroughs I probably understood absolutely nothing.
I also used to watch TV for hours on end. I couldn’t point to one thing that particularly helped me improve my Japanese, but it certainly didn’t hurt to spend all of my time consuming Japanese in some form, and then trying to use the bits I’d learned in everyday life. I learnt how to say, “can I take a bath?” during my first week in Japan, and it ended up being a very important sentence that I could use to ask about other things:
お風呂入ってもいい？
お風呂 = learn about the honourific お and 音読み
入って = learn about verb tenses, おくりがな, 訓読み, te form
も = learn about usages of particles
いい = learn that putting てもいい on certain things is a grammatical phrase about permissions.
Wait weren’t we going to talk about 知る vs 分かる?
Sure. 知る and 分かる cause issues for people if you spend your time learning Japanese by looking up words in the dictionary. You’ll find the dictionary entries for them as follows
知る【しる】
(v5r,vt) (1) to be aware of; to know; to be conscious of; to cognize; to cognise;
(v5r,vt) (2) to notice; to feel;
(v5r,vt) (3) to understand; to comprehend; to grasp;
(v5r,vt) (4) to remember; to be acquainted with (a procedure);
(v5r,vt) (5) to experience; to go through; to learn;
(v5r,vt) (6) to be acquainted with (a person); to get to know;
(v5r,vt) (7) to concern
分かる【わかる】
(v5r,vi) (1) (uk) to understand; to comprehend; to grasp; to see; to get; to follow;
(v5r,vi) (2) (uk) to become clear; to be known; to be discovered; to be realized; to be realised; to be found out;
(int) (3) I know!; I think so too!; (P)
A cursory glance of these definitions, and a lot of people will probably just shorthand these to both mean “I know”. But their actual usage in Japanese means that they are not direct synonyms, and they are very rarely used in the plain form but much more likely in the ‘progressive tense’, that is the ている form. This is particulary … interesting once you get to the negatives.
わかっていない would be used in the context of “someone doesn’t get it” like
「あいつ、親の苦労わかっていない」
“That guy, he doesn’t understand the difficulties of a parent”
知っていない is a bit weird because 知る is a stative verb. You either are in the state of knowing something or not knowing it, there is not really an in-between, which is why once the moment where you acquire the knowledge has passed, you would say 知っている. 知らない is also fine, because you haven’t “flipped the switch” of knowing yet. 知っていない is harder to use since it’s literally “being in the state of not knowing” but you do hear this in the past tense
「あの2人が付き合っているの、知っていなかったみたい」
“it seems (someone) didn’t know that those two were dating”.
You also see 知っていない in sentences like
「この事は知っていても知っていなくても大丈夫だろう」
“It’ll be alright whether you know about this or not.”
and on this case, 知っていなくても can be replaced by 知らなくても with no issue. I linked a paper on the negative form of 知っている for anyone who wants to take a look, with some example sentences that might be good even if you can’t read the rest of the paper.
So how on earth would you be expected to remember all this? Well, some people can and do remember all this. I’m certainly not one of them. But you can’t tell me apart from the people that do have an amazing memory because I still use these words correctly. I do so, because when I come across example sentences that I will find useful (particularly once I found out that there are differences between 知る and 分かる) I made sure to write them down and run through them. Shows like Terrace House are amazing for picking up things like this.
If you found this article useful and would like to contribute to further writings on the subject, please consider a donation using the below service.
If you’d like to have personalised Japanese lessons, be they 1-on-1 or group lessons, contact me today via the website’s contact form. You can checkout my youtube channel for examples of what lessons will look like, and I have a professional home studio setup with microphone, lighting and software so that I can display anything on screen including articles, videos and much more.
