Knowing and not knowing: 知る vs 分かる

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Link to the paper.

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.

still have it 18 years later, it also taught me the word for ‘sheriff’.

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.

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New Video: 水道管の工事現場で水噴き出す – 記事を精読する JLPT N3/N2 読解

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Article readthrough of a Japanese news article. I go through this line by line and explain vocab and grammar. I’d put this around N3 level for grammar and N2/N1 for vocab.
If you want to read articles like this, you should look at using a free browser extension called rikaichan/rikaikun, I’ve done a video on this topic if you’d like to know more.

If you’d like to get personalised one on one tutoring from me to help improve your Japanese, contact me through my Contact tab or book a lesson via Cafetalk by clicking on the below picture.

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Japanese classes in a classroom environment is not the panacea you think it is

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I took Japanese classes in primary school, highschool and did my major in Japanese at university. Would I recommend them? No. Of course the very existence of this website and blog are for promoting my Japanese tutoring services (you can check out my fantastic YouTube videos as well!) so of course I will be biased, but let me make my case.

The cliff notes on why are:

  • bad value for money
  • classroom environments are required pragmatically to keep the class around the level of the weakest student; and
  • general ignorance of successful Japanese teaching strategies

Value for money

Japanese classes tend to be very bad value for money. How many hours per week of classroom instruction will you get for thousands of dollars? You can get much more Japanese immersion for free through YouTube, audiobooks, Japanese SO…
Nobody will care that you have a degree in Japanese. If your job requires you to speak or use Japanese, at some point you’re going to have to prove you can do that. Showing someone a piece of paper that says you completed a Japanese program will not help.
I learnt more in my 10 months exchange living in Japan than all the hours I spent in Japanese classes.
You won’t have a monopoly on the teacher’s time and as discussed below, your teacher is not necessarily going to be any good at teaching. I’ve met many people who’ve learnt to speak Japanese, and almost none of them got competent by attending classes.

The classroom issue and pragmatism

Classes progress at a snail’s pace. The learning has to be done by you, having a teacher read out kanji or vocab or going through grammar to you every day will never result in you actually learning it. So if students haven’t done the homework or got across all the material yet, classroom discussions are moot. The divide in language classes will be stark, as you will generally end up with people who are bilingual/went on exchange for a significant period and then everyone else. As the years progress and the class size gets smaller and smaller, the class discussion will be dominated by the people who can speak and understand on the fly, and the rest sitting there completely out of the loop and not contributing.

Kanji, one of the most important aspects of Japanese, is virtually never taught in a classroom environment. You might get a list of kanji that will be on the exam and if you’re lucky you will be left to your own devices you can work through it. If you’re unlucky, the instructor will make you do rote memorisation (ie writing each one out 100 times and hoping you remember it because that’s how Japanese people do it) which does not work.

Pragmatism is a big issue with Japanese learning due to the structure of the language. You have polite and casual forms in Japanese. Unfortunately, the polite forms are conjugations on the casual form. However for pragmatic reasons, that is because teachers/schools/educational experts prefer that students speak politely, the polite form is taught first. This causes a lot of confusion for learners of Japanese and I have to spend a few hours going through it whenever I get a new student. If I know they’re in school, the very first thing I will do is ask some basic questions to see if they get this point. Generally it will go like this:

Say “I will go to the park”
こうえんにいきます
Now say the same sentence, but casually.
こうえんにいく
And generally by that point, I’ve got enough information about their level to start teaching effectively. Spoilers, I have to start from the beginning of Tae Kim’s guide or Imabi.

General ignorance of successful teaching strategies

This is not particularly a problem with Japanese classes but with any type of learning.

First of all you have a selection bias with regards to anyone who makes it to a teaching position. There will be a large cohort of people who make it to become teachers, particularly where barriers to entry are higher (eg tertiary sector) or because of opportunity cost evaluations they make (“I’m already making good money in sales, can’t be bothered to get my teaching degree”), who just ‘get’ the material. It is hard to say exactly what ‘getting it’ is, but it could be biological reasons such as IQ or environmental reasons. The point is not exactly what it is, but because of human diversity there will be people who will do well in certain areas and others who will not.

However just because you make it to become a teacher, this does not mean you are going to be a good teacher. In fact, as many of the parts may have come easy to you, you will find it very difficult to ever convey this to your students.

Unless you luck out and get a good teacher who has examined the established teaching methods and rebuilt a curriculum on their own that will actually make you proficient, it’s not worth it. I always teach to a syllabus etc when I have school students but at the same time I’m using that as a list to make sure they know what’s on the exam, because in the end they are getting marked via exams and so I make sure that they get the highest mark possible. The rest of the 75% of the time I am trying to actually teach Japanese to them so that they understand why those items are on the syllabus.

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四字熟語 or how I learned to stop worrying and love kanji

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Click the image below to go to the article from which I draw these examples from:

ヨジジュクゴとは？

Kanji can be an intimidating part of Japanese. I think it is a big reason why a lot of people give up on Japanese. If you can’t consume the written word of a language easily, that makes it hard to get a lot of immersion done compared to other languages.

I’ve talked about general kanji study tips and tricks on youtube here, here and here. I’ve also done previous blogs here and here. Today I’d like to focus on 四字熟語 【よじじゅくご】 (n) four-character compound word (esp. idiomatic). While ‘true’ 四字熟語 are idiomatic, their usage in Japanese goes much broader than in Chinese, which is where the concept comes from. The wikipedia entry is an adequate primer for the topic and I would recommend you read it if you’re unsure as to what a 四字熟語 is. The entry points out that, ‘四字熟語 is itself a non-idiomatic four-character phrase’.

So how does getting into more complicated kanji topics like this help you, the average JSL learner? I would propose 3 reasons

  • They are ubiquitous in Japanese
  • The non-idiomatic ones are easy to understand through literal breakdowns of the individual kanji
  • Attempting to read 四字熟語 helps you practice ‘kanji logic’, that is how do 漢語 (かんご) work.

So let’s go through the above linked article about train seats and look through all the 漢語 with particular focus on the 四字熟語.

行動習慣 does not have a separate entry into the dictionary, normally a hint that it is a non-idiomatic 四字熟語. I would point out that such a 四字熟語 is the combination of two words

  • 行動【こうどう】 (n,vs,adj-no) action; conduct; behaviour
  • 習慣 【しゅうかん】 (n) (1) habit; (n) (2) (social) custom; practice; convention

So it could be translated along the lines of behavioural conduct, societal conduct. This article is talking about certain strategies or behaviours that should be done to avoid aging quickly. So one strategy that I find to be successful when you see four kanji in a row, is to put the four characters into two pairs as I did in the above bullet points.

一念発起【いちねんほっき】 (n,vs) (yoji) being resolved to (do something); having a wholehearted intention
Unlike the previous entry, this is actually in the dictionary, but it still can be looked at as　一念+発起. This one actually is quite tricky as 発起 can be read as ほっき or はっき but 四字熟語 often are only allowed to be read in one way and in this case it must be ほっき and comes from a particular sect of Buddhism.

体脂肪率 【たいしぼうりつ】 (n) body fat percentage. This is a slight variation on what we have been looking at in the sense that it is a 三字熟語, or a 3 character phrase with the kanji 率, which tends to be used as a suffix to talk about rate, ratio, percentage etc.

血管年齢 is back to the more common style of adding two 漢語 together, けっかん (blood vessels) and ねんれい (age).　It could be translated to something like ‘the age of the blood’ vessels, straight after it in the article it puts 28歳, meaning ‘blood vessels aged 28’ or something similar.　

限定書籍 is another, with げんてい meaning: (n,vs,adj-no) limit; restriction and 書籍 しょせき (n) book; publication.
While doing my research about this one, I came across a new English word called a retronym. Not knowing what it was, I did what I always do first and have a guess at etymological clues in the word, principally being ‘retro’. This isn’t too far off the meaning of the word but my point is that this is exactly what you should be doing when you’re looking at kanji! Indeed it is basically the whole point of this blog today.

内臓脂肪 is another example of the Lego-like way that you can join 漢語 to one another, with 内臓 being in place of 体, therefore being read as ないぞうしぼう and meaning visceral fat (although in my head I just thought of ‘organ fat’) and is technically excess intra-abdominal adipose tissue accumulation. Now there’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d be saying today.

The last entry is (we’re still in the first paragraph of the actual article) 特別公開

  • 特別 とくべつ (adj-na,adj-no,adv,n) special; particular; extraordinary; exceptional; especial
  • 公開 こうかい (n,vs,adj-no) opening to the public; making available to the public; putting on display; exhibiting; showing (play, movie, etc.); holding (interview, etc.); open; public.

    In other words, a ‘special opening’, ‘special event’.

Takeaway

The takeaway I hope you get from this article is to see the importance of learning how to read 四字熟語 and 三字熟語. Most of the examples I gave (6 out of 7) were basically just two 漢語 together, the 7th being a 三字熟語 with a suffix. 一念発起 is perhaps considered as one set phrase but it is totally possible to break it down into two components hence why I put it in the first category.





Article breakdown of ‘Zero is too harsh? 1st year primary students getting marked down for stops, upward flicks and sweeping strokes MEXT’s opinion’

Article link:
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/94af3649323a03d2dfb09bd850600defeccd70c1

Video readthrough of the article with translation and explanation:

0点は厳しすぎ？小1「とめ、はね、はらい」で×　文科省の見解は

0点 is read as れいてん which you can read more about here.

習字のような「とめ、はね、はらい」ができていないと、漢字ドリルは全てやり直し。テストは0点―。小学1年の担任のこうした指導に対し、保護者から「厳しすぎる」という悩みが届いた。わが子の就学を前に、どこまで丁寧に字を書かせるべきか思案している保護者は多いはず。西日本新聞「あなたの特命取材班」がウェブサイトで意見を募ったところ、保護者や教育現場からさまざまな声が届いた。字体の指導は、どこまで厳格であるべきか。

小学1年の担任
a たんにんせんせい is the homeroom/form teacher that you have generally in the morning before school actually starts in Japan. But たんにん also means to be in charge of, so in this sense this is just the teacher running the first year classes.

保護者から「厳しすぎる」という悩みが届いた
Here is an interesting usage of という, which is used to define or describe certain concepts. In this usage, なやみ is a type of trouble or worrying aspect and is being connected with が to とどいた from とどく, which means to arrive. However the parents haven’t really all directly said ‘This is troubling’ but more that from the variety of different responses, the majority opinion could be summarised as the parents/guardians being ‘troubled’ by the news. In this case, the ‘arriving’ is that these opinions have all been sent or collected by the journalist.

「習っていないのと、知って省くのは違う」

Here we see some nominalisation by the presence of the の after both verbs, and the usage of the と…は to show a contrast. ‘There’s a difference between not learning something and leaving something out’.

「同じタイプの厳しい先生がいたが、数年後は皆さん感謝していた」「高校生や大学生の指導をしているが、字が雑で読めないことがある」「大学教員として国語の入試の採点をした。とめがはねになっている場合や、雑で判別が難しい字も不正解」…。 　
冒頭の教師の指導に賛同する立場からは、こうした投稿が寄せられた。中には「とめ、はね、はらい」が不完全な字に丸を付けた担任に「小学生は基本が重要。習っていないのと、知って省くのでは意味が違う」などと訴え、指導を変えさせたという保護者も。
北九州市の小学校に30年勤務した教員は、採点の裁量は各担任にあるため、クラス間でも差は生まれるとした上で「教えた通り書けていない場合は減点し、0点にはしなかった」と自らの体験を紹介した。

雑で読めないことがある
雑, read as ざつ, refers to messiness, roughness, untidiness or miscellaneous. Useful words for remembering this would be 混雑 and 複雑. ‘There are times the characters cannot be read as they are messy/disorganised’

北九州市の小学校に30年勤務した教員は、採点の裁量は各担任にあるため、クラス間でも差は生まれるとした上で「教えた通り書けていない場合は減点し、0点にはしなかった」と自らの体験を紹介した。
北九州市 is a city in the north of きゅうしゅう, the small island on the west of Japan including 福岡, 長崎 and 鹿児島.　教えた通り is using the grammar point of ～とおり, while we see there is a difference between 減点, subtracting marks, and 0点にする which is to give a 0.

どこまで減点…文科省「各校の判断」

一方で、福岡県の小学校教員は「とめ、はね、はらい」を基準に減点することは「誤り」だと投稿した。根拠とするのは学習指導要領解説の国語編だ。字体は骨組みであるため、実際に書かれた場合は無数の形状があり、「正しい字体であることを前提とした上で、柔軟に評価することが望ましい」と書かれている。

字体 じたい is a reference to the composition of kanji characters including concepts like とめ、はね、はらい, relative sizing and other factors.

だが、文部科学省教育課程課の見解は異なる。「国語ではなく、社会や理科など他教科で書いた字は『とめ、はね、はらい』ができていないからといって、減点はしないという柔軟な評価を意味する」と説明する。

学習指導要領には「漢字の指導においては、学年別漢字配当表に示す漢字の字体を標準とする」とあり、漢字テストや書写では配当表通りの「とめ、はね、はらい」が求められるという。ただ、実際にどこまで減点するかどうかは「各校の判断」と付け加えた。

実際にどこまで減点するかどうかは「各校の判断」と付け加えた。
‘They added that in reality, how far to subtract points is up to each school’s judgement.’

「書くことが嫌い」になることを懸念

I’ve got a discussion on する・なる with the に particle here and here.

一方、小中学校に長年勤務した平嶋一臣・純真学園大客員教授（国語表現法）は、厳しい指導で「書くことが嫌い」になることを懸念する。鉛筆をうまく扱うには「指の筋肉が動作を覚えるような地道な練習が必要」だからだ。

冒頭の保護者も、小1の子どものやる気が損なわれていることを気にしていた。幼稚園や小中学校で書の出前授業をしている平嶋さんは「とめ、はね、はらい」がきっちり書けるのに越したことはないとした上で、「もう少し子どもの発達を緩やかに見守ってはどうか」と強調した。

「もう少し子どもの発達を緩やかに見守ってはどうか」
‘How about watching over children’s development with a bit more leniency?’

This is just a teaser on how I would go over an article in detail, in reality we would go through the whole article and then check comprehension with questions as well as revisiting grammar, vocab and kanji over subsequent lessons. You can book lessons with me to be able to read articles like this through the Contact page or click the below picture to go to my profile on Cafetalk and use my coupons for cheap lessons!

Min-Maxing Rabbitholes

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Checking out Japanese language learning forums reveals some common trends. I often find myself analysing people’s entire personalities through their comments. I’m not entirely sure remote psychology is a thing but I do see certain attitudes and behaviours that are unlikely to be very helpful in your language learning journey. The one I’ll focus on today is ‘Min-Maxing’.

Min-Maxing?

Min-Maxing is a an idea that comes from games, particularly RPG style games involving building a character. The basic idea is that you minimise or reduce things that won’t help you, and maximise something that will help you the most. At its core, this idea is very powerful as it involves having a sort of Platonic ideal or fully formed concept of what your ‘endgame’ or goal is. Then you consider how to reach that goal and the steps that need to be taken and the things to be avoided. If done correctly, it can lead to great efficiency, specialisation, success and above average achievement.

However it can also have the downside of the end result being unbalanced, asymmetrical or otherwise janky.

So how does this apply to language learning? One of the big issues with min-maxing things in the real world is that it is not as easy to do the 1-to-1 conversion of effort ⇒ result. Spending inordinate amounts of time to determine the ‘best’ study method would have been much better spent actually studying, even if it was inefficient. To continue the RPG analogy, the ‘grind’ must be done at some point: the words must be learnt, the grammar internalised and the immersion must take place. If you’re into your fifth article reading about which anki deck to use or typing out your huge wall of text asking for opinions on which Vtuber to watch, you’re probably better off actually opening a textbook, reading a news article or speaking to a (Japanese) native speaker.

Worked Example

In response to the question, ‘how do I learn compound kanji?’, this is a response that is worth reading (emphasis added):

It’s best if you don’t think of them as ‘compound kanji’ as much as you think of them as words. Because (usually) what comes first is the spoken word, then a writing system appears. And for that, there’s not really a ‘best way’ simply because it’s too complex of a task and learning is an individual process.

What people generally do for Japanese is use a core deck (2k or 6k), which has audio for every word. Then you start consuming native media and either relying on encountering them enough times to stick or making your own cards (sentence mining). At the same time to get familiar with kanji, you can use one of the common methods like WaniKani or KKLC that teach them to you together with words [or kanji damage -Ed].

What’s the deal with kanji anyway?

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One of the most common beginner questions I deal with is about kanji. But from experience, it it clear that even people who get to a relatively advanced level of kanji still don’t know basic things about kanji or study them really ineffectively. The treatment of kanji in most textbooks is terrible and generally consigned to a few pages at the beginning.

I’ve done a video on the kanjidamage.com system which you can find below and this will teach you basically everything needed to study kanji effectively.

The general advice is to not look at ‘learn kanji’ as a goal in and of itself. Instead, learn them as part of words. When you study a new word like say, 牛乳; learn how to read this word, ぎゅうにゅう, memorise how to write the two characters in this word, and remember that this word means “milk”, specifically cow’s milk.

By studying like this you’ll eventually build up knowledge of kanji, what they mean, how to write them, and what readings they have.

Studying kanji in a vacuum can be interesting, and isn’t a complete waste of time if you enjoy it, but it’s general a better use of your time to learn them in context, as part of vocabulary study.

If you wish to progress to being able to write kanji by hand, it will take a lot of work and a detailed understanding of the concepts in the above linked video. Also check out this video.

Read Japanese sentences backwards

Tip: Look for the noun and then read backwards.

One issue I see coming up a lot in my lessons is students struggling to understand ‘clauses’. I’m no linguist and there are many fancy ways to specifically talk about what exactly a clause is (and isn’t) but for the purposes of this article, clauses are like mini-sentences within a larger sentence. An introduction to what I am talking about can be read about on Tae Kim’s website

Generally you want to identify the beginnings and ends of words and clauses by the position of kanji and particles. Also, generally the types of clauses that tend to cause issues are basically just adjectives and verbs being used to describe specific ideas (generally nouns). Let’s go through an NHK Easy Article and look at a few examples.

Article here: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k10012928001000/k10012928001000.html

交通事故になりやすい「危険なバス停」が１万か所あった

So from the headline, we already have an example. As you’re reading, you should be looking at the kanji and possible particles to try and work out where one word ends and the other starts. The first candidate for a particle に, only has found kanji in front of it, so probably not a clause. The next is が, and by the presence of 危険な we can almost be certain that バス停 is a noun (which it is, bus stop). So putting it together by working backwards from the noun, we have:

危険なバス停, a dangerous bus stop
But then, in front of that we have no particle, so it’s likely we can assume that this is part of a clause. The next part

なりやすい, easy to become
Now here we have a particle, but に is joining なりやすい to 交通事故 (こうつうじこ, traffic accident), so it becomes all part of the same clause. At this point, read it from the back.

バス停➡危険な➡交通事故になりやすい
Bus stop➡dangerous bus stop➡easy to become (involved) in a traffic accident➡ Dangerous Bus stops (where) it is easy to become involved in a traffic accident. So you can see that everything before ‘bus stop’ is being used to modify ‘bus stop’ because it’s not a usual bus stop, it is a specific idea of certain bus stops being dangerous because of the high levels of traffic accidents that occur nearby.

道を渡っていた女の子が車にはねられて亡くなりました

Again if we start scanning, first particle is を but it is just joining 道 and 渡る, but if we keep going we see a noun after the verb, 女の子 followed by が. So 女の子 looks like the noun that is getting modified by everything before it:

女の子➡道を渡っていた
girl➡crossing the road

The rest of the sentence is ‘died after being hit by a car’, therefore, ‘A girl crossing the road was hit by a car and then died’.

バス停に止まったバスが邪魔になっていた

Doing the same process here, we see a に particle which isn’t showing much, but the presence of a noun after a verb again should at least make us think of clauses. It’s not just a bus, it’s a bus stopped at a bus stop.

３年以内に人がはねられた事故があったバス停などです。

Here the first が is just showing a grammatical relationship between 人 and はねられた, but the second shows a noun following a verb so it’s likely we have a clause again. Reading backwards, ‘an accident where a person was hit by a car within the last 3 years’. However it actually goes further, because we see another noun following a verb, and so the full sentence is actually ‘bus stops where an accident where a person was hit by a car within the last 3 years’.

Hopefully this tip can help you understand grammar better and start to get into translating sentences into more natural English. Once I started doing this, I found my understanding of Japanese increased dramatically, and I hope yours will too!

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What do I need to learn Japanese?

There are so many options for learning Japanese or any language. The amount of choices can be overwhelming. As many beginners have found out, the early stages of language learning can be tough and it is easy to blame the methods, techniques or resources for the slow progress.

So what should YOU use? Of course I’m professional Japanese tutor so take my recommendations with a grain of salt, but I have experience with many different students from many different backgrounds and there are certain things that tend to work with everyone. Someone from reddit has also written this guide which I think has some very good ideas and strategies.

However before you start learning Japanese, or do anything that is going to require significant effort and time commitment, is to start off with some goals in mind. I’ve done another post where I go through the fundamentals of goal setting with language learning which I would really recommend you read and then 1) set what your own goals are and 2) how you will try to achieve them.

Step 1: Learn Hiragana and Katakana

Nonnegotiable. I wouldn’t even bother opening a textbook, starting on a kanji study program or doing immersion before you’ve spent at least 80% of your study time on hiragana. You want to get to the point where you can read hiragana without much trouble and ideally you want to be able to write it as well. Writing it will reinforce your memory a lot more than just reading it all the time. Romaji is a crutch and WILL hold you back. The fact that many textbooks that cover basic beginners’ Japanese insist on using romaji all the way through is a terrible editorial decision and I would not recommend you ever use a textbook (or any material) that does this.

So how should you learn it? Tofugu.com has a good guide that shows you all the hiragana, has pronunciation guides and shows you how to write them. Go through it, then find some flashcard deck or one of the million free hiragana apps and drill them for a while. As soon as you start getting the hang out if, you want to go to NHK Easy and start reading articles. NHK Easy is fantastic for 2 main reasons: every article has an audio recording and an option to turn furigana (hiragana showing the reading of the kanji) off and on. So you attempt to read through the NHK Article, listening to the recorded version if you’re finding it hard to read and then playing back the audio to check you did it right.

Next you want to expose yourself to as much hiragana as possible. One way is by thinking of any Japanese word and then try and write it out in hiragana. Start with car brands (Mitsubishi, Toyota, Honda) and then move to nouns like sushi, kimono. You’ll need to start building some type of word list you can run-through something like anki with. Then you can go down that word list and look at the English column, and then try and remember the Japanese word for it, then write it in Japanese, and then refer back to your word list and compare if you wrote it down correctly. I discuss more strategies here:

Step 2: Get into grammar and kanji

Grammar and kanji will need to be done over time. There are so many strategies for pursuing grammar study and it is hard to say which is best. However a structured approach is likely to work better than an unstructured approach for most people.

Grammar is conceptually difficult no matter what language you learn, and so it is important to not try and speed through grammar guides or textbooks. Generally it is good to pick a point or so and work on it for a while, then move on to something else. At the same time you want to be trying to consume Japanese media of some description, hopefully close to your level, so that you can get experience picking out grammar and vocab that you’ve learnt.

Structured Approach

This would mean learning Japanese grammar points ‘in order’ and following one pattern with another pattern which may build on the previous. This is the general way most textbooks and classrooms will teach Japanese. If you get tutoring with someone like me, I tend to teach by JLPT level if the student has no real plan they wish to pursue. It would also mean following a grammar guide like imabi or Tae Kim.

Ideally you want to start by learning in the plain form and then the ます・です form. This is why I recommend imabi and Tae Kim.

Unstructured Approach

This would be similar to the types of immersion methods. Rather than using a textbook, you just immerse yourself in Japanese media, and try and grab sentences, vocab etc and put them into anki or other learning tools. This would be hard to do with audio-only podcast or subtitle-less TV shows but works well with written works. It has the advantages of being ‘proper Japanese’ as opposed to textbook Japanese, but the difficulty of the grammar, language will vary wildly, especially if it is a piece of media meant for adult Japanese native speakers.

Used correctly, such a method will develop your listening skills, pronunciation and speed which gets you into speaking and understanding Japanese to a near-native level, generally the best case scenario goal of most Japanese learners.

I’ve listed some resources like AJATT and you can also check out Refold.

Kanji

It’s never to early to start on kanji. I’ve talked about kanji a lot in other posts and videos but the main thing to keep in mind is to be careful about how you learn kanji. Textbooks meant for Japanese or non-Japanese speakers are generally not great. I’ve done videos on a great website called kanjidamage.com and this is one of the best ways to learn kanji, including reading and writing.

Step 4: Get a language partner

It is very important to get someone to talk to. Direct interaction via conversation is the best way to learn and practice your skills. There are many options for this, in no particular order:

  • Move to Japan
  • Get a Japanese friend, partner etc
  • Get Japanese lessons (contact me through my website or Cafetalk coupon: 0a77c3de) 👌
  • Find Japanese language meetups nearby or use VR Chat, Twitch etc to find Japanese communities

So there are some roadmaps and strategies to learn Japanese. What you do think?
Any suggestions comment below or join me on Youtube!

タイヤロック付けたまま走り去る。

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記事を精読する Japanese Article Readthrough

Japanese grammar, vocab and kanji practice through reading an article about stealing cars with wheel locks still attached. I’d put this grammar-wise around JLPT N3, kanji/vocab JLPT N2+

Original Article: https://car-moby.jp/article/automobil…​

Tofugu article on 込む referenced 4:17​: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/komu-compound-verbs/

Grammar of てしまう referenced 16:56: https://acejapanese.com/shimau/​

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Do you want to improve your Japanese? Do you want to get better marks in Japanese? I specialise in exam preparation and exam technique to help you get the best marks you can in the final exam for Japanese. I am from WA but I teach material which will get you top marks in all states. I also teach beginners so if you’ve always wanted to learn Japanese but don’t know where to start, start with an email to me via acejapanese@protonmail.com or checkout acejapanese.com

I run professional online Japanese lessons with proper microphone, fast internet and ability to play videos, read material, practice writing, learn kanji, learn grammar all from the comfort of your own home using Zoom. Checkout my website to learn more and to contact me! Want to speak, listen, understand, read Japanese? I am a Japanese tutor with JLPT N1 and I can teach YOU Japanese, from the comfort of your own home with professional, personalised lessons.