Learn Japanese – 5 Essential Tips

If you are going to learn Japanese, you need to decide why you are learning the language. I learned Japanese for work in 1971. I lived in Japan for nine years, mostly during the 1970s. Surrounded by the language, I learned on my own mostly through reading, listening, and practice. 

Most people who study Japanese won’t have the learning conditions that I had, and they’ll need to find another motivation for learning the language. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of good reasons to learn Japanese. 

Why Learn Japanese?

Japan has a fascinating, refined, and unique culture. Japan has been influenced by other cultures, particularly Chinese civilization. However, Japan takes this international influence and creates a specifically Japanese cultural environment, evident in art, music, thought, sports, work, craftsmanship and personal relationships.

Much has been written on the insularity of Japanese culture. In my own case, I found the culture welcoming, friendly, and full of contradictions. My wife and I often feel nostalgic for our years in Japan. Perhaps it is the qualities of mutual trust and respect that remain the clearest in my mind. The rewards for learning Japanese are great.

Today, we meet Japanese people everywhere. The Japanese have become keen globalists. As businesspeople, artists, tourists, or even chefs learning foreign cuisine, the Japanese can no longer be considered culturally insular. Internationally, traditional aspects of Japanese culture like judo, karate and flower arrangement have become quite popular. More recently, manga and anime lead people to study the language.

So, how do you learn Japanese? Let me offer you five tips on achieving fluency in this language.

5 Tips To Help You Learn Japanese

1. Learn the Kanji

Massive amounts of reading is an essential activity for accumulating vocabulary. It’s the fundamental measure of language growth. Therefore, my first tip is to buckle down and learn the Kanji (the Chinese characters used in Japanese writing). Without Kanji, the range of content that you can access is quite limited.

There are many systems for learning Kanji today. I can’t recommend any one of them simply because I learned Kanji 50 years ago, long before the computer, the iPad, and the Internet. What I can say, however, is that you need to be consistent with your Kanji. Study it daily, and accept that you will forget often. For this reason, daily reading and practice is essential.

In addition to Kanji, there’s also hiragana and katakana, the phonetic scripts used in Japanese.

Extra tip: Kanji has several potential pronunciations. There is usually an “on” pronunciation, which somewhat approximates the Chinese pronunciation. But there is usually also a “kun” pronunciation when the Kanji combines with hiragana to form a word. This is the native Japanese pronunciation of the word. 

Let me just provide some quick examples:

センタ    　　the foreign loan word “centre” is written in katakana and pronounced “senta”.

会話する　　two Kanji, 会話 combine to form “kaiwa”, conversation, and are followed by the        

                         hiragana する  “suru” to do, to give us “make conversation”.

会いできる    Here the Kanji 会 is pronounced “ai” and means to meet.

話します        Here the Kanji 話 is pronounced “hanashi” and means to speak.

2. Move to Hiragana ASAP

Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, two parallel systems each with 50 symbols. Each symbol is a syllable rather than an  individual sound. Hiragana is most widely used, and katakana is usually limited to foreign loan words or to words that represent sounds.

Much of language learning consists of listening. When you first listen to any language, it is very difficult to distinguish the sounds. Therefore we need to rely on a phonetic alphabet in order to make sense of what we are listening to. Sure, Romaji, a romanized Japanese script, can be helpful. However, you should start reading in hiragana as soon as possible.

Japanese writing consists of a mixture of hiragana, Kanji and the occasional use of katakana. It is difficult to get your brain used to this. The earlier you start, the better. 

3. Read and Listen a Lot

Japanese has fewer phonemes than most European languages. This makes it appear at first as if all new words sound the same. It is important to remain patient. As with so much in language learning, time heals all wounds. You simply have to trust that by continuing to listen and read (using hiragana while gradually mixing in more and more Kanji), the sounds of new words in the language will become easier to distinguish from each other. Your intuition for the language, its structure, and its sounds will only grow through continued, ample exposure. 

Gradually, progress to more challenging authentic content to enrich your vocabulary. A larger vocabulary is necessary if you hope to understand television and movies. If you are able to read well and understand at least some of what you see in movies, push yourself to face rapid fire conversation and slang with Japanese people. You can also find thousands of hours of compelling Japanese content on LingQ to help improve your reading and listening skills.

Extra Tip: Make reading a pleasure. Read whatever you want and use tools that make reading easier. Today, the range of material that we can access (radio programs, podcasts, YouTube video transcripts, etc.) with audio vastly exceeds what was available to me before. Online dictionaries make the texts more accessible. Mobile devices make the listening more portable.

4. Focus on verbs  

As in all languages, it helps to focus on verbs. It’s not a bad idea to review the most frequent words in Japanese and grow comfortable using them. When it comes to verbs in Japanese, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that verbs in Japanese have one form, and there are fewer tenses in Japanese than in most European languages. The bad news is that there are polite and casual registers. 

From my experience, as a Japanese learner, I never worried about politeness level. I tended to use the most neutral form of the word, and I gradually developed the ability to discern what level of politeness was required for certain situations. Textbooks often emphasize this too much for my liking, as I mostly see this as an extra burden on the novice learner. Trust that, overall, communication is more important than formality. You’ll develop an intuition for this eventually.. 

5. Go Light on Grammar, Focus on Patterns

I suggest that learners ignore complicated grammatical explanations, counters, and technical terms for different tenses or other aspects of Japanese. It is far more useful to focus on the patterns of the language and how certain concepts are expressed in Japanese. Through patterns, we build intuition. Through grammar drills, we rely on memorization. 

In English we say “I think you are beautiful”. In Japanese we say “You, beautiful are, I think.” The verb comes at the end. In English we say “I am going to Tokyo”. In Japanese we say “I, Tokyo to, am going”.

Not only is the main verb at the end, but the preposition that precedes the noun in English is replaced by a word that appears after the noun or pronoun. I didn’t know the terms or grammatical explanation while living in Japan. I just got used to the patterns in sentence structure. 

The endings of verbs also indicate tense, as in European languages. However, the endings of Japanese verbs also reflect whether the verb is positive or negative, a question, or other information that we in English use conjunctions like “because”, “in order to”, “since” and many more to express. Grammar is useful. It provides a short overview or clarification of patterns that you’ve already noticed, but in-depth explanations are best reserved for advanced learners hoping to polish their speech. 

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You Can Learn Japanese – What Are You Waiting For? 

The process of learning Japanese, with its unique structure and patterns, is a process of gradual discovery. It is not something that you will suddenly understand because someone explained it to you. It is something that you will hear, read, touch, feel, and gradually get used to. Today, there are far more resources to get started than when I learned Japanese. This blog post is a good place to learn some basic phrases. There are many graded readers with online dictionaries. At LingQ, we have beginner material with English translation. Here’s a post on the LingQ blog that talks about reading in Japanese and best practices.

The most important factor to your success will be your motivation to learn, and your willingness to accept that much will remain somewhat unclear for quite a while. However, gradually, you will realize that your comprehension is improving, and that you are able to express things naturally (and intuitively) in the language. There will be moments of victory and achievement, as well as periods where you are struggling. Just stay the course.

Is Japanese hard to learn? Check out this LingQ blog post to find out what we think!

Learning Japanese? Check out this LingQ blog post to learn some cute Japanese words!