Learning Japanese

A great many expats manage to isolate themselves from the Japanese language. Often it's a combination of (a) circumstance - working in exclusively English-speaking environments, having only English-speaking colleagues and friends (both foreign and Japanese), and (b) desire - making no effort to learn any more than the most basic vocabulary and avoiding reading altogether. But still there's no substitute for living there and putting yourself in situations where you have to speak it.

Before I went to Japan (in the late 1980s) I took lessons, but it really only built up my passive knowledge. Without frequent opportunities to get some conversation practice with a real live human it was definitely uphill work. And if ever a language requires heavy practice, its Japanese. Of course there are always people who think it's something you can just pick up, but many newcomers have been disabused of that notion very quickly.

Of course speaking good Japanese is difficult enough, with its levels of politeness and its grammatical nuances and so on. But as a foreigner in Japan the locals usually cut you a lot of slack and tolerate what would otherwise be considered blunt and crude Japanese. in fact they're often highly impressed by even the most rudimentary sentences you utter in their language.

Reading and writing Japanese is a big undertaking of course. For that you have to become as a child again, forgetting everything you've grown up with in terms of how words are structured (syllabically rather than orthographically) and how they're represented visually, viz combinations of kanji - Japanicized Chinese characters - and two types of kana (syllabaries). There are no shortcuts,and it just requires frequent practice and reinforcement.

I used kanji cards when I started. They're just pocket-sized cards with a kanji on one side and the pronunciation and meaning printed on the other side, handy to carry around for whenever you've got a few minutes to spare. I also found it was much more effective to memorize kanji through writing practice rather than just trying to remember in my mind's eye what each kanji looked like. You are supposed to write each kanji with each particular "stroke" of the pen coming in a fixed order, and writing and rewriting a kanji many times in the correct order really helps to reinforce it.

One of the biggest hurdles is the way each kanji can have multiple pronunciations depending on whether it stands alone or whether it's in combination. Also, different combinations can result in one kanji having multiple pronunciations. For example 建 (referring to "building" or "construction") can be pronounced ken, kon, tate or date, depending on how it's used (what it's combined with in a word). You get a feel after a while for whether a particular combination requires a pronunciation derived from its original Chinese source (ken or kon in the earlier example) or a native Japanese pronunciation (tate or date). But this takes time. And it's always going to be messy, with odd and quirky pronunciations all over the place. (Keep in mind it's not easy for Japanese people either, and they have to spend a lot of classroom hours right up to the end of high school mastering all this.)

I used to get a lot of practice with hiragana (one of the two syllable-representing systems I mentioned earlier) when I walked on the street. Every Japanese car's number plate has a hiragana symbol on it, and in the course of a few minutes you can see hundreds of them. I found that a good way to get those hiragana fixed in my memory, as long as I didn't get hit by a moving vehicle or another pedestrian.

Also I made it a kind of hobby to learn the pronunciations of the kanji used in people's names. You see certain kanji used very often in surnames (山,　田,　川,　藤　and so on) and given names (子,　美,　介,　祐, 和 and so on). That was - for me at least - a fun way to learn some of the more commonly used kanji. It was (and still is) a good little way to break the ice when meeting Japanese people for the first time, asking if the kanji in their name is ... or ... or maybe ... They're usually pretty surprised when they get that sort of thing from a foreigner.

By the way, that -n- sound in arigatou is not universal. People in the Kanto area (around Tokyo) and in northern Japan often (but not always) nasalize the -g- sound and turn it into a soft -ng-. It's also something you hear out of the mouths of newscasters on NHK (Japan's equivalent of the BBC). But it's not done much at all in western Japan (Kyoto, Osaka etc) or in southern Japan. In fact in that part of the country it would sound a bit pretentious. I never nasalized the Japanese -g-, even when I lived up north, and nobody seemed to care.

How do you type in Japanese?

On a mobile phone when you send an email (not a text message as such but an actual email) each pad on the keyboard is marked in the Roman alphabet and the hiragana syllabary. If the phone is in Japanese mode (which it almost always will be for almost all users in Japan) you type the word you want using hiragana.

Say you want to type the word kawa (river). You type "kaｗa" か (ka) わ (wa) and the screen shows the most likely kanji combination with that pronunciation. If that's the one you wnat, you click it and move on to the next word. If it's not the one you want, scroll down till you find it and click that. There are two kanji pronounced kawa and both mean river (川 and 河). So if you want 河, choose that.

On computer keyboards in Japan there's a similar setup. You can use the hiragana setting or the English setting. The hiragana setting is just as I described with the mobile phone.If you use the English setting (which all computers in Japan have, by the way) you can just type the letters kawa and the screen will show you 川,　河 and a few other words with that pronunciation (one meaning of kawa, for example, is "skin", and its kanji is written 皮). So you just click the one you want and move on to the next word.

It sounds cumbersome but you can do it all very quickly if you know what you're doing.

If you live in a big city, you'll easily find free lessons fo all levels (teachers are volunteers, you still pay a tiny fee that barely covers the cost of paper). Address the local International Center.
The website of the NHK offers good lessons.
Get out without your friends from the same country as you, and speak japanese!

Thanks for the tips, everyone!! They are most helpful.

But as a foreigner in Japan the locals usually cut you a lot of slack and tolerate what would otherwise be considered blunt and crude Japanese. in fact they're often highly impressed by even the most rudimentary sentences you utter in their language.

That seems to be the case for most people who have visited japan. I have not been there myself, but hope to, one day....

Lonelier_Planet, you mean tere are more than one ways to pronounce a kanji word, unlike Mandarin, where such cases are quite rare? I mean, you can pronounce the same word differently too in Mandarin, but that's quite uncommon. I am still struggling with hiragana at the moment, haven't even got to katagana, let alone kanji yet....

With the kanji-pronunciation thing I really run the risk of oversimplifying it here, but one analogy could be with the English -ough being pronounced various ways as in THOUGHT THOUGH COUGH and TOUGH.

So with the example of the kanji I gave in #1, 建　(ken/ kon/ tate/ date), we have such words as:

建立 konryuu - erection (of a building)

建国　kenkoku - founding of a nation

建物　tatemono - a building

建築 kenchiku - architecture

二階建　nikaidate - 2-story .

If you look at the 2nd kanji in 建国, it's pronounced "koku" in this combiｎation, but can also be pronounced "goku", "kuni"　or "guni": 国内　kokunai (domestic), 雪国 yukiguni (the snow country), 中国 Chugoku (China), 国 kuni (country, nation), and so on. That means anybody learning the kanji 国 for the first time would have to learn it as "国 : koku, goku, kuni, guni".

So whenever you learn a new kanji you also have to learn a list of possible pronunciations. There's very rarely a simple one-to-one correspondence between a kanji and its pronunciation. This adds layers of complexity to the whole process, but also makes it all rather fascinating if your life doesn't depend on it.

And a final word: As I mentioned in #1, it's a demanding process for the Japanese people too. The learning of 国語 kokugo (the national language) in schools takes up a lot of time and energy, simply because Japan's written language is so complex. People may often be puzzled by certain kanji combinations, in that the meaning may be relatively easy to work out, but not the pronunciation.

This particularly affects names, some of which may be so obscure that for some people introducing themselves requires a short lecture on the pronunciation. (The next time you meet a Japanese person, if you have the chance ask them how to pronounce the following surname which belongs to someone I knew in Hiroshima: 本子原.)

I studied Japanese a in the mid-70s and spent a little time in Japan. I felt that I was progressing with the spoken language and knew most hiragana and katakana and maybe 200 kanji. When I returned to the US and graduated from college, my access to Japanese dried up in the sense that I was in a rural town, there were no Japanese, no Japanese channels (no cable), etc. I thought about continuing with ordering books, but I realized I would have no way to look up a word containing a kanji to find the meaning. I have seen Japanese language dictionaries, but I have always wondered:

How in the heck do you figure out how to find a kanji in a dictionary? I vaguely remember something about each kanji being made up of quadrants (I may be wrong), but I've been curious ever since about how you go about finding a word.

Any explanation? BTW, I gave up trying to study Japanese and regret not being able to continue because I really liked the language.

You mean a kanji dictionary with the meanings in English as well, right? Like Nelson or Spahn and Hadamitzky or O'Neill?

If you already know the pronunciation of the target kanji you can just check the table at the back of the book for all kanji with that pronunciation. Either the kunyomi (native Japanese pronunciation) or onyomi (Chinese-derived pronunciation) would do.

So if you want to know what 誠 means, and you already know it's pronounced "makoto" (the kunyomi, in this case), you can look it up under that pronunciation. If you already know its onyomi is "sei", you can just as easily look it up under "sei" as well, and you'll be directed to the same entry in the dictionary, which will tell you it means "sincerity".

If you don't know the pronunciation at all you can try to look it up under the radical, which in this case is 言. All the kanji with that radical will be grouped together and you look for the one that combines 言 with that other element in your target kanji.

Some dictionaries also group kanji according to how many strokes they have. 誠 has 13, So if you count it right you'll find it grouped with all the other 13-strokers, and you take it from there. If your count is a bit off you'll probably have to search for it in the 12- and 14-strokers, using a magnifying glass if your dictionary is O'Neill's Essential Kanji.

As a personal observation, I really like Spahn and Hadamitzky (The Learner's Kanji Dictionary). It's comprehensive and user-friendly. But I guess Nelson still remains the most authoritative, especially for classical references and obscurities.

"You'll probably have to search for it in the 12- and 14-strokers..."

By that I meant if you miscount the strokes you'll inevitably search for it - in vain - among the 12-stroke and/or 14-stroke kanji before going to the correct list, the 13-stroke kanji. That's why I prefer Spahn and Hadamitzky or Nelson to the O'Neill dictionary. O'Neill has no classification according to radical, only classification by pronunciation and stroke-count. But the print is painfully small, adding to the inconvenience, and the range of possible kanji combinations it presents is realy tiny compared to Nelson or S and H.

What do you guys think is the most difficult bit of learning Japanese?