Japanese Language Ability

Living in the country is the best way to learn a language, right?

Then why is it so difficult!

I have noticed improvement, I'm picking up new vocabulary I tried to learn before but it didn't stick like きたない (kitanai - dirty), which came from a conversation with a housemate about the state of other floors in our guesthouse. I think ours is the cleanest!

But mostly I just feel frustrated. I spent 5 whole years studying this language! Of course, it was in my spare time, slotted around GCSEs, A-levels, and writing a novel, but 5 years is a long time!

I can create complicated sentences in my head, but they don't come out right. My vocabulary is still very limited, although it's slowly getting better. I think the biggest problem is listening and understanding.

I listen to my housemates having conversations around me and I can understand random words and sentences structures. Sometimes I get hung up on a certain word that I can't quite remember, and by the time it's come back to me, I've lost track of the conversation!

My housemates are all very understanding and speak to me slowly in Japanese, or in English. But I know I must really annoy them, you can't relax if you're constantly translating for someone or wondering if they have any idea what you're talking about, or trying to speak to them in their own language for their benefit.

And then there's reading and writing!!

Hiragana and katakana are no problem, they've stuck with me over the last 5 years and my reading speed is improving, although there's so much English around it's actually quite hard to practice 'in the field'.

But those kanji! They are so difficult! Even if they have furigana (the small hiragana telling you how to pronounce them) you still need to know the word to get any sense of meaning! In a lesson over the weekend, I got to talking about kanji with a student and I mimed writing 愛 (love - ai) and she said it was perfect and I should take up calligraphy, which I thought was nice.

The most annoying thing is that I've forgotten words and phrases that I knew a few months ago. I got an A* (the top grade if you're not familiar) in GCSE Edexcel Japanese in June, but, ironically, as the trip got closer and closer, I had less and less time to practice and study so things slowly slipped away from me.

Definitely a down-side to the method I used to teach myself Japanese is having no one to talk to! Teaching yourself using a CD course works to an extent, but it does mean that the practical experience of conversations is minimal. If you take this approach, take every opportunity possible to speak with native-speakers or anyone with Japanese language ability. It's priceless, albeit a bit nerve-racking.

One thing I've noticed is that hardly anyone uses the textbook Japanese that courses teach you, with desu and masu endings. They use either the plain forms of verbs e.g. taberu instead of Tabemasu for 'I eat', or miss out particles like ni when talking about times and places, which makes speech much quicker, but also harder to follow. For example, a polite sentence for 'I went there' might be 'Soko ni ikimashita' but the plain version would be 'Soko itta'.

I've seen some improvements, like being able to understand announcements on the subway, but that might be because of the Berlitz method - drilling parrot fashion! One example I've seen of improvement is slowly starting to understand the way words change in certain positions, like when you say 'first block' (in terms of the city's layout) you don't say 'ichi choume', you say 'itchoume', because it's quicker and easier, to say - not to learn! And why the pronunciation of words changes when a word is put in front of it. A good example is the district, Nihonbashi.

Literally, it means 'Japan Bridge' and Japan = Nihon, and bridge = hashi. But when something is put on the front of hashi, the diacritical marks (") are added to the hiragana character (は becomes ば) and it becomes -bashi. Because an 'n' (ん) before an 'm', 'b' or 'p' is pronounced as 'm', Nihonbashi becomes Nihombashi.

I used to wonder why they made it so confusing, changing all these words and pronunciations, but now I'm here I can see that it's actually easier to say and it makes speech flow much better.

I suppose the longer I'm here, the better I'll become and more things will make sense. Maybe I'm just being me, expecting 100% as soon as possible.

Well, I have 6 months left to get better, and then a year of studying Japanese at Uni, and then I'm back here for a whole year at a Japanese Uni, so there are plenty of opportunities to improve!

How to teach yourself Japanese

Everyone I talk to about what I've done over the last four years and plan to do soon asks me some seemingly pre-prepared questions. And one of them is always "How did you teach yourself Japanese?" This post will not stop people asking me that but it might help others who want to give it a go.

The first six months I spent teaching myself I devoted to learning the two Japanese alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Here's a good page you could print out and use, although I didn't use this one, I can't find those any more.

The Japanese written language consists of the hiragana, katakana, kanji and romaji alphabets.
Hiragana - phonetic syllables used to write Japanese words e.g. さようなら
Katakana - phonetic syllables used to write non-Japanese words e.g. チョコレート
Kanji - Chinese symbols used in Japanese to represent words or ideas e.g. 愛
Romaji - Japanese words expressed using the Roman alphabet e.g. Konnichiwa

Katakana is the alphabet I taught myself first because it seemed to be the simplest. At the time, I wasn't convinced that I could actually achieve what I set out to do so I just tried my best.
I learned each one five at a time. I started with the vowels.
I would recommend using a whiteboard to save paper. Thankfully, my brother Dominic had been given a whiteboard for his birthday so I stole that (it's actually still in my bedroom, I should probably give it back). But failing a whiteboard, paper will do the job.
I used the time-honoured tradition of look-cover-write-check-ing and yes, dull and repetitive at times, but it does work.
And you feel real good when you can jumble each lot of five up and write them without difficulty.
Test yourself all the time, have some spare time? Write them on your leg with a finger. Draw them in the air. Anything to get them into your brain. And, of course, if you ever find yourself confronted by Japanese text - read as many characters as you can! It feels great, even if you have no idea what you're reading.

Hiragana came next. With a thorough grounding in katakana I felt I was ready to advance to the next level. I was worried that the new characters would override the old ones so I constantly referred back to katakana after studying hiragana.
It was difficult to separate the two alphabets in my mind, but in general, katakana is straighter than the curlier hiragana. Katakana just looks simpler.

After that six months of looking, re-looking, covering, re-covering, writing, re-writing, checking and re-checking the two alphabets, which add up to 142 characters together, 71 in each, I finally felt ready to move onto speaking.

I would definitely recommend Random House's Living Language Japanese Beginners' course. Although others may work better for other people, that's the only course I have used, so mine is by no means the final word on the subject. Please let me know your thoughts and recommendations if you have any.
The pack includes a coursebook, a English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary and CDs to accompany the coursebook. This course is meant to last you six weeks and give you a thorough understanding of basic conversational Japanese. And it has certainly done that for me. However, it took me a whole year to work myself through its 40 lessons as I was also doing my GCSEs. I wanted to really understand everything in every lesson, but now I've finished it I realise that that wasn't necessary. They really mean that once you have a good understanding of the lesson and can get 100% on the quiz then you should move on. Everything wrapped up nicely at the end, I went through the entire course not understanding a certain tense formation (I can't remember what) and kept finding examples of it in lessons but it didn't explain it. Then I found it, in Lesson 40. So don't take it too seriously.
Any chance you get to speak/ listen to Japanese, take it!!! The downside of teaching yourself is that you don't have anyone to speak to on a regular basis as you would on a course or at school, or indeed, in Japan. So when I was offered the chance to take a group of Japanese tourists around Cadbury World and Bournville village in South Birmingham, I jumped on it. I was terrified as I had never spoken to real Japanese people in the flesh before. But it all went well. Some of my rehearsed sentences and phrases didn't come out quite right, but they were very understanding.

After I finished the Beginners' course, I asked my parents for the Advanced course. It seems to be very business-orientated, based around a fictional character's experiences moving to Japan for work. But it is still very useful in expanding and building upon existing Japanese knowledge. Do not get the Advanced course without first having a base in Japanese language!! You will be put off for life!

Then came the kanji, the Chinese characters. There are 1,945 kanji commonly used in Japanese writing. To read a Japanese newspaper (shinbun) you need to be able to read all of these apparently. I currently know about 150 kanji and I hope that this number will increase significantly once I actually get to Japan. Sentences in Japanese are written using a combination of hiragana, katakana and kanji so you can't understand sentences without knowing all these alphabets. Frustrating!! But it keeps you working.
At first I just printed some kanji off the Internet and tried learning them parrot fashion. This worked up to a point, particularly for the simpler ones but eventually it became very difficult to retain them all. So I looked it up on the Internet and found a book.
'Remembering the Kanji: Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters' by James Heisig.
And it does what it says on the tin. It teaches you how to remember each kanji using a story. Just remember the story and the rest will flow. More information here.
All of these things really helped me. So much that I actually felt prepared to do GCSE Japanese in June 2007. I was scared about doing them, and they were a bit challenging at times but it all came good in the end. I got an A*! I was more pleased with that result than my A-levels! But maybe it is not surprising that my top grade was in the writing paper.

So if you want to do it, and feel that you can work at it, then do it!! Teach yourself Japanese!! It's really worth it.