English is my native tongue and I’m fluent in spanish as well but, I’ve always had a big interest in learning Japanese. Since I have a trip planned for Tokyo in the next 12-16 months; I figured there’d be no better time to finally learn. Fortunately, with my current work schedule I can dedicate some decent time to studying and learning.
These first two weeks I’ve just been dedicating my time to learning and memorizing Hiragana and I’ve ordered genki to start off with. There is a couple of Kanji books I’ve looked at but have been hesitant to order until I got some advice on where and how to proceed. As well as thinking about maybe getting a tutor. So I guess some of my questions regarding this post would be:
-What are some tips for someone just starting out?
-How much can I expect to learn and be proficient in Japanese before I go to Tokyo?
-Should I start learning Kanji now or hold off until I’ve progressed more.
I want to eventually become fluent in Japanese and go for N1 but I understand that it will take some time. I do eventually plan to move to Japan and try my luck. Sorry in advance if this post is a little scattered and long as I’m not too good with post of these kinds. Also thank you for your time and replies!
4 comments
If a possible future move to Japan is part of your reason for starting to study the language, then you first need to make sure you qualify for a visa to move to Japan. Do you?
For someone like myself who doesn’t like making decisions for someone else, I’d recommend studying kanji asap
>What are some tips for someone just starting out?
Whatever methods you end up studying with, be consistent about it. At the same time, allow yourself room to breathe and absorb the information you’ve just learned. This is to lessen the chances of you burning out before your 12-16 months.
>How much can I expect to learn and be proficient in Japanese before I go to Tokyo?
It’s all subjective. For some people, that’s enough to become an independent tourist. For others, it might be enough to attain N1 starting from zero.
>Should I start learning Kanji now or hold off until I’ve progressed more.
Yes, start if you’re ready. Most resources that have high proficiency in mind typically have some form of literacy expectation. The resources that don’t touch on the kanji tend to not go all that in-depth. Besides, unless you’re gonna start a career in reading preschoolers’ literature, you won’t see most words in kana-only in the wild.
On the flip side, don’t feel pressured to study kanji meticulously in an unreasonable amount of time. Sure, the decade it takes most natives to learn all jōyō kanji isn’t accounted for in your time limit, but you could make the most of it by first learning how to distinguish kanji if you can’t already, and then going through the most common vocabulary. You’ll be hitting two birds with one stone by not splitting up your kanji and vocab studies and you won’t have to worry about individual kanji readings if you focus on full-fledged usable vocab.
As far as expectations vs reality…
Textbooks are good as a foundation, but the conversation examples in them can be far more unnatural compared to something like anime (highly subjective depending on what you’re watching), much less real life, so if you were gonna bother with one, don’t be afraid to use the other.
You can find people who learned to speak and read Japanese fluently in 1-2 years. This is almost certainly an unreasonable expectation. Among other things, these people generally devote 8+ hours a day to studying. Even if you were able to do this, most people would burn out doing this sort of thing.
If you want to work in Japan in a job that’s not foreigner-specific, you’re looking at 3-5 years of serious study. You will feel like you are making good progress for a few months. At some point you will feel like you have wasted X months/years and know practically nothing. Going from N4 (you can barely hold a conversation about the weather or going to the supermarket) to N3 (able to hold a variety of basic conversations and understand some details and the general ideas in native speech) will take like a whole year. Going from N3 to N2 (able to hold somewhat complex conversations and understand ~70% of the details in native speech) will take *years*. If you’re good at studying language, and keep it up consistently, you can get here in 3 years of part time study. But until you get to N2 your Japanese basically sucks. Arguably, it still sucks at N2. To get to N1 (around first year high school student level Japanese – follow 90% of native conversation), double the amount of time it took you to get from zero to N2.
Now, obviously, the above depends on your goals, study habits, natural ability, time/resources available etc. If you can study 4 hours a day every day, maybe you can cut 30% of those times. Can you find a group of Japanese friends (maybe online?) that you can meet with frequently? That will also help. But the above is a pretty reasonable baseline for expectations.
In terms of what to study specifically, there are a million methods with positives and negatives, you’ll just have to find ones that work for you. Do use anki (or another srs). For people studying outside of Japan I’d strongly recommend RTK – some people hate it and it does have some negatives but none of those negatives are particularly important if you’re studying outside of Japan. wanikani and bunpro are good websites you can use but not necessary. Also I’d probably start with a textbook and just go through the whole thing, either genki or minna no nihongo. But maybe I’m just an old man in that regard.