**TL;DR: living in Japan without support taught me you will spend many months soullessly grinding bureaucracy Japanese vocabulary, practicing 敬語, and most likely the JLPT. Studying from anime and books is a luxury.**
I am pretty sure this has already been written somewhere, and it likely applies to a large share of subjects, not only languages, but I believe restating it won’t hurt.
In the Japanese learning community when it comes to choosing material people advocate three approaches: the textbook-first approach (which almost always aligns with the JLPT), the immersion-first approach and a hybrid of the two. Plenty of bits have already been flipped about the importance of immersion content as well as variety especially when dealing with daily and/or serious situations. However, no-one ever addresses the elephant in the room: “will textbook/immersion actually help me survive in Japan?”.
Living in Japan in almost full immersion outside of working hours, I can assure you that the immersion many of you are doing (anime, podcasts etc. on “light” content) will not help you dealing with the boring, albeit important tasks that are part of adults’ life.
For the ones who have not lived for long periods of time in Japan I will quickly illustrate how important a _solid and wide_ knowledge of Japanese is in daily life. Of course your mileage may vary from mine (PhD student in STEM).
– Going to the city office to register your new residence is among the first things you have to do, and typically involves: talking to the city clerk, explaining your situation, compiling a new residence form, applying for health insurance, pension exemption (even if they see you are a student this is not automatic, you have to know about it and ask for this)
– You need to buy stuff for the house? Right, go to Donki or the supermarket and expect to learn all the names for toilet products, kitchenware, stationery, bed stuff etc.
– You need groceries, and quickly realise many vegetables from your native country are not there so you have to learn local food names, recipes, allergenes.
– You need to go to the bank, or even just use the ATM? Expect to learn words like deposit, withdrawal, money transfer, taxes, interest rates etc.; let alone the kinds of bank accounts (預金口座、普通口座 etc.) (ATMs sometimes support English, but the options I need are almost never translated and won’t be shown).
– You’re moving to a private house? Expect to spend weeks of back-and-forth conversations with real estate agents (in full business Japanese, at least on their side), discussing stuff like room type and size (stuff like 1R 15帖), layout, with/without furniture, house type, appliances, contract jargon, type of gas hose and thus cooktop you need to buy, insulation, insurance, deposit, guarantor, key change and cockroach disinfestation, the choice for internet provider, yet more electricity supplier jargon etc.; (to add salt to the injury, most often than not you have to make phone calls, not emails, to speak to someone – I’ve always hated them even in my own language).
– You need to go see a doctor? Recently I had to see an oculist, and had to explain my whole family situation (stuff like 糖尿病性網膜症 = diabetic retinopathy) Similarly for the dentist.
– You want to enter a Japanese language school? Guess what, they use JLPT study material, hence you have to study that as well, both _before_ and _after_ enrolling in it. (At least the Uni-sponsored courses were free, so I can’t really complain); additionally, one of my classes, 専門読解, only covers technical japanese used in engineering, stuff like 燃料電池 (fuel battery) or 並列計算 (parallel computing). You can imagine the struggle.
– You want to study in Japan? Even at top Universities, _students do not speak English_; and hence courses are hardly ever held in English. English-taught courses are borderline useless, and the actually useful ones are in Japanese. But if you are in STEM like me and are considering entering one, [hold your horses]( https://web.archive.org/web/20221121100813/https://www.comp.tmu.ac.jp/yosihiro/teaching/how-to-read.pdf ).
– You want to work in Japan during/after the PhD? Unless you were lucky enough to be a native English speaker and work as an ALT you need a JLPT on top of the domain-specific vocabulary.
– And of course I am omitting all the culturally specific vocabulary Japanese has.
If it was not clear enough **none of the vocabulary sets in each bullet point overlap with each other**. And I had/have to grasp all these fields this *on top of my actual work*.
Many people who come to Japan are usually handheld by a long-time resident/native for bureaucracy but in a strange turn of events I did not have this luxury. Alas, I decided that being babysat would not help my Japanese learning cause, hence I set to do _everything_ myself.
I started around 5000 words from JLPT and some anime last October. Now I sit at around 12640 words, i.e. 32 new words a day. Yesterday, I have finished the JLPT N2 deck from 新完全マスター, and have to ramp up my grammar and listening for the JLPT exam this upcoming July. Very little bit came from shows.
The irony? After all this work, I can still barely read a novel. JPDB states there are only 5 animes with 95% coverage. Books? Only 13 beyond 90%, 0 beyond 95%. After 7 months, I only managed to watch the first half of 古見さんはコミュ症です S2, and no other anime or J-drama. Of course I tried reading children’s books from 東野圭吾, but every chapter contains around 30 new words to learn, which means spending one day per chapter without feeling overwhelmed – assuming you did not study anything else. News too still feels very hard to read (although I usually get the gist and basic details now), although not as hard as when I started.
Do I feel overwhelmed? Yes. Did I feel burnt out? Quite often, especially knowing that all of the vocabulary I learnt above above is just a small drop in the ocean.
Isn’t it infuriating that despite almost 13k studied words (which would put me in the N1 category) I still do not master (>=95% coverage) plenty of animes or J-dramas? You bet!
Did I get annoyed by the typical gatekeeping attitude shown by that other foreigner who, without using Anki or anything, somehow magically knows more Japanese than you? No doubt!
Do I struggle with daily conversations, jokes? Of course. But at least I can rent a house, go to the pharmacy and get prescriptions, or get an eye check-up at the oculust. Those are skills you won’t learn by watching anime. Things my gatekeeping foreigner friends likely cannot do.
Do I regret doing everything myself/coming to Japan? No. Despite the overall frustration that motivated me to write this, **I do not regret coming to Japan nor studying Japanese, I fulfilled many of my aspirations in one go so I can’t complain at all**. I can’t deny sometimes I’m brooding over how my original goals have completely changed, but such is life 😐
Maybe one day I will learn enough Japanese to be able to correctly understand and pronounce めぐみんの爆裂魔法詠唱 , who knows?
I have high expectations for the next year 🙂
by erolm-a
14 comments
> You want to enter a Japanese language school? Guess what, they use JLPT study material,
Not all of them. But yeah
Learning is learning. If you got the boring stuff covered that means the fun stuff is just beginning.
“cockroach disinfestation.” Feel like there’s a story here, care to elaborate?
I think for some points you’re right, but a lot of things you mentioned I had no trouble doing with the help of Google Translate and other tools, even if my Japanese is very beginner level. Renting an apartment was almost entirely done over email, which made the whole process much easier.
Most students at my University speak a little bit of English, and many others would really like to learn, so maybe it depends on your University?
I remember a complete beginner telling me they learned the word 会計 while in Japan and I had no idea what it meant. I only learn through books, visual novels and YouTube and I had just never come across it before. It made me realize there is quite a difference between daily life Japanese and Japanese in media. Not that it’s a huge problem, because at this point I remember new words really quickly. But it still takes some adjusting.
>You need to go to the bank, or even just use the ATM? Expect to learn words like deposit, withdrawal, money transfer, taxes, interest rates etc.; let alone the kinds of bank accounts (預金口座、普通口座 etc.) (ATMs sometimes support English, but the options I need are almost never translated and won’t be shown).
To be fair, Genki I has a small section on bank accounts and ATM (a “Cultural Note” as it were). But also, I haven’t opened up a bank account here yet, since I’m just using the Revolut JP subsidiary, which makes things somewhat smoother. So I haven’t fully felt your pain yet.
But as someone who moved here 1 month ago and is attending language school, I completely agree with everything you said. I passed N5 in December (knowing it was nothing), been studying hard since June of last year. I was in no way prepared for actually living here. I know about ~800 Kanji and ~2500 words, basically: *nothing*.
Luckily someone from my school (actually a phone service provider that partners with my school to bootstrap new students with phone plans) went with me to the 市役所 to help translate (funnily enough, he didn’t even know English). I believe I could have gone through the process myself, there was *one* English-speaking clerk available, but I was way out of my depth in any case.
Something as simple is figuring out the charges for my phone bill today, which involves creating an account somewhere, navigating the app, double-checking the service plan, figuring out how to change it, and executing those changes, easily takes up to an hour if not more.
Figuring out what foods in the supermarket have what kinds of meat, figuring out how to cook rice, simple things, so difficult. The other day we thought we were buying rice, but ended up buying [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Liw6psgv-Bg) instead (still don’t know exactly if we have a term for it in the West) and cooking that instead. Spoiler: it’s not exactly rice.
On top of the language difficulties comes of course the cultural differences, and now is kind of a weird time to be moving here with the Yen crumbling and the resultant over-tourism and its negative side-effect the locals.
Living here is a unique sort of mental fatigue that I didn’t experience when moving to Europe from the U.S. and I had to (wanted to) learn a foreign language (and did, up to a humble B1 level). It’s like being an illiterate infant all over again. My partner compares is to being underwater, upside-down, with weights on our ankles. It’s a humbling and fatiguing experience, probably the hardest challenge I’ve been through (and I’ve done some somewhat hard things, have an advanced technical degree, have had some high-pressure and high-stress jobs for years, been a lifelong chronic overachiever), not just intellectually but spiritually. There was a thread on r/expatFIRE recently where someone announced they wanted to move to Japan because of (and I quote) “Climate, Food, Anime” (sic). It came off as awfully naive.
If I end up staying after 2 years and successfully integrating, it’ll be definitely something to be proud of, I think. I find that I need to continue to remind myself of the things I love here (because they’re still here), because the fatigue can be overwhelming.
And I don’t even have time to watch anime or movies anymore.
So you are basically saying, that for making groceries I need vocabulary for grocery products, for going to city office I need city office vocabulary, and for talking to doctor I need medical vocabulary. And moreover I can’t learn all that while watching isekai anime?
Some of this stuff I definitely agree that you’d likely have to learn in Japan, some of this other stuff I learned before going to Japan. I think everyone with an allergen needs to learn the name(s) of the their allergen(s) prior to visiting countries where you don’t know the language (and foods you can’t eat for religious reasons, like 豚肉 and/or 牛肉). I’m curious what cultural specific words/phrases you learned? One that still sticks out is お姉さん being used by strangers and store associates who were older than me. I understand that they aren’t really calling me older sister now, but it’s definitely not something a textbook will teach you.
>I started around 5000 words from JLPT and some anime last October.
I think you should’ve probably mentioned this point a lot earlier in your post. The first part reads like you came to Japan already having a pretty high level and still struggling, only to find this point right in the middle of your post.
It’s obviously no surprise that you’re going to struggle when moving to Japan, since knowing 5000 words doesn’t even put you on N2 level. At least in my opinion, it’s obvious that someone without N2 will struggle with all these tasks in Japan. I’m just barely starting N2 material and I don’t even know how to say most of these things.
But you can learn these things through enough immersion before even moving to Japan, assuming you don’t just immerse through just anime, but also through all the other native content that’s out there. I recon that someone who does it that way and spends enough time to get to a good enough Japanese level will have way less trouble with these sorts of situations.
At least I wouldn’t plan on moving to Japan until my Japanese is good enough to get me through these situations. Though tbf if you want to study abroad in Japan, you’ll likely move to Japan before you can reach that level. So I guess this post will be helpful for people like that. But still, it would’ve probably been better if you had mentioned the level you were at when moving to Japan at the beginning of your post. Otherwise it might paint the wrong picture.
Welcome to Japan.
It’s gonna be a wild ride navigating through everyday stuff without bare minimum N2.
Japanese isn’t one language. It’s a massively different set of sounds and words depending on which Japanese world you inhabit. This goes for all languages. There’s not really any elephants in rooms, there’re different language learning experiences and needs. For example, I don’t plan on living in Japan, just working with Japanese and Japanese people, so I’m focusing on developing a general understanding of Japanese via jlpt and then language I need for the remote work environment. Another person will want to live there and will need to learn that language, instead of learning other vocabulary. Another will only be interested in niche anime/historical language and learn that.
My autistic ass, even after passing N1 and being a self-taught Japanese translator for several years (without ever having to live in Japan, mind you): Yeah, I’m not gonna be able to do all that.
But it’s more about the fact that I am autistic (which comes with innate communication deficits, feeling overwhelmed from excess sensory input, constant fatigue etc.) and need more support than your typical (almost) 30-year-old.
Not just learning the names of things in supermarkets – learning to read the kanji for them.
Being in a hospital for several days means learning lots of things. Not just “blood test” and “saline drip” but how to talk about urination etc.
I’m doing 20 Anki cards a day and thinking of upping it to 30… your post tempts me XD