Consensus is that it would be slower/harder bar a handful of special cases (eg: learning a few tourist phrases; explicitly for having conversations with family)
I bet the reason you want learn to “only speak” is to save time
it’s possible to do actually but it probably won’t end up saving time, you won’t be able to read the dictionary for instance, you won’t be able to read example sentences to learn how to use words, plus reading is an efficient way of building vocab and even re-enforcing it
so to save time you actually gotta cross train, but you can focus on spoken as your kinda specialty
like, you don’t need to fast-track learning 2000 kanji you can go with like 500 most common ones and then start to really focus on speaking and listening
Possible yes
Harder overall mostly because learning materials are mostly written, also yes
It’s definitely possible, and saves you from climbing the huge mountain of kanji learning, but it has its downsides.
The easiest way to do it is by having daily interactions with native speakers (whether a spouse who speaks Japanese, living in Japan, etc.) starting with simple one word sentences and working your way up.
Without that level of interaction, things get harder. Most people doing self study focus a lot on manga, websites, books, etc. You don’t need daily interactions with Japanese people, can work through the material at your own pace, and kanji give good cues for disambiguating homophones.
There are some resources for learning Japanese on your own without reading it, like Pimsleur audio lessons and textbooks that use romaji, but you would be hard pressed to get to the intermediate or advanced levels that way, as these things mostly target beginners.
I have heard of people learning to understand Japanese just from watching enough TV shows in the raw (jp audio no subs), so maybe try that. My brain definitely does not work that way though, unknown words all strung together just sound like gibberish to me.
Yeah, but reading is the best way to increase your vocabulary, so in the end, you’ll probably only be good at basic casual speech. Unless you’re speaking with highly educated Japanese people about complex topics all the time, which I doubt.
Possible? Probably.
Recommended? In almost no circumstance.
Highly unlikely, considering that reading is generally easier than speaking and is a stepping stone towards speaking.
It’s possible for a native speaker to be illiterate
Yes, but it will be harder and slower, and not by a little.
It probably has some advantages when it comes to your listening/production ability, but it’s not a method for someone who wants to learn the language quick and easy. It’s a method for people who are willing to put in way more time than even the most disciplined learners to extract relatively minimal gains.
In my experience, the people who shirk the writing system in an effort to make things easier end up memorizing a few canned phrases at most. There’s a limit to how much you can memorize in the abstract, if you want to actually develop conversational skills you need a functional core understanding of the language. That’s hard to do by listening alone, not impossible, but if you’re not up for the task of learning the writing system you’re definitely not up for the task of developing comprehension through listening alone.
Definitely. But spoken Japanese can be very different from written Japanese. There are some older native English speakers who are virtually illiterate. If you have a good environment, you can learn a spoken language relatively easily. I became a very fluent (almost native) Mandarin speaker after working in Taiwan for 4 years. But I learned written Chinese as a kid and I know more Kanji than a typical Japanese.
Learning how to write well, on the other hand, is a lifelong process. Although I can write English reasonably well, my reading speed is extremely slow compared to an average native English speaker.
Yes if you live with Japanese speaking people and speak Japanese with them everyday. A few of my kids’ friends speak their parents languages without knowing how to read/write them. They go to some extra-curricular lessons to learn how to read/write. Unless that’s the environment you are in, then most likely you have to go through more formal routes.
Possible? Yes. Advisable? No. Unless you only want to be VERY basically conversational, it will be much much faster and easier to learn to read as well. I was actually just last night talking with a friend who lives and works in Japan about how impossible Japanese would be to navigate without kanji.
You could get to the point where you can…. kinda sorta get the gist of things like television, anime, and vtubers without learning kanji. Just learning the very most common, say, 500-1000 words, some basic grammar, and just intuiting the rest from context, you’d be surprised how far you can get with minimal knowledge. But for going beyond that and achieving an actually usable level of Japanese you’re shooting yourself in the foot by avoiding kanji.
But there’s no reason to avoid it, really. They’re more intimidating than they are actually difficult.
12 comments
Consensus is that it would be slower/harder bar a handful of special cases (eg: learning a few tourist phrases; explicitly for having conversations with family)
I bet the reason you want learn to “only speak” is to save time
it’s possible to do actually but it probably won’t end up saving time, you won’t be able to read the dictionary for instance, you won’t be able to read example sentences to learn how to use words, plus reading is an efficient way of building vocab and even re-enforcing it
so to save time you actually gotta cross train, but you can focus on spoken as your kinda specialty
like, you don’t need to fast-track learning 2000 kanji you can go with like 500 most common ones and then start to really focus on speaking and listening
Possible yes
Harder overall mostly because learning materials are mostly written, also yes
It’s definitely possible, and saves you from climbing the huge mountain of kanji learning, but it has its downsides.
The easiest way to do it is by having daily interactions with native speakers (whether a spouse who speaks Japanese, living in Japan, etc.) starting with simple one word sentences and working your way up.
Without that level of interaction, things get harder. Most people doing self study focus a lot on manga, websites, books, etc. You don’t need daily interactions with Japanese people, can work through the material at your own pace, and kanji give good cues for disambiguating homophones.
There are some resources for learning Japanese on your own without reading it, like Pimsleur audio lessons and textbooks that use romaji, but you would be hard pressed to get to the intermediate or advanced levels that way, as these things mostly target beginners.
I have heard of people learning to understand Japanese just from watching enough TV shows in the raw (jp audio no subs), so maybe try that. My brain definitely does not work that way though, unknown words all strung together just sound like gibberish to me.
Yeah, but reading is the best way to increase your vocabulary, so in the end, you’ll probably only be good at basic casual speech. Unless you’re speaking with highly educated Japanese people about complex topics all the time, which I doubt.
Possible? Probably.
Recommended? In almost no circumstance.
Highly unlikely, considering that reading is generally easier than speaking and is a stepping stone towards speaking.
It’s possible for a native speaker to be illiterate
Yes, but it will be harder and slower, and not by a little.
It probably has some advantages when it comes to your listening/production ability, but it’s not a method for someone who wants to learn the language quick and easy.
It’s a method for people who are willing to put in way more time than even the most disciplined learners to extract relatively minimal gains.
In my experience, the people who shirk the writing system in an effort to make things easier end up memorizing a few canned phrases at most.
There’s a limit to how much you can memorize in the abstract, if you want to actually develop conversational skills you need a functional core understanding of the language.
That’s hard to do by listening alone, not impossible, but if you’re not up for the task of learning the writing system you’re definitely not up for the task of developing comprehension through listening alone.
Definitely. But spoken Japanese can be very different from written Japanese. There are some older native English speakers who are virtually illiterate. If you have a good environment, you can learn a spoken language relatively easily. I became a very fluent (almost native) Mandarin speaker after working in Taiwan for 4 years. But I learned written Chinese as a kid and I know more Kanji than a typical Japanese.
Learning how to write well, on the other hand, is a lifelong process. Although I can write English reasonably well, my reading speed is extremely slow compared to an average native English speaker.
Yes if you live with Japanese speaking people and speak Japanese with them everyday. A few of my kids’ friends speak their parents languages without knowing how to read/write them. They go to some extra-curricular lessons to learn how to read/write. Unless that’s the environment you are in, then most likely you have to go through more formal routes.
Possible? Yes. Advisable? No. Unless you only want to be VERY basically conversational, it will be much much faster and easier to learn to read as well. I was actually just last night talking with a friend who lives and works in Japan about how impossible Japanese would be to navigate without kanji.
You could get to the point where you can…. kinda sorta get the gist of things like television, anime, and vtubers without learning kanji. Just learning the very most common, say, 500-1000 words, some basic grammar, and just intuiting the rest from context, you’d be surprised how far you can get with minimal knowledge. But for going beyond that and achieving an actually usable level of Japanese you’re shooting yourself in the foot by avoiding kanji.
But there’s no reason to avoid it, really. They’re more intimidating than they are actually difficult.