Hi, I’m planning to learn Japanese this year, mainly to watch anime & read manga, but also to learn how to find food, public toilets and certain items in Japan. Just want to know, is it a good idea learn to speak & listen to Japanese first before learning to read later on?
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Uh… I’m not sure what part of your goal doesn’t involve reading? Can you explain why you believe what you’re asking may have an advantage?
You’re going to need Japanese subtitles on video content, books are clearly reading, and finding stuff in Japan involves reading signs.
Learning grammar and vocabulary will be difficult and inefficient if you don’t at least learn kana. Skipping kana/kanji and opting for romanization might seem like a shortcut but it’ll actually hinder your progress significantly.
Yep
A lot of people seem to have this one or the other approach when it comes to learning Japanese and I don’t really get it. How are you going to learn grammar if you can’t understand written Japanese? The example sentences won’t make sense to you if you can’t comprehend what’s what in the sentence. Not trying to say you can’t try your way, but I sincerly don’t understand it.
Is your plan to just stop learning Japanese after this year? You’re not going to get good enough to watch any (maybe some is possible) anime without subtitles in just a year since it requires a huge vocabulary. And, as the others said. Without knowing how to read at least kana, you’re gonna have a really hard time learning grammar
Avoiding reading is shooting yourself in the foot before a marathon. Maybe you can still finish the marathon, but now it’s way harder for no reason.
Understanding Japanese sentences is how you get more comfortable understanding Japanese sentences. Reading lets you do that at your own pace. A Listening only approach does not give you a chance to get comfortable, and although it does work if you’re willing to spend a thousand+ hours with it, trusting the process, I’m not getting the impression from this post that you are.
My first Japanese learning experience was a class called “Functional Spoken Japanese” at the community college I was going to at the time. I signed up and thought to myself “please don’t make us learn how to read!” First day we started learning Kana. And I was absolutely shocked at how easy it was. Much easier than learning the English alphabet because each “letter” (not sure how to correctly refer to them) has its own sound that it always makes. I had Hiragana and Katakana down within a week. Kanji is an entirely different ball game, but if you try learning the Kana, you might be surprised how much of a non-issue it is. Trying to learn things though romaji is way harder.
kana and kanji aren’t even in the same bracket in terms of their complexity
Kana takes a few hours and you can just learn it. Imagine you wanted to learn the greek alphabet, how long would that take? Similar scope of problem. Do this first!
Kanji is a much more complicated problem.
Some people who are advanced actually say it’s ok not to go full-bore on kanji at first.
This question comes up all the time. You will understand zero learning material. It simply can’t be done. Kanji can be skipped until an intermediate level. Kana no way – and it will take you a week to learn anyways.
While I kiiiinda can understand not wanting to learn kanji, not learning kana is like trying to learn english without alphabet