Learning Japanese through english, which is not my native language

10 comments

1. I am also not a native speaker of English, but it doesn’t really bother me. Sure, sometimes my native Dutch has more direct translations for Japanese than English (Dutch has words for ‘the day after tomorrow’ and ‘the day before yesterday’ like Japanese does, for example), but that would also be true the other way around anyway.

   After a while you’d hopefully reach a stage where you can just read or listen to Japanese without an English layer in between, so at that stage the issue is gone entirely.

2. I think it’s quite possible because I’m doing the same thing right now. Since, I couldn’t find any resources in my native language, just learning Japanese in English. I don’t think this impacts how I learn that much, for meanings though I still think it doesn’t change anything since meanings are still the same and give the same idea even if you translate them.
   Good luck!

3. There is an abundance of english ressources, that’s a huge benefit. Tho knowing more then just english is a benefit too. I often encounter english ressources overexplaining something because it’s an alien concept to them, while it’s not that strange from the german or polish perspective (the languages I speak).

   It’s like when americans do videos about Japan and talk about how important it is to take your shoes of when you visit someone’s home. Meanwhile that’s the norm for most europeans

4. Im learning from English to that are not my native language. My English reading did really improve when I started to learn japanese.
   I did start with Japanese from Zero that also have quite easy English.

5. I also learn from English with it being my second language – I even think it benefits me because I also get some free English practice at the same time. There are actually some cases where I didn’t know the English word in my Anki deck -> bonus learning and it sometimes calms me down a bit because I’m very confident with English and yet I don’t know every single word there either in the “basic vocab”.

   Some polyglots even recommend using one of their foreign languages to learn a new one to keep the language active, so for some it’s even a strategy.

6. English is my 2nd language and I’ve been studying Japanese mainly through resources written in English so in my experience it’s possible

7. I prefer the english translations over the spanish ones because I figured out that most of the times the spanish translation comes from the english version, not the japanese one. So some information is lost in the process.

8. You should give it a try. There is ZERO ressources in my native language, so I started studying Japanese by using English (my 4th language). I could have used a different language, but there are soooo many ressources in English to help you with your studies.

9. English is not my first language either and learning Japanese with the available resources is quite possible. Especially up to JLPT N3. On the way to N2 nuances become way more important and it is slowly starting to annoy me that I can’t really get the Japanese nuances, because I don’t get the English nuances from the explanations. Just today I was trying to figure out the nuances of “~風に” using this [stackexchange post](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/2446/when-are-%E3%81%B5%E3%81%86-and-%E3%82%88%E3%81%86-interchangeable).
   I eventually gave up because the English examples look synonymous to me and I’ll just remember that it has the same meaning almost every time.

10. I wouldn’t worry about it. Like you said, you can understand everything in English, so why not use the advantage of having more learning material available.

    Like CureDolly said, in the end, you have to think about Japanese in Japanese, because the structure is very different from most other languages.