Challenges in learning Japanese

6 comments

1. Biggest challenges I’ve faced are—
   •Learning Kanji and learning numerous readings for a single Kanji.
   •Since, I’m a semi-med student with Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Psychology, time has been a great restraint as well.
   •Learning a lot of Kanji combinations that sometimes or sometimes don’t make sense.
   •Struggling to understand the casual Japanese (which I hate) when I’ve always studied only formal Japanese.
   •Combating Japanese grammar because it’s very difficult.

   Moreover, I’ve never paid for tutorials, study material or any tutors, but still managed to study for atleast seven years.

   And I’m maybe going to start teaching Japanese as a side hustle from this June.

   Hope this helps.

2. I’ve been studying Japanese for about 17 years and now I currently teach Japanese at a public HS, a private language school and tutor on the side. I started studying through self-study, then did Japanese in my undergrad, studied in Kanazawa, got a masters degree in Japanese and taught English in Miyazaki for three years.

   Before my ~1 year with self-study, I’d try to use phrase books or the Japanese textbook my friend gave me with little success. The textbook looked daunting and I don’t know how to structure my time. Phrase books are not textbooks and aren’t the best for learning from. This is also way, way before things like YouTube took off, so a lot of material was from books only.

   I got my hands on Marc Bernabe’s Japanese in Mangaland (they’re apparently being reprinted under a different name), which kept me engaged and worked through each concept more or less logically, although installed in the second/intermediate book. Expressing obligation took a while to click. By that time I was in a Japanese class.

   For the next two years I took Japanese at my college. When I went abroad, my listening skills were very poor. I had a complex about it for a bit, but my listening now is pretty good. In hindsight, my university classes back home didn’t train enough in listening. My advice – practice LISTENING a lot!

   Study abroad as okay. More rigorous than I anticipated and it knocked me down a few pegs. In retrospect, I would have put more emphasis on meeting Japanese friends and using the language proactively.

   When I came back, I focused on graduation and taking the JLPT N2. Graduation went well, but it took three tries for the N2. I’d get close, but I wouldn’t get the lowest passing score. It wasn’t until I went to grad school and was in a more structured environment and using Japanese every day that I passed.

   While teaching English in Japan, I was in a pretty good place. I planned on taking N1 in my first year, but personal issues put a wrench in that, then there was the pandemic. I went for N1 during my last year, but failed the reading section (got good/decent scores in everything else). My advice for reading is to do a lot of reading outside of study.

   I needed to take some tests for my teaching license, or rather I took them in case my grades/JLPT/etc. needed additional backing. I hired a tutor for conversational practice. It helped quite a bit. I’ve taken tutoring before that as well. It definitely helps.

   Currently, I do plan on taking the N1 again in the US, just to say I’ve taken it, and to work on speaking and writing to keep in practice beyond the basics (I teach a lot of lower-level courses) and for the sake of my teaching license.

   TL;DR advice:

   1) Practice listening and reading outside of class/studies. Do it for fun, not necessarily as study.

   2) Use textbooks or resources that provide structure AND are accessible to you. Genki is a good resource.

   3) Supplement with references beyond your textbook. Textbooks may only show part of the picture and reference books provide greater clarity. Buying the Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar was a move I should have made 8 years earlier.

   4) Get tutoring, especially if you need/want feedback on how to improve from a native speaker or a teacher.

3. For me, there are essentially three main challenges (from hardest to easiest):

   1. The amount of vocab and the necessity to actually learn it. In most language, you can switch to passive learning once you reach 97-99% comprehension. This isn’t the case for Japanese because there’s still a lot of words containing unknown kanji, words that aren’t read as you’d think they are or even whole expressions which are read in a particular way.
   2. Too many homophones, which make listening significantly harder. Also, unlike English and many other languages where words representing difficult concepts are typically longer, I have a feeling that in Japanese it’s essentially the other way around.
   3. The grammar is completely different from English and there’s just too much of it.

4. I’m a self-learner and only use free materials and in the long run it’s obviusly kanji and their multiple readings. But at the beginning the biggest challenge was definitely the lack of spaces in written japanese (especially in text without kanji, like in the often recommended Yotsuba&). Looking up stuff was a real pain in the ass because i could only guess were words/grammar starts and end.

5. Honestly just time. I know what I need to do for vocab, grammar, and immersion, but to be able to put in 3 hours a day is just not feasible for me.

6. I pretty much just watch anime and vlogs and read manga and play video games. Yes, there’s some study in the mix too but I’ve run out of common grammar and reasonably common vocabulary, so I’m only learning rare stuff and pitch accent now. The most significant challenge is that the language is very large and very foreign so it takes a long time to develop any significant skill.

   Most people give up because during the first 12 months or so you don’t understand much more than baby stuff and even that is a huge win.

   The worst thing about learning Japanese is that you’re either the kind of person who still enjoys Naruto somehow (you are in touch with your inner child) *or* the kind of person who would otherwise be memorizing chess openings or competing on Jeopardy, and these two groups of people like to fite each other for no good reason. So the overall social environment of language learners is unusually toxic. If you value your mental health, consider pretty much any other language.

   I would pay for conversation-practice tutoring if I had the money for it. Group classes feel scammy and apps are worse.