So I’ve been learning (on/off, work is intense) for like a year now. I can read kana and around 200 kanji, doing anki and trying to widen my grammar and vocabulary.
I don’t have the money to get in a local japanese school let alone a japan-located one, but I’ve been thinking about it. I wondered, how can I know if I’m not learning textbook language from the future outlet I’ll choose? How can I know what a teacher will teach me, assuming “I only know what I know”?
Using my current knowledge, I can notice textbook japanese when others use it, ONLY when I already know the learned material, say, if they speak about something I’m better at.
Now I know I need to know the basics first to learn “actual” language, I learned english that way, but in japanese I’m having more trouble.
Do schools (in japan and outside) usually use textbook language? Actual spoken one? Both? Depands on the school?
What other ways I can learn besides just assuming everything is textbook until I learn otherwise?
2 comments
I feel like there are two meanings when people say “textbook” Japanese. The first one being the stuff that’s targeted at beginners who know close to nothing about Japanese but wanna learn. The other would be the kind of Japanese that even Japanese natives would need to brush up on.
The “foreigner” textbook language is the one that has plenty of watashis and anatas where they naturally shouldn’t need to be, as well as using stiff and unidiomatic expressions because saying things that way is what was covered in the book and the learner doesn’t know any better.
The second one is the type that someone would need to know for workplace interactions due to formalities based on hierarchy between bosses, employees, and clients/customers. If keigo hasn’t driven you mad yet, you have that to look forward to. There are plenty of resources for this kind of Japanese for natives by natives because it can be quite a bit more strict than if someone were just talking respectfully to other people and the working culture essentially requires that people know it.
These two examples both operate on the idea of speaking more stiffly than one otherwise would. The former feels stuff because that’s just plain not how people speak, and the latter feels stiff because it **is** stiff by Japanese standards. You’ll be expected to at least understand the latter and ditch the former at higher levels.
The only way to learn casual, day to day Japanese is by encountering it via immersion. Native content, podcast, conversation, vlogs, social
media content that is *not* aimed to teach you Japanese. Because if it’s meant to teach you, most content once again reverts back to very watered down “English” style structure Japanese.
It’s actually pretty much the same as any other language learning process. You start by the basic-basics. Think English:
“Hello, my name is John. It is nice to meet you! What is your name?” is a sentence 99% of all student books teach. Real life English is hardly or never spoken like this.
“Hey, how’s it goin’? I’m John. And you are…?” and so on, are used a lot more often in colloquial speech whereas formal (business) English will be more like this “Hi, I’m John. Pleasure to meet you.”
Or German:
“Guten Tag, wie geht es Ihnen? Ich bin Sarah. Schön, Sie kennen zu lernen.”
Hardly anyone talks like this in Germany and depending on the region and dialect, these structures change beyond recognition for learners. “Hey, na? Wie geht’s dir?”. “Freut mich, dich kennenzulernen.” is more closer to a colloquial German introduction for standart German. Bavarians would greet each other with “Servus” for example.
And yet, all are perfectly fine and understandable sentences. It’s not a bad thing or faulty to use the more stiff textbook variations. You’ll grow out of them eventually by using and encountering more Japanese. As the other comment said; Keigo is stiff because it’s sorta meant to be while the other is just not commonly used.