I am a big fan of Tim Ferriss. I am thinking of learning Japanese and starting with the Jōyō kanji. If you only knew this how well would you do in Japan – getting around, communicating, complex conversations?
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[https://tim.blog/2009/01/20/learning-language/](https://tim.blog/2009/01/20/learning-language/)
2 comments
Knowing the Jōyō kanji in isolation is going to get you next to nowhere for spoken conversations. Knowing kanji helps with reading, writing, and parsing/remembering vocab – but does not represent a practical language skill in and of itself. There are much more efficient and effective places to start your Japanese learning journey.
By the way, nowhere in that blog post does Tim Ferriss advocate for hyper-focussing on the jōyō kanji as a starting point. It explains how he learned a lot of Japanese by reading sports manuals in the language – a non-typical approach, sure, but certainly a practical one.
About as well as knowing 2000ish English words without knowing sentence structure, grammar, how verbs work, how things are phrased, etc.
That being said, you can get by fine in the biggest cities in Japan with little to no Japanese ability (I’ve seen it done from my lazy friends).
The more remote or less touristy you go, however, the more you’ll need to know.