My friends and I are planning on going to Japan in 2025 for the star wars celebration. Since I was there a couple of months ago for deployment, I now understand how important it is to know the language to fully enjoy everything.
I’m currently learning Spanish, and if I have to put a level on it, I guess I would be A2 at best. I’m working on my speaking and listening skills. I don’t want to lose my progress while working on a goal that may not be achievable.
I won’t be completely at zero knowledge with Japanese but might as well since I hadn’t looked at the language for ten plus years.
So my question for everyone, is it even doable goal?
8 comments
Definitely doable in my opinion, it all depends on you, the amount of time you can dedicate to thorough study, and more importantly… focusing on what matters to your actual goal, which is to not get totally lost while doing your job abroad (if I understand your situation correctly), so focus on output and understanding.
Most things are doable depending on the amount of effort/time/determination put in and the money you are willing to spend. My recommendation would be to get a professional tutor and meet with them multiple times a week. They can recommend study plans, resources, etc.
I studied Spanish and Japanese. Keep in mind that as a native English speaker. Spanish is the easiest language to learn while Japanese is the most difficult. For me it was like “I need to know what word is “fridge” in Spanish vs “I understand every single word said in the sentence, but I don’t know what this sentence mean, how do one even cough in Japanese”.
The things you need to swallow and just drill down.. you won’t get through it if a Star Wars fair for a week or two is your only motivation.
depends on how high your standards are and how much time you can plunk down
if you study full-time vs an hour a day is a huge difference of 8x the number of hours
you can definitely get basic “survival level” conversations by that point
you could probably talk a bit more in-depth about some topic you are interested in
you probably can’t talk much about complicated topics by that point except if it’s some special area you know more about
Spanish and Japanese are almost not that comparable, they are both languages and have “practice makes better” as well as other things such as “learn a lot of vocab” in common, but you already know like 20,000 Spanish words more-or-less for free, the grammar isn’t totally different, and you aren’t facing as large of cultural differences even though there are some of course, and the writing system is not …uh not kanji
Definitely doable. Just need to keep up the motivation.
Totally doable. The key will be to define what “conversational” means to you. Does it mean being able to ask for directions and order at a restaurant? Does it mean making small talk with people you meet? Does it mean debating the merits of the prequels with someone at the convention? Set yourself a goal for what you want to achieve (or actually 4 goals ideally, one each for speaking, reading, writing, and listening).
Once you have your goals decided, you can decide how you want to spend your study time and how much study time you’ll want to set aside for Japanese. For example, if your main interest is meeting people at the convention, and you mostly just want to be able to read signs the you probably don’t need to spend too much time reading novels. Based off what you said in your post, I think working with a tutor on italki would be a good starting point.
As far as your forgetting your Spanish, the goal is to keep interacting with Spanish regularly. Some people even actively study two languages at once. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an either or
It is a long as you stick with it. Also I’ll be going to celebration as well, should be fun.
Definitely doable. Commit 3 – 4 hours a day, 2 hours at an absolute minimum of deliberate study and you will get there to a pretty good level.
1. Learn Hiragana and Katakana
2. Immediately start hammering down learning vocabulary and kanji at the same time. Use flash card based systems of Takoboto or Anki. Start with N5 and work your way down towards N3.
2.1 Start learning particles, verb conjugation, and basic grammar points while you learn new vocab and kanji
2.2 When you learn new vocab, burn the kanji into your brain so you can at least also learn to read instead of just memorizing words based off of sound. When you can visualize the Kanji, the words will make more sense in conversation.
3. While learning new vocabulary, set a goal to learn individual Kanji as well, maybe 2 – 4 characters a day. This will help fortify your vocabulary and you will also be able to learn new words and visualize them better.
3.1 I will get a lot of hate for some, but skip learning to write/draw kanji. It is an overly lengthy process and will set you back many hours. Focus speaking/listening/conversation/reading. Only focus on learning to write hiragana and maybe katakana, a few basic Kanji like 月 or 分
4. Don’t forget to use YouTube for grammar.
If I could do it all over again, I would honestly have just grinded away at all the JLPT N5 – 3 flash cards since most of it is pretty useful. Learned some basic important grammar principles like verb conjugation and particle usage, and then go absolute ham on memorizing new vocabulary. But then again, when I first started studying, it was a long time ago and I had to suffer through paper note books and paper dictionaries. There has never been a more streamlined and easier time to learn a new language.
At the end of the day, the more vocab you know the more you can piece things together. Even if you don’t know certain grammar points, you can and will be a able to feel them out by exposure. You can’t do the same for vocabulary if your vocab is limited.