I’ll try to keep this short but basically my mother is Japanese and my father is Canadian, and growing up in Canada i rarely learnt Japanese on a regular basis but definitely knew how to talk and understand it. I did go to a small Japanese school in Canada but it wasn’t anything special and was more about fun activities while speaking Japanese.
At the age of about 7 my mom took me out of this school because she thought if i stopped this Japanese school it would benefit me in my regular education/elementary school and more.
Since i’m in Canada i’ve been learning french for my entire life, i regularly started getting French and Japanese mixed up and all together since i was only visiting my family in Japan every 4-5 years so i straight up stopped all types of learning Japanese (regret lol)
Now i’m planning to stop taking French in school so i want to relearn Japanese…
couple things to note:
– I can understand Japanese pretty clearly but not understand each and every word
– I can easily determine if a person is speaking Japanese compared to other Asian languages people often mistake for Japanese. (Korean, Chinese, and others)
– I cannot spell or read anything and was never able to even as a kid
– I can barely speak it but i can sometimes give one word responses
– Lastly i’m confident in the fact i could speak it if i remembered the words
Very specific but what would you do?
9 comments
my uneducated recommendation is: learn hiragana. at least. learn to read and start going through beginner/n5 level grammar and vocab (and if that seems a little too easy, move forward to n4 and so on). treat the things you already know like a review and don’t spend too much time on them. just move on. basically, just start from the very beginning with the slight advantage you have. some of these beginner grammar points and whatnot may come very naturally to you.
it seems like listening is your best skill. so, to keep it sharp and to better gauge where your level is in the current day, listen a lot. things of different levels. podcasts, anime, audiobooks. listening a lot and audio comprehension skills should help you a lot in your new goal of being able to read and speak. and STUDY FROM AUDIO. if that’s your best method of input, that’s how you’ll identify the most vocab and especially grammar points.
so, tl;dr, i guess my recommendation is: start from square one. get a genki textbook or start watching cure dolly. learn hiragana and read a bunch, and do anki if that’s your thing. check out the sidebar of the subreddit and research learning resources and styles to find one that best suits you. while it doesn’t seem your level was that far, you already have a good head start to know what methods might work for you and what things to focus on. review what you need to, use your strengths to your advantage while you work on learning new things.
(and if you have questions about any of the resources i name drop here, i am more than happy to elaborate if you need help in your searching.)
I would just look at the sidebar for advice for people learning from zero. With your foundation you should be able to blitz through a lot of the beginner stuff while also filling in any gaps you may have along the way.
if I were you I’d start watching japanese movies and tv shows on a regular basis. and next step would probably be reading and writing. If you learn hiragana and katakana, you can read manga or play animal crossing in japanese for example, since those have furigana so you don’t need to know kanji.
that would be my personal “least effort” approach.
Just start from the beginning like everyone else, and use your advantages to quickly go through any of the basics that you already know, like certain words and grammar points, so you can concentrate on the stuff you don’t know.
But if you were like me, you’ll also figure out that even with certain words that you do know, there are many other usages for those words that are actually really common, but you’ve never heard them used that way before at home in everyday casual conversation.
Also ton of grammar points use very common words, but in specific patterns that can be hard to identify unless you specifically learn them. Some just appear in formal speech or print only, but others you’ve probably heard in everyday conversation but you’ve just glossed over them, not exactly understanding the nuance of how they were used.
So that’s why it’s good to go over from scratch so you make sure you know the fundamentals.
Also the range of vocab used in daily conversation at home is usually really narrow, so until you start reading and watching a wide range of media, your vocab probably resides in that narrow range.
Like I had no problem with small talk and family talk, and I knew a crapton of words related to food and cooking and toys and stuff, but I couldn’t understand news shows, and many TV dramas that where over my head, and obviously I couldn’t understand audiobooks since I couldn’t read books.
**Some tips:**
When learning words, in addition to learning the spelling, consider using sound-based mnemonics to help you remember them. Since I originally learned Japanese by ear (Japanese was technically my first language), I just naturally focused more attention on how a new word sounded.
Like when learning 危うい / ayaui, which means “dangerous”, I thought of my friend *Aya* and the danger of her falling into a *gooey* substance. Aya-gooey = aya-ui.
This helped me later on as I could more accurately hear and recognize the word in the wild, which is how I learned Japanese as a kid — just by the sound of the word. Also I was more likely able to recall the word if I wanted to ask my parents about it, or use it in conversation. I just had to remember my sound-based mnemonic,
**Pitch accent:**
This seems to be a controversial topic on this sub, but since you grew up with Japanese like me, you may have an ear for pitch accent patterns, at least for certain patterns.
Some words may just sound wrong to you when you say it but you don’t know why.
Oftentimes it’s because you’re saying it with the wrong pitch, and somewhere in your brain it knows it’s wrong, but you don’t know how to fix it, so spend some time early on learning the four different pitch accent patterns. Check out Dogen’s videos on YouTube for an [introduction to pitch accent](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6AoilGEers) and consider becoming a Patreon member if you want access to more of his videos.
I had no idea I was already using pitch accent patterns like the kifuku (起伏) pattern for verbs which was a massive eye-opener for me.
Also adding a pitch-accent add-on to Anki when I was learning words really helped me to increase my ability to spot them during listening immersion.
Things may depend on your mother though and her dialect. My mother is from Tokyo and even though my father is from Kyushu (where they often use the reverse pitch for many words), he learned how to speak fairly standard Japanese because of business college and when he later moved to Tokyo. Because of that, I grew up hearing fairly standard Japanese at home.
**On reading:**
Learning how to read will be tough despite your heritage and background. It was a maddening experience for me for the first several months. Seriously, it was excruciating, but keep at it, and it’ll get easier, and don’t get upset at yourself like I did for not improving fast enough despite your advantages.
But do take advantage of your listening ability when reading, so in the early stages, try to read things that have audio, since that part of your Japanese is the strongest. Because I read so slowly in the beginning, many times a sentence wouldn’t click until I heard it. This helped ease my frustration in the beginning.
You can try things like Human Japanese apps, and later use Satori Reader when you’re past the basics.
Also try to make it a long-term goal to read Japanese at a proficient level. The ability to read novels, newspapers, etc, has really increased my overall Japanese ability, not just with my vocabulary, but in my ability to articulate myself with more nuance in Japanese.
You’ll also be able to read JP subtitles when watching shows so can pick up new words and slang when watching shows.
**Pronunciation:**
If you find you have an accent with certain words, try to remember Japanese words that you can still say correctly. It may be something like “baachan” or “gohan” — words that you first learned as a child, and probably kept saying as you grew up even after you stopped speaking Japanese. You’re probably saying them with the right vowel sound and try to apply it when you’re learning a new word. You’re probably also saying certain Japanese words with the right pitch too, which can help train you to hear pitch in other words, so that’s another reason why I think some pitch accent knowledge early on can help heritage learners.
**Using family and relatives as motivation and a resource:**
Don’t be afraid to ask your mother or other relatives, or Japanese friends for help. They’ll also probably encourage you to keep improving. Also it’s less embarrassing to make mistakes in front of them so act like a fool and try things out with them.
As you improve in reading, also try to start texting or emailing them in Japanese so you can work on your output skills.
As for specific tools and apps and books, let me know, I can tell you what I used. I did use some of my Japanese textbooks from Japanese school and my Japanese college courses, and borrowed some relatives Japanese textbooks too, but I ended up mainly using things like Anki, mnemonic-based kanji learning systems, and online grammar guides, and I also did a ton of sentence mining from Japanese media.
Ah, a fellow Canadian!
People have more or less covered the basics but I would also add some Canada specific options (though this based on my own experience so mileage may differ). Depending on where you are in Canada, you may have a local Japanese-Canadian center you could go to, where you could either participate in some activities while speaking Japanese (similar to your original Japanese school) or take a class. I’m from Toronto so I can only really speak for that, but Toronto for example has the Japanese Canadian Cultural Center, as well as various schools through the GTA. If you’re in BC or the Montreal area it also wouldn’t surprise me if they have something similar (especially BC).
Also, depending on your age and location, some school boards offer Japanese classes (though obviously you’d have to find the right level for you). I know school boards in the GTA offered language classes on weekends for languages other than French/Spanish. So you could also check those out. I took Japanese in high school through one of those classes, which is where I learned hiragana and katakana, but you’d obviously have to determine what level you’re at and make sure a school board near you offers something similar.
this has to be a joke.
> Lastly i’m confident in the fact i could speak it if i remembered the words
this is pure meme material
Most heritage speakers are in a similar position: great listening skills (sometimes speaking skills), but poor skills everywhere else.
I’d start at the beginning with kana and work your way up.
Do a core deck on anki, learn kana, read and listen to podcasts
UPDATE: Started going over Hirigana and all of a sudden some muscle memory came out of nowhere. I heard from someone that relearning a language is obviously way faster and is basically like removing your rust from lack of usage, and also i really appreciate all the responses and advice you’ve given me, and i also appreciate the people joking about what i said too because some of them are correct lol