Live in Kyushu and I really need to start learning/improve my Japanese. My wife is Japanese and speaks perfect English, I’m Scottish-italian, native English, near native Italian, good French etc. So I’m linguistic, however my wife keeps saying that classroom style lessons are a waste of time and I need to hiragana/katakan first, just on my own. O totally get how important that is but I’d love to be able to just converse a bit more initially.
I know a lot of vocab and I understand a lot but o find it difficult to construct sentences so that is what I’d love to improve.
Am I wrong, is this not the right approach or is the wife right as usual? 😂
10 comments
Your wife is right. You know quite a lot already, but you don’t have the basics down at all.
A language is more than just vocal communication.
Hiragana/katakana takes 2 weeks tops if you do the bare minimum. Grammar is harder, and the fastest way to learn is mass amounts of reading alongside grammar teaching material.
“Know a lot but don’t know kana” makes it seem like you’re the guy slapping Ne at the end of your sentences and saying you are conversational.
Hiragana/katakana is pretty foundational towards being able to actually study the language. It unlocks the starting point for reading, grammar, and kanji. Starting there will teach you more than trying to memorize some phrases.
Watch the JapanesePod101 hiragana/katakana videos, drill them for a bit with something like Duolingo, then lock them in by putting them into practice with things like graded readers or Wanikani.
Listen to your trouble and strife!
As an effective English-Italian bilingual, you already had a huge foundation for French. You could just get stuck in and start critiquing Foucault.
With Japanese, you are going to have to work on grammar. With what you know already, why not try out the free grammar resources and see how you fare?
Honestly, one of the best things you can (IMO) do is set aside like 10 minutes a day for Japanese only conversations with your wife. Not only does it provide an excellent opportunity for noticing (the phenomenon where you realize there’s something you want to say, but don’t know how to express it, which can lead you down what to study next) but it also gets you used to listening to natural spoken Japanese. This’ll also help with grammar since actually using a piece of grammar builds recall, a form of memory stronger than simple recognition. Of course, in addition to that, you’ll also want to pick up a textbook (like Genki or Minna No Nihongo) and put in the hours there as well.
I came to Japan with roughly N2 Japanese, and within a year I was able to become fluent enough to work in Japanese with zero issues, read books, and just live life here, a feat I can largely accredit to my patient girlfriend for simply conversing with me in Japanese (in our case it helps that she can’t speak English.)
Best of luck on your journey!
頑張って！
がんばって
Ganbatte!
I think your wife is right that in that you probably should dedicate some time to learning hiragana and katakana on your own, the classroom setting is not going to offer any advantage there and it will take forever if you just study them one hour a week at class. Once you’ve done that (flash card app and/or kana drill books that you can pick up cheap at the 100en shop), your local international center or volunteers at a nearby kouminkan probably offer free or nearly free classes (check out your city newsletter), which is both nice for learning and for connecting with the international community.
Classrooms aren’t bad, but imagine such situation. If you go to a language school, then you will learn for something like 6-8 hours day, and will spend quite a lot of money. It’s going to give you a good result, but at the same time you can self learn without spending anything at all, without a need to commute, or have a fixed schedule.
Classrooms by itself aren’t bad, but the main advantage of it are teachers, so you can ask anything you want and get immediate answer. And it’s around it, because anything else you can get in other places too.
And any other types of classrooms like 1 hour several times a week simply won’t give you a fast progress. If we talk about any kind of fluent ability to use Japanese, we are speaking about at least 1000-2000 hours, quite often even 3000-4000 and more and something like 150-300 hours/year is just a slow tempo. People can learn like that, but typically it takes 5-10 years to get good results. There is no trick here, the more you learn daily, the faster you achieve your goals.
Native speakers often say “don’t waste your time on teachers, my language is simple, just learn x and z and then practice with me!”
In reality, Japanese is really complex, and teaching Japanese is even taught as a major at universities. This should tell you that learning Japanese isn’t a simple as it seems.
The benefits of a teacher are 1. their pedagogic skills, a good teacher will plan the lessons appropriately, and answer your questions (which you will have every five minutes or so), and 2. they will provide a fixed learning schedule. Even if you make a plan yourself (which is difficult) you need to stick to it. Having a teacher and going to class regularly and interacting will really help you stick to the schedule.
I’m sure there’s some great self-learners out there, and they know what they’re doing. But it seems like you might need a teacher (a qualified one, not your wife or your friend) at a university, for example. With being in Japan and attending classes you’re really at an advantage when it comes to learning, good luck!
>but I’d love to be able to just converse a bit more initially.
This is what’s holding you back. This is like saying “I’d love to go to the gym but I’d love to have some muscle mass first”. Your ability to make coherent sentences is going to come from reading.
How much do you *actually* understand if you can’t make sentences?