I will travel to Japan in mid October and would like to learn some of it in order to be able to have some basics to get by and I’m not sure what is the best way to do so.
I don’t want to reach peak fluency, i want to be able to get to the point of speaking and understanding at a broken but understandable level.
What i mean for example, if in English you don’t conjugate verbs and always use the infinitive you will be speaking a terribly broken language but people will still understand what you mean.
I saw some posts about N5 but i’m not sure if it is really relevant and if maybe it has more rules than necessary.
What is the best way to speak to most broken but still understandable Japanese?
6 comments
DuoLingo.
DuoLingo will teach you basic phrasebook Japanese but no more than that, and it’s pretty bad at teaching grammar. So, it’s pretty much what you’re looking for.
The bigger problem is vocabulary. Using just DuoLingo, you’ll only have a very basic vocabulary and there’ll be a lot of things you can’t say at all, not even in a broken way.
The solution is to study more vocabulary, of course – but by then, you’ll be spending so much time on the language that you’re learning grammar simply by osmosis, and by needing to understand the teaching material.
Passing the JLPT N5 test means you can say stuff like “Good day, my name is [x], nice to meet you.” But N5 is actually *below* “broken Japanese” in terms of effort required. And N5-level Japanese is useless for all practical purposes, because you won’t have a useful vocabulary and won’t be able to understand what natives say, *even* if they’re deliberately speaking easy Japanese for your sake.
N4 is capable of talking about things like the weather. N3 is capable of ordering food and talking about everyday subjects, but nothing specialised.
Point being: if you’re spending so much effort learning vocabulary that you can actually converse about basic topics (about N3 level), then you will automatically also learn the basic grammar, unless you make a deliberate effort not to.
One does not aim to be broken but understandable.
Rather, one aims for much higher but still end up broken. However, because one aimed much higher, one manages to stay understandable enough.
Isn’t this universal? Like, you “aim” for full marks and you bet like an 80, you “aim” for a barely passing grade and of course you don’t pass.
How long are you in Japan, are you traveling for business or fun? Why exactly do you feel you have to learn Japanese for this trip? If it’s a week or two long trip in Japan it is not worth your time to try learning good enough Japanese, because you won’t be good enough in 5 months time to converse brokenly. You’ll barely be able to understand what is being said to you much less be able to respond brokenly. Translation apps are enough to enjoy a trip abroad. If you are staying for an extended period it might be worth studying Japanese, but Japanese is literally one of the hardest languages to learn from English as ranked by the US government. Especially if you are traveling to the well known tourist areas, there is plenty of English and people who understand enough that there is no reason for you to spend 2 years of hard study to become conversational in Japanese, because 2 years for a working adult is about what it takes imho. That’s if you study hard and consistently.
“get to the point of speaking” as in able to form words from your memory or? Idk maybe learn set phrases?
just doing your best to learn to be understandable is going to be far more effective than some invented version of pidgin japanese that you construct as a shortcut to avoid work
take all this effort you’re making that’s trying to game the system and create something useable that no one has ever created before, and put those minutes or hours into just reading genki 1, i promise it will be more fruitful
Duolingo is a free app. Not great but you learn some basic vocabs and sentences.
There are a lot of free Youtube Videos where people explain basic gramma and there are for Sure some anki Decks (vocab cards for the App anki) that are directed for Traveling