Now that the school year is over my mother decided that she didn’t want another lazy daughter and said I could choose one foreign language to practice and learn. I chose Japanese because I actually really enjoy the culture, I think I could do this so if anyone has tips I’ll proudly accept them. 🥲 (p.s. it’s Hiragana Japanese btw)
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Just remember that learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint.
Good luck and have fun!
‘Hiragana Japanese’, as in you are planning on just learning Hiragana? If so, why?
I think the comment about it being “Hiragana Japanese” illustrates that there are some basics that you need to look into before you begin learning the language. Reading the first few chapters of a guide like this [https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/](https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/) would be a good place to start, I suspect. It really isn’t feasible to learn or consume Japanese to any meaningful degree only with Hiragana, in my opinion.
Work on pronunciation. Not in-depth but at least understand how to pronounce A, I , U, E, O, (あいうえお), the Japanese R sound and the F sound. You’ll have to learn Kanji and Katakana eventually. Learn the basic grammar as well.
Learn all the writing systems, they are very straightforward.
You will need to learn all of the writing systems. Check out /r/LearnJapanese for resources. There are some pinned posts there that will give you a good start.
Ironic considering I learn solely by sitting around doing nothing while being at the peak of laziness. Hell I feel like I’ve made more progress with comprehensible input vs the typical school classroom, write everything down and memorize stuff, study method. Though what works for me may not work for others but if I recommend anything it is at least sticking to whatever method you choose, even if it isn’t “the best”. Good luck!
If your mom’s pushing this, see if there’s a Japanese cultural center near where you live. You could probably get her to pay for classes.
You need to know hiragana and katakana *before* you begin learning Japanese, stay away from romaji as much as you can.
This is by no means feasible for everyone but if your mom is willing/able to support you in learning a language this summer, there’s a Japanese language summer sleepaway camp in the US. You/anyone else can dm me for more info 🙂 Source: former camper/someone still close to the program
I could be misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you think hiragana is a type of Japanese like Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese, but it’s not. Hiragana is one of three writing systems they use, katakana, hiragana, and kanji. Japanese people might use all three in like a news article. Katakana is mostly used for borrowed words and is phonetic, hiragana is phonetic and can be used to spell out most words until you learn kanji, and kanji are symbols with specific meanings but may be read as a few different sounds, and there are a lot of them. To reach a high level, you’ll need to learn all three.
That’s nice! I’m Japanese, ask me if you have any questions
Set a goal and work toward it. If you want to take a trip to Japan and talk with Japanese people, focus on conversation. If you want to watch anime, focus on listening. If you want to read Murakami in Japanese, focus on reading. Trying to become an all around fluent speaker, listener, reader, and writer all at once is very difficult, when Japanese is already one of the most difficult languages for an English learner. The skills do reinforce each other, but it can be easy to get bogged down if you’re not careful.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn kanji if you mainly just want to talk to people. I am saying taking six months to memorize 2000 kanji because someone on the internet said it was a good idea when you just want to talk to people is a bad idea. Keep in mind what you want from the language when you’re studying it, or it will be easy to lose motivation. I speak from personal experience.
Also, there is no one set path to fluency. Choose the path that you’ll stick to, the one that is most rewarding to you.
Lastly I’ll give you an unpopular opinion I’ve been downvoted for before. You don’t need to learn to write kanji. It’s like learning cursive, it has its uses, but everyone really just uses devices nowadays. I lived in Japan for 3 years and not once did I think “wow I wish I had spent more time learning to write kanji.”
Of course if you just enjoy writing kanji more power to you.
Good luck! And more importantly, have fun!
Personally, I found [Duolingo](https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/ja/en/Learn-Japanese) was a good way to get a hang of hiragana and katakana, but I also practiced by playing a few games I’m familiar with in Japanese. (Not advisable if you aren’t certain you can read either script and understand the little characters like りょ)
I also [noted any words or sentences and saved links to websites](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EDiWsYx0dCtv-Pef9myPKgIDB5te1tQa?usp=sharing) I thought would be useful.
Other people have done similar things which you can probably find [about the place or if you ask](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gK14qcihSBtGV5VevgaK3z6fc7DFSrFP).
You can just run into a wall until you get used to memorising kana and then you can move onto kanji which I don’t have any advise for other than getting used to breaking down pieces (radicals) of similar ones and individually memorising them with flash cards.
Hey, I’d recommend you checking out Matt vs Japan, he throughly explains the AJJAT studying method. I’ve started learning Japanese for a year now. I started in the summer too. Use dualingo only for Hiragana and Katakana not for Kanji tho.
Also download anki it’s gonna help you a lot with pinning words.
And immerse a lot in Japanese. What I mean by immersing is watch stuff only in Japanese or read stuff doesn’t matter. Don’t use Romaji and subtitles while watching Anime or movies idk whatever you enjoy.
Do all the fun stuff you like to do in Japanese. Doesn’t matter if you understand or not. Learn like baby’s Learn the language!!!
Enjoy it and have fun!!!!!!