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<h1 class="title">Learning Japanese</h1>
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<p>I’ve been trying to learn Japanese for a while now; with moderate success. On this page I collect links to things that I found useful and some general tips.</p>
<h2 id="general-tips">General Tips</h2>
<ul>
<li>Like anything worth doing, learning a language is hard and takes <em>a lot</em> of time. Because of its shitty writing system, Japanese is especially hard.</li>
<li>Your level of proficiency is primarily determined by the number of hours you put in. For example, if you learn five new words a day<a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a> it will take you about three years just to learn the JLPT Level 2 vocabulary. At half an hour a day it will take you 12 years to get the estimated number of hours for a JLPT Level 2.<a href="#fn2" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a></li>
<li>Tenacity is key. Study every day for at least half an hour. Skipping a day quickly turns into skipping a week which quickly turns into never learning Japanese. Don’t overdo it or you’ll burn out quickly.</li>
<li>I recommend signing up for classes. They’re not essential, but fun and help with motivation. Just don’t believe that you’ll ever become conversational by spending just one or two hours a week in a classroom.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="grammar">Grammar</h2>
<p>As a computer scientist I have a certain affinity for formal rule systems. So I found Japanese grammar to be both intriguing and relatively simple compared to the task of learning enough words to actually understand and speak some Japanese. However, the textbooks I’ve used were all terribly lacking in grammar.</p>
<p>It seems the common approach is teaching fixed sentence patterns. This is fine for simple patterns like “AはBです。” – “A is a B.”, but I think the method breaks down for more complicated things.<a href="#fn3" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref3"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>Fortunately there are excellent free resources for basic and more advanced grammar that actually explain rules instead of just teaching patterns.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/">An Introduction to Japanese Syntax, Grammar &amp; Language</a> is an excellent guide to basic grammar and also provides some history, which I find quite appealing. It is quite formal, teaching you for example about inflection bases instead of just telling you how to negate a verb.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar">Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar</a> is very practical and teaches the basic grammar. It’s focus is on teaching you useful things quickly, without as much back-story as the guide above. This makes it a little less interesting to me.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.jgram.org/">The Japanese Grammar Database</a> is very useful if you want to look up the meaning of a particular construction. They have a nice newsletter that sends a grammar topic to your e-mail every day.</li>
<li><a href="http://dojgdeck.neocities.org/">The DoJG Anki Deck</a> for studying grammar using the excellent Anki software (also see below!).</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="vocabulary-and-kanji">Vocabulary and Kanji</h2>
<p>I use <a href="http://ankisrs.net/">Anki</a> together with the (now sadly disappeared) <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/300a4b/request_old_anki_core_2k6k_optimized_deck/">Core 2k/6k</a> deck. Anki punishes you if you skip studying for a day by making you study more the next day, so for me it helps immensely with my consistency. Anki is a spaced-repetition system. That means it repeats cards in increasing intervals. There is considerable evidence that this method of studying is most effective for remembering things. For references to actual research, see this <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition">massive article</a> by Gwern.</p>
<p>To see words in context, there is <a href="https://tatoeba.org/eng">Tatoeba</a>. For looking up Kanji, I find the handwritten Kanji search at <a href="http://kanji.sljfaq.org">sljfaq.org</a> very convenient. Searching for Kanji by radicals on that site also works very well. I never bothered to learn how to look up Kanji in a dictionary.</p>
<p>For a while I only tried to learn the pronunciation but I noticed that the usefulness of my Japanese knowledge didn’t increase at all. I couldn’t understand spoken Japanese at all and couldn’t read it either because I didn’t know the Kanji. Eventually I figured out that understanding spoken Japanese is hard, so reading is an important intermediate step. Unfortunately to read Japanese you need to learn Kanji, which is also hard. I’ve heard people claim that you can read newspapers if you know about a couple of hundred characters and have a dictionary at hand. This is complete bollocks unless you’re willing to spend like half an hour per sentence. You need to know almost all Jouyou Kanji to read texts for adults.</p>
<p>So eventually I reset the Anki deck and started again, this time trying to remember the written form as well as the pronunciation. This proved to be a much better strategy. The time I spent just learning the pronunciation feels wasted now. I’m now able to read simple Japanese without looking up too many Kanji. Reading helped me get my Japanese up to a level where I can somewhat understand natural spoken Japanese.</p>
<p>I don’t study Kanji explicitly, just as part of my general vocabulary studies. So I often don’t know the meaning of a particular Kanji in isolation, but I know words that use it. Honestly, I don’t see the point of just learning Kanji meanings (and I’m not alone <a href="http://www.guidetojapanese.org/blog/2008/01/31/final-thoughts-on-remembering-the-kanji/">in this sentiment</a>), it makes more sense to me to learn them in context. It’s true that you can sometimes deduce the meaning of a word if you know the meanings of its Kanji, but I think you could just learn more words in the time it takes you to remember all the Kanji meanings. However, sometimes I find it interesting to look up the history of a character. For this I bought Henshal’s <a href="http://www.tuttlepublishing.com/language-books/japanese/kanji-books/a-guide-to-remembering-japanese-characters">A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters</a>. That book explains the meaning of each Kanji from its constituent parts and its history. Unlike Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji the stories for each character are not made up by the author but are the results of actual research. I also own a normal dictionary for all the Kanji, but I find it completely useless. Looking the characters up on the Internet is much faster.</p>
<p>I also don’t think that the ability to write Kanji from memory is very important. Learning to write is very time consuming because it involves muscle memory, so you have to write the characters over and over again. I believe this time is better invested into improving your recognition skills. I’m not really able to write by hand. However together with a computer I can write at least as well as I can read, because I can recognize the word I want. <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473">Native speakers have similar problems</a>.</p>
<h2 id="reading">Reading</h2>
<p>I think reading is really essential if you want to improve quickly. It reinforces both vocabulary and grammar and helps you develop a feel for the language. Reading texts is a natural way to get those study hours under your belt. My Japanese got a lot better after I started getting my news from the NHK Easy News. As you can read at your own pace and consult a dictionary or a grammar text at your leisure, you can start reading quite early in your Japanese studies, which I unfortunately did not do.</p>
<p>There are plugins for your browser that let you hover over words to display their translation. I use <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yomichan/">Yomichan</a> for Firefox, but I try to avoid it as much as possible. I find that I can remember a word much better if I try to deduce its meaning from the context first. Yomichan has a nice integration with Anki, you can add words that you don’t know automatically to your deck, with surrounding context. This is a nice way to keep increasing your vocabulary after you finished the basic Japanese deck.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/">NHK Easy News</a> News for children and foreigners updated on weekdays. Simple Japanese, Furigana, reasonably interesting. As the language is kept very simple, it is quite repetitive. After struggling for a couple of weeks you will quickly learn all the grammar they use and most of the words.</li>
<li><a href="https://chokochoko.wordpress.com/the-great-library/">The Great Chokochoko Library</a> contains Japanese stories and articles on different topics at various reading levels.</li>
<li>児童書: “Children’s books” Amazon.jp delivers these world wide for reasonable fees. Even though the language is simplified for children, the lack of an electronic dictionary makes these quite challenging to read.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="listening">Listening</h2>
<p>I find listening a lot harder than reading. But some people swear by listening to stuff even if you don’t understand it yet, so maybe give it a try even if you don’t know too much Japanese yet.</p>
<ul>
<li>The <a href="http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/">NHK Easy News</a> provide audio for their articles in slow Japanese. Together with the text that makes them easy to understand. If they are already too easy for you, they have a link to the normal news article for adults. For me, normal news are way too hard though.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nhk.or.jp/kokokoza/">NHK Kokokoza</a> Videos that repeat subjects from school for Japanese students. This is real spoken Japanese at native speed. They’re very well done. <a href="http://www.nhk.or.jp/kokokoza/tv/basiceng_sp/">Basic English</a> in particularly easy to understand. In general, I think that these are reasonably easy to understand, because you should already be familiar with the topic from school.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcj-cHmS0uD91MLjtdiN89Q">Try It</a> More videos with subjects from school. There are nearly 4000 videos here.</li>
</ul>
<div class="footnotes">
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<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p>Currently I learn seven new words each day, but on average I also forget one or two old words…<a href="#fnref1">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2"><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-Language_Proficiency_Test#Estimated_Study_Time">Wiki:JLPT Study time</a><a href="#fnref2">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3"><p>For example “Verb(a)なければなりません” is often taught as “have to do Verb”. You have to remember to inflect the verb to end with an あ and then add this long sequence of syllables. I find it a lot easier to remember that you negate the verb (make it end with ない), then inflect it to the conditional form (なければ) and then add “won’t do” (lit. won’t become) to get “If you don’t Verb, it won’t do.” Anyway, this is not really important for this page, but examples like the above make me prefer “real” grammar texts over the formulaic approach I encountered in textbooks.<a href="#fnref3">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
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<p style="margin-right:2ex">CC-BY-SA <a href="mailto:adrian_neumann@gmx.de">Adrian Neumann</a> (PGP Key <a href="https://adriann.github.io/ressources/pub.asc">A0A8BC98</a>)</p>
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