I learned Japanese in 1971. Here’s how I would do it now

Today I wanna talk about Japanese, how I learned Japanese over 50 years ago, and how I would learn it today. So in 1971, I was assigned by the Canadian government to our embassy in Tokyo, and I remember that relatively quickly I was interacting with Japanese people, even gave speeches in Japanese. But I had the benefit that I had studied the characters in my Chinese learning. And I think for anyone who wants to learn Japanese, I think it's tremendously beneficial to learn the characters. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about that, about five things that I would do in learning Japanese. And the emphasis on all of these is to simplify. So first of all, why suddenly am I doing a video in Japanese? My wife and I were watching a series on Netflix called The Wasteland or something like that. And the name in Latin letters was Fumochitai, and I had no idea what Fumochitai was, although I speak Japanese quite well, so I had to look it up. And it's, if you look at the characters, Fumochitai, barren land, and FUMO like no hair, CHITAI Land Belt, zone. So that gives you an idea of the extent to which phonetics alone, and therefore, hiragana alone is not enough to convey meaning in Japanese, and that's why learning the characters is so important. So how do we learn characters? Well, I had the benefit of learning characters ahead of time when I learned Chinese and I had to learn, say, 4,000 characters, which was a lot of work. However it appears, or it turns out because of this phenomenon of rapidly declining frequency, this Zipf's law, in every language, the frequency, like high frequency, words appear very often and then very rapidly they appear much, much less often. And apparently this is particularly the case with characters with kanji. So with a hundred kanji, you've almost got, uh, 50% of any context. With a hundred characters, you have, say, 50% of any context, with, uh, 500 characters, you've got 75 to 80% of any context. In other words, don't make the problem of learning kanji into a bigger problem than it is. Once you start reading and you start recognizing characters and some of the very common characters appear very, very frequently, this gives you a sense of confidence as it, with so much in language learning, you have to start out with a position that it's not that difficult. If I put in the time I will get there. And that is particularly true with characters. So you don't have to learn all 2000 Joyo Kanji. If you learn 500, you'll be doing very, very well. So how to learn them well, I learned them while learning Chinese. I had a very primitive, sort of personally developed SRS system with paper flashcards. You may do that, you may use Anki. Uh, my son learned kanji for Japanese, and he used the famous book by Heisig. So nowadays there are so many ways of learning kanji. I am reluctant to recommend anything because I learned them long before these systems were available. But I think the basic principle that a small number of Kanji go a long way should encourage you. Not to mention the fact, as Heisig points out in his book, apparently there are components of these characters that repeat very, very often and they again are number in a hundred or so that you start to recognize and. As you continue in your kanji learning, you start to recognize familiar things, familiar characters, familiar components of these characters. So my advice is you may start with an SRS system, but very quickly you wanna move to reading. where you see these characters in context because the meanings of these characters, and particularly the sounds are gonna be very dependent on context, so you have to get to where you see them in different contexts so that you start to see what they mean. Uh, for example, you know, shokai means to introduce, but it's also used in the names of companies. So Okamotoshokai. And all by itself, shokai doesn't tell you what the meaning is. Is this shokaishimasu, I introduce someone or is this Okamotoshokai? So you have to start learning these in context, which means get started reading. And this brings me to the second point, and that is that, yes, learn characters, but also learn the hiragana because you want to supplement the kanji with the phonetic writing system, which is used with the characters.

And when I was in Japan, I had to use these hiragana only readers put out by Naganuma. And if I remember correctly, there was no spacing between the words in the, uh, hiragana text that I had to read. So it was extremely painful and difficult. You don't need to do that now. So not only can you read texts, for example, the mini stories on LingQ, you can read them with characters and look up the characters. And there's even little furigana, in other words, the character, but it's very small, above. The character itself, hiragana shows up. But what I just, uh, experimented with is if I take a, a lesson on LingQ, for example, a mini story, which is relatively simple, and if I go print the story, print the text, and then I take that and ask Perplexity or Claude to convert that to hiragana. I then get a hiragana text, hiragana only text of that lesson. If I import that into LingQ, I now have a lesson in LingQ spaced, which I can use to read the hiragana, to look up the meaning of the Hiragana words to combine with doing the same lesson in a text with Kanji. I can even ask AI to convert the same text into katakana, let me just digress a little bit here. So Hiragana is based on the characters, the Chinese characters, and it was developed apparently by ladies who had a very elegant cursive script based on the characters. And so they stylized the characters and eventually these components, stylized components of characters based on the sound of those characters, became hiragana, which is not an alphabet, but a syllabary, in other words, each symbol represents a syllable. And at the same time, monks who were putting little notes on Buddhist texts used a different system called Katakana to do the same thing to represent the sounds of the language. And it was also a syllabary. And sometime around the end of the 19th century, as there were more and more foreign loan words coming into Japanese, they decided that they would specialize that the hiragana would be used for Japanese words and the katana foreign words or for, in other words, representing sound. The unfortunate thing with Katakana from the point of view of a learner is that you don't see it very often. Katana script isn't used that often, and so it's kind of difficult to get used to because as with any script that you learn, it's not just a matter of knowing what the symbols represent. It's a matter of reading enough so that your brain gets used to those, to that script. So in that sense, I experimented again and I converted the text into Katana imported it, and I can read it on LingQ. So my advice is, first of all, give yourself as an objective that you're gonna learn at least 500, maybe a thousand characters. And once you have those, you're reading. Through your reading, you will gradually acquire more and more characters and recognize that it's not the insurmountable obstacle that you may think it, it is. Second of all, move into the phonetic script, but use hiragana. Don't use, you know, romanized script. As soon as possible move into hiragana. It's very much part of the text that you're going to read, kanji with Hiragana, occasional katakana, and I would recommend something that I could didn't have the opportunity to do back over 50 years ago. I would use something like LingQ, you know, combining it with the ability of AI to convert text into different writing systems of the Japanese language. Now, the next thing that I would do is that recognize that in Japanese there are a lot of words that sound the same, and this is particularly true at the beginning of learning any language, but it is even more true with Japanese because there are fewer sounds. So English apparently has 44 phonemes, and Japanese has 25 phonemes, fewer phonemes. And because the writing system is based on syllables and because a lot of the words come from Chinese where there are tones and there aren't tones in Japanese, a lot of the words are very similar. And so only through a lot of listening do you gradually get used to the fact that kawarimasu/wakarimasu, a lot of words sound the same. And you gradually start to differentiate words that initially sound extremely similar. Be patient. Anything in language learning and in particular with Japanese, is going to be a function of you being willing to stay the course, put in enough time, allow the brain to get used to it, and very often it's the context that will determine the meaning. And I have mentioned before the subject of pitch that, you know, Hashi, Hashi too, the same word for a bridge and, and chopsticks.

And how do you tell the difference? In Japanese, there is no difficulty telling the difference between words that sound the same and which might have a different pitch. But in fact, the pitch varies from region to region in Japan and it is the context. The structure that tells us what the meaning of that word is in that particular context. So if you want to go after pitch, by all means do so. But everything that complicates our task becomes a bit of an obstacle. And it's not something that I favor, but to each his own, or her own. fourth point Japanese word order is different then say we're in English. Uh, if you are using LingQ and you have the Interlinear translation, you'll see that the verb shows up here in English and Japanese. It's just something you get used to. Similarly, I never try to read or remember any grammatical explanations in Japanese. Japanese is very regular in how it works. You just have to get, get used to the patterns of the language, how things are added to the end of words, and you start to get used to what these patterns mean and how they are used. And I don't think you can short circuit the process. The same is true for polite language. You don't have to be overly worried about offending someone by not using the correct, polite form. It's far more important to make sure that you take your shoes off when you enter someone's home in Japan, uh, that you don't sit, uh, cross-legged in front of someone, that you don't give an impression of being disrespectful with your body language. But the words that you choose, the level of politeness of your words will gradually evolve as you get used to the language. It's not something to worry about. And similarly, the grammar itself. Through enough exposure, you will gradually become better and better at using the patterns of Japanese. And finally, I would say once you have done, maybe it's six months, maybe it's a little longer, you've had enough listening and reading, you've acquired a vocabulary. By all means, find yourself an online tutor. In today's world, there are lots of them just as when I was in Japan, I had to really look for, you know, texts that had glossaries. Nowadays, you can find content all over the web to listen to, to read. Everything else becomes so much easier, including the ability to find very good online tutors who will talk to you. When I was in Japan I had colleagues at the Canadian Embassy, Japanese who were very patient and patiently speaking to me in Japanese, something that I couldn't have done with random strangers. So I had people where I felt comfortable that they were supportive of me in my efforts to learn Japanese. And that's why you want to have an online tutor with whom you can speak, who is supportive, who doesn't necessarily correct every word, but give you some level of feedback and an opportunity to speak the language. So I would certainly recommend that you set yourself as a goal. To take your sort of vocabulary up to a certain level, your kanji familiarity with hiragana so that you can read, do a lot of reading. And pretty soon you'll want to talk to people. And if you're lucky enough to be in an area where there are Japanese people with whom you can speak, go for it without worrying. Uh, otherwise, find yourself online tutors. And then take your language to the next level. So there you have it. Learning Japanese then and now what I might do differently. Thanks for listening.