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

Today, I want to 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 going to talk a little bit about that,

and I'm going to talk 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,

Baron Land, and Fumochitai, 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 Zip 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 it is a particular case with characters, with kanji,

so with 100 kanji, you've almost got 50% of any context, with 100 characters, you have say 50%

of any context, with 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 frequently, this gives

you a sense of confidence. As with so much in language learning, you have to start out with the

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 2,000 Toyo kanji, if you learn 500, you'll be

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, my son learned kanji for Japanese, and he used the famous book by Heiseik, 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 Heiseik points out in his book

apparently, there are components of these characters that repeat very very often, and they again

are a 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 want to move to

reading, you want to move to where you see these characters in context, because the meanings of these

characters, and particularly the sounds, are going to 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. For example,

you know, a shokai means to introduce, but it's also used in the names of companies, so Okamoto Shokai,

and all by itself, Shokai doesn't tell you what the meaning is, is this a shokai shimasu, I

introduced someone or is this Okamoto Shokai, so you have to start learning these in context,

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 a

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 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 many

stories on link, 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 experimented with is if I take a lesson on link, for example,

I'm in a story, which is relatively simple, and if I go print the story, print the text, and then

I take that and ask perplexity or clothe to convert that to Hiragana, I then get a Hiragana text,

Hiragana only text of that lesson, if I import that into link, I now have a lesson in link 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 text with kanji, I can even ask 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 on 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 were specialized, that the Hiragana would

be used for Japanese words, and the katakana would be used for foreign words, or for onomatopoe,

in other words, representing sound. The unfortunate thing with katakana from the point of you

have a learner is that you don't see it very often, katakana 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 that script, so in that sense, I experimented again, and I converted the text into katakana,

imported it, and I can read it on link, so my advice is, first of all, give yourself as an objective

that you're going to 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 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 couldn't have

the opportunity to do back over 50 years ago, I would use something like link, 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, hwakarimasu, 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 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, and 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 is a or her own. Fourth point, Japanese word order is different,

than say word or in English. If you are using link and you have the interlinear translation,

you will see that the verb shows up here in English and shows up here in 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 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, that you don't sit 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. Similarly, the grammar itself,

through enough exposure, you will gradually become better and better at using the patterns of

Japanese. 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 texts that had glossaries. Nowadays, you can find content all over the web to listen

to, to read. Everything has become 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 to 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 up to a certain level

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 are lucky enough to be in an area where there are Japanese people with

whom you can speak, go for it without worrying, 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, bye for now.