I intend to learn some Japanese during the 6 weeks I travel here, though I should state at the outright my goals are very modest. I would be happy achieving an A1 level.
The last time I came to Japan, I spent the hour or so while I was waiting in the airport in Bangkok for my flight to Osaka to bookmark and download some Japanese phrases and commit “nihongo wa wakarimassen” (“I don’t understand Japanese”) to memory. I was fine with just the handful of courtesy phrases and found it easy enough to navigate using my knowledge of hanzi to interpret kanji on signage.
At some point however, and I remember it was in Nagoya, I decided I needed to learn Hiragana and Katakana. So I looked around online, found this wonderful website. I spent one night cramming Hiragana, one night cramming Katakan, and the rest of my trip practicing. I didn’t really pick up much else of the language other than figuring out some English loan words (like hotel, beer, and tomato).
Fast forward to the winter and I’ve finished the Spanish language tree on Duolingo and was looking for something else to work on. Duolingo just launched Japanese (beta) and I thought it would be good to refresh the letters (of which I’d forgotten almost half). I worked on Japanese exclusively while in Nepal, completing the tree in a month. I kept trying to keep the skills strong until they switched over to crown system, so I redid some of the earlier lessons until I decided to focus fully on Spanish again.
My Current Plan
I don’t want to bother with podcasts or a textbook this time around because I don’t want to fall too far down the rabbit hole of spending all my time studying instead of traveling. I have (had) 2 modest goals. Finish the Duolingo lessons, maxing out all the levels. Go through Level 1 Japanese on Lingodeer (averaging 3-4 lessons a day at first to get a good start).
Regarding Lingodeer, I completed the first couple of lesson on my last day in Korea, but as soon as I landed in Japan, I realized they completely changed their business model to put all the content behind a paywall. Ironically, I had considered purchasing a membership, but I’m now so annoyed that the issue is a non-starter for me. The company’s excuse is that they need money to build new content, but that doesn’t make sense. They are charging people who want to learn Japanese (or Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, or German) to build lessons in another language that they don’t necessarily want to study.
I did already pay for Lingodeer+, which has vocabulary and grammar drills for Japanese, so I can make do with that. Based on my work with it in Korean, it appears to cover all the same knowledge points of the main lessons (because, honestly, why rewrite their database when they can just repackage it), so with a little patience I can reverse engineer all the knowledge. The issue, however, is knowing when to stop. With 100+ lessons introducing 20-30 words each, this might be exactly the rabbit hole I want to avoid. Or I just learn Japanese. I guess there are worse things in life.
The fact of the matter is that it does not seem even remotely necessary to learn Japanese to travel around. English seems even more widely spoken than the last time I was here, and I suppose with the Olympics coming up in 16 months, there must be an ongoing push for internationalization. Still, I really want to get enough Japanese in me so that I could exercise some cross-linguistic comparisons among the three languages that have had so much exchange and mutual influence over the past 2000 years.