Category: Japanese

Six weeks in Japan (and about 1-2 hours a day) was enough time to lay down the basics of Japanese. My pacing for Duolingo was perfect, allowing me to max out the crown levels by the last day. The other app (Lingodeer Plus) would have needed 100s of hours more to fully “max out” all the available content. Altogether, I feel content with what I was able to achieve.

• Alphabet: My reading of hiragana and katakana, which were shaky to begin with, are quite strong, and I am confident it will persist in my long term memory. Oddly, I have the feeling that a handful of letters are waiting to surprise me if I were to test myself at some time in the future. I did notice some symbols are very common, while others rarely show up. It would be interesting to see some statistical analysis.
• Kanji: Though there are lots of differences in the form and choice of characters to express concepts in Chinese or Japanese (for example 自行车 vs 自転車 or 我 vs 私), I don’t think I was ever tripped up by them, accepting everything quickly and naturally. On the other hand, I can only confidently read aloud the kanji from the vocabulary items I learned. Every kanji has a number of readings that is highly context dependent.
• Vocabulary: It is an interesting question of how much vocabulary one should study when one only wants to learn a little bit of the language. I certainly ended up covering more words than I was expecting, and dutifully copying them into a notebook to practice kanji/hiragana. However, I don’t think I ever encountered too many “I really don’t need to waste effort memorizing this” kind of words.
• Grammar: I think my favorite aspect of Lingodeer Plus is the Grammar Tunes game that requires the user to determine if a given sentence is grammatically correct or not. Each lesson covers 2-3 grammar points, covering everything from sentence order, the use of particles, and conjugation of verbs. In terms of single sentences, I think my (reading) comprehension is probably quite strong (for an elementary speaker). My preference for the grammar exercises wasn’t necessarily the grammar aspect, but the means of reviewing vocabulary in context.
• Speaking: Overall, I did not have too many opportunities to really immerse myself in Japanese conversations. In the daily routine, “hello”, “thank you”, and “excuse me” are generally quite sufficient. When asked if I could speak Japanese, I would always demur. There were times when Japanese people attempted to make conversations with me, but after guessing “Where are you from,” any additional discussion would involve the use of a pocket translator. The one time I had an extended immersion in a Japanese conversation, where it wasn’t solely focused on me, I did my best to listen and follow along, but it was overwhelming and a little dispiriting.

Reflecting on the process of learning Korean and Japanese over these months, it is clear that one can learn a lot in an isolated, academic way, but that there is still a huge gulf between the language as written in a textbook (or app) and actual communication in real life. With Chinese, I was getting into conversations much earlier and more frequently than with either Japanese or Korean. Perhaps I was younger and more motivated then, or perhaps a key difference is the presence of a “ladder.” I wonder if the key to my rapid acquisition of Chinese, was spending those early critical months with another learner of Chinese in multiparty conversations. It might be easier to learn a language when it is being modeled to you in a simplified form. Conversations are less daunting when there is a “coach” there handling the main work and providing on-the-spot support and the opportunity to join in. I did meet quite a few foreigners living in Japan who spoke good (to my ears) Japanese. I would have to move there to make the contacts and build up the relationships in order to have more of those “bridged” experiences.

I did lose my motivation to learn Japanese in the last couple of days, simply because I knew I was leaving and wanted to switch back to Korean. On the plus side, it was reassuring to know that most of the Korean was still dormant just under the surface after focusing so exclusively on Japanese for six weeks. I think with periodic review I can maintain the bulk of the linguistic block I built up. In the future, I still want to travel more of Japan and learn more of the language.

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.