This past week was fairly uneventful (aside from the first snow of the season and going out until 4am last night, but there’s not much of a story there), so instead of focusing on just the present, I’ll talk about something that has been a big part of my life for the past two years. Warning: If you don’t care about languages and, specifically, Japanese then this will probably be pretty boring, as I get into the gritty details of my textbook/materials and study routine.
I started studying Japanese when I made the decision to move abroad about three years ago. Even though I studied dutifully a few times a week, it wasn’t enough to make any meaningful progress during the months leading up to the big move.
I think a big problem was the textbook I chose to study from. Hearing that I would be moving abroad, my first tutor recommended a textbook that she said would prepare me for daily life in Japan. In fact, this was basically a phrasebook full of grammar that was too complicated for a beginner to comprehend.
Having now been a foreign language teacher for over 2 years, I have to say I hate phrasebooks. I have a few students who don’t want to pay for a full beginner grammar course and opt for the quick travel course. Most of them are proud to be able to get the pronunciation, which is cool, but at that point it’s still just a bunch of sounds, and they don’t know what any of the words mean.
Even for a tourist who only wants to dedicate a few weeks to language study, I can’t understand the benefit of memorizing questions if you aren’t going to be able to understand the answers. Have you ever tried to follow directions that have been given to you in a language you don’t understand? Even just the directions to the bathroom are a mystery, unless you’re near enough that the person can just point to a door or a sign.
It can even backfire in some cases. Imagine it: someone asks you, in lightly-accented but clear and correct English, what time it is. You’ll probably assume they speak English, so you’ll glance at your watch and say “quarter past eight.” On the other hand, if someone says, “sorry, no English…time?” then you’re more likely to say, slowly and clearly, “eight fifteen” while showing them the clock on your phone screen. I know no one wants to be condescended to, but let’s be honest. Which is going to be more useful?
If you only have a few weeks, but you’re really set on studying — which, to be clear, I think is great and worth it — then I think you’re far better off memorizing mostly sentences instead of questions. I recommend “Hello!” and “Thank you” and “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak ______. Do you speak English?” For anything else, pull out your smartphone and let Google Translate do the rest.
Anyway, I didn’t have that insight at the time, so I went with my tutor’s recommendation and memorized a bunch of phrases that were probably good for helping me mouth get accustomed to making Japanese noises and little else.
At the same time, I started studying kanji on a website that I still use today. Kanji is an added challenge that I never had to deal with when I studied Spanish, and it’s not always my favorite thing. I often think about how nice it was to be in Spain or Argentina, where every street sign and menu could serve as study material. The alphabet and phonics of Spanish are such that you can be quite confident about the pronunciation of any word you see. Not so for Japanese, where if you haven’t studied a character, then you have no hope of reading it.
Next, I got a proper Japanese textbook for first-time learners and began my study in earnest. It felt silly to be going from long phrases like “Excuse me, could you help my process these documents and renew my residence card?” to “I like apples,” but of course it’s necessary to learn the basics first.
I started using Anki, too, which is an online flashcards program with spaced repetition software. The word means “memorization” in Japanese. I use it almost everyday, and it’s absolutely the bread and butter of my study regime.
I studied from Genki I until my family-funded online tutoring hours dried up, at which point I had already moved into my tiny apartment in Takaoka. Even though I was taking lessons once a week (ish), progress was slow as I built my grammar foundation. Even though I was living in Japan, there wasn’t much time for immersion, as I spent almost 50 hours a week at work, where I spoke only English. Also, I did a lot of traveling (it was pre-COVID) with coworkers, with whom I also spoke only English.
A note about language learning here is that confidence cannot be understated. One of my training buddies had studied Japanese in college and was finished with both Genki I and II, but he was too nervous to speak to anyone. Luckily, we made a good team because I was bold enough to use my level 0 Japanese to ask where the bathroom was, and he had studied enough to understand the answer, which he could relay to me in English. As a result, people seemed to think I, with my shallow phrasebook knowledge, was better at Japanese, even though that was very far from the case. Speak up, friends!
(A caveat — I’ve been reading about another theory that suggests speaking too much too early on can cause you to develop bad habits and ingrained mistakes, so be careful I guess. But I still think it’s better than being too scared to try.)
A few months into my time here, I started seeing this guy quite regularly (I guess the kids would call it dating) who only speaks Japanese. It was a good chance to practice everything I had learned in Genki I and the first bit of Genki II. That said, anyone familiar with those materials knows that you cannot have the most exciting discussions with just that elementary grammar. Our conversations consisted of a lot of Google Translate, which is tedious but actually gets the job done, in my experience, as long as you have a bit of patience. (And, let’s be real, talking to language learners takes a bit of patience well past the Google Translate phase. That’s not an insult, just facts.)
I certainly think it helped me get used to speaking the language, even if my overall level didn’t improve that much. And it made me a big believer in quantity over quality, when it comes to language learning. Do I think reading a book would be better for grammar and vocabulary exposure? Yeah. But the most important thing is finding contact points that you’re going to touch everyday.
Anyway, after two or three months of that, my level started to stagnate. I became very “fluent” (able to express myself) with familiar topics, using the grammar that I knew, but I sure didn’t know a lot of it.
Luckily (and, yes, I do say that quite wryly) the pandemic started around that time, and I was presented with the perfect opportunity to refocus on my grammar studies. My coworker at the time decided to move back to America, leaving his Minna no Nihongo I textbook with me. This textbook covers a lot of the same grammar as Genki I, which I had already completed, but it had some different vocabulary, so I went ahead and started it from the beginning. I breezed through the first few chapters and finished it in a few months, and I passed it onto my new coworker and bought the next level for myself.
I worked on Minna no Nihongo II for about a year, finally finishing it earlier this month. It was all new grammar, and I wanted to make sure I had gotten everything I possibly could out of it, including all the “cultural notes” and extra vocabulary. I started taking online lessons again, too, so I could get a native speaker to work through it with me.
Now, I’m debating whether I should move on to an intermediate textbook or work through this hugely important foundational grammar one more time. As an English teacher, I see what happens when you try to use high-level grammar before you’re ready. Even if my pronunciation is never going to be close to native, I’d like my sentence structure to be nice and neat. But that might be more related to the amount of comprehensible input I get rather than textbook study time…I’ll ask my tutor for her recommendation.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I took the JLPT N4 (the second lowest level out of 5) a few weeks ago, and I felt pretty confident that I passed (knock on wood). I also sometimes have interactions at the bank or the supermarket where no one even thinks about pulling out a translation device, which is awesome. And I can watch a simple Japanese anime and understand, like, 50% of it!
Of course I’m happy, but I also can’t believe two whole years of study has only gotten me this far. I love languages and am enjoying the journey, but still. Wow.
My next goal is to take N3 in July. The gap between N4 and N3 is pretty wide, but I might as well challenge myself while I’m living here. What else can you do but keep moving forward, step by step? Language learning is definitely one of those things where you can’t really see progress, but you have to trust the process.
If anyone has any language tips, feel free to leave them in the comments or shoot me a message. I’m always looking to level up my learning.
That’s all for today. See you next week!
Alisa & a Visa 