I Can’t Learn Japanese Because…
I spent years thinking learning Japanese was hard. It isn’t. It’s easy. There are no complicated methods or specific benchmarks or forms and orders and grammar points and readings and all that junk. Forget it. This is all you have to do: Read Japanese. Write Japanese. Listen to Japanese. Read, Write, Listen. Done.
This is how I did it and so far it’s working pretty well for me. You, though? You can’t possibly do what I did. I mean, for starters:
“I’m not living in JAPAN.”
Yeah, well neither am I. So you don’t see kana signage every time you go outside, but you know what? There are plenty of Japanese movies at Blockbuster and Barnes & Noble will special order Japanese comics for you and chances are there’s a language group on your city’s meetup.com or at least on facebook and you probably already own a ton of anime (or, if you’re like me, just ate a lot of imported sweets and noodles) since you want to go there in the first place and there are sites like YESAsia and Amazon.co.jp and craigslist and ebay and J-List and there’s at least one Japanese person in your state who would love to tell you about the homeland and most sushi restaurants have native menus if not waitresses and are you getting the idea?
“I don’t have enough MONEY.”
You don’t need money. There’s this really neat thing called the Internet, and word has it people in Japan/Italy/France/Iran/Wherever are on it too. You don’t have to pay for a class or buy Rosetta stone. Use Lang-8 or Smart.fm instead for free. Find a language partner to skype with. Follow @cipher on twitter. Better yet, follow the people that @-reply @cipher on twitter. Watch weird Japanese commercials and music videos on Youtube. Stalk Hikosaemon and Chris Gen and Maggie-sensei on the interwebs. Download game emulators and Japanese versions of cheesy 8-bit games for your computer. Change your operating system to Japanese. Listen to the hundreds of free podcasts from Alex & Beb, Japanesepod101.com, and JEdutainment. In total I’ve spent maybe $50 on Japanese materials for my 9 months of study.
“I’m short on TIME.”
You are lying to me. To my face. And I don’t appreciate it. Yes it is true that you totally need a lot of time to learn a new language, but time does not equal time. You don’t need an uninterrupted block of four hours to study. That’s grossly ineffective, actually. You need a lot of exposure hours (10,000 is the recommended) in sum. As in total. As in not all at once. You just need to find out how to integrate Japanese into the cracks in your schedule. While you’re waiting in the supermarket queue, pull out your phrasebook and try to learn some new vocab. When you’re driving/commuting pump up the M-Flo. If you’re waiting for your regularly scheduled programme to resume, practice writing some kanji until the commercial break ends. There are plenty of spare moments, if not minutes, hours, and you know, “time.” But if you are always prepared, there’s plenty of time.
“I’m too big of a NOOB.”
Okay, that’s why you’re doing the whole learning Japanese thing instead of coming out of the birth canal already speaking the language. You’re not going to know enough out of the gate. You’ll be listening to endless amounts of Japanese and you won’t have a clue what any of it means, and guess what? No one’s going to teach you. The point of listening to so much native audio isn’t that you’ll suddenly wake up and know half the words. The point is to expose yourself to certain patterns and phrases enough that you’ll get comfortable hearing them, and then too comfortable, so comfortable you’re curious as to what they mean and you’ll go look them up. You may only know two words when you start — “domo” and “arigato” — but eventually you’ll see/hear a phrase like nanimo or konomama enough that you’ll just have to go figure out what they mean. So yeah, you better like what you’re writing and reading and listening to in the meantime, but on the bright side, there’s a whole country worth of books to read and movies to watch and music to listen to that it won’t feel like work. Stop worrying about how much you don’t know and start worrying about how much you’re doing to fix it.
“I’m too OLD.”
If you can read this right now on then you are not too old. If you can make out letters and noises, you can learn Japanese. If you can say the phrase “Can you pass me two eggrolls please?” you can even speak Japanese (it includes all the proper vowel tones and most of the consonants). Contrary to ’70s linguistic theory, your brain actually never stops learning. So you’re not a toddler. So what? Your neurons travel a lot faster and your brain makes connections a lot more rapidly so you actually don’t need to regenerate brian cells as fast. It’s all mental, folks. If you believe you can learn it, you can learn it. Look up all those Definitely Not the Opera podcasts on self-worth and self-identification’s impact on assessment testing in high schools or that RadioLab podcast on Limits. Right now it may seem surprising what the human body is capable of, but you need to get it in your head that you can do it no matter your age or upbringing.
“It’s too HARD.”
Well it ain’t easy. But you want to do this, right? You’ll stop at nothing, right? Most people say “I want to learn Japanese” but never read, write, or listen to anything in Japanese. They get all nervy when it’s time to speak and refuse to try. They like the idea but not the actuality. That’s fine. If you don’t care enough to put in the work, then you obviously don’t want to learn. You people, just go away. I certainly don’t want to waste my time or yours. On the other hand, if you’ve tried to put in the elbow grease and are still coming up against the wall, then perhaps you’re expecting too much. A case of biting off more than you can chew, perhaps? Are you trying to learn 35 new kanji a day and expecting to be able to understand Spirited Away after watching it twice? Are you trying to write paragraphs when you barely know one hundred words? In other words, if the problem isn’t that it’s hard, but that it’s too hard, that’s fixable. Just lower your expectations and back off your intensity. Make it fun and inconsequential and it becomes infinitely easier.
“I’m not wired like THAT.”
Funny, no one on this site is telling you there’s only one way to learn Japanese. I don’t learn so well in a Japanese classroom, a fact I had to learn the hard way. Take me out of the classroom and give it a whirl, and what’s that? I can still learn? You are together enough to have gotten this far, so clearly you just have to start experimenting with different ways of getting the information in your head until you find one that works for you. There’s no right or wrong way, and in the real world, no one cares about your process. Japanese people don’t care that you logged over 200 hours in a classroom. They care that you can properly pronounce words and that you know when to be polite. Learn however you have to learn, even if it turns conventional wisdom on its ear, and we’ll wind up at the same place anyway.
So go! Go forth and learn Japanese because there are no more excuses! Write, Read, and Listen to Japanese! Conquer! And feel free to brag about your language conquests in the comments!