Author: Faisal

Introduction

Having an interest in learning the Japanese language is great and all, but how do you ACTUALLY get started? Given the fact that you need to learn Hiragana, Katakana, sentence structure, vocabulary words, kanji and more, it can be a daunting task. This is really a catch 22, if you don’t start somewhere, you won’t get anywhere, but you might be totally confused on where to start. This can lead to a very lengthy delay in when you had the initial idea of learning Japanese and when you actually started learning. There are many guides out there, and I’ve definitely done my fair share of reading through them, but I thought I’d give you my take on it as well. This is going to be geared more towards just starting out with Japanese, without any formal exposure to the language. Later on, there will also be a written series/guide which will be continuing on after you’ve mastered the basics.

The Kana (Hiragana/Katakana)

First things first, don’t use Romaji. Seriously. My passion for hating Romaji is not that I hate the idea of the Romanization of the Japanese language (In fact this principle is how you’ll be typing out Japanese on a keyboard anyway), it’s the fact of how Romanization is done. The most popular system is Hepburn Romanization which you can read up on here – Hepburn Romanization. Essentially I much prefer using the Nihon-Shiki Romanization, as it more accurately aligns with how Japanese words are actually spelled in Japanese, the Hepburn system gained a lot of popularity as it was geared towards western audiences in making Japanese words much easier to pronounce. I’ll be doing a video on why I think the Hepburn system is flawed, however this is still by far the most widely used Romanization scheme for Japanese in the English speaking world. This system was also the Romanization system the Elementary Standard Japanese language course at York University begins with (although we switch to fully using kana within a few weeks into the course). Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad system, however once you learn the kana, the Nihon-Shiki system will make far more sense than using Hepburn.

To learn the Kana, you can essentially use any study sheets. Basically any free online resource will work well for this, however I do have a few personal favourites.

York University Japanese Studies Program Kana Practice Sheets

• Hiragana (HTML or PDF)
• Katakana (HTML or PDF)

Tofugu

• Hiragana chart 
• Hiragana guide
• Katakana guide

Grammar and Basic Sentence Structure

Once you’ve started to gain mastery of the kana, it’s time to move on to learning about grammar and formulating basic sentences. Again, there are plenty of resources available, both free and paid. Again, a list of resources that I like has been included. The beauty of learning Japanese (at least from an English speakers perspective) is that it is a very well documented language. The dictionaries are there, learning materials are readily available and with platforms such as iTalki and Tandem, the platform for getting in touch with native or fluent Japanese speakers is present. One note I do want to add here is to always challenge yourself. I made the mistake of staying in a comfortable zone too long and not pushing the boundaries of my knowledge. When this happens, you end up in a situation worse than not starting at all, and that is stagnation. When you’re not learning anything new or practicing some element of the language that is already completely second nature and ingrained, it doesn’t add any value to your studying routine. This time could be better spent learning something new. Stagnation is your worst enemy. It’s very tempting to try to stay in our comfort zone since learning a new language is daunting and I know for some of you who may only speak one other language, this is an entirely new experience. Push yourself to explore the boundaries. Don’t speed through the books or other resources, take your time reading through and learning the content, however don’t stick with that content for an extended period of time, move on to more advanced materials as soon as you get familiar with the basics. It’ll keep you learning and while you will make mistakes, keep yourself motivated as learning a new language is a process of continuing growth, you will be continually getting closer to achieving that goal or dream.

Genki I + Workbook (Second Edition, 2011)

• Amazon + Workbook  
• Amazon Canada + Workbook 
• Amazon Japan + Workbook 

Genki II + Workbook (Second Edition, 2011)

• Amazon + Workbook 
• Amazon Canada + Workbook 
• Amazon Japan + Workbook 

Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar

Reddit

• Learn Japanese 
• Speak Japanese
• Japanese Resources

What about Mobile Apps/Computer Programs?

There are ton of great apps or computer programs that you can use to assist in learning Japanese. However I did not include them here on purpose. I’ll be doing another post about which apps I’m using to help me learn Japanese and sharing some tips of what I found to be both efficient and effective. When starting out Japanese, it’s always good to stick with the basics first, hand write the kana and really grasp the core concepts. I would recommend doing this first before attempting to use mobile applications to help you study. They’re super effective! Although I believe starting out with the basics first will help you use these apps a little later on to augment your studying. So first things first! Get started with the basics and don’t worry too much about the mobile apps or computer programs/software as of yet. I’d say get through at least Genki partially through Genki I before getting into using apps to help you study.

Introduction

If you are new to learning Japanese, you may have noticed a curious element to the language itself. There are no spaces. Of course, if you are familiar with other languages such as Chinese or Burmese the lack of spaces between the words would be nothing new. However, for speakers of languages which do use spaces, such as English, French, German, Spanish, and countless other languages, this appears to be a daunting task. In order to understand why Japanese does not use spaces in writing, it is important to first go back in time and see the origin of the writing system itself.

Back in Time

The Japanese writing system did not consist of Hiragana or Katakana until rather recently (about 800 AD). Japanese speakers did not have a written language, their language was basically a spoken language up until the adoption of the Chinese writing system occurred. Although there are some differing hypotheses as to when the Chinese writing system was adopted, it’s has also been speculated that despite the “adoption” of the Chinese Hanzi, the Japanese remained illiterate for a few hundred years.

How does it play out in writing?

So why is it important to look at these historical details? Well, when investigating the Chinese script itself, we find that it’s not exactly an alphabet. It is more of a logographic system. This means that unlike English for instance, where each character represents a letter and a combination of letters formulate words, Chinese characters are not individual letters, but rather they are expressive of words or phrases. Contrasting that with alphabet based languages such as English, German, Spanish and so forth, this begins to make sense.

English requires spaces in order to be legible. Chinese – and by extension – Japanese does not require spaces in order to be legible. If you were not an English speaker looking at a series of words without spaces will be daunting, even if you are able to read and write the language proficiently, there will be points of confusion without maintaining the spaces. Letters can merge when no cut off points are set (spaces) but in Chinese and Japanese, the use of Hanzi or Kanji allows for this to act as a natural divisor. Lets take a look at some examples

English – Hi, my name is Faisal. How are you doing?

HimynameisFaisalhowareyoudoing?

It’s rather easy to see in this example how in English, the spaces really do help in identifying the words. Despite this example being relatively simple, there are still locations within that sentence which could be mistaken for different words at a glance. Now let’s take a look

Japanese – こんにちは私はファイサルです元気ですか

In our Japanese example, let’s break it up further. The first part is こんにちは This consists of the word and the topic marker particle “wa”. This particle helps distinguish the end of the topic. When “wa” is written as は and NOT わ we know that this indicates the topic.

Now we are clear to move on. 私 is our first kanji. When reaching this kanji, so far we know that the speaker has said hello (good afternoon) and is continuing on with their sentence. This kanji acts as another stop or space if you will, it lets us know that this is a new word. So technically we have two indicators as to the new word here, the kanji itself and the wa particle.

After the kanji, we are greeted with some Katakana. This is also a great break from the sentence and does indicate a new word. My name appears different since it has been modified to fit with the Katakana structure for foreign loan words. The katakana ファイサル indicates that these characters are independent of the previous particle, and therefore should be read as a word.

です is a copula that is relatively common, but to go even further than that, let’s assume the reader of the above sentence does not know that です is a copula. We move on and find our second kanji. So we must stop and take the words in between the Katakana characters and our new Kanji and assume that these two Hiragana characters formulate a word. The fact that it is a copula does help us because we know the meaning of です and therefore we can safely move on (the Kanji character that come next basically act as confirmation of our hypothesis).

元気 is a word which is formulated with two Kanji characters. Let’s assume we do not know what these words mean, we can continue and look forward in the sentence and we see that there is more Hiragana, in fact it’s the same copula we encountered before. Therefore, we can assume that 元気 is our next word. Now assuming that we do know the meaning of these words, we can say that means “well” or “healthy” typically speaking. Also we can look forward and see the copula, now we are clear to move forward and identify the next word in our example sentence.

We come across the です copula and we already know the function of this copula but if we didn’t, we would look forward and see that there is a single Hiragana character of か if we took a look at the dictionary, we would see the definition for just か, and not the Kanji that could be written as か in Hiragana form, is that it indicates a question. So we know it’s the question marker of a sentence. Now interestingly enough, even if ですか is assumed to be a word and a beginner puts that into a dictionary, the end result is still “indicates a question” but the beginner will quickly learn that か by itself is the question marker and です is the copula.

Conclusions

Yes, I’m going to start this off with a disclaimer. This DOES NOT apply in ALL cases. Languages have exceptions to their rules. English probably being the worst offender of them all in fact. These rules generally apply in regular texts. There are some notable exceptions where spaces are used in Japanese. Such is the case with books geared towards young children. They have a limited comprehension of Kanji, and therefore spaces are used within the Hiragana only texts as a means of providing the child with distinct words.

Also, when Kanji is being learned, it is often not learned as a single unit. Associations to other Kanji characters are used. For instance, if I know 曜日as meaning the “day of the week” I can break down that Kanji into its separate components but because the learner already knows that meaning, if they see this exact Kanji sequence in writing (and they will since it’s quite common) they intuitively know that it means day of the week without having to worry about the character before it or after. Of course if we write 月曜日it’s important to look at the Kanji preceding the the “day of the week” portion in order to understand the word, but this comes with practice.

Again, I can not stress this enough, these rules are not hard and fast. There will be exceptions. There are some words which are written with Kanji, Hiragana AND Katakana characters. However, these examples stand out on their own and based on the context of what is being read, generally speaking, having no spaces in Japanese is not as bad as it seems, although it is an element of the language which certain individuals may not be familiar with, but that is all part of the learning experience.

Hiragana and Katakana can be considered to be the basic building blocks of the Japanese language. While Kanji  (Borrowed Chinese characters) does have a huge role in Japanese writing, all of the words that any Kanji character can represent can be shown using Hiragana or Katakana.

What’s the difference?

Hiragana tends to be used for words that are native to Japan (although there are exceptions). Hiragana also tends to be used for words which do not have a kanji character associated with the word, or if the kanji is rare enough the writer may opt to use the hiragana instead.

Katakana is typically used for loan words. Usually it is not used for Chinese loan words (ie. We can use Kanji instead), although sometimes they can be used for that purpose as well. Katakana is also used for onomatopoeia in Manga as well.

How Fast can I learn the Kana?

This largely depends on how much time you have to practice. There are 46 basic hiragana characters, and another 46 for katakana. The good news is you have some similarities with the characters so you aren’t learning 92 characters that are completely different, there is some overlap.

Everyone will vary. Some people can learn the all of the kana and modifiers within a week, others a month or more. It really depends how much time you have to dedicate to the task. Practice is very important as well. A general rule that my university had followed was 1 week for hiragana and 1 week for katakana. In the span of two weeks we were expected to have learned all the Kana including their modifiers (eg. が、ぎ).

So a good time frame to have is learning the kana within 2 weeks. This should be doable with 1 hour of study per day

(This is greatly exaggerating the time needed, we only did 4 hours of study per week at my university, meaning within 8 hours we were expected to learn all of the 92 sounds that the hiragana and katakana would produce).

I can read it, but I can’t write! What should I do?!

Relax, this is something that is inevitable with learning Japanese, and any other language for that matter. Chances are that before you fully learn how to write out the kana, you will be able to recognize them. This is a GOOD thing. This simply means that you are able to remember the kana.

Repetition  is simply the best way to remember how to write the kana. At my university we did it the old-fashioned way, pencil and paper. You might be wondering why I’m not recommending apps like Obenkyo or Anki now, that’s because these apps are wonderful for getting you introduced into the kana and helps you to remember them, but the best way (at least in my opinion) to learn how to write them is simply to keep writing them out. Spending 20-30 minutes a day writing out the characters and testing yourself is a great way of practicing. Before you know it you’ll be able to write all the kana! The sooner you do this the better though, since the kana are seen so frequently in Japanese that as you further your studies, it will become difficult to forget the basic kana.