How I became fluent in Japanese | Kanji

hey guys my name is tokuyu and welcome to my first video [Music] i'm going to do a multi-part video series where i talk about how i became fluent in japanese starting from absolutely nothing as i get asked about this a lot to give you some background i've been studying japanese for about seven years now i took a couple of introductory japanese courses through my university but the majority of my japanese learning has been through self-studying and to further validate me as your new japanese sensei i've also passed the jlpt n1 for those of you who are unfamiliar the jlpt is the japanese language proficiency test which is the official proficiency test recognized by the japanese government it is broken down into five different levels starting from n5 the most basic level all the way up to n1 the most advanced level i'll get into the specifics later but for now just know that n1 is the highest level aka i'm dopa japanese in all honesty though i don't consider myself native level but i do consider myself fluent and i think there are a lot of things that i can share that i wish i knew when i first started studying japanese so let's jump right into it with the most feared aspect of learning japanese [Music] a lot of people despise kanji and for a valid reason there are so many kanji and they look like hieroglyphics and while kanji are harder to learn than an alphabet like in english i don't actually think learning kanji is that bad and drawing them can actually be kind of fun but before i even get into kanji let me first explain that japanese sentences use three different writing systems each writing system has a unique usage and the three that japanese uses are called hiragana katakana and kanji the very first thing you should do if you decide to learn japanese is learn all the hiragana and katakana because they're basically the alphabets of japanese there are 46 letters of hiragana that collectively represent all the sounds in japanese etc hiragana is primarily used to conjugate verbs and form grammar structures katsukana is another 46 letters that represent the exact same sounds in japanese but their usage is primarily for foreign words and onomatopoeias to learn these letters i used a lot of mnemonics to associate the shape of the letter to its sound for example the letter wolf to me looked like someone on a surfboard so i imagined a surfer saying woe if you're strapped for creativity there are plenty of videos on youtube that can help you associate each letter with a particular mnemonic also be aware that these letters have a particular stroke order so be sure to practice lots of writing when you learn them once you memorize hiragana and katakana you can already read a lot of japanese and you can already understand a lot of borrowed words from english such as okay now it's time to move on to the scary part kanji kanji are characters that originate from chinese and represent the nouns verbs adjectives and more there are over 10 000 kanji out there but luckily you only need to know about 2200 it's less of a daunting task if you break it down i like the breakdown that the jlpt uses n5 is the most basic level consisting of only around 80 characters but they're also the most common characters it's actually pretty crazy because japanese newspapers look intimidating but you can already recognize 36 of all characters written just by knowing the 80 most basic kanji this is because the meanings that these characters represent are used to describe so many different things when you add the 166 characters from n4 you'll be able to recognize 62 of all characters written in japanese newspapers in other words almost two-thirds of all written japanese if you add the kanji from n3 you'll be able to recognize 85.5 of all written kanji if you add the n2 kanji then 94.4 percent and finally if you know all 2200 kanji for n1 you'll be able to recognize 100 of all kanji written in newspapers well almost 100 percent it's actually around 99.8 percent but luckily the other point two percent will typically have furigana which is hiragana written above the kanji to show you how to read it as you may have noticed each level has an increasingly greater number of kanji with diminishing returns however a lot of the new characters are just compositions of the old ones you already know i personally like to use the kanji study app to study kanji but you can also use wanikani anki and of course textbooks and kanji books it all comes down to preference when studying a new kanji you should keep in mind the common words that use that kanji as well as the kanji's stroke order and radicals and yes it does matter how you write your characters as you may not think it makes a difference but japanese people can tell just by looking at it [Music] huh radicals are the components that make up a kanji they typically have a specific meaning associated with them but they're not always a standalone kanji on their own and you'll begin to notice that a lot of these radicals keep appearing in different characters i find that building stories from the radicals can help me better remember kanji sometimes it can make a lot of sense all right so the left radical means day and the right one means blue so if the day is blue then it's clear out easy easy and sometimes you're just gonna have to memorize the kanji all right so we got two trees here and between the two trees is the radical for can so that's a two tree can sandwich of course and right below that is the radical for hair yeah okay and beside that is the radical for yeah what the that is when i studied a new kanji i would write down all the relevant words that used that kanji in hiragana and on a separate piece of paper i would repeatedly write down the kanji to review the kanji later i would look at the words that i had written in hiragana and try to draw the kanji from memory if i couldn't then i would repeatedly write the character again consistency in studying is important for example when i started studying the 1200 characters for n1 i set up a schedule of studying 5 new characters every day i would also review the characters from the previous three days of studying this would take me about 30 minutes each day and i continued this for 8 months until i had gone through all the n1 kanji now by no means had i memorized all the characters but it was enough that i could at least recognize a character if i saw it again and when i looked it up i would go oh yeah that's what that means which over time reinforced my knowledge now you can try to learn kanji through immersion by just trying to recognize kanji from seeing them over time but i strongly recommend studying the characters at least once on paper this makes it a lot easier to pick up the characters when you see them japanese immersion is not the simple magic that a lot of people seem to think i've spoken to people who've lived in japan for eight or more years and still cannot read japanese or speak it at an above beginner level but once you have studied the kanji once on paper there's no better way to practice than to read i like to use my kindle to read japanese books because i don't need to order a bunch of books to be shipped from japan and i can look up words by just tapping and holding them there are also easy japanese news apps you can download that are designed to help you learn the language these apps have current news articles written in japanese using a range of difficulties this allows you to select an article that best suits your level and finally to practice reading comprehension for the jlpt exams i use the shinkansen series they have all the kinds of passages you will see on the exam with comprehension questions this allows you to actually test your understanding and practice your time let me tell you a little secret before i passed the n1 exam i actually failed the n2 exam a big part of this was because i was too slow at reading i could recognize most of the kanji but it would take me too long to actually understand the sentences and it didn't help that i did no background research on the exam before going into it which was really stupid now that i think of it so if passing one of the jlpt exams is one of your goals then i strongly recommend you familiarize yourself with the exam format and the types of questions you'll see and be sure to practice lots of reading i sure know i didn't japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn as an english speaker and the character system is a big reason for this but realistically there are only a finite number of kanji and drawing them can actually be kind of fun just remember to be patient learning kanji will feel really tough at first because you probably aren't used to studying characters but over time you will develop study habits and techniques that will make the journey go faster and feel more enjoyable so if you're thinking about learning japanese hopefully this video gave you a better idea of how to study kanji so go out there and start learning those hieroglyphics [Music] hey guys thanks for watching my first youtube video until the very end if you like this video please smash that like button it really helps me out as a small channel and if you have any questions or comments leave them down below i'll try to get to them all but it might be hard to get to all three of you watching this video i'll be doing more japanese language videos like this one as well as life in japan videos since i'll be moving to japan in two months so if that's something you'd like to see then consider subscribing to my channel and becoming part of the tokyo tv crew but for now thanks for watching tokyo tv it's actually pretty crazy because japanese papers look japanese papers you

Channel: TokuyuuTV

Views: 1,346,228

Keywords: Japanese, fluent, language, JLPT, kanji, fluency, best method for language learning, best method to learn a language, how to learn a language, how to learn a language fast, language learning method, language learning methods and approaches, how to learn japanese, study tips

Id: 4CvoPRZsejc

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021