How to Learn Japanese

[Music] hey guys it's yuta so if you want to know how to learn japanese you've come to the right place because i will show you three simple steps to learn japanese so we're gonna start with step one the alphabet and pronunciation we have three types of scripts in japanese hiragana katakana and kanji and line stickers we can say hiragana and katakana are japanese alphabets because kanji literally means hand letters as in han chinese now you could technically write japanese using the latin alphabet which we call lomaji but we don't use it for daily communication and honestly it's such a hassle for us to read it so unless you want to talk to japanese people purely in line stickers which by the way is entirely possible you need to learn hiragana and katakana they are pretty straightforward because most of the time because there's always exceptions one letter represents one sound so it goes and that's it easy peasy japanesey you can actually write japanese entirely in kana because they cover all the sounds this means you can also learn pronunciation as you learn khana it will really pay off to pay attention to the pronunciation in the beginning because it's going to be very hard to change your accent once you get used to it just imagine how hard it's going to be if you have to completely change your accent in english but you probably don't want to spend 3 months just to perfect your japanese accent so i recommend focusing on sounds that matter for example some american english speakers have trouble telling the difference between a and o in english books and backs are the same word they're just different accents but in japanese a and o are completely different kawaii means cute kauai means scary i've heard the story when somebody tried to say kawaii cute to a girl but ended up saying kawaii scary such a nice compliment so you don't want to mix up these words this was a difference not just in terms of vowels but also length and pitch patterns kawaii has four boras and low high high low pitch pattern hawaii has three moras and low high low pitch pattern they are pretty different so spending time to learn these differences would make a lot of difference on the other hand japanese is not very strict about the r sound the japanese r is softer than the english l or the spanish r and it's very different from the english r however they all kind of sound the same to many japanese people i'm pretty sure most japanese people have trouble telling the difference between la ra la and ra many japanese people can't tell the difference between light and right so the chances are even if your r is a little softer or little harder than the proper japanese are they can't even tell the difference so if you have a limited amount of time which everybody does it makes more sense to focus on things that are semantically different such as r and o of course if you really care about your r and want to perfect it there's nothing wrong with it so that's pronunciation and you might be wondering what about kanji you can learn little by little there's many ways of learning kanji that work for different people so maybe i will discuss these on different occasions now we can move on to step two basic grammar and vocabulary this is what most people think of when they think about learning japanese some people go to language schools some people use textbooks and apps and some people use learning japanese as an excuse to watch a lot of anime what resources you use doesn't matter as much as actually using these resources and learn but if you want to learn japanese with me i will teach you the kind of japanese that real life japanese people today actually speak which can be different from the kind of japanese that textbooks and apps teach you because they can be unnatural and outdated so click the link in the description and subscribe fortunately basic japanese grammar can be quite simple for example we have this word musukashi which means difficult if you're learning japanese and you think it's difficult you can say musakashi but what if you think it's not that difficult well musukashi is a type of word called e adjective and with this type of adjective you can replace e with kunai to make a negative form so muzukashi becomes muzuka kunai now you know what to say if you think japanese is not difficult pretty easy right or should i say muzuka now compare that to basic english grammar do you know how many irregular verbs english has it has about 200. what's the past tense of the word work well it's a regular verb so it's worked what's the past stands of right is it write it no it's wrote and what's the past tense of hit is it hit it no it's still hit why english people why we have to memorize these irregular verbs in school but do you know how many regular verbs we have in japanese do we have a hundred do we have two hundred no we only have two of course japanese has its own quirks but overall basic grammar is fairly regular so you just have to remember a bunch of these patterns and you can move on to step three getting a lot of input after doing step 2 you can speak some basic japanese you can go to a restaurant and order food you can talk about what you did yesterday and you can definitely make japanese people say but you probably struggle with making sentences fast and think is it or is it your japanese is still not good enough to discuss complex philosophical topics like why your waifu is better than other people's waiku or to articulate your nuanced thoughts on how you are superior to all those weebs because you're not into anime so what do you have to do many people think that if they continue doing step 2 studying textbooks and taking classes they're going to be fluent but that's not how it works instead you need to get a lot of input you can use anything for this you can watch netflix youtube videos you can listen to the radio you can read manga books or you can even watch anime just like how i watch anime for research purposes just be sure you're not reading english subtitles you need to understand japanese directly without translation but japanese captions are great because they can actually improve your listening skills netflix has tv shows an animal with japanese captions so you should definitely give it a try the most important thing here is whatever resource you use you need to understand enough to enjoy them you don't have to understand everything but you need to understand enough this is called comprehensible input let me demonstrate this i'm going to read this listen to this song if you don't speak a lot of japanese how much japanese you just learned from this probably not much and if i continue reading how much japanese you think you will learn probably not much either now let me try something else ningo taberu to eat so i'm asking you if you want to eat this apple tamagota now even if you don't know the word tamago you could probably guess even if you didn't understand 100 you could guess some words so if you keep listening to something you can understand a little bit you will learn new things and that's why it's important to use resources that you understand just enough and that's also why you won't be become magically fluent just by moving to japan unless you already know enough japanese to understand conversations between japanese people and that's the reason why we did step two did you know adults can learn languages faster than kids it's because they can use their first language to understand a lot of concepts pretty fast how long do you think it takes for kids to understand a phrase like i might choose an ambiguous abstract argument it's not going to be easy for little kids to understand these words you can understand this instantly if i explain i may means ambiguous chi sho teki means abstract girom means argument so basic grammar and vocabulary is kind of a shortcut to learn a language they're not enough to be proficient but they accelerate your learning and the next question is how much input do you need it really depends on your goals but a good number seems to be about a thousand hours for average english speakers do you think a thousand hours is a lot well when i started learning english seriously i also came across this number and it did seem a lot at the time i didn't speak enough english to understand books and tv shows so spending a thousand hours consuming english sounded like a chore but when i actually went ahead and started getting a lot of input i realized that it wasn't nearly as hard as i thought sure it was hard in the beginning but once i started to understand books and tv shows to just enjoy them consuming them for hours became really easy so don't be discouraged if you feel it's a little hard in the beginning just try finding something you can understand even if it's a little bit and keep doing you're gonna get there so now you've spent a thousand hours getting comprehensible input and you feel comfortable communicating in japanese if you think your japanese is good enough for what you want to do and move on that can be a practical choice but if you attempted to go online and start criticizing other people's japanese not so fast at this level even though you can communicate with japanese people you're making a lot of mistakes without realizing it's very easy to be overconfident once you get to this level and i'm certainly not unfamiliar with this situation there was a time when i was thinking my english was amazing but looking back it really wasn't confidence is great but self-awareness is also important so it's time for you to unlock the hidden step brushing up your japanese this is where you have to pay attention to the nuances that you might have been missing and this step can be quite rewarding because these nuances are some of the most interesting parts of the japanese language for example so they are [Music] all of them they all mean something like that's right but they have different nuances a lot of people who speak japanese reasonably well use these particles incorrectly and sound a little strange which by the way is fine on the practical level because we can understand them most of the time from the context but if you want to be really good at speaking japanese these are some of the things that you can work on so these are the steps of learning japanese and honestly knowing how to learn japanese is not the difficult part the difficult part is actually doing it so if you want to learn japanese with me i will teach you the kind of japanese the real-life japanese people today actually speak which can be different from the kind of japanese that textbooks and apps teach you because they can be unnatural and outdated so click the link and subscribe to my email group japanese with utah all right see you guys soon ciao

Channel: That Japanese Man Yuta

Views: 1,232,927

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Id: caQQRs-hDf0

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021