LEARNING JAPANESE: 9 Tips for Success

when I came to Japan about two years ago I brought two things with me dreams and teabags and whilst the number of teabags declined gradually throughout the following weeks and months through relentless consumption the dreams met their demise far more rapidly and far more aggressively Mazin was I was just completely disillusioned with learning Japanese I've never learned the language before before coming to Japan and I just assumed I would magically pick it up in a month or two and I've been magically wonderful and just magical even more it didn't happen the thing that gave me hope was people I met along the way who had done it before me who gave me advice and my own discoveries that I made through the process of self-study and today I want to give the advice and knowledge and things I've acquired along the way in the last two years and give it to you with the hope that you get off to a better start than I did and finally some of you might be wondering why this video is 9 tips to learning Japanese as opposed to 10 tips which is far more aesthetically pleasing and the answer is I just get excited about number 9 well that and it's the number of kilograms of chocolate I eat on a daily basis to overcome the stress of learning 2,200 kanji characters and how to read them honestly it's like a willy wonka reduced [ __ ] nightmare learning a language like Japanese is difficult and it does take a lot of time and for that reason many people give up early on or just don't even stop altogether in my own case I pretty much gave up learning Japanese about a month in after I just kept failing to remember things no matter how hard I tried I couldn't remember the vocabulary the phrases the characters and then I realized that the main problem I was facing was the same problem that plagued me for the last twenty years and it was my memory I didn't know how to use it I've never used it properly or intensely on this scale before so I took a month off from studying Japanese and I bought half a dozen books on memory and I spent about a month just learning about how my memory works why I've been failing for the past 20 years and most importantly how to use it and how to prepare it for learning Japanese and seeing the genuine massive improvement in my memory across that month-long period was extremely motivating and really got me through those first few months of learning Japanese which to my mind are the toughest try and diagnose your weak points maybe it's your memory maybe it's your confidence maybe it's your motivation overcome them and then dive back into learning Japanese because if you get off to a bad start early on then you'll just be due motivated they'll just give up and you won't want to learn anymore if you're really serious about learning Japanese start learning the kanji early on as soon as you've got hiragana and katakana out the way which takes a matter of weeks to do the reason is the sooner you become accustomed to the kanji as soon you get them into your head the sooner you feel comfortable reading and writing Japanese not being able to read the kanji is really difficult and frustrating particularly if you don't know what they mean or how to write them because then you can't look them up on your phone and see what it actually means perhaps most important it's like a jigsaw FX you'll learn a new word and then you'll learn B kanji they'll come together quite naturally and it'll all just come together and you'll start being able to read quite quickly another piece of advice is then the kanji separately from their readings and quickly work your way through as many plans as you can get them into your head because as long as you understand the meaning that takes care of a lot problems and you can understand how to write them you can look them up on your phone when you encounter them in your daily life I talked about it in a previous video called remembering the kanji and it's based on a book by someone called James hey sig and it's a very popular method and I encourage you to go and have a look at it but in short learn the kanji early on and learning separately for the vocabulary laughter you start memorizing them you start seeing them about and you can suddenly ascribe meaning to them in your daily life it becomes quite motivating it becomes quite exciting but like the vocabulary you will start to forget them quite quickly if you don't revise them or don't review them and especially if you're living outside Japan this could be a big problem I hate forgetting things it's basically the equivalent of just throwing away time and time is the second most important resource we have after pictures of silly animals but there's genuinely a way or a tool that stops you from forgetting things and it's called a SRS tool spaced repetition system tool and again I talked about in a previous video basically you input the information you're learning throughout the week on a daily basis and then a later date the information will pop up again on your smart phone or laptop or whatever you're using and you can revise and review the information so you don't forget it over a sustained period of time but to learn Japanese you need to know thousands of words and thousands of characters and if you're not using them on a daily basis after you've learned them then you will just forget them and using an SRS tool solves that problem because you'll be revising reviewing the information so regularly but it stays in your head if you have a smartphone you can have it on you all day and when you've got a bit of free time you can pull it out and just start revising and reviewing the information everyone I know who is learning Japanese or has learned Japanese has used a space repetition system tool to get there my personal favorite is an app called Anki there are others I use Anki because that's where boy else was using when I turned up here but there are plenty of other ones for example there's a new one that called memorize which is pretty good but either way if you don't use one it will be pretty difficult to learn Japanese it will take a lot longer and you're missing out on the fast track to memorizing lots of information the most popular old-fashioned way of learning something is by rote learning where you repeatedly write something out again and again until it sticks until it's stuck in your head unfortunately while stroke learning does actually work it's very slow very tedious and it is worse than this 91 yen hot dog I bought earlier this afternoon which on closer inspection after buying it looks absolutely disgusting I regret buying it but by using our creative imaginations and demonics were able to memorize information a lot more easily and a lot more effectively and one of the most popular methods is the link method so for example I might use the link method to learn some vocabulary or a new character and the aim of the link methods to find a link between the words you're learning and a word or a sound or something from your own language for example Japanese word for like is ski in this case you can say I like to ski I like to ski and create that image that link between skiing and something you like doing or for the Japanese word for suburbs which is cool guy that cool guy lives in the suburbs that poor guy that cool guy lives in the suburbs it does work it really does work and drawing out also helps as well and memorize the website I mentioned earlier uses this concept and users can actually create their own memes and share them with other people and it makes the whole process of learning vocabulary quite simple and in some cases even quite fun motion is probably the most overused word I find when it comes to language learning and it was the reason that I assumed I would pick up Japanese just by being immersed in Japanese culture but magically just happen and obviously if you live in Japan then you're a big advantage because you've got television lots of cheap manga comic books everyday conversation but if you don't live in Japan there's still plenty of tools at your disposal for example Wikipedia Wikipedia section there's plenty of Japanese has some great anime on YouTube the most important level when you do read or hear a new word look it up and learn it and then input it into your SRS system because that way you won't forget it and you'll be able to rapidly progress and if you look up something as soon as you've learnt it from personal experience I tend to find I remember it better because I have the context the context around it and focus on inputting Japanese not outputting too early on if you start out putting loads of Japanese early on you'll be making lots of mistakes it won't be natural Japanese it makes me really angry the people always say oh start using your Japanese early on start now use it now go and make an idiot for yourself now god it makes me angry so as soon as you've learned some new grammar also vocabulary you should really try and use it as quickly as possible I guess a fairly obvious thing here is to find a native Japanese speaking product and I made the mistake of not really having many in my first year admittedly I was too busy focused reading out of book I'm actually practicing with actual Japanese people but if you live in Japan it should be difficult to find a good speaking partner if you live outside Japan granted it is more difficult but thanks to computers in the internet it's becoming more popular people to do video chat shouldn't be too difficult to find a Japanese speaker on skype or online who is willing to exchange Japanese with you perhaps you can exchange your own language with them but once you've used what you've learned you'll become more confident using it and it lends to your long-term subconscious memory and it will be like a magic Japan is still very much paper-based society they use this thing called a fax machine but the reason paper and writing and drawing is essential is because because there is so many characters to learn is quite easy to forget them and especially if you're a new learner to Japanese if you don't keep writing out the characters bit hitogata katakana or kanji you will forget them quite quickly for example I've already forgotten how to write many cutta cutta characters hiragana okay even kanji okay but katakana I haven't practiced recently I've forgotten I'm good at to learn them again but if you are able to write out the characters then you're definitely able to read them reading them becomes really easy so write out the characters grow accustomed to writing them and enjoy writing them but I spend about an hour every day writing out kanji characters a to remember them and B because it's actually quite fun and quite therapeutic learning a language shouldn't be about passing tests or exams but if you do aim to take the jlpt Japanese language proficiency test be it level 111 5 you'll have thousands of words you'll need to learn add thousands of characters you'll need to learn to get there if you set a target for aiming for the jlpt test then you have a tangible target to actually aim for and it will motivate you to set aside the time during the day to learn 20 new words or 20 new characters during the day as well in my own case I may need to take the n2 test later this year December and I've still got a long way to go I might even fail probably will fail but along the way I've learned thousands of words thousands of characters that are used in everyday conversation everyday life in Japan anyway regardless of if you pass or fail you'll still have loads of words to characters and be able to appreciate Japanese literature or Japanese TV and film and most importantly be able to speak to Japanese people as well so I hope you've learned something in the last 9 or 10 minutes from this video please feel free to 303 please feel free [ __ ] you now please feel free to send me your questions and please follow on Twitter and Facebook as there'll be some articles coming out in the coming weeks and it's the best way to notify you about them have a great day eat this Performa now the best thing about or not oh finished yeah come in here come on look at this I finished a whole nother book it's pretty cool oh oh yeah I live alone and most importantly able be able to respond to Japanese in a quick and effective mother bumble hunt oh he's your bastard schmuck Bernardo Matt that's already got it

Channel: Abroad in Japan

Views: 700,728

Rating: 4.9806938 out of 5

Keywords: learning japanese, japanese, japan, learning, studying, tokyo, funny, abroad, Students, Student, Japanese Language (Interest)

Id: GfCc00zmPZI

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 22 2014