Learning How to Learn Japanese | Hacker News Reader

Learning How to Learn Japanese

zachdaniel.dev

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I wish that people referring to Japanese as "the most difficult language to learn..." could add the important caveat "...among major global languages". There are thousands of languages spoken on Earth, and some of them involve complexities that would daunt speakers of English or other Standard Average European languages more than Japanese. As just two examples, I remain daunted by the morphology of Skolt Saami and Nganasan, and Japanese’s inflexion looks easy by comparison.

I am learning Japanese now, actually, and the hardest part is the writing system, but that is really just a matter of rote memorization. (I already learned Chinese years ago, mastering the kanji is just repeating the same process of flashcards, except with the need to learn two readings for most characters and not just one.) Rote memorization of glyphs is something open to anyone with adequate time, but matters of phonology/morphology/syntax might ultimately defeat a learner regardless of how much time they throw at the problem.

Yeah, I actually find a lot of the grammatical rules to be pretty straightforward and generally there aren’t many weird exceptions. Distinguishing sounds is pretty easy too, unlike Mandarin for example. The levels of formality are tricky at first but you quickly adapt to it, and they also follow well defined rules. A lot of the odd pronunciations of words like you mention are generally things you can just memorize blindly. Cultural aspects and sensitivity can be very tough, but I think that’s true for any foreign culture. Time intensive? Sure, but most difficult? I don’t think so, but I think that depends on what you mean by difficult and what your goal is. If your goal is to masquerade as a pseudo-native speaker and be fully literate, then yeah, I could see it. But if it’s just to be conversant, it’s not that bad.

echoing this, getting to a "everyday discussions doable" level for the spoken language is a relatively quick affair. There are very few sounds in the language, and the hardest thing for native-english speakers is perhaps the double-vowel timing and like trying to decipher loan words/overwrite the "original pronunciation"

The writing system is hard, but learning it helps complement your vocabulary in the same way that learning greek and latin prefixes/suffixes expands your english vocabulary.

Not even to get into the fact that, as a high context language, you can get away with extremely simple sentences and rely on context way more than in other languages.

Having studied both Mandarin and Japanese, not to mention Latin, Spanish, French and English, plus looked into myriad other European languages...

Mandarin is an order of magnitude harder than Japanese. Japanese is easy to speak and hear. It has two phonetic alphabets, and fewer pictograms in its Kanji than Mandarin. It has a highly regular grammar. So much easier than Mandarin. Just my 2c.

I agree with your opinion that the reputation of Japanese being hard is mainly due to its arcane writing system, and sorting Japanese writing is practically an unsolved problem [1].

Compare this to Korean where you can learn the writing system in a single day [2].

[1] http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/13/sorting-in-ja...

[2] https://www.meridianlinguistics.com/news/learn-to-read-korea...

I don’t fully agree with the trope of learning the writing system in one day kinda false.

I mean you can learn to map it to alphabet in one day, but unless you can grasp the subtleties of the pronunciation of the similar sounding vowels and consonants have you really learned what the characters represent?

Are you trying to create a strawman? How do you learn characters without their pronunciation? There is nothing else to learn other than that. If you know the "alphabet" equivalent then you can pronunciate words written in that alphabet. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There is one exception which is Japanese where many characters merely have a meaning associated to them which need to be combined to form words. Sure, you do have to blindly memorize that but often the kanji on its own doesn't have one pronunciation, it has many and therefore it doesn't make sense to memorize all of them. Instead you just have to associate the pronunciation of the entire word with a given combination of Japanese characters.

In my experience, I have found learning Korean more difficult than Chinese/Japanese. I've lived and studied in China to provide some background. My difficulty in Korean stems from the nuance of how the characters interact with each other in terms of pronunciation and grammar. Still interesting nonetheless, each person holds their own perspective on how challenging a language can be to learn.

> Compare this to Korean where you can learn the writing system in a single day

I really, REALLY wish people would stop saying this about Korean. Sure, there's a couple of dozen letters and you can learn their individual default pronunciations in a single day, I'm not doubting that.

But that literally doesn't get you even close to being able to correctly pronounce many common words, because, guess what, when these letters are together in a word they influence each other in different ways and their pronunciation changes or they may not even get pronounced at all.

There is a reason why all these "learn hangul in 1 hour" web pages/videos never mention the existence of four-letter syllables. ;)

Learning Japanese phonentic alphabet(s) on the other hand, really can be done in one day and they are consistent and phonetic and there's no weirdness in pronunciation, but of course then you have to deal with thousands of kanji too. So I guess from that perspective, Korean really is easier, but learning to correctly pronounce the sounds and words in Korean is in my opinion much harder than in Japanese.

You either really missed out on something when learning Chinese or you are in for a realization in Japanese. (Probably you just simplified your explanation)

The problem with Japanese kanji vs Chinese Hanzi is not just that Japanese has two (or more) common readings for every character, it’s that they don’t follow the phonetic element to nearly the same degree as Chinese.

In Chinese you really do have a fighting Chinese of reading a word out loud that contains never by you seen before characters.

In Japanese you will regularly come across names consisting only of known to you characters and you will still have no chance of knowing how to read them out loud.

But I totally agree with your main point: Japanese is not as difficult as it’s reputation will lead would be learners to believe but it does have some road blocks (mainly the writing system) that will stand in the learners way.

> In Chinese you really do have a fighting Chinese of reading a word out loud that contains never by you seen before characters.

Not really. Sometimes you can guess the root without the tone, but you won’t get the tone itself, and so you can’t really claim to recognize the word. Tones are not optional in Chinese.

I absolutely found Mandarin more difficult than Japanese - mostly due to pronunciation and tones.

The consistency in phonems in mandarin probably makes it a bit less demanding than Japanese, but I find that difference marginal on the whole.

(Studied Japanese 1y+, Mandarin 6 months)

I'm taking the mostly immersion approach to language learning. I just watch hours of Japanese gaming youtubers and whenever a word starts to stand out, I look it up if it wasn't obvious from the context. I estimate that I learn a new word every 2 hours of content

I looked into traditional methods, I also know about Antimoon, AJATT, MIA, RTK, WaniKani, Anki/SRS, etc. But I'm too low in conscientiousness to stick to a plan, and I burn out on SRS and mnemonics after about 500 cards, even with reasonably low card rates. The mnemonics become a frustrating scramble of meaning in my head.

Just last night I learned the words for mirror and crime with almost no effort and I still remember them today. That's two words learned, both only encountered once, in context. I even have the image in my head of one of the in game mirrors. That kind of "fast mapping" just doesn't occur any other way (that I can find). I've also picked up plenty of written Japanese, including kanji, from menu screens, subtitles, etc.

You're doing precisely the correct thing to learn a language the right way: Stephen Krashen is an expert on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBuQ61lSIBI He rambles on about dementia and reading ant the start but i think he explains Comprehensible Input here. http://sdkrashen.com/

My experience is that this takes an absurd amount of time to learn anything. Sure you can probably learn Japanese in one year by staying in Japan but only because you have effectively spent 5000 hours doing nothing but Japanese. My learning efforts haven't even scratched 10% of that yet I am much further along the journey than 10%. My own estimate would be that I'm 50% the way to fluency.

If it works for you then fine, but it doesn't work for me.

Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper, and for that kind of challenge this stack seems OK so long as they index much harder on the NHK Easy News after getting a basic level of kanji and grammar knowledge (they already claim to know 1000 so they should be fine).

But if the author wants to have any chance of understanding spoken Japanese or speaking, this will never get the author there - much better off watching and listening to as much Japanese material as possible. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in it, the Mass Immersion Approach [1] gives a good overview of how one can reach a good level of fluency relatively quickly without being in Japan.

[1] https://massimmersionapproach.com/

I leaned towards MIA at first when starting to study Japanese, but couldn't bring myself to work through it because I wouldn't have had the motivation to listen to Japanese content for hundreds of hours without understanding a whole lot of it. By contrast, WaniKani and BunPro are incredibly rewarding because you quickly know enough characters and basic grammar rules to be able to understand simple sentences and even form them with some effort. It's one of the few occasions that I"ve seen gamification applied to further the interest of the user instead of just the platform operator.

I do agree that immersion is important in reaching fluency, but I've decided for myself to build up a bigger foundation of kanji, vocabs and grammar than what MIA prescribes, so that the immersion will be more enjoyable.

> Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper

Newspapers? How boring. I would want to be able to read the text in video games and manga!

On a semi-related note, I heard of someone who learned English largely by playing Final Fantasy 7 with a dictionary in hand. [Also learned practical bonus vocabulary like "mako energy" and "materia" I assume. ;-) ]

So being able to read a newspaper will enable you to chat with people whom you're not super close to.

Reading and understanding video games & manga is more challenging in that the way the people speak in these situations is much more informal, i.e. lots of slang.

You won't be able to get to the latter without spending some time on the former because the grammatical structures in idiomatic Japanese are full of contractions that arise from the spoken language.

Just as an aside, if you actually spoke like a manga/game character, you'd definitely raise some eyebrows. Probably not in a good way ;)

Though not verbally, as verbal communication is a separate skill altogether from reading comprehension, especially for a language like Japanese that uses Chinese characters. Your bang for the buck in terms of verbal progress will be very low with the approach the author describes.

> Newspapers? How boring.

I think that's a matter of interest. I personally like reading the newspaper but I am more of a fan of online news than newspapers, my personal favorite being: https://news.tv-asahi.co.jp/

I started learning Japanese four months ago and slowly converged on the same toolbox as the one in TFA. My only gripe is that SRS works much better for kanji and vocabulary than for grammar. Learning one kanji has a much more stable difficulty than learning one grammar rule, so it's much easier to set a goal of "learn X kanji per day" than "learn X grammar rules per day". At some point, I'll have to force myself to take a break from kanji and vocab lessons to work on grammar for a while.

EDIT: I should add that this method is not the "One True Way". Different people learn in different ways. If you want to see a radically different approach to learn Japanese, check out https://massimmersionapproach.com/

Apparently there’s ‘some’ recent drama going on at massimmersionapproach.

The thing I wish I had known originally is that Japanese talk shows are probably the best source of "normal spoken Japanese" out there. Definitely better than youtubers (TV people speak with better enunciation and less weird net slang), and 100x better than any anime.

On top of that the shows tend to have a lot of text on screen to emphasize points etc, and will cover really easy to understand topics.

It might be boring/low brow, but you'll absorb a lot more in shorter amounts of time IMO. And like... who wants to read the news?

I enjoy watching terrace house, and I think that is much closer to real life conversation I’ve had than any anime or variety show. I also feel that many dramas are pretty down to earth in how characters speak.

Anime is by far the most over the top, but I do find variety to also be over the top. Or maybe I’ve only been looking at the comedy ones.

Do you have any recommendations?

Can't imagine why one would want to learn real japanese instead of anime japanese.

On the off-chance you aren't just being ironic: what a horrifying lack of imagination!

I started learning again last week. This is now attempt #3 to learn Japanese for me and this time I'm coming at it differently to before. I tried using WaniKani in the past, and although it was good it wasn't quite what I needed.

This time around I'm instead primarily using Anki, and I have 4 main decks. A hiragana/katakana deck, a WaniKani kanji deck, a KanjiDamage deck, and a custom deck for anything else I want to learn. I work through the first three decks each day, but I'm not great at learning through memorisation, so instead the third deck is where I put things I actually want to learn; useful phrases, text from manga that I didn't know, poetry, and regional dialect words. I've bought a moderate amount of Japanese-language manga (CDJapan ships internationally, and buyee.jp is great), and I'm trying to acquire more poetry books (send me recommendations if you have them!)

Ultimately this means I'm learning lots of fairly obscure stuff early on (like how nakagama is a billhook) but as that's what I'm interested in it's far more likely to hold my attention. And my short-term goal is to be able to write in the various Japanese poetry forms.

Kanji is still immensely frustrating to learn, no matter the techniques used. I am ultimately resigned to learning it though; in my lifetime I must learn a second language, and Japanese is one of the few that has ever held my interest.

That's interesting. For me, it's the exact opposite way. Kanji are actually the easiest thing for me. Does the WK deck or the KanjiDamage deck include mnemonics? If not, I highly highly highly recommend you get something with mnemonics. If not WK or KD, then get yourself the RTK book (Remembering the Kanji) and study with it. There are Anki decks with Kanji in RTK order, too.

It does actually have mnemonics! However they're mostly for remembering the onyomi/kunyomi rather than how to remember how to draw the kanji, which is something the hiragana/katakana decks have (they use the mnemonics from https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/). And I mostly remember the onyomi/kunyomi better by working through sentences that use that kanji I must admit.

I do quite like the KanjiDamage method so far, in that it teaches you lots of kanji that use the same radicals early on, even if they're obscure kanji. If I find I'm getting stuck on one repeatedly I just mute it if it's an obscure one rather than getting caught up on it.

I'll probably start on a RTK deck too because I'm not finding the numbers of cards overwhelming yet. And I have bought a book and pen for learning to write them out, as I figure that will help a lot too :D

I'm using 2 Anki decks to learn Japanese: one was something named "COREplus" with keys in kana and the answers showing kanji and definition of the word. I figured it would be useful to pick out words from their pronounciation alone, despite the amount of homophones. The second deck I generated myself [1], it includes kanji and words containing kanji, and also statistics on how often each pronounciation of kanji is encountered. Finishing this deck allows you to read quite a lot of things (although it doesn't cover words containing non-Joyo kanji).

Now when I wanted to take an JLPT exam, I realized that my listening skills are awful, and my grammar skills aren't very good either. I started watching grammar lessons on Youtube in Japanese, as well as random videos in Japanese (mostly about trains/traveling). In the end I just barely passed listening (JLPT N2) but my grammar skills were really good.

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744

I actually just started learning Japanese in my free time a few nights ago. (No particular reason aside from that it seemed like fun.)

I've got nothing really to add here, except that I've been using LingoDeer (another app in the same category as Duolingo) based on recommendations in /r/LearnJapanese, which if nothing else has made the process feel less like schoolwork and more like a game.

Hiragana and katakana weren't hard to pick up at all — I can read and type them comfortably now without too much latency — and I'm 62.5% through the intro course that LingoDeer claims to be N5-equivalent. Picking up enough kanji for this to become a useful skill does seem a bit daunting, but as others have said, rote memorization is only a matter of time and consistency.

I’ve been learning Japanese on my own for 6 years, no teachers. In the beginning I used iknow.jp which worked very well for a little more than basic kanji and vocabulary. From there I moved to Japan and messed up my study of kanji. On second year living here I started with RTK and I wish I had done that earlier. Even though I procrastinated a lot, that book has been most successful with my retention.

Now that I’m learning Korean also as a beginner I googled sentence mining and downloaded Korean deck which after 2 months of using seems to work well and now I’m at the point where I will start study of basic grammar once a week to support the anki study

Two fundamental aspects of learning a language largely missing from the article. Speaking and listening.

Arguably more important the reading and writing is correctly pronouncing words in a language and being able to identify what's being said.

Worth to https://archive.vn/pjW8G

By reading this article, am I learning how to learn how to learn Japanese? So meta. :D

That's a beautiful website. Definitely bookmarking this one

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