I have always been firmly of the belief that if you’re going to go to another country, you should make an effort to speak that country’s language. So, naturally, before I came to Japan, I started learning Japanese – only to realize that a couple of years of self-study is basically useless in actually navigating even the most basic of conversations with a native speaker.
I feel very fortunate that every single Japanese person I’ve spoken with has been very gracious and appreciative of my paltry attempts to speak Japanese. I hear that this is the attitude in general towards foreigners since Japanese isn’t the most popular foreign language to learn.
My self-study in the beginning consisted mainly of two methods: (1) a Japanese workbook (which was very useful for learning grammar and more polite speech) and (2) translating a Japanese game. The former was a lot of hard work but taught me a lot of valuable things about the language, while the latter was more fun but also more chaotic, since I didn’t have any sort of guide – half the time, I was just throwing out my best guess.
Now that I have more of a solid foundation in grammar and speaking (not to mention daily practice, what with living in Japan!), I feel a bit more comfortable in casual, conversational Japanese. Even so, I still have a lot to learn – both in terms of grammar and vocabulary. The question is, what’s the best way to study?
There are, of course, a lot of different ways to study Japanese. My weaknesses tend to be in listening, which makes a certain amount of sense because most of my study has been through books, one way or the other. My husband mentioned that the best Japanese-speaking foreigners he’s heard have all studied Japanese by watching Japanese dramas and anime. I have to agree that this is an excellent method; every time I’ve really studied anime or Japanese television, I feel like my pronunciation and grammar, in general, has seen improvement.
The real challenge is finding something that not only interests me but my children as well, since I don’t really have much time to myself. It’s much easier to watch something together than to try to watch a program by myself with my children constantly interrupting every five to ten minutes. It’s pretty much impossible to get any meaningful study done that way.
The above is why most of my studying lately has been by watching children’s programming – which is very useful in its own way, since it’s easy to understand, and that is, after all, the way that any native speaker learns their mother tongue: from the bottom up. However, it’s a very slow way to learn, so recently I’ve taken up reading old manga that I really enjoyed when I was younger, but in Japanese. It’s too early to say whether it’ll be effective, but I am learning a bit of new vocabulary if nothing else.
