On learning Japanese in my thirties and how it's been going

My first brush with the Japanese language was none other than…

Yes, it was Naruto when I was in my early teens.

I mean, there was Digimon and Pokemon airing on national television in Singapore when I was even younger, but they were dubbed in mandarin and english respectively. At that age, I honestly believed the originals were in mandarin and english.

Then came the age of torrents and file-sharing which gave me access to watch actual anime coming out from Japan. A friend passed me a burned CD-R with the first episode of Naruto and the rest was history.

Well it’s been almost two decades since, and I finally decided to take up the Japanese language as a form of knowledge pursuit. Main reason? I had my first-ever Japan trip planned and I wanted to be able to converse with locals.

I remember learning Spanish only after visiting Spain because I loved Spain and I regretted not knowing Spanish before I visited Spain. I had a hunch I’d love Japan given my main entertainment in recent years has been anime, and I didn’t want to regret not learning the language before I visited.

Learning goals

Frankly my only goal was to be able to travel Japan with ease. I’ve studied enough languages to know that a few months wouldn’t get me up to a point where I could talk with a local and not get responded to in English (it turned out to be true).

But there were other nice things that would happen as a side-effect.

For the longest time, I’ve listened to Japanese popular music. There’s something unique about their sound that draws me to it. Also, it serves as nice background music since I don’t understand the language and what else is a voice other than yet another instrument if you don’t understand what they’re singing?

Sometimes, I’d google about the lyrics to see what a particularly-nice song was about, and… I’d always be disappointed by the broken-English translations. Yet, in forums, people spoke about how beautiful and poetic the songs were and how an understanding of Japanese was needed to grasp the nuances that made the lyrics beautiful.

Another goal for me was born. It was to be able to understand these nuances in Japanese lyrics.

Then there’s that whole thing about being a casual weeb anime watcher. It’s always an inconvenience when I have to leave the screen for a bit and need to pause even though the scene doesn’t contain any action.

Well, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to not have to pause and be able to understand the ongoing conversation while I take a piss?

I had my last goal. So…

1. Survive in Japan

2. Understand Japanese songs

3. Watch anime without subtitles

And I opened Duolingo for the first time in years (I coudn’t remember it but apparently I had joined in 2019 — probably Spanish).

How I’ve been learning

I wasn’t willing to take up IRL Japanese lessons.

The pace of language lessons are generally slow (not without reason, I know) and I wanted to cram as much as possible within four months before my trip to Japan. IRL language classes was not an option.

Duolingo

My primary method of instruction turned out to be Duolingo; which isn’t great if I’m being honest, but it’s sufficient to get exposure to concepts.

IMO the one thing Duolingo did right in their Japanese course was forcing me to memorise the hiragana and katakana (Japanese alphabet systems) character sits once I hit section 2 (out of 5, which should be a JLPT N5++ level).

Memorising the alphabet system helped me a lot in Japan where majority of kanji (the Chinese symbols writing system) found in public/touristy places had furigana (subtitles using hiragana/katakana). Knowing how words were pronounced also meant I could search for them in a dictionary, accelerating my learning.

The part that Duolingo doesn’t do so well in is explanation of concepts. For the most part, you won’t truly understand what they’re trying to teach unless you google the concepts for yourself. For example, there’ll be a section named “Past tense” and you’ll be exposed to sentences that use the past tense, but there’s no lesson on the relevant conjugations that change a word’s meaning to it’s past tense.

Regardless, it was good enough for familiarising myself with the language. After a certain unit where you’re at least aware of the Japanese alphabet systems, Duolingo stops showing you the romanji (the English pronunciations), and that’s where the learning really starts.

A trip to Japan

You’ve probably heard of the “immersion method” when it comes to learning languages.

I thought it was bull, but turns out, being in Japan was actually a huge accelerator in my learning. Turns out (surprise surprise) Japanese is everywhere in Japan. This meant I had so many reference materials to decipher on-the-go. Road signs could be read, so were warning signs, so were handwritten menus at izakayas, and description plagues in museums et cetera.

Then there’s the fact that (again, surprise surprise) Japanese people speak Japanese. Frankly nothing prepared me for how quickly they actually spoke. Duolingo’s listening exercises are like 0.2x speed compared to actual Japanese’s speech.

But that helped. A lot. It was confusing initially but after hearing commonly used phrases a number of times, the pronunciation became clear and with a knowledge of hiragana and katakana, it became easy to figure out what they were saying. Eventually. Like near the end of my trip.

After my trip to Japan, I noticed that my reading was a lot faster — which isn’t saying a lot tbh — and some commonly strung together phrases/particles became natural to vocalise (eg. ます, でした, ございます). Commonly seen words like 居酒屋 (izakaya), 焼肉 (yakiniku), とんかつ (tonkatsu), and ラーメン (ramen) became instantly recognisable.

Singing Japanese songs

Before taking up Japanese as a knowledge pursuit, Japanese songs were just nice and lively background music for me.

Turns out, they’re also a really nice way to learn the vocalisation patterns of the Japanese language. After attempting to learn 3-4 languages, one of the main learning difficulties I found I had was reproducing language-specific sounds. For example the “r” in both Bahasa Indonesia and Spanish is heavily emphasised, there’s even an “rr” tongue-roll in Spanish, and the unique “th"/”ç” sound in Spanish.

Japanese was quite close to Bahasa Indo and Spanish given the heavily vowel-ed phonetics, and the difficult for me mainly came from sequences of alphabets and how they sounded. For example, it’s rare to have consecutive syllables starting with “r” in a sentence in English, but in Japanese there’s conjugations like ーいられる (-i-ra-re-ru) used in たべられる (ta-be-ra-re-ru).

There’s also the collapsing of alphabets like く (ku) when they’re used mid-word (eg. あさくさ — A-sa-ku-sa — is pronounced more like Asak-sa), the collapsing of す into an “s” sound when it’s part of です (de-su), and the collapsing of し when it’s part of でした (de-shi-ta).

Attempting to sing Japanese songs was an interesting learning intervention that I found helped with acclimatising my tongue to the phonetics of the language.

The sites I use for this learning intervention are:

1. Utaten — These are good for an initial reference since lyrics on this site contains furigana (phonetic subtitles) for the kanji.

2. LyricsTranslate — Generally decent English translations of Japanese songs.

Slow-listening practices

Similar to Spanish, I found that Japanese was spoken very quickly by natives. Even if they were saying something I would’ve understood in text, I couldn’t catch it.

Another aspect that Duolingo isn’t so great at was getting me used to how the language would’ve naturally sounded. Duolingo uses a textbook voice at speeds friendly to beginners, which is great for when you’re new to the language, but which doesn’t help when it comes to understanding natives. Actually, a simple tweak they can do is to allow the speed of speech to be adjusted (if somehow you’re working for Duolingo… Please?)

I knew that if I wanted to converse with locals the next time I’m in Japan, I’d have to get used to how natural Japanese speech sounds: speed, quirks, shortcuts, native accents and all.

Turns out that there are slow-paced and beginner-friendly Japanese narrations on YouTube (thank you to all the Japanese bothering to make these!). Watching these helps me to both expand my vocabulary and also get me used to the vocalisation/usage of more nuanced particles (eg. use of から (ka-ra), まで (ma-de), だけど (da-ke-do) etc)

One of the channels that I use alot is @SpeakJapaneseNaturally.

Learning the Kanji before Duolingo taught it to me

One thing I really don’t like about Duolingo is how they force you to learn and use words as hiragana first before introducing the kanji at a much later point.

As a disclaimer, this probably only works for me because I have a background in the chinese language. But… Seeing the kanji made it a lot easier for me to grasp the meaning of words. Turns out majority of kanji has its roots in the meaning of chinese characters as ancient Chinese understood them.

For example, あめ (a-me) is rain and it’s kanji is 雨 which also means rain in chinese. But there are also kanji with slight differences from the chinese meaning in today’s understanding; for example 走る (ha-shi-ru) means “to run” in Japanese, but the character 走 means to walk in chinese.

For every word that I learnt in Duolingo, I made sure to find the relevant kanji and include them in a list on Notion that I maintain for remembering Japanese words. It’s been very effective, although I suspect this method may not work if you don’t have a background in the chinese language.

My main difficulties

So far, Japanese has proven to be the most difficult language I’ve taken up to date. Others online have likened it to the difficulty level of English and I don’t disagree although I’ve never had difficulties with English given it’s my native tongue.

Grammar

The biggest issue I had when adapting my brain to think in Japanese was the order in which clauses were used. Japanese is a Subject-Object-Verb language while English and all other languages I know about were Subject-Verb-Object languages. The sentence-forming thoughts were extremely unnatural though I’m getting better at it.

For example, in English we’d say “I go to the beach in Summer”, in Japanese that would be “夏 (summer) は海 (beach) に行きます (go)”

Particles

Then there’s the use of particles. These will usually be the hiragana that connects subjects and objects or provides the structure for conjugating verbs. These confused me a lot initially especially for particles like が (ga) and は (wa), and に (ni), で (de), and へ (he) which are used similarly but can change the meaning of the sentence

For example, 学校 (school) に行きます (go) means I’m going to (eventually be exactly at the) school, while 学校 (school) へ行きます (go) means I’m heading towards school but doesn’t mean I’ll eventually reach the school. Another example where you’re not going to but instead are doing something else there, instead of に, you’d use で, for example 学校 (school) で踊ります (dance) means I’m going to dance at the school.

Particles extend beyond that and more recent ones I’ve learnt are から (ka-ra) which means from and can be used as such as in 一時から (from 1 o’clock), but actually has a deeper meaning of “emerging from/as a result…” which means it can be also used as a connector to provide a reason for something else happening. For example お腹が空きからたべれる (my stomach is empty so I can eat)

Conjugations

Probably the hardest part of Japanese IMO.

Some time into learning Japanese, I started wondering why there wasn’t a word/phrase representing “can” (as in “I can go”). Turns out, it was accounted for as a conjugation using the え alphabet (ie 行けます). It also turns out, negation was also a conjugation using the あ alphabet (eg. “I can’t go”: 行かない). So was instruction (eg. “let’s go”: 行くぞう).

Verbs in Japanese come in three categories, 一段 (ichi-dan), 五段 (go-dan), and irregular. Conjugation patterns differ among all three, and within each is a whole host of possible changes in meaning.

Then there’s the adjectives which come in two main categories, い (i) adjectives, and な (na) adjectives.

Definitely haven’t reached 50% of the known unknowns, but learning conjugations — and gaining the intuition to what’s a “correct” conjugation — is probably the next hurdle to me right now.

What next?

So I’m done with my Japan trip, do I still have a reason to continue pursuing the Japanese language?

もちろん！ After visiting Japan for the first time, I’m convinced it’s a country that I want to return to. Definitely as a vinyl umbrella and matcha wielding gai-jin, and potentially as a resident. Frankly I’m considering the possibility of living there for a while, hence the Japanese language is something I want to keep learning to keep that option open if an opportunity ever emerges.

After growing up and living in Singapore for most of my life, I yearn for the seasons. It’s a nice phenomenon that gives a sense of the passage of time (and also Spring to look forward to).

Being Asian-looking also means that in the majority of countries I’ve travelled to and loved — which were mainly in the northern and western hemispheres — I stuck out sorely amongst the locals.

In Japan, I passed for a local with flying colours. Most Japanese spoke to me in Japanese at first and there wasn’t discrimination based on first glances. There was after I opened my mouth though, but anyways, language is something that can be learned over time, skin colour and how small my eyes are can’t be changed that easily.

And that’s all that matters I suppose.

Here’s to hoping my Japanaese is at least marginally better this time next year.