Learning to speak, read, and write Japanese was without a
doubt the most challenging aspect of living in Japan. For 2 years prior to my
trip I studied Japanese intensively at school. The first and most daunting task
of learning Japanese is getting your head around the massively complex seemingly
endless amount of characters and symbols used every day. There is not one, but
3 separate alphabets, with the first two comprising of 108 characters and the
third and most complex alphabet more than 4000. So where do you start? I
started with memorizing the first two alphabets as they would give me a
foundation to learn the more complex “Kanji” writing system. Flash cards and
the creation of pneumonic devices really helped! The pronunciation of Japanese
was actually relatively easy to get a handle of simply because there are no
silent letters like in English, and every character only has one pronunciation.
When I arrived in Japan, even though I had had 2 years under
my belt of Japanese study, I still felt relatively lost. Learning Japanese
sitting in a class room and actually using it in everyday life are two completely
different things. I learnt quickly that I would have a long way to go in
improving my Japanese to be able to communicate on the most basic level. I was
lucky enough to find a bunch of Japanese students who were interested in
learning English and we were able to help each other learn their respective
languages. One of my first discoveries of the Japanese language once in Japan
was the importance of a relatively small amount of key phrases. Phrases like “sumimasen”
(excuse me), “dozo” (Go ahead, please) and “chotto matte kudasai” (Please wait
a minute) can really be used in almost any situation, even if they don’t seem
to make sense.
After getting a basic grasp on Japanese, I found several
tools that really helped to get my Japanese to a higher level. Listening to
Japanese TV, radio and music was on. Although I certainly didn’t understand
even close to everything, it helped to hear words that I did know and try to
figure out the context. A secondly more unorthodox way I found to improve was
to start teaching English to Japanese youth. Although I was speaking in
English, the questions were always asked in Japanese. And being able to
understand everything a child was saying to me was a nice change from the day
to day feeling of incompetence.
