Climbing the Mountain — Learning Japanese
By: Greg Garcia
Tags: Japanese Language, Study, Language Acquisition, Language Learning, Japanese

A samurai slicing through the Japanese word “kanji”. Probably because he’s fed up with studying them.

When it comes to learning Japanese, or any language for that matter, what should one focus on? In other words, how do we ensure that when we study, we are learning as efficiently as we can? Let’s say you set a goal to become conversational in Japanese in one year. That’s a pretty steep mountain to climb, but not it’s not necessarily impossible. Just as in hiking though, where it’s best to take the safest and surest path to the top, trying to take shortcuts in language learning can be risky.

For example, many students of Japanese complain about kanji. “There are simply too many kanji,” they say. “I can’t be expected to memorize all these godforsaken things!” Still, they want to learn Japanese, so instead of trying to learn kanji meanings and readings, they focus on their listening and speaking skills. I do think that’s a very organic way to learn a language. After all, it’s how everyone learns to speak their native tongue when they’re growing up.

On the other hand, there are some students who believe that reading comprehension is key. “What happens if I move to Japan and I get all these important letters and stuff in the mail and I can’t read any of it? What about when I’m out to eat and I can’t read the menu and there’s no pictures I can point to and say ‘that please’ to the waiter? What if I have to go to the hospital but I can’t read any of the forms, let alone fill them out on my own?” These students may spend all their studying time focusing on improving their reading skills. Literacy is definitely a crucial skill if one wants to be a truly independent member of society, i.e. one who doesn’t have to beg their friends who are capable of reading and writing to take them to the doctor every time they get sick. It’s kind of an extreme example but, in my opinion, what happens between you and your doctor, should stay between you and your doctor and ideally, there should be no third party involved.

Oh, no.

So, we have Student 1 who devoted all of their time to listening and speaking and completely neglected improving their reading skills in hopes that by ignoring the kanji, they would simply go away. Then we have Student 2 who wants nothing more than to be a self-sufficient adult living in Japan and to that end learned how to read and write in Japanese, though they never really practiced listening or speaking. They both made amazing progress, but at the end of one year, which student is fluent in Japanese?

The answer is both and neither. Fluency is a very fluid term as it tends to vary from student to student and situation to situation. You could be completely conversational in Japanese but still get lost when watching a courtroom drama or listening to a conversation between your science obsessed friends. It isn’t that you don’t know Japanese, it’s that you haven’t learned those situation/topic specific words. And all those cool-looking manga and novels your Japanese friends have given you over the years sit on the shelf collecting dust because there’s no way you could ever make sense of them.

Or, maybe you know every single word in the Japanese language, but you’ve only ever seen them in writing. You can read everything from a newspaper to a dissertation on Buddhism and your writing skills are top notch. Even though you technically know Japanese, you find it difficult or even impossible to engage in even the most basic conversations because you can’t understand what anyone’s saying and every time you try to speak, you sound like an idiot.

Now consider Student 3. Student 3 is no genius when it comes to learning kanji and they don’t really have any sort of an ear for spoken Japanese. Still, they want to improve in all areas of the language, no matter how long it takes. Sadly, at the end of one year, they are nowhere near Student 1’s level of listening comprehension and speaking ability. And Student 2 would scoff at Student 3’s reading skills as they’ve only just begun to make sense of short stories for children without relying on a dictionary. Still, I would argue that Student 3 is in a much better place at the end of one year than either Student 1 or 2. In my book, gradual improvement in all areas of a language trumps rapid improvement in a single area of a language every time.

This is just my opinion however. I’m not a linguist or anything, just an avid student of the Japanese language. Oh, and by the way, I have been every single one of the example students during the course of my studies. I once believed that kanji were impossible to learn, so I just didn’t even try. I focused on trying to understand what people were saying and on my own pronunciation and clarity when speaking. Then I discovered a systematic method of learning the kanji meanings, and my reading ability improved drastically. I then focused all my energy into learning how to read and write in Japanese. When I finally returned to listening and speaking, I was dismayed to discover how much my abilities had decreased.

Revising the way I studied, I decided that even though it might take more time to achieve my goals, gradual, steady progress in all areas of Japanese is preferable to a tunnel-vision approach. I still catch myself dreaming of the day when I will be ‘done’ studying Japanese. The truth though is that even if I pass the JLPT N1 (the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test) and got a job teaching Japanese to others at some university, I still wouldn’t be ‘done’ learning the language.

When climbing a mountain, people often make the mistake of thinking that it’s all about reaching the summit. They go so far as to entertain the notion that they can ‘conquer the mountain’. But climbing a mountain is not about reaching the summit, and there is no way a human being could ever conquer something as massive and ancient as a mountain. However, it is possible for a human being to conquer themselves. Part of that process includes realizing that reaching the summit of a mountain is inconsequential. What is there at the summit of a mountain but the view of other summits of other mountains and vast distances to travel? Whether hiking, learning a language, or just generally trying to improve oneself, we are never done climbing. All we can really do is try to stay on the safest, surest path. That’s what I have to say.