The complete basics of Learning Japanese Part 1
By: James Vincero
Tags: Beginner, Learn Japanese, Learning Language Tips, Language, Japanese

A beginner’s guide to learning Japanese

So you wanna learn Japanese huh? Well just like when you learned English or whatever your first language was, it didn’t happen overnight. And despite what people say you 100% can not become just like a Japanese person in just 6 months.

You can, however, get yourself up and running in just 6 months and that’s what this mini-series is all about. Getting you to a point where you can remove the training wheels. So strap in, put on some coffee and let’s learn the basics of Japanese.

Break it down

1. Slow down and make a plan

So if you’re anything like me you’ll want to just go out and buy every book (which you’ll use once or twice) on learning Japanese, read the first page of a million websites and it can kinda feel a bit like running in quicksand. Slow progress.

Japanese is a big pie to eat and as they say, the best way to eat pie is one bite at a time.

For a guide on making a Japanese plan check out my post on Japanese Self-Study Planning.

2. Do not learn romanized versions of Japanese

So many textbooks start with o-gen-ki-desu-ka? But it’s less than useless. You will get into the habit of converting all the Japanese you read into Roman Characters. It’s not only going to slow your progress but it’s also going to slow your speaking progress. That’s right, the Japanese writing sub-systems (Kana) is designed to help you say the words, hence why we call them “Readings”.

Just don’t bother with converting to Roman Script.

3. Learn the Kana

So what are the Kana? The Kana are 2 writing sub-systems Japanese use to write with. They are made up of Hiragana and Katakana.

Hiragana was born out of the Chinese writing characters. The Kanji. In 391 AD Korea introduced Japan to the Kanji writing system. The Kanji only represent meaning. But about 100 years later they started to use some of those Kanji to represent sound.

At the time women were not allowed to learn Kanji. So women started forming their own writing system based on these Kanji which became known as 平仮名 (ひらがな or Hiragana). Hiragana literally means Flat False Name or Simplified Fake Characters. So what was originally pictures that represented meaning symbols that represented sounds.

Hiragana today is just 46 base characters made up of:

5 vowels on their own Vowel consonant pairs 1 consonant on its own

The consonant-vowel system is exactly the same as in English. A, E, I, O and, U are vowels and the rest are consonants.

They look like this:

Hiragana chart

They also can be modified to change the sound of the symbol. For example:

゛On top of any H symbol becomes B for example; ひ (hi) becomes び (bi) when you add it to K sounds it becomes a G sound き (ki) becomes ぎ (gi) ゜Changes the H sounds to a P sound, for example; ひ becomes ぴ (pi) っ Sometimes called the small tsu (つ) the っ symbol can be used to add emphasis on a sound. For example; みせって is misette putting emphasis on the te sound

Hiragana is super important, not only because it represents the sound of the word but also because of many of the grammar fillers are in Hiragana. For example, the character for の it works exactly like an English apostrophe when used for possession. Dave’s bag is Dave の bag.

For a great way to learn the Hiragana check out this LinguaDecks Hiragana Deck.

Kataka is exactly the same thing, about 100 years after Hiragana they created a writing system for all the new foreign words being brought to Japan. So instead of adding a new Kanji or Japanese translation for the word computer, they just user コンピューター(kompuutaa) notice ー symbol make the vowel a long vowel.

4. Build Vocabulary

Before you can do anything in Japanese, you need to know a few basic words. The words then become combination words, combinations words then become phases, phases then become sentences and at that point, you can speak Japanese.

Here are some Japanese nouns 名詞 (めいし):

Notice that school is using the small tsu (っ) to make the kkou sound stronger. Also, take a look a word for older brother. The first character is お this is an honorific. Which mean we put お in front of something when we want to show more respect or honor for the following noun. Then you have the symbol for older brother (兄) then we suffix it with the word さん.

さん is the Japanese way of saying Mr. or Mrs. But instead of putting at the beginning they put it on the end. This doesn’t mean Mr. Brother. It’s another one of those honorifics things. Adding さん to the end of many nouns makes it more formal and respectful. This kind of honor suffix is added to cats, dogs mothers, fathers, and even after the word customer お客(様).

Just knowing these few words will allow you to start combining words!

Japanese Compound Nouns

At this point, it’s worth pointing out that there are no Japanese plurals. You can’t say these are my wallets. You can say all of the wallets are mine 財布(さいふ)はすべて私(わたし)のものです. But whether you’re talking about one puppy 子犬 (こいぬ) or many dogs 多く(おおく)の子犬 it’s the same word.

Here are some Japanese verbs 動詞 (どうし):

Japanese verbs

At this point, you can speak and read Japanese. Okay… it’s not a lot of Japanese but you speak Japanese, Yay!

Hopefully, you applied the same thinking of combining nouns with verbs. But here’s a tip; You can not say 私(わたし) 走る(はしる) because that doesn’t indicate who is doing the running. In English we just say I run. But Japanese is a vague language. You need to give it context. So we use the を (pronounced as ooh) particle to indicate that the former is doing the later. 私(わたし)を走る(はしる). 私(I) を (am doing the) 走る.

Well done. If you understood all these words you can now say at least 26 sentences in Japanese and read them too!

5. The Kanji

So like I said before the Kanji were introduced to Japan around 1600 years ago. The symbols were loosely converted to sit on top of the existing Japanese spoken language.

Japanese interpreted the Kanji

Which is why the Chinese symbol for the sturgeon fish 鮪 is actually now used to represent 鮪 (まぐろ) or Tuna in Japanese.

There are over 2000 daily use Japanese Kanji, but don’t worry. You don’t have to use to know them all to communicate. In fact, I know many people who speak really good Japanese but barely know any Kanji.

I don’t recommend doing that though as it will limit your communication drastically, especially if you don’t live in Japan or get to practice it with a real Japanese person.

But conversely, the Kanji mean almost nothing without the words that use them.

The is a great deck on LinguaDecks that lists all of the words (and their Kanji) you’ll need to get started in Japanese conversations.

Summary

Learning Japanese is hard, but as you’ve seen here it doesn’t take a lot to get going. You can learn the Kana in just one day and as long as you keep practicing you’ll have them memorized in no time.

knowing just a few nouns and verbs can get you speaking to people, but you’ll soon run into vocabulary fatigue. This is when you have said all of the words you can say in Japanese, and the other person moves on to more difficult topics for which you don’t know the words.

Listen to Japanese as much as you can. Japanese songs, Japanese movies and my personal favorite Japanese Japanese Dramas (JDorama).

Join me in the next part where I will go over some essential adjectives, so you can describe your nouns.