Learn Japanese: A Guide to Resources that Are Cheap and Effective

When I began learning Japanese seven years ago, there was very little in the way of resources. I had to travel hundreds of miles to find a bookstore that carried language reference for Japanese. It's much easier now to find such resources but the problem is which ones are the best? If you search for Japanese language books, you will get a veritable avalanche of possibilities. Wading through all of the possibilities can be a bit daunting. I spent nearly a thousand dollars on Japanese reference material in the course of two years, and much of it on products that were not that great. Hopefully this guide will give you tips on what you need to do to learn Japanese.

1. You don't need to buy the entire book store out when you decide you want to learn Japanese. I recommend buying a Japanese Dictionary, Langensheidt's Pocket Dictionary is the best one there is. The cover price is $13.95. This will allow you to look up any words you might be thinking of or that you might hear.

I also recommend buying a set of CDs with vocabulary so that you can learn how to pronounce the words. The best thing for this is the Vocabulearn series. There are three levels for Japanese. This is just vocabulary, you won't learn any grammar or anything here, but that's next. The list price for the three volume set is $49.95, but you can buy it for around $30 at http://www.amazon.com

I recommend you buy a grammar book on Japanese, Barron's is a great choice for this and cheap, with a price of $6.95.

With these three things you can learn to speak Japanese. You don't need anything else, unless you just want to dish out money on unnecessary books. Vocabulearn has thousands of words. If you can learn all of the words that they teach and study the grammar book to learn how to construct sentences, you will be well on your way to fluency.

2. Those resources are good for speaking but what if you want to learn to write Japanese. You need two books for this. The first is Kodansha's Compact Kanji Guide. It allows you to look up any kanji you might see with ease. This title has been republished under the title Kodansha's Essential Kanji Dictionary. The list price is $39.95 but you can buy it from Amazon for under $30. This book provides two ways to look up the character, by stroke count or by radical.

The second book contains the most common Kanji used in Japan, A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese, by Florence Sakade. The original is out of print, and that is the version I have, although there is a third edition available on Amazon. It contains the 1,945 Joyo Kanji prescribed by the Japanese government as essential learning. If you learn all of the Kanji in this book, you would be literate enough to read most newspapers and books. The list price is $22.95 but Amazon has it right now for $16.29.

3. Now that you have your self-study resources, and for much less than the near thousand dollars that I spent, I would recommend seeing if there are any classes being taught in your area. Often local community colleges offer continuing education classes in foreign languages, and I have seen some offer classes in Japanese. These classes are usually extremely cheap, for example the ones at Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College in Asheville, NC where I used to live, ran about $50 for an eight week class. This can be a great way to practice your language skills and to talk to other students who are trying to learn the language as well.

4. And lastly, it would be good if you could find a native speaker willing to let you practice on them. It is nearly impossible to fluently learn a language without speaking to native speakers. A native speaker can immediately correct any pronunciation mistakes that you are making, and prevent you from thinking that you are saying something right when in fact you are not. It will save you having to unlearn bad pronunciation because you never talked to a native speaker.

5. If you simply can't find any native speaker, to help you out, the best alternative may be to at least listen to spoken Japanese in a natural context. I would suggest renting Japanese movies or anime that are subtitled from your local video store and watching them. Try to pick out words and listen to how they are saying things.

On this note, it also might help if you listen to songs and learn the lyrics from them. It can be much easier to learn songs than to learn random sentences. Hopefully this guide will help you on your way to being completely fluent in Japanese.