So You Want to Study Japanese?

You love Japan. You have for years. You're fascinated by the culture, you love the food, you love the cinema, the literature, probably the animation too. And you decide that in order to have a better appreciation of all of these things, you should start learning Japanese. Maybe you want to become fluent. Maybe you even want to work in Japan. Maybe you just want something to fulfill that foreign language requirement for your degree. Whatever your reasons are, studying Japanese can be a very enjoyable venture (never mind that it'll look fantastic on your resume). But before you start, there are a few pieces of advice you should take into consideration, things that will affect just how much you get out of your language study.

1.) Be serious. - No, really. This one I dedicate to my fellow anime fans. If you're just getting into Japanese to translate manga and watch raw anime, not only are you showing little respect for such a complex language and culture, you're probably going to end up getting frustrated at the amount of time and effort it's going to take before you can actually understand anything from your favorite series. There's certainly nothing wrong with making that a goal, just as long as it isn't your only one.

2.)If possible, take a class - There's nothing at all wrong with self-study, if you have the motivation. The problem with this is that it can get lost in the day-to-day routine of work and family and possibly school, and the more time you go without practicing, the more you forget. Also, the guidance of an experienced teacher can prove extremely beneficial to you. After all, if you're working by yourself, you have a much greater probability of falling into incorrect habits early on with no one to correct you. Also, the classroom setting provides a sort of added support system for you, giving you the added motivation of being surrounded by a group of people who share a similar goal. It's similar in some ways to going on a diet. When you make a commitment to lose weight, isn't it much easier to follow through with it when you surround yourself with other people with the same goal?

3.)Invest in good dictionaries - I stress dictionaries here. Never, ever settle for just one. After all, what happens if there's a word in one that isn't in the other? No dictionary is going to contain every single word in any language. My advice to you is to stay away from the "pocket" dictionaries. Get the fattest, most inconvenient to carry dictionary you possibly can to start, to maximize your resources. The Internet can also be a source of countless valuable learning tools. Jisho.org, I've found, is an excellent website, complete with a section for individual words, a kanji search, and one for actual sentences, so you can have an example of certain grammatical structures.

4.) Translating for extra practice - This one is also dedicated to my fellow anime fans, though this can be helpful to you even if you're not. Translating raw manga is a very good method of additional study. They're excellent when you start studying hiragana and katakana, and when you finally start learning kanji, it's a good way of learning new characters that aren't necessarily covered in whatever textbook you may be using. My only advice is to do a bit of research into what you're studying. Try to look for something with a simpler concept, at least in the beginning. You'll have your hands full making sense of the sentences you're translating, there's no point in tracking down the most avant-garde storyline possible and confusing yourself further.

5.) Practice! - Japanese isn't something you can just work on whenever you feel like it. Much like any foreign language, you'll lose it if you don't find a way to practice with it. I absolutely recommend developing some sort of routine, and setting up a specific time each day for study. Especially when you're learning the writing system, you'll find that the more time you keep away from your studies, the more you forget. I still clearly recall the long, long list of kanji I had been memorizing, had down perfectly, and then forgot about for two or three days as I worked on projects for my other classes. By the time I came back to my list, I remembered about a third of it at best.

Japanese is definitely a difficult language to study. The sentence structures are completely different from what we are used to in Western languages, everyday conversation requires a level of politeness and discretion that most English-speakers aren't used to at all, and let's not forget the incredibly complex writing system. Still, if you enjoy studying languages, and if you don't mind putting forth some effort, it can be a very fun and very fulfilling experience, one which will allow you to meet all sorts of interesting people and open you up to an entirely different culture.