How I Learned Japanese in Two Years and Lived in Japan for 3 Months

How I studied Japanese to conversational fluency completely outside of Japan

From Pixabay user 1820796

First of all, Japanese is not an easy language. There are 3 “alphabets” and numerous words that all have the same pronunciation but vastly different meanings. It is literally backward compared to English, it uses a subject-object-verb rather than a subject-verb-object structure. And it is insanely subtle, especially when spoken by Japanese people.

My first step was to learn the basics. When I first started learning Japanese, I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy, and I knew that it would be something that once I started, I would have to keep working for the rest of my life. I think accepting that there was no end goal made it easier for me to keep studying and setting new goals for myself.

I started by researching what the best ways to study were. I came across things like Tofugu, Memrise, and an insane number of apps designed to learn one thing or another, each with their own specialty.

I also started watching a lot of the J-vlogging community, people like Sharla, Rachel and Jun, Texan in Tokyo (please come back to youtube), Abroad in Japan. This helped me get some more ideas about what life in Japan is like as a foreigner, and remove the somewhat anime-polluted version of Japan that I had stuck in my head.

I made sure that I had rigid study habits at this point, and made sure that I studied for at least two hours a day, every day after work.

One of the portraits from the collection of portraits, Portraits of Actors, Often Playing Roles by Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900), a traditional Japanese Ukyio-e style illustration of two actors with a samurai sword. Original from Library of Congress. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

By the end of the first month, I had learned more than 100 words, had a rudimentary grasp of hiragana, was struggling with katakana and had learned my first kanji. This strategy allowed me to skip a whole semester of the Japanese coursework in school, and join in on the second half of the first year of classes, all having only studied Japanese for one month.

After the start of the semester, I slowed my studying pace quite a bit since I had more than just Japanese studies to worry about. But, I made sure that I had spent at least some time studying, and I kept myself constantly surrounded, at least to some extent by Japanese. At this point I found my school’s Japanese club (spoiler alert I became the VP of it at one point) and was basically listening exclusively to Japanese music.

I personally am a bit biased when it comes to music, I like the more obscure/ older stuff, bands like Itsue, Kinoko Teikoku, Soutaisei Riron, and I absolutely love Chage and Aska, Ulfuls, Yamishita Tatsuro (you should check them out).

After the first Japanese class was over, I was invited by the second year Japanese teacher to join an intensive summer course that would go through basically the entire second year semester over the two month summer break. Obviously I said yes. I lived up to its name of intense, it was 3 and some hours a day, 4 days a week, not to mention all the studying that had to be done at home to deal with all the quizzes and tests. It was a fun time.

It was around this point that I started using an app called Hello Talk to find language partners, I think it helped ease the pain of actually having a dialogue with someone in Japanese, especially since they weren’t that good at English either.

Once the summer course finished, I started with the third and final year of structured coursework. The first half of the year I felt myself a little less motivated than usual, but this was the first time that classes were sometimes fully held in Japanese, and the textbooks used strictly Japanese. I went through and finished my first year of Japanese studies with a group of students who had been learning for some years.

The next year, I took the last class that I have taken to date in Japanese. The class was taught exclusively in Japanese, and there were many times when I was completely lost. I was a fish out of water at this point, I was the only person in the class who hadn’t been to Japan, or been studying Japanese for years past the count of one. The end result for me was that I failed this class. At this point, I had spent a year and a half studying Japanese and had just finished college. I wanted to go to Japan.

I spent the next year, working nights at a restaurant and studying every day. At this point, I discovered an app called iknow.jp and kept working on it every day. I made sure that I was listening to something in Japanese all the time, even if I didn’t understand it.

Asian Noodle by Jakub Kapusnak — from rawpixel.com — CC0

I started going to social events, and tried to meet the local Japanese crew, and tried to make friends with people who were also studying. I’m lucky that I grew up in New York, not everywhere would have this privilege. Having a beer or two definitely made me a lot less shy.

After a year at this pace, with some money in my pockets, I decided to go to Yokohama. After two and some change years studying, in my first week in Japan, I was paid the highest compliment 日本長いですね… You’ve been in Japan a while, haven’t you?

Pure.

Bliss.

How I Learned to Let Go of My Fear and Speak Japanese

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