Learning Japanese, part 1 - the basics · 2006-04-06 20:59 by Damian
So you’ve become curious about learning a new language – Japanese to be exact. Where to begin?
In “civilized” parts of the world it’s usually not a problem to find classes teaching languages English, German, French or others. Japanese can be a bit more difficult. Even at university level far from all places have any East Asian languages at all on their curriculi.
Fortunately there are a wealth of resources on the Internet to not only familiarize yourself with Japanese, but also do some serious studying, all on your own. If you’re a complete beginner, a good point to start is to learn about the writing systems, for instance from this Wikipedia article.
Of course not all aspects of learning a language are suitable for Internet learning, but you can come a long way. The hurdles for westerners can seem rather steep, so you need to brace yourself a bit. To fully master a new word written in kanji there are two steps involved. First you need to know the reading of the kanji, and if you’ve never seen them before you need to look that up. Armed with the reading you can go on to actually look up the meaning – finally. The other difficult part for people used to the roman alphabet is that you need to re-learn the basics of reading. For example when you’re reading this text, you’re not really looking at the individual characters. Rather, you’re seeing words. Since the brain is so good at pattern recognition it has trained itself to recognize the words directly.
Guess what – with Japanese there are no spaces between words, so you can’t use that to help you separate words. You will probably find yourself struggling along for a long while before your reading speed picks up, but don’t let that discourage you. Read as much as possible, whatever you can find. Lots of practice is key.
In the next part I’ll talk more about the resources available for studying on your own, stay tuned.
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