My Japanese language learning journey

Japanese language isn’t an easy language to learn, believe me I know that all too well now.

For one thing, writing and reading Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana is super challenging for me.

It’s not impossible to learn all the characters if studied and practiced every day.

But I am honestly not studying either Kanji, Hiragana or Katakana on daily basis.

It isn’t high on my priority list right now and here is why.

Before I moved to Japan, I was only focussing on speaking and listening Japanese.

Since I don’t work a desk job with a Japanese company, I don’t need to read and write Japanese content.

So in my current situation, reading and writing Japanese isn’t important or necessary at all.

If I really need to read something in Japanese, I use Google Lens with the translator option.

But in terms of social communication skills, speaking and understanding Japanese verbally, will give me valuable more immediate options and abilities to do things with locals in Japan.

To increase my Japanese vocabulary, I find the DuoLingo app sufficient for now. I am using it everyday and it gives me many new practical Japanese words and sentences in an easy to digest and fun way.

Interestingly, DuoLingo leads me occasionally to “oh” and “ah” moments.

For example, the word “elevator” in Japanese is pronounced as “erebeetaa”. Words like these, derived from English are clearly easier to memorize for me.

Another example is the word for “part time work”.

In Japanese conversations it is pronounced as “arubaito” which comes from the German word “Arbeit” – another easy to understand and memorize word for me as Germanic native speaker.

It really helps me that I already speak 4 languages.

As I remember in my teen years when I moved to the Netherlands, I wasn’t able to have conversations in Dutch or English.

Swiss German, German and French were the languages I knew back then.

However, I learned speaking and writing Dutch in 12 months because of two reasons.

One reason is that Dutch is a Germanic language and therefore I recognized many similarities with Swiss German and German. Also some Dutch words are clearly derived from French which I was familiar with already.

The second reason is that I was simply bombarded with Dutch language on a daily basis.

There was no way to avoid the Dutch language back in the Netherlands.

So my brain just kept registering anything in Dutch whether I understood it or not.

English on the other hand, I learned rather coincidentally.

I learned English by staying with a Scottish family in the Netherlands for more than 5 years.

During the first few months, I didn’t understand what the Scots were saying to me.
It sounded all like gibberish to me.

But over time, hearing Scottish English on a daily basis, I started to understand and speak English…uhuhm..Scottish.

Having said all said this, I realize now that I will go the same way in learning Japanese. This means, I keep practicing and learning Japanese with the DuoLingo app on a daily basis to increase my Japanese vocabulary. Also, I will watch Japanese TV or Youtube videos, without any subtitles in English on a daily basis.

And most importantly, I will gradually make smaller to bigger conversations with the local Japanese people.

Perhaps this is called immersive language learning, I don’t really know.

Be it as it may, I am confident it will prove to be effective again.

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