One boring night, a thought swept across my mind. How hard would it be to learn Japanese?
Before I get into this, here's my background: I'm a 15 year old boy from Slovakia about to attend high school. My English is at C1, I'm pretty much fluent in my mother tongue, and last time I was offered to learn German, I politely declined. Japanese is the last thing my mind should be thinking of right now. But honestly, it can't be that hard, right?
How Japanese actually works
If you're stuck on this question, don't worry. I already Googled the answers for you. Japanese has 3 main writing systems. Hiragana, katakana, kanji, and a mix of the first two: romaji. From now on, I'll use Hiragana.
Hiragana and katakana are essentially just letters and mean nothing when alone. For example, あ is more or less the same as the English letter a.
Kanji describes concepts. I'm not advanced enough to understand exactly how it works so far - cut me some slack, I just started learning the damn language.
And romaji, well, that's just a method of writing the pronunciation of Japanese symbols. For example, てと would be "te to" in romaji.
How I'm planning to pull this off
I'll learn Hiragana and Katakana first. By learning, I mean fully comprehend and understand those symbols. If you were to wake me up at 2AM and tell me to write "tsu" or else my family gets it, I absolutely have to be able to spit out つ. The same would apply backwards. If you told me to pronounce さ, you better hear nothing other than "sa".
The first thought of actually learning Japanese grammar would be to use Duolingo. However, from what I've heard, it's pretty flawed over there and after a year of learning, you don't pick up a lot. When I was a lot younger, I did try using Duolingo for Japanese (back then, I had no idea what I was doing) and was bitterly disappointed to find that after a month of 1 hour long daily lessons, I've learned essentially nothing. Duolingo might be great for other languages. Alas, Japanese isn't one of them.
The method I'll use will be a combination of writing on paper and using tools like realkana to revise and learn new symbols. (I believe those are called "kana") My plan is to spend about 30 to 60 minutes every day, enough to not burn me out while also enough to pick up knowledge as I go.
As for grammar and such, I'll use renshuu, which provides the benefit of also teaching hiragana and katakana, allowing me to revise there as well. As for kanji: I'm not quite sure if I will dig that deep into learning Japanese, albeit I know it's pretty much required for effective communication. For example the kana かみ (ka mi - hiragana) could describe the following kanji:
- 神 - God,
- 紙 - paper,
- 髪 - hair.
I'll journal everything I learn on this blog, posting weekly updates about my progress. Tips and tricks, etc. All as I go.
It would be really cool if someone else, also in a similar situation, would attempt this as well. Knowing this blog doesn't get that much unique human traffic, this might be an impossible task. However, if someone like that is in fact reading this, please shoot me a DM on Discord: @dvidpi. Alternatively you can email me at [email protected].
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