TL;DR: Use tons of examples and analogies with memorable stories. Give the appropriate weight to different parts.
If I hadn’t made it clear in Part 1 of the Insomnia Story, I never really intended to learn Japanese as a language. I was looking for some brainless, repetitive, calming activity which I could do instead of tossing and turning in my bed. And on the top of my bed/head — the ideal Zen activity was calligraphy, and I started practicing brush writing on my phone with my stylus. How did calligraphy turn into learning a full-fledged language? Here’s the timeline~
2019: I learnt hiragana and katakana because I downloaded Anki randomly and decided to see how effective it is. Turns out it was! (It took me 3 days to learn both hiragana and katakana with like 80% recognition and recall accuracy).
2021: I listen to J-pop, which means some of the songs I listen to are in kanji and not english. I lost a really good song (which I found later thanks to remembering the singer’s voice), so I decided to learn kanji. When I started learning kanji, I learnt that they are made of radicals. To remember a couple kanji, I just needed to know the radicals and make up a story. So, I learnt a bit of common kanjis and radicals.
2023: I started singing and I wanted to sing the songs I listen to. Spotify has lyrics option which lets me see the lyrics except it’s in Japanese. When I read these lyrics, I randomly ended up learning a few more kanji, grammar structures and vocabulary (some are really common in songs haha). So, I decided to learn to read completely, because why not? Additionally, I also was taking the course on memory, and I thought kanji was a great way to learn the method.
2024: Hunting through the library, I found a “Complete Japanese Grammar Guide” and I borrowed it thinking why not? because I end up reading only 10-20% of the books I borrow anyway.
Now, at the end of the year, there’s quite a bit I learnt in terms of what doesn’t work. In no particular order:
- Memorizing kanji and readings is pointless — there’s no context.
- Reading textbooks doesn’t help — it’s very boring.
- Reading literature doesn’t help — it’s too difficult.
- Remembering vocabulary doesn’t help — it’s a lot of overload.
There’s specific things I don’t care about, as of now. In no particular order:
- Pitch accent: I’m just trying to read.
- On that note, I don’t care about speaking as much I do with listening (it happens naturally because I’m listening to songs).
- Writing my own ideas, I can make simple sentences but I’m definitely not at the same level that I understand.
So, what does work for me? Thinking of language as a human body, each part of the language as different parts —
- Grammar is like the skeleton of the body, it is what gives the structure to a statement
- Verb tenses are like bones, they’re important for carrying the weight of the meaning or the movement of the idea.
- Prepositions are like tendons and ligaments, they help in directing the movement.
- Adverbs and Adjectives are like muscles, they give the power for the movement.
- Conditionals and other conjoining particles are like the tiny bones and ligaments in hands and legs, they tiny but help in interacting with the environment.
- Nouns and clauses are the skin, they make the “face” of the meaning, the main character to which the story happens.
- Questions are like senses, they look out to see what’s there in the world.
Using this analogy, there’s a few tactics to make learning fun.
- Parallelize. I don’t like reading textbooks because I might know some of the chapter already (I have general knowledge from the stuff I listen to and read). So, I need different tracks at different difficulties.
- I’m learning vocabulary from WaniKani. It takes care of radicals, kanji as well as vocab. And it’s easy to review it by level and easy to skip over words that you already know. No more sitting through greetings and list of vegetables for the hundredth time.
- For grammar, there’s “Practice Makes Perfect Complete Japanese Grammar by Eriko Sato”. It’s a great way to learn different parts of the grammar along with using vocabulary in the sentences. This blog is a great starting point and takes like a day to go through all the articles. Another complete free guide from Tae Kim.
- Using a lot of example sentences for understanding the context until you internalize and form the intuition for a word or a grammar structure. I mean lots. Until you don’t have to think what something means.
- Flashcards/Repetition — Using Anki or regular refreshing. Don’t just focus on recognition (seeing Rot — Red and thinking ah, I know this) but also recall (what is Red in X language along with what is Rot in English).
- General sentences and idioms in real life — understanding slang and regular phrases.