Why is Japanese so difficult to learn for English speakers? Part.1

The topic on this journal is more like "How English speakers need to learn Japanese to become fluent: from a Japanese perspective".

In this journal, I would make some suggestions that MAY work for English speakers (or other Western language speakers). So, please read on if this topic rings a bell somehow.

As a Japanese, I learned English a while ago, and well, my English is not perfect, but I can say I am fluent enough to express myself in English to the natives to the point where they would understand what I mean almost 100% if they have some time to chat with me.

For Japanese people, learning English is far more difficult than English speakers' learning Spanish. So, I suppose the other way around could be true, or maybe even more so. And, it was hard for me to learn English as well.

Well known difficulty in learning Japanese is the number of characters we use. 2 sets of 46 basic characters and well over 1,000 Chinese characters (in a way, it's countless number because I heard there may be 10,000 or more, which I don't even bother to research).

But hey, don't complain! You guys have so many words as opposed to characters, and have you ever even bothered to count the number of words you guys know or even use in everyday life?

I took an MBA program, a well known word as "Master of Business Administration", and most Japanese back in time went like "What?! You played basketball at NBA in the U.S.? It's the top league in the world, d'oh!" (This was somewhat true. I came back home and had to explain what I learned by telling them the difference between M and N almost all the time).

Or like one day when I was watching NEWMAX TV, they were talking about Kyle Rittenhouse case, and they used the word "vigilante", which sounds pretty much French or some other languages. Now I have a question, do you guys even use the word, even once in your life? But still you guys manage to know what it is. And there's another word "vigilant", looks pretty English, please imagine how complicated

it could be for English learners as a second or so forth language?

Or, ROI, ROE, IOU, etc... What's up with that?

This may be a little too extreme as an example, but you know what I mean. In the world today, we have to condense words so that we could shorten the sentences, and squeeze some precious time out of it. And, Japanese essentially is an extremely efficient language to import and digest new ideas and words and to concentrate what they mean to our society (and that's why we have so many sets of characters. It's the historically proven fact, I think).

Well, these are the complaints Japanese English learners would have, and it's pretty much the same when I read comments on how difficult Japanese is, by English Japanese learners (or other language speakers learning Japanese).

So, here's some suggestions I would make. It's from my experience when I learned English.

1. Reading

2. Writing

That's it. Yeah, I hear you say "What?! I've already done those for so long and it ain't gave us nothing, you moron!".
Okay, just calm down and listen to me for a little bit more. It's not what you do is wrong, but it is how you do is wrong. Let me explain.

1. Reading

By reading, I meant "without a dictionary".

When I went to the U.S. and started studying English, my daily task was to write the whole chapter of the assignment in English, and look up all the words in a Japanese dictionary and wrote them down in the following row, then I translated the sentences into Japanese and wrote them down in the last row. It took 4 to 5 rows in notebooks to do the above and the neat looking notebooks gave me some awkward satisfaction.

Do you think I made any progress with that? The answer is a huge "NO".

Probably Japanese teaching method (Or, maybe Asian's) is totally cursed and that's why most Japanese teachers recommend to do the same thing like this, but think about this: Did you come over all the way down to this tiny little islands to become a translator? Well, even so, become fluent first.

Let me ask a question here. Have you looked up words when you read articles in your own languages when you were kids? Probably no.
Even for Japanese speakers like me, it would be a rare occasion to even pick up a dictionary in any case.
A Japanese dictionary was something we needed when my brother and I fought over which of our definition of things is right, or else, hit him in his head with the dictionary.

When I was a kid, reading was something fun in that my mom used to read me books right before going to bed and I begged for the next sentence when she stopped until I fell asleep. Reading was something so addictive that I couldn't even stop reading until 4 o'clock in the morning when I was reading a novel in which a mysterious thief was about to grab treasures and when a hero came out from middle of nowhere.

Yeah, you need to get to the certain level to read novels, but this is the level probably the most learners would start complaining about how hard the Japanese is to learn. I suppose you already hit the point where you need to move on if you can read hiragana, katakana and say, 200 Chinese characters or so (yeah, you can include numbers in that number as well).

Let us dig a little bit more into why it is wrong to look up a dictionary in your own language when you are studying another language.

The first stage of language learning process is two folds, I believe. First you need to understand what each word means by recognizing the image which represents the word.
Say, what red looks like, what water is like, sort of words which cannot be described just in words. At this point, you probably need to write or say the words over and over again.

By the way, even doing so was not a painful experience when we were babies. We just pointed pictures and have our parents (or others) express them in words and giggled. The same response for the same picture was such an exciting moment, I guess. It may not be a painful thing even after we became adults after all.

Second, when we achieve the point where we have enough vocabulary to describe other things in words we know, then that's when we start reading by ourselves. And, this is when you guys feel how stupid you are, unfortunately.
Remember, you are not. You just need to change what you do to learn further, instead of keeping remembering what each word means.

At this point, what you need to do is to let the words explain other words and accumulate the meanings by each other. To do so, we used to read something we were eager to proceed to the next page without knowing every single word to know what the ending would be like, don't you think?

I looked up the word "作る" and it came up with:
1. to make; to produce; to manufacture; to build; to construct
2. to prepare (food); to brew (alcohol)
3. to raise; to grow; to cultivate; to train
4. to till...
and this goes up to 13! This word may be a little too easy because it only means "make" in your language, but do you intend to look it up in your dictionary to find the right match every single time you encounter the new meaning of it? NOOOOOOOoooooooH!

In this example, the word "tsukuru" is a verb to describe when you form a thing from other thing(s) or something like that. Probably initially it was just making a pot or something, and because the meaning fits, it came to mean other things like "to have sex" by saying "子作り", yeah, we say it.

By the way, the word "作る" symbolizes the act when a person cut off branches from a trunk according to this site. It's amazing how far this word could stretch its meanings to even "try having a baby".

The whole idea of reading in this method is this:
Try read and add meanings to words you already knew in Japanese, instead of pointing out what they mean in your own languages.

This is pretty much why reading is so important in learning Japanese. And, well, it was really important for me to learn English.

So, just seal your dictionary and go get some Japanese books that look interesting to you. We are so lucky we have so many options here, even adult books (not recommended) would be fine if that's what you really want.

The important thing to remember when you read in this method are follows:
1. Any book that you are interested in is fine, but I would recommend novels because it would be easy to follow the plot without knowing meanings of all the words. Comic? Yeah, but you probably tend to end up with less vocabulary compared with the time you spend and all the words you would know would be about how we communicate with each other. And, you may also end up with becoming a regular at a "Maid cafe", or wearing "gothic lolita" fashion. If that's what you really want, go ahead (I'm just kidding).

2. If it's possible, read the same book twice or more. In each other time you read, you would appreciate more by knowing what to come, although how boring it may sound. From my experience, the excitement of realizing how much more you can learn by doing so would exceed just following the plot.
It's like you would understand 40% of the novel in the first run, 60% in the second, and so on.

3. Use Japanese dictionary (instead of English, or your own languages) every once in a while when you have to stop because you don't understand.

4. Keep reading the novel without thinking what each sentence would mean in your own language. Just keep going on. This might be pain in the butt when you start, but when you reach 20 to 30% of the novel, I would say you would be urged to go forward, not backward.

5.When you reach 20% to 30% of the novel, and if you don't have any clue of what's going on in it, the novel is way too above your league. The novel can wait for you. Just grab an easier one.

Thank you for reading this by far. And, this goes on a little more, so I wrote the second part of this series in Part.2.

Reading itself would really work better for your language skill, but it's not enough to become fluent. Writing in a certain way is fundamental.