Learning to listen and speak

Once you’ve found yourself some motivation, you’ll need to know what you should study first. You’ll almost certainly want to concentrate on the spoken language at first, because it’s considerably easier, and far less intimidating. Spoken languages are generally easier; you, and pretty much everyone else in the world, learnt to speak before they learnt to write (if they learnt the latter at all). Not only that, but the Japanese writing system in particular looks very scary. They have two sets of around fifty phoenetic characters, plus thousands of kanji (Chinese ideographic characters).

That said, it isn’t a good idea to ignore writing entirely. Whilst you can learn Japanese without the writing, using the latin alphabet to write Japanese sounds (romaji), experts seem to agree that this isn’t a terribly good idea. You can tell from the way the Japanese say English words that their pronunciation is rather different from ours. Learning the Japanese phoenetic “alphabets” (technically syllabaries) should help you pronounce words more accurately.

So if you’re going to learn to speak and listen, you’ll need some Japanese to listen to. What about anime? While this is a good idea in theory, it doesn’t hold up in practice. Anime tends to be packed with strange accents and dialoge which, whilst they are Japanese, aren’t really what you want to be learning. Besides, they generally go to fast for you to actually learn anything, so the best you’re likely to achieve is a collection of odd words and phrases, but no real language.

The university language centre offers evening Japanese courses at various levels, with discounted prices for students. Trouble is you have to sign up at the start of the year (Wednesday of week 1), otherwise you’re not going to get a place. They are, however, very useful. They also run some courses for accademic credit (CATS points). These are free, and move at a faster pace.