How can you learn Japanese quickly?

Answer 1

Depends on your native language. Korean and Japanese are grammatically similar with some cognates. While I do not speak Korean I have heard that it is structurally very similar to Japanese. Korean friends also tell me that it in Korean there are a great many levels of politeness or respectful language. This is like Japanese. One needs to know colloquial Japanese as well as "keigo" polite Japanese. Japanese has a huge number of loan words from Chinese as well because Japanese is largely written using Chinese characters. When I lived in Japan I visited Chinese speaking areas and could read signs and understand some words because the pronunciation was similar to Japanese. It seems that both Koreans and Chinese tend to learn Japanese faster because of these similarities. It will take longer for people whose language is not similar to Japanese (the vast majority). I had to start by making rhymes in my head to remember words (mnemonics) because there were very few words in Japanese that resembled English apart from loan words like "pasukon" (personal computer) or bisketto (biscuit). I think you simply have to do a lot of memorization. The grammar, vocabulary, writing system . . . just about everything . . . is completely different from English. I used to think French was tough in High School, but it has nothing on Japanese. My main strategy for learning new words in Japanese was to try to relate the new words to previous words I'd learned or to create rhymes in my head to learn new words. For an extended period I found it difficult to not think of "wa" as a verb because English follows the Subject-Verb-Object formula. In Japanese the verb is always at the end of the sentence. Verbs though are fairly regular and not nearly as difficult to conjugate as they are in other languages. There is no future tense, no past perfect or present perfect. One other thing is that in Japanese there are no plural forms on the ends of nouns, and there are no articles: a, an, the, . . . and no worry about masculine, feminine, neuter nouns etc. etc. Reading and writing though are extremely hard to learn. It will take about 10 years to read a newspaper fluently (assuming you really hit the books every day). You need to do a lot of memorization of kanji (Chinese characters). Hiragana and Katakana are a breeze to learn in comparison. It could take about 1 year to get to a level where you are comfortable having an every day conversation. It really depends on you though. If you are keen to learn and immerse yourself it will come more quickly. It took me a while to get to my present level (intermediate). I'm still learning. I still have a lot of difficulty understanding news programs on t.v. Hope this helps.