Where do I start?!

One of the biggest problems with teaching yourself Japanese comes from the very beginning: How am I supposed to start doing all this?!

You have a lot in front of you right now. You're thinking, "I need to learn reading, writing, speaking, and listening... and within those, I'll need to learn grammar, vocabulary, three writing scripts, pronunciation, and..."

Okay, stop. While it's possible to break Japanese ability down into all those things, it's also possible to simplify it into one single thing. You just need to understand. 

You probably already understand some Japanese. I'm guessing you've heard of words like "sushi," "tsunami," and "anime," right? Those are all Japanese words, and you understand pretty much what they mean.

Learning the rest of Japanese is not too much harder, actually. You just start building on that.

Now, you may have already started trying to study on your own and are just looking for direction, or you may be wanting to start studying but have no idea what you should be studying or looking at.

The answer is simple: Learn what you want to learn!

Of course, you're not going to just learn it all at once. You need to learn what you can. You can't play an instrument if you don't know how to hold it; you can't play a sport if you don't know the rules; you can't do algebra if you don't know arithmetic. You're not going to be able to read a book in Japanese or say a complete sentence unless you know the parts that make those things up.

You're going to want to be speaking complicated sentences right away. You're going to have all kinds of things you'd like to say in Japanese, or you're going to want to understand what someone or something is saying. But you're not going to be able to understand all of that in a day, or from one session of studying. You're going to have to understand just little pieces at first, and eventually put those pieces together to make a fuller understanding of Japanese.

So the most important thing you can do in the beginning is start working on building a solid foundation of Japanese. But how do you do that?

Step 1: Figure out what you want and need to learn next.

You probably have all kinds of things you want to learn. But you need to think about what all skills you need to be able to do that.

Let's say you want to say a sentence in Japanese. It doesn't matter what it is. Maybe you want to say "Your mom in a library looks like a unicorn cupcake in a Saw movie." I'm guessing you can't say that in Japanese if you're just starting.

What skills and tools do you need to be able to say that.

Well, for one you need to know all the words. Now, you could go find a Japanese dictionary and look up all the words. Now what do you do with those words? If you just put them all in the same order you do in English, it's not going to make any sense. So you need to learn how to use the words.

Now, you're not going to be able to learn all of the grammar concepts needed to say something weird and long like that all of a sudden. You don't even understand how to make a sentence!

And you've answered your first question: How do you make a sentence in Japanese? How are words put together in Japanese to make sentences?

Step 2: Go find out what you need to know.

This is going to be the hard part. How are you supposed to find out how to make sentences? This is where I hope to come in and help. Across the articles and posts I'll be writing, I'll be pointing to resources and give my own help on these important questions.

In this particular case, you'll want to find some kind of article or textbook lesson (or even a person?) that can tell you what makes a Japanese sentence.

I plan on making a post all about this particular subject soon, so stay tuned. But even then, it's a difficult concept even for advanced students. But I think it's actually quite simple if you learn it early before trying to over-cram your head with all kinds of information.

And that's how it works... 

Seriously, just figure out what it is you want to do, and then figure out if there's anything else you need to know first. Keep repeating to you figure out the most basic things you don't know yet, then learn about them. You can keep repeating this process until you know Japanese. It's really that simple.

Okay, that sounds great, but I still don't know what to do. What do you recommend learning first?

I know you want to get started right now. It's exciting! And when there are so many things you want to learn how to do, it's hard to choose what you should be doing first, even if you try to break it down into the most simple things, because you'll probably find there's all kinds of simple things you can learn now.

Everyone learns differently, I know, but you still have to learn some things before you can learn others, no matter how you learn it.

Everyone wants some kind of simple step-by-step method to follow, but honestly, I just don't think that's how self-study works (or really any study). Everyone learns differently and at different paces and in different ways. There are just some core things you need to be doing first.

Here are my tips on what you should be doing if you're just starting:

1. Whether you understand it or not, you want to familiarize yourself with Japanese. Listen to Japanese music, watchanime and movies and stuff, try watching with the subtitles off, or try your best not to look at them. You're mostly ignoring the Japanese while you're reading the English.) It's a lot easier to learn about Japanese when it's familiar. Just like it's easier to play a song you've heard before, even if you are new to reading music, because you're just familiar with what it's "supposed to sound like." I'm serious, it really helps more than anything! So get out there and start experiencing. And don't ever stop.

2. Now learn how to do that yourself. You've been listening to Japanese now, so you know what it sounds like. Learn to read and pronounce romanized Japanese. Romanization is simply just writing out the Japanese using the roman letters so that you can read it. So it just means writing "kuruma" instead of 車 or くるま. (That means "car," by the way.) I recommend that you DON'T try to learn how to write just yet. I'll make a post about that later, but it's better to learn how to write once you have a handle on basic Japanese, because you need to know a bit about how the language works to better understand how the writing works. Don't worry, it won't be long before you should be comfortable learning writing. It's okay to try it out and look at it, but it helps to know a bit more first. Trust me. :)


3. You know what it's supposed to sound and look like, but you can't do it yourself yet, right? Start building a vocabulary. In the beginning you're not going to know all about types of words and stuff, so it's better to start with names of things and nouns, because you can easily relate them to English things. Like if you learn the word for "cat" (猫 "neko") and "dog" (犬 "inu") you're probably going to be able to use them well, because they never change, and a dog in Japan is the same as a dog in English-speaking countries.


4. You'll know some words, but you need to know how to put them together to say what you want to say, and you're going to need to know how to figure out what they mean when you encounter them together. Now you need to start building a foundation. Learn what the different types of words in Japanese are and how they fit together. Learn what makes a sentence and how to use them. It's a lot at first, but don't worry. A good first step is to learn the most basic sentence.

5. Build upon all of those things until you can start learning more complicated things. Once you have your  foundation down and you know some words, it's just building up from there. Sometimes you're going to find that the things you want to learn are more difficult than you expected, so you might have to try learning them later.


For some more specific direction...

If you want some personal direction because you can't choose for yourself what order to do things, I really recommend using Japanese: The Spoken Language, a textbook designed for classroom use. I warn you now, this book is not going to teach you Japanese as a self-study student; however, the book is built to offer the means to build a solid foundation in Japanese for classroom students with the aid of teachers and a class full of interactive peers.

However, you can still use the book as a really great guideline to what order to learn everything you need to build a strong foundation in Japanese. The book starts out simply telling you how to read and pronounce the words, then starts off with the most basic of sentences: A single word. From there, it slowly builds on this, only using knowledge it's already given you. So you learn 1 + 1 and build up from there until you're doing calculus.

I'll warn you, though, that you're not going to learn Japanese from this book alone. But if you want to know what you should be studying next, this book is your perfect road map. I think it's a really important addition to any self-studier's arsenal of study tools, but remember that you're going to be using it as a map or outline of what you should be learning and when. (And you can feel free to deviate within your own comfort, too.) I plan on making another post on what kinds of tools and resources you should gather for learning Japanese later, and what you should be using them for, so look out for that to see what you need to use to complement this text.

I know it's overwhelming right now to decide where to start. But even just watching the news and learning random words from a dictionary is helpful in the beginning. My next few posts will help you get started even further by telling you what materials and resources you should gather, and I'll be explaining some of the most important points to learn to help you build a strong foundation that will allow you to learn anything you want in Japanese on your own.


Like in math, if you can't add, subtract, multiply, and divide, you're never going to be able to do algebra or geometry or trigonometry or calculus. And even if someone taught you how to do random geometry problems with a calculator, you'll never be able to learn other ones on your own or even understand what you're doing. Knowing the basics is the most important thing.


In Japanese, that means knowing how to pronounce words, how to make sentence, and how to organize and use the different types of words. Stay tuned to this blog, and I'll try to help you master those fundamentals so you can start teaching yourself Japanese.