Learning Japanese

by John Pinney

If you're thinking about applying for a Daiwa Scholarship, the chances are you've never learned a non-European language before. Perhaps you're a frustrated linguist eager to get your mental teeth into a real challenge. More likely, your last experience of a foreign language was a GCSE French oral exam, and you're more than a little unsure whether you'll be able to cope with the demands of full-time Japanese school. The language component of the Scholarship is substantial, and the selection panel will be looking for some evidence of linguistic skill when choosing Scholars. However, formal language qualifications are certainly not as important as the right attitude to study - when it comes to learning Japanese, degree-level French or German is not necessarily more useful than a good GCSE and a methodical approach. Whatever your background, I hope the following is of some use in helping decide if Daiwa is for you.

First of all, the good news: Japanese is not as difficult as you think. Once you have got your head around the fact that it works in a completely different way to any European language, the grammar is actually fairly simple, with regular patterns and literally a handful of exceptions. The number of sounds in the language is very limited, and they are all easy for English-speakers to pronounce. There are no "tones" (such as in Chinese) to make life difficult, and the oral-based teaching at Naganuma means that the correct sentence patterns are easily picked up by copying the teacher. After 3 months of classes you will have covered most of the basics and you should be able to go out and wow Tokyoites with your skills.

The bad news? Be prepared for a long, hard slog, because once your spoken language is coming on nicely, it's time to concentrate on reading, writing, and acquiring some vocabulary. Learning Japanese isn't intrinsically difficult, but it does require a large investment of time and effort in order to reach any standard of fluency. The main problem is, of course, the writing system. Japanese uses three types of script (not counting the Roman alphabet, romaji) - hiragana, katakana and kanji. The first two are phonetic "alphabets" - two equivalent sets of syllables used for writing indigenous words and foreign loanwords respectively. If you are selected for the Scholarship then I strongly recommend you invest in a workbook and make sure you know these 92 symbols thoroughly before your plane lands at Narita. Not only will it make your first few weeks at school a lot easier (after lesson 2 there is no more romaji to help you!) but it will also enable you to start learning kanji as soon as you start school.

Kanji are the Chinese characters used in written Japanese. There are around 2000 of them in general use, plus many more in specialised vocabularies and proper names. But don't panic! You don't need to know them all. The most important kanji are introduced gradually throughout the school textbooks, but the pace increases fairly rapidly so it is a good idea to be a bit ahead of the game. Everyone soon finds their own method for memorising kanji, but my advice would be to concentrate initially on learning how to write the most common radicals (parts of kanji) and their names. This is the strategy adopted by the "Let's Learn Kanji" workbook, amongst others. Although it might seem a bit irrelevant to start with, it is well worth the effort because if you know which radicals make up a particular character then it is much easier to recognise it, write it or look it up in a dictionary. The main sticking point in learning kanji is that each character will have at least two, and often three or four different readings depending on its context. This can make reading aloud a bit of a pot-luck exercise, but rest assured the teachers will put you right if you slip up! By the time you leave school you will probably have covered around 700 kanji, enough to start reading easy novels or newspaper articles and a very good basis from which to build at your work placement or in further study. Incidentally, apart from the hiragana and katakana workbooks, I would leave any other language book purchases until after you arrive in Japan, where the choice is much greater than in the UK and you will be able to find a kanji dictionary and grammar manual to suit you.

Another problem particular to Japanese is that the "level" of language can change dramatically depending on the social situation. The type of language you will learn at Naganuma is the everyday, polite language that is deemed acceptable for foreigners to learn, because although they might get it wrong, they won't be able to offend anyone with it. However, as soon as you make friends with some Japanese people, you will find that they are speaking what appears to be a completely different language, called "plain form" - time to learn some new grammar! Be careful who you choose as your teacher though, as men and women use rather different words. You will come across several expat businessmen around town holding forth in fluent colloquial Japanese but sounding remarkably like 20-something women. Speaking this more relaxed version of Japanese can be quite addictive, but beware of using it in class or other inappropriate situations because it could well get you a frosty reception. As with many things in Japan, context is everything - if in doubt, stick to the polite forms. At the other end of the scale there is keigo, the ultra-polite language used in very formal situations. Although as a foreigner it is very unlikely that you will be expected to produce any keigo, some time is spent learning the verb forms in class so that you can at least understand when someone phones up trying to sell you something!

Lastly, I would like to emphasise how rewarding it is to study Japanese. Quite apart from the fascinating mixtures of symbolic and phonetic elements that make up kanji, learning Japanese really is learning to think in a very different way. This is why language school is such an important part of the Scholarship: to truly communicate with anyone we must first of all know where they are coming from.

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