Welcome to my newest blog on learning Japanese!
わたしのブログへようこそ！
I hope you had wonderful holidays and I hope the brand new year will give you love, health and adventures! And if you have stumbled upon my blog, this only means that learning Japanese is one of the goals you set yourself to achieve this year!
I am glad to be able to do this again as I have missed teaching languages. You can call me Dolly Panda (or should I say, Panda-sensei!) and I'll be your teacher for the next few months!
So, have you ever wanted to learn the language of the country of the Rising Sun, but never knew where to start? Or have you ever dived into it, but found it too difficult? Or perhaps, you are simply tired of rigid textbooks and you just wanted to learn real Japanese?
Well, you are in luck, because I myself am also tired of this rigid way of learning languages and I seek to teach real or natural Japanese to finally allow people to speak like native Japanese. So, forget textbooks or learning apps that only teach you one way to say things!
My blog will carefully be divided into easy lessons that will be simple to follow, along with tips to really explain to you in detail how this language is constructed. If ever you do not understand something, do not hesitate to leave a comment with your question(s), I will make sure to answer ASAP, and I will also update my lessons or add your questions, so other people will also be able to have their own questions answered.
So, a little bit about me, I guess. I have taught Japanese to my friends and other people since high school. I have always been passionate about languages, having taught myself English and other languages like German and Polish, and I have always loved sharing my passion with others. I have taken education classes in university to perfect my way of building courses on my own and I have incorporated everything I have learned in my lessons. I find Japanese to be easier to teach than English or French, so this is why I have decided to open up this blog. And I will assure you, Japanese is not as difficult as people think it is! With motivation and passion, you can conquer almost any language!
Japanese is also a really popular language to learn, thanks to anime, hence my decision to set myself on teaching this language. I have encountered many people who wanted to learn Japanese, but unfortunately, with the rigid teaching of textbooks and the unnatural Japanese that often comes with these books, many people had a tendency to stop learning after a while or to sound unnatural when speaking Japanese. Well, I want to solve that problem!
The Language of the Rising Sun
日本語
So, before even diving into learning this language, let's look at some facts about it.
Japanese is a language belonging to the Japonic or Japanese-Ryukyuan family and is spoken by around 128 million people in Japan. The language is mostly close to Korean, so if you ever master the Japanese language, think about learning Korean next, it will be much easier for you!
Japanese has a subject-object-verb order like most languages. English has a subject-verb-object order, so it might take you a while to get into the grove of Japanese because of this. The verbs in Japanese are always at the end of a clause or a sentence, do not forget that!
Japanese has three forms of writing: katakana (カタカナ), hiragana (ひらがな) and kanji (漢字). In the ancient times, Japanese used to be written with only kanji, which are Chinese non-simplified characters, but was later simplified by creating other writing systems to make it easier for people to read and write (which were the hiragana and katakana). The katakana alphabet was invented in the 9th century and the hiragana alphabet during the second half of the 9th century. It was believed that since hiragana were more delicate that it was a woman's writing, while the kanji remained a man's writing.
Japanese is also a language that uses the keigo system (which we can call the polite system). You may have heard that the language has a polite form and a neutral (familiar or casual) form. Most of the time in anime or manga, you will see a lot of the neutral (or familiar) form, and in textbooks, you will see mostly the polite form. We will call the familiar or neutral form 'casual' henceforth to not get confused. We will look at this later on, but for now, I will briefly explain what it entails.
The polite form, or keigo, works with the verb endings and there are three keigo forms: the teineigo, which is the basic politeness, and the two keigo-styled politeness, sonkeigo and kenjougo. I will not go into much detail on those polite forms in the courses, because the sonkeigo and kenjougo are highly difficult to master (Japanese people themselves, we just do not know how to use them properly), but just be aware that they do exist. In the lessons, we will mostly view the teineigo and the keigo itself.
All of this (the three writing systems, the keigo system...) seems to be difficult. But do you know what is nice about the Japanese language? It does not have any gender, like Romance languages, nor plural like many languages, and the verbs keep the same form no matter the pronoun used (and most of the time, pronouns are dropped altogether!) And it has no noun cases like it is the case in Polish or Finnish! This makes it, in my opinion, one of the easiest languages to learn.
With this in mind, are you ready to learn Japanese?
Oh, and another thing before we dive into the lessons!
You can actually write Japanese with letters. This is called roumaji script. However, it is also important to learn the Japanese alphabet, along with katakana, hiragana and kanji. Japanese people just do not write in letters. I know this can be hard and not a lot of people actually want to learn them, but you have to! This is the only way if you want to read manga or if you ever visit Japan outside of Tokyo. So, in my lessons, I will start up with roumaji, but I will slowly abandon it to favour the Japanese writing instead to encourage you to learn it. So, at some point, if you do not learn the katakana and hiragana, you won't be able to go further into the lessons!
Keep also in mind that I will not teach kanji here, because it requires knowing the stroke order and this is impossible to do in a blog. There is an excellent book I found to learn kanji, so if you really want to learn some, this book will come in handy for you! The book is Kanji Look and Learn; I bet you can find it on Amazon.
Duolingo is a good way to help you learn the hiragana and katakana, and even kanji, but the Japanese on Duolingo is not natural and can contain mistakes. I would avoid it to learn the language itself, but it can be a good tool to learn the writing systems. You can learn the kanji, but I would not really worry about it, to be honest. It is almost impossible to know all 2000 kanji to be sufficient in Japanese if you do not live in Japan for several years and to be fair, only knowing an handful is good enough. If you know the most useful ones, I would say it is enough. Most manga, if you want to read manga in Japanese, have furigana, which are hiragana written next to kanji to help you read them anyway.
じゃ、これからいっしょにがんばりましょう！
Ja, kore kara issho ni ganbarimashou!
So, from now on, let's do our best!
