Learning Japanese with JLDrill

Introduction

It may be that you have come to this site wanting to learn Japanese, but not knowing how to approach it. In this case I’d like to offer some advice on how to learn Japanese based on the experience I’ve had over the years. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that over time I learn more and more what works for me. I have changed my approach many times as I’ve learned more effective techniques. No matter what you read, or what people tell you, be flexible in your approach and observe how well various things work for you. It might be very different than what works for me.

Often people are put off by the apparent complexity of the Japanese language. Even Japanese people will tell you that their language is impossible to learn. However, don’t let that dissuade you. In reality, Japanese is not particularly more difficult than any other language. However, because of the writing system and the various levels of polite speech, there is a lot of material. It is not complicated, but it will take you a long time to master. If you are patient and approach it in a slow consistent manner, you will definitely succeed.

My Current Approach

It took me a long time before I started getting traction learning Japanese. I am not a natural learner of languages. It takes me a considerable amount of effort. But over time, I’ve discovered techniques that work for me. They are relatively simple and have the advantage that they don’t require an investment in money. In fact, I don’t recommend buying a textbook or taking a class if you don’t want to.

It is possible to learn Japanese using only free materials that you can get on the Internet. And you can do it in your free time using whatever schedule is available to you. However, there is a caveat. You must study every day. The study is light and pleasant but it must happen every day, or else you will not retain the information. So find a time where you can study and be consistent. Regardless of how much time you spend each day, this consistency will guarantee results eventually.

Learn To Read

Learning to read in Japanese is the first thing you should do. For many people, this is probably a surprising statement. Very often people decide that they won’t learn to read at all, thinking that it will be too hard and they don’t need it anyway. But reading is the foundation to learning the language quickly. Yes, you can learn the language aurally just like a child. But do you really want to spend 5 years studying the language only to be able to speak like a 5 year old?

Reading allows us to use our adult brains to aid in the process of learning. Japanese is especially well suited to learning through reading because it uses Chinese characters in its writing system. These characters act like mnemonic reminders that allow us to learn and remember vocabulary much more easily. Learning to read, more than anything else I’ve done, has accelerated my progress.

There are 3 writing systems in Japanese. This may sound like an unnecessarily large number, but it’s actually much simpler than it seems. 2 of the writing systems are phonetic (just like our alphabet). Having 2 phonetic scripts seems like a lot, but consider that our roman alphabet has both upper and lower case letters. Japanese has hiragana (for Japanese words and grammar) and katakana (for words borrowed from other languages). Katakana is also used like italics in English writing, and is often found on signs.

The absolute first thing you should do (even before you learn how to say “Hello”) is to learn hiragana. This will help you in many ways. Japanese people have learned how to use our roman alphabet, which they call romaji, and often suggest that beginners read Japanese using that alphabet. However, the language is imperfectly represented by romaji and using it leads to confusion and mispronunciation. Stay away from romaji at all costs!

Luckily, learning hiragana takes much less time than you will suspect. After 1 or 2 weeks of study, you will be able to read both hiragana and katakana relatively easily. Some people can do so after only a few days (alas, I was not one of these). You can use JLDrill to practice hiragana and katakana.

There are two things you should do when practicing these letters. The first is to pronounce the sounds out loud when you review them. Japanese has an almost perfectly consistent pronunciation. So when you see a letter, you always know how to pronounce it (unlike English!). So get into the habit of pronouncing it as you read it.

The other thing you should do is write the character each time. This is surprising advice. Again, most people feel that learning to write is not necessary and will take too much time. In fact, learning to write the characters will dramatically speed up the time it takes to learn them. The muscle memory that you create will help you remember the characters very easily and retain the memory for a long time.

To learn how to write the character, you can hover the mouse over the hiragana or katakana character. This will pop up a “stroke order diagram” of the character. Simply follow the numbers on the diagram to determine which order to draw the lines. “Stroke order”, or the order in which you draw the lines, is much more important to readability in Japanese than the shape. Japanese people recognize the characters more by how the lines connect than from the overall shape, and in fact handwritten characters often look nothing like what you think they should. So you must always draw the strokes in the right order. This will allow you to write and read the characters in all situations.

Earlier I recommended tracing characters with your finger rather than writing them on a piece of paper. I’m revising my thoughts on this matter. Writing on physical paper is important. Lately as I’ve been writing more and more I’ve noticed small mistakes that I hadn’t seen before simply because I never looked at my own writing. Definitely don’t let a lack of pen or paper stop you from studying. But I recommend that you involve regular writing into your regime as well.

The Next Step

What you do after you know how to read kana (hiragana and katakana) depends on your needs. If you are planning a trip to Japan, or have some reason to interact with Japanese people right away, you will need to learn some idiomatic expressions. You probably will want to learn how to say, “Hello”, “Goodbye”, “Good Morning”, etc.

But before you do so, let me give you a warning. Many of these expressions use advanced and sometimes old/bizarre grammar. Greeting people in Japanese is something you must be polite about, and so very polite forms are generally used. In Japanese the way to be polite is to add a whole bunch of mostly meaningless grammar at the end of a sentence. So when you learn these idiomatic expressions you will be learning very long and complicated jumbles of syllables. I believe this is mostly what gives Japanese it’s undeserved reputation for being complicated.

Interestingly, if you walk up to a 3 or 4 year old Japanese child and greet them politely, they will probably just run away from you. That’s because they haven’t learned these expressions. These idiomatic expressions, that beginner language learners usually try first, are things that even Japanese people find complicated. So unless you are going to meet Japanese people right away, there’s no particular reason to learn them first.

But I realize that it seems strange to learn a language and not even know how to say “hello”. Therefore I recommend going to Japanese Podcast 101 and learning these basics. It’s a free podcast that teaches you Japanese. You have to understand how to use these idiomatic expressions and when they are appropriate. The podcast does a very good job of explaining these issues.

Ideally, you would have a list of vocabulary that you learn from these podcasts to put into JLDrill to study. Unfortunately I don’t currently have this. But you can create your own drills. First press control-D to load the dictionary. It will take about 30 seconds to load. Then press “+” to add a new entry for your quiz (if you have just started JLDrill, the quiz will be empty – subsequent versions of JLDrill will have the ability to create an empty drill at will).

Listen very closely to the sound of the word and try to write it using hiragana in the “Reading” part of the form (you will have to learn how to use the IME, or Input Method Editor, on your computer to write hiragana – instructions are outside the scope of this document). Then press the “Search” button. You may have to try a couple of times to get the spelling right, but JLDrill only requires that you type the start of the word – you don’t have to type the whole thing. Once you find the expression in the dictionary (most common ones are there), you press the “Add” button to add it to your quiz. This will allow you to review your vocabulary.

The Secret To Speaking is Grammar

Learning a lot of set expressions will get you quite a long way in Japanese. In fact, I know foreigners in Japan who have lived here very comfortably for years only knowing common expressions. But you can’t have a conversation or express any novel ideas.

One of the most frustrating experiences when learning a language happens when someone says something to you and you can’t respond. You understand exactly what they are saying, but you can’t formulate a response. You will often hear people say, “My Japanese is pretty good and I understand a lot, but for some reason I can’t say anything”.

This is because the person understands their vocabulary and grammar, but the grammatical expressions are not deeply ingrained enough to spring to the mind when formulating sentences. Often they will resort to translating from English, using English expressions. The result is slow and halting and probably incomprehensible to the average Japanese person.

In order to speak, a person must have the grammar ingrained so that it instinctively comes out. And there is only one way to get the grammar ingrained so strongly – practice.

There are two ways to practice. The first way is one you experienced when you learned your first language. It is an interactive and cooperative approach. You have one or more people who already understand the language. They model language constructs and prompt you to try them. They patiently listen to you and correct you when you make mistakes. Then they model the language again. You pass it back and forth until the language becomes second nature.

This is the very natural approach you took when your parents taught you your native language. It’s natural, and comfortable. If you have a good teacher it can be fantastic. Recently, techniques like TPR (Total Physical Response), which mimic this approach, have been used to great success in classrooms.

But there’s a downside to this approach. You need a willing and patient teacher. This is great if you can find one, have the time to go to class every day, and can afford to pay the huge cost of a daily lesson. But what if you are alone (or poor)? What can you do?

The alternative is something we are also all familiar with – rote memorization. You are given a model and you practice that model until you memorize it. Then you apply the model in real conversation.

This approach also has disadvantages. First, it’s boring. Many people have difficulty memorizing things. That’s why JLDrill was written. The intent is to make rote memorization as fast, comfortable and pleasant as possible. The second problem to memorization is that it has an extra step. Once you memorize the model, you must practice it with a real person in order to get used to applying the model to new situations and vocabulary. So you still need to talk to people. But the need for cooperation with others is much less than the interactive approach.

You don’t have to chose one approach exclusively. It’s OK to mix and match, possibly using one approach to supplement the other. But since this is discussing JLDrill, I will discuss the memorization approach (the approach I tend to use, even though I’m “bad” at memorization).

The approach I’ve used with the most success is to obtain a good grammar text book. Luckily, the best one I’ve found is free and available for download on the Internet. It is Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar. Tae Kim introduces the grammar concepts in a logical and understandable order. And most importantly introduces “plain” form before “polite” form.

Usually polite form is taught first. The rationale is that if one wants to talk to Japanese people one should learn polite form first. This allows you to have discussions with strangers without being rude. Later they teach plain form which is what you would use with your close friends and family.

But this approach is flawed. First of all, when you are a beginner, you do not have the ability to have conversations. You just don’t have enough grammar and vocabulary. So you are only really capable of set expressions anyway. Second, polite grammar is complicated in that it has a lot more grammar than is necessary (it’s this extra grammar that you must take care to say that makes it polite).

But the most important point is that the Japanese language is built on plain form. People think in plain form. It is easy to change from plain form to polite form, but the reverse is conceptually difficult. This is another reason why people consider Japanese difficult. Save yourself a considerable amount of pain and learn plain form first.

Luckily the amount of plain form grammar you must learn before you learn polite form is actually quite small. So unless you desperately must speak in a polite situation to strangers, just avoid polite form until you have a good grounding in the language.

The approach I take is to read a chapter of Tae Kim’s book. Then I memorize all the vocabulary. Then I memorize the example sentences in the chapter. Taking advantage of JLDrill’s spaced repetition I then review the example sentences over time. I have found that this is all that I need to do in order to effectively use the grammar in conversation.

If you want to try this approach, you can use the grammar.jldrill drill file that I made. It contains most of the material in Tae Kim’s book (hopefully I will finish it for the next release). Simply read a chapter of the book. Then allow JLDrill to present the material for memorization/review. Stop when you reach the material for the next chapter (you can tell because I introduce vocabulary for each chapter first and then sentences. When you start getting new vocabulary to learn, you know you are at the next chapter).

The Vocabulary Grind

Once you start learning, you may be very surprised to realize that Japanese grammar is quite simple and consistent. There isn’t even all that much to learn. Using JLDrill you could probably read a chapter of Tae Kim’s guide every few days and review the material for an hour or so. In that way it would only take you a few months to learn almost all the important grammar in the language.

But the real difficult part of Japanese is not the grammar: it’s the vocabulary. Speaking Japanese well requires quite a big vocabulary since it uses whole sets of different vocabulary for different social situations. In fact the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) includes 10,000 words that you should memorize in order to be considered at all fluent in the language.

So the vast majority of your time will be spent learning and reviewing vocabulary. You might be feeling a bit overwhelmed. With 10,000 common words to choose from, which should you learn first? Luckily, there’s an easy answer to this question.

The JLPT has 4 levels. The lowest level is level 4 and the highest is level 1. Each level has roughly twice as much material as the level before it. So level 4 has 800 words, level 3 1500, Level 2 3000 and level 1 5000. In my opinion, learning the level 4 vocabulary first, followed by level 3 followed by 2 and then 1 is actually a very effective way to learn the language. The levels really are good indicators of the utility of the vocabulary.

(Note: The JLPT has recently been revised to contain 5 levels. However, they haven’t published the content of those levels. So my discussion here pertains to the old JLPT structure.)

JLDrill has vocabulary quizzes for all 4 levels. Unfortunately the vocabulary lists were compiled using a partially automated process and many mistakes were made. I have reviewed and corrected some of the vocabulary, but there are still lots of problems. Also, as the EDICT dictionary gets updated, the vocabulary in the drill gets out of date. So you should check the vocabulary yourself.

It is quite easy to check and correct the vocabulary. When you are learning new vocabulary, load the dictionary by pressing control-D. It takes several seconds to load. After that, whenever a word is different than what’s in the dictionary, the “Differs” button in the upper right corner will turn red. When that happens, simply press “e” to edit the vocabulary.

This will bring up the vocabulary edit dialog. JLDrill will automatically search the dictionary (if it is loaded) for the word and give you the candidate matches. It does this by searching for the reading and giving you all the words that start with that sound. The search currently ignores the kanji (this may be improved in a subsequent release). Simply click on the correct dictionary entry and press the “Set” button. This will set the item to the vocabulary you selected.

Being consistent at reviewing vocabulary is the secret to learning the language quickly. As was previously mentioned, learning vocabulary will take up the bulk of your time. But if you are consistent, you can learn it surprisingly quickly.

Personally, I found that the vocabulary in levels 3 and 4 are really easy to learn from a list. Most of the vocabulary has only one meaning and the meaning is clear even without context. For example, dog, cat, house are all very easy to understand. But once you get into level 2 and 1, the vocabulary gets more abstract and difficult to understand. Without an example sentence, you’re left wondering what the word really means. For example, the word “concrete” could mean a hard rock-like surface, or it could mean a definite idea. It’s not always clear from the dictionary entry.

Finally, a lot of the more abstract vocabulary is used primarily in set expressions. Just memorizing the word doesn’t allow you to use, or even understand the word in context.

Thus, lately I’ve abandoned studying vocabulary lists. Instead I read level appropriate books and memorize words that I don’t know. That way I end up with common vocabulary and I have the context I need to use and understand it properly.

But what about Kanji?

So far I haven’t talked about kanji. Kanji are the characters in the third writing system (the other two being hiragana and katakana). Unlike kana, kanji is not phonetic. It is conceptual.

It is a common misunderstanding that kanji characters represent words. This is not true. They are more of an alphabet that represents concepts rather than sounds. A word can be made up of one kanji character, but it could also be made up of several.

The important thing is that each kanji character has a distinct meaning which can help you memorize the word. For example, the word 鉛筆 means pencil. It is pronounced えんぴつ (or in romaji, enpitsu). The character 鉛 means “lead” (i.e., the metal) and is pronounced えん (en in romaji). The character 筆 mean brush and is pronounced ぴつ (pitsu in romaji).

Note: I’m giving you the romaji since I assume you haven’t studied hiragana yet, but generally you should avoid romaji like the plague. When you learn how to pronounce the hiragana, you will see that it is pronounced differently than you would expect from the romaji.

So pencil is made up of the characters lead - brush. This is quite easy to remember. A pencil is a lead brush if you consider a brush analogous to a writing tool (originally Japanese people used only brushes and ink for writing). And if you know that lead is pronounced えん and brush is pronounced ぴつ, then it’s very easy to remember that pencil is えんぴつ.

Kanji helps you learn Japanese vocabulary. So it is well worth investing the time to learn the kanji as you learn the vocabulary. Overall, I have found that I learn kanji and vocabulary together twice as fast as I learn the vocabulary alone. And as a bonus I avoid being illiterate!

But there are some complications. First, in case you didn’t notice, the characters look quite complicated. The first time you see them they look like a random collection of squiggles. How can you possibly memorize them quickly?

Another complication is that each character has more than one way to pronounce it (called a “reading”, because that’s how you read it). Usually it has at least 2 and sometimes as many as 10 or 15! How can you possibly memorize all the readings of a kanji and remember which reading to use for which word?

Finally, there are lots of kanji. To be literate you need to know at least 2100 characters. Most University graduates know more than 3000 characters and there are about 60,000 characters which pop up from time to time in publications. How can you possibly learn so many in a reasonable time frame? It takes Japanese people 9 years of school to learn the first 2000 or so.

Luckily, it’s not nearly as complicated as it all seems. In fact, I consider learning kanji the most interesting and fun part of learning Japanese. But you do need to approach the task systematically and with a little bit of technique.

Let’s address the first complication. The characters appear complex. Well, there are tens of thousands of characters, so obviously you have to make it somewhat complicated. But as it turns out, the characters are actually formed in a logical way. Once you learn the logical method, memorizing the characters is much easier.

Each character is made up of parts called “radicals”. For example, the character, 鉛, is made up of 3 radicals: 金 on the left hand side, 八 on the upper right and 口 on the lower right. 金 means metal. 八 means enter and 口 means mouth. It turns out that 八 sitting on top of 口 is rather common and in each of the characters in which it appears can be thought of as a kind of gully into which a flow of something (usually water) goes. It’s the entry into the mouth of the flow. So 鉛 can be thought of as the metal that flows into a gully – a good description for lead. The apparently complex radical (which is also a kanji character), 金, can also be broken down into parts. In this way it becomes relatively easy to memorize the characters.

There is a book called “Remembering the Kanji” by James Heisig. He was the first to describe a method of memorizing kanji by breaking it down into parts and telling a “story” with the parts. The first section of his book is available for free download as a PDF. I highly recommend reading it.

That being said, after buying the book and working through a little more than half of the kanji, I gave up on the book. I believe the method is excellent. However, some of the keywords assigned to kanji parts are clearly arbitrary and sometimes (in the case where they are a kanji character themselves) even wrong. I found that it was causing me enough trouble that I wanted to start over using a different order and new keywords for many of the kanji parts.

Eventually I will have a tool in JLDrill to facilitate researching kanji characters for this activity. However it currently does not do this. Nor does it easily allow reviewing of kanji characters and keywords. So for now I recommend using Heisig’s book.

Once you understand how to easily remember the kanji, using them as mnemonic devices for learning vocabulary is quite natural. Virtually every Japanese word can be understood simply by looking at its kanji. And once you have learned many of the kanji, you can often understand words you have never seen before simply by looking at the kanji. This speeds up vocabulary memorization greatly.

This leaves learning the readings (pronunciations) of the characters. The most usual method here is to simply memorize them using flash cards, or a spaced repetition program like JLDrill. And you could probably make drills like that if you wanted to. However, in practice, I’ve found it completely unnecessary. Simply learning vocabulary causes me to remember the readings of the kanji. Probably this is because I learn the vocabulary using the kanji as a mnemonic. This reinforces the sound of the kanji in my head. And the fact that there are many different readings for each kanji doesn’t seem to confuse me. So I don’t recommend doing anything in particular to learn the pronunciation of kanji.

Finally, we have the problem of the large numbers of kanji. For the JLPT tests it is important to be able to read the roughly 2100 kanji that are required for literacy. This will also enable you to read newspapers, books, street signs, menus, ingredients on food boxes, etc. If you ever go to Japan without learning kanji, you will quickly discover how difficult it is to live being illiterate.

But what order should these kanji be learned? Heisig has his own order which he feels is optimal. I understand his reasoning, but I personally don’t like his order. The JLPT tests have an order that is roughly similar to the order that they are introduced to Japanese school children. This is better, but not ideal since they include characters that are only commonly used in names (something you probably won’t have to deal with early on). Also there are many common words in the vocabulary lists for which they don’t feel you need to know the kanji. This breaks my technique of using the kanji as a mnemonic for the vocabulary.

I feel strongly that the kanji learned should be driven by the vocabulary you are learning. You should learn the kanji that are in the vocabulary. You should also learn the kanji that are used as building blocks for the kanji in your vocabulary. If you do this, you should naturally learn all the kanji as you learn vocabulary.

I would like to provide a tool that automatically selects the kanji you should learn based on your vocabulary and drills you appropriately. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten that far yet. So at the moment you are on your own to create your own method.

Currently, if you press control-K it will load up some kanji information. Hovering over a kanji character with the mouse will show a stroke order diagram for the character. It will also show a list of readings for the character, a list of potential english keywords for the character and a list of radicals (building blocks) for the character along with their meanings. It’s enough to get you started, but probably not sufficient. In time I will try to provide something better.

Conclusion

Congratulations if you made it all the way to the bottom of this document! Even with so much text, I still feel that I’ve left a lot out. But doubtless will find your own methods that work well for you. To summarize my points, the list of tips, in order of importance are:

Good luck with your studies!

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