Original subtitles

What's the best way to learn Japanese from school? How would you answer? Do

tell your students to learn kanji and law? Or you don't really recommend?

When you watch anime, does it help to learn Japanese?

Hey guys, how are you doing? I'm Takashi from Japan. Today I'm going to

interview Japanese tutors. What's the best way to learn Japanese? And I also

interview my foreign friend who speaks really good Japanese. So I'll ask her

she learns Japanese as well. Okay, let's get started.

Okay, thank you for your time. Could you introduce your background?

Hi, my name is Koji -sensei. I am from Tokyo, Japan, and right now I am an

online Japanese tutor.

I'm Risako Onishi from Osaka, Japan.

I'm currently living in Mexico City as a Japanese tutor and content creator.

Hi, I'm Sayaka, and I teach Japanese online.

I've been teaching Japanese for like five, six years now. I live in Nagoya.

Lived in the United States for two years in total.

In Japanese. In Japanese? Okay.

As a Japanese tutor, I'm going to ask you some questions. First of all, what's

the best way to learn Japanese from scratch? How would you answer?

In the beginning or the earlier stages, I would say to focus on pronunciations

because over time, if you start building up the habits of saying a word in

Japanese, it will be difficult to fix it. So I would focus on like

pronunciations by working on the shadowing and then listening.

So write down reading.

Of course, hiragana and katakana are pretty important as well because

and katakana are the reading syllables for us.

To read a kanji, we need hiragana and katakana. So I would say these two.

I would start from learning the characters, but not just the characters,

also some basic phrases and stuff. I think it's important to learn all of it.

all together at the same time. I wouldn't just focus on hiragana,

I would try to learn phrases and try to write those phrases in hiragana and

katakana. I think it'll be a kind of approach for them to start from letters,

from hiragana, katakana. Start to associate each letter with each sound.

develop like to absorb vocabulary.

With that vocabulary, you can learn to express.

So small units, like letters, like for many people, first step in learning

Japanese. How I learned Japanese.

I started off back in 2013 and I started just like looking up how do you learn

Japanese. So right now, you know, you can learn Japanese fairly a lot easier

than maybe like 20 years ago because there's so many resources.

And so then I looked up how I learned Japanese and I found some blogs on...

The exact process to do it. And I was like, well, let me just try this out.

And I downloaded a bunch of apps from the app store.

And I just tried all of them. And I was like, okay, there's a couple I like. I

started learning hiragana, katakana, and then kanji.

And then I started to understand a little bit of the grammar.

And then I was just watching a lot of anime, dramas and stuff, listening to

Japanese music already.

And so then after a while, it was like really exciting to hear words that I

learned. It's better almost to watch like TV dramas and stuff because when

have example sentences, you're attached to the context of that show and you know

what they're saying. And so it's easier to remember words and how to say it. So

you speak Japanese, English, Spanish, right? So what are the differences?

English, Spanish and Japanese.

Pronunciation, the letters, you know.

Structure and everything. Can you explain?

The similarity I see between Spanish and Japanese is how close they are

in pronunciation.

Each letter tends to be constituted of two elements, which is consonant and

vowel. That makes two languages sound similar in pronunciation.

Would you say that it's easier for Spanish speakers to pronounce Japanese

language? I think so. I personally think they have great advantage.

Difference is...

Japanese writing is a bit more complicated.

Three patterns of writing. And I think it's a huge obstacle for beginners.

I think English and Japanese are completely different.

So I feel bad for Japanese people learning English because it's just so

difficult. And I speak Telugu, which is also a language from India. And we have

the same grammar structure.

So it's a lot easier for me to pick up Japanese because I understood the verb

-noun structure.

What about pronunciation?

Pronunciation is like, oh my god, I feel like it's so different.

English is just, we have a lot of like, or like R and T sounds I think are very

like rough, like the way we say it. But then Japanese, where you say the T sound

and then the R sound, it changes where you're putting your tongue, like at the

roof of your mouth. And so I had to kind of study where to place it each time.

The way you approach the language, it's different, depends on your native

language. I think there's definitely a difference.

If you only speak English and you're suddenly learning Japanese, I think

definitely a bit of a hurdle because it's tough to get used to the new

the grammar structure.

And so for me, I do feel like it was a little bit easier because the Telugu

pronunciation and the grammar structure is slightly similar.

And in general, if you speak at least two languages, I think you have that

flexibility and you're able to pick up languages a lot easier. And especially

you're Chinese, you don't need to learn kanji. Exactly, there you go.

Particle is probably the biggest thing, joshi.

Wa or ga or o.

And those are kind of similar to prepositions in English, but not

the same.

And that is the framework of a sentence. So connecting words together and make

sentences in Japanese.

And I think that's one of the hardest part of learning Japanese as well.

When you watch anime, does it help you learn Japanese?

It definitely helps because the more you hear...

Any kind of negative aspect of...

Learning Japanese by watching anime. You learn some bad words.

And some words are not really used in real life.

So maybe that's the disadvantage.

To study Japanese or to learn something just in general, you have to have a

passion, right? I always tell my students to have passion in learning

And if it's just understanding anime, I think that's amazing.

And also...

Anime is a great way to build up your vocabulary or phrases that we use in

life. You know, action anime, they use the phrases that we don't really use in

the daily conversations, like maybe, or like, or something like that. So that's

something that you should be careful with, but it's nothing wrong with, like,

being familiar with those.

Interesting, because I get so many DMs on Instagram, and some people call me,

like,

Which is very, very, very rude. I never heard of it in real life, but very rude.

But, you know, they use it a lot in anime, so I think they assume that it's

to use it, but, like, it's not okay.

Don't call me Kizamaba. Anyway. I think it's difficult to learn everyday

Japanese words from anime.

I think it makes it difficult because you don't know which is which.

But what I think it does help is with listening practice.

Because you will hear words that you've studied before and you'll get used to

hearing Japanese.

So I was watching a lot of anime the first 3 -4 years that I started Japanese

learning. And there are animes that have very natural speaking Japanese as well.

So I think you can totally use it. But I think if you aid it with... with

something like TV dramas, you'll get an idea of what normal Japanese speaking

is. The first five, six years that I started learning Japanese, my entire

that I lived in was in...

Japanese. Like, I would make notes in Japanese, I would watch TV in Japanese,

and I would just try and make my entire environment that language.

And that included music, I listened to Japanese music, TV shows, like variety

shows as well, like comedy, anime, and I would call my friends in Japanese,

or I would write blog posts in Japanese.

And yeah, basically every single part of my life was that. In this video, I'm

asking Japanese tutors what's the best way to learn Japanese.

I also want to share one of the best methods from my perspective.

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Let's start learning Japanese by sign up for Priply. Okay, let's get back to

interviews. Any common mistakes Japanese learners tend to have, tend to make at

the beginning?

in the beginning i would say the biggest one is the pronunciations we have like

certain like or specific pronunciations that only exist

probably only exists in Japanese.

Like long vowels, for example, if we say movie in Japanese, it's 英が

in the written.

But when an 英 sound and an 英 sound together, you would say 英が, so hold it

long sound.

And which can be difficult in the earlier stages. And I always focus on

teaching in long vowels. And also double consonant, which is スモツ, the pause in

between. And like I mentioned, each character represents one sound. So we

to say them properly. Otherwise, it will sound like an accent in Japanese.

Anything you did, but you didn't need to.

I bought a dictionary of all Japanese verbs, and I tried to memorize every

single day a verb, and it didn't work at all. It was such a waste of time

because I didn't have anything to work off of. You need some kind of TV show or

some kind of context or something practical, or else you're just kind of

there trying to memorize something that has no relevance to you.

And so now what I do is I use flashcards. And even then, a lot of

recommend Anki, for example.

but I've never used it because I think that for me flashcards it was just

for me to use the app that I had but anyway I would put in words from

conversations that I've had and those words is what I would use because I'd

the context one of the things that I see often is start learning kanji so much

before building a lot of vocabulary if you learn the kanji first and then you

learn vocabulary you are learning two things at the same time but if you knew

the vocabulary I think it's easier to apply the kanji to what you know already

and also not speaking out people are just writing down and understanding but

because they don't really pronounce it try to do the output work the output

is also as important as doing the input work do you believe that kanji is really

important to learn acquire or to live in japan to to be able to speak japanese

like what do you think like oh as someone who actually lives in japan like

what's your opinion I think it's really important.

It's not important to write it.

I don't write Japanese. I just type it. Yeah, me neither.

Yeah, I don't think you need to do that. But I try to make sure that I know the

kanji of like signs around me or just in general. I think it helps so much

because it reduces the amount of time you have to think.

It's like...

You know the kanji, so you know generally what something says and you

to think beyond that. So I was really glad that in moments like if I had to go

to the doctor, I could read kanji and I could be like, oh, like I think blah

blah blah blah blah should be like this, like, you know. So you don't think that

you need to write kanji to memorize kanji to be able to read?

I definitely wrote Japanese to practice the beginning, like nakaとか.

And you really have to do a lot of image training of what each word kind of

represents. And after a while, it really looks like... what the kanji was meant

to be.

And you grow like an appreciation for it too at the same time. Nowadays, we use

a lot of online resources. So if you can recognize the kanjis and understand the

meaning of them, I think it's fine.

However, in the daily lives, like if you're living here, you need to know how

write them. So balance is probably important.

I wouldn't say like you need to know like...

100 % or 3 ,000 concepts by tomorrow. You can learn like 10 a day or like even

one a day is fine, but know how to write them and kind of get used to writing

those. At the same time, reading and understanding the meaning, I think. So

cannot ignore, but you don't need to focus that much. Right. I would say so,

yeah. The real Japanese that Japanese people actually use in their daily life

and Japanese that you learn on textbook or in the class or something, like...

You know, I think there are some differences.

Yes. In my class, we use this textbook, very famous one called みんなの日本語. Oh, I've

heard of it. Yes.

And it has 50 lectures, lessons from 1 to 50. And from 1

to 20, 21, the information that they give you is formal.

This, math, blah, blah, blah. From 21, you have like the first...

approach to informal casual style but those 20 episodes are very important

because informal Japanese is based on formal So you can't keep like any of

behind thing, I think. Textbook Japanese sometimes can be really robotic.

They pronounce each sound really correctly.

It happens in English and I'm sure it happens in other languages too. For

example, not at all is not at all or something like that.

And we omit a lot of words from our sentences when we speak in real life. So

those are the things that are not really mentioned because I think it's

important to learn the textbook Japanese first so that you can understand

everything. It's easier to omit something than adding something more to

you've learned, I think.

I know that many foreigners living in Japan for 10 years, 20 years still don't

really speak Japanese.

So that means living in Japan doesn't mean automatically being able to speak

Japanese, right? So any cons of living in Japan when it comes to learning

Japanese?

Yes, so regarding the topic, I think the most important thing is to be out of

the comfort zone and try to make... a Japanese friend one Japanese friend is

fine but it is sometimes it's difficult too because Japanese people here want to

speak want to learn English as well so if you come here then it's the purpose

like maybe you get to use English in a conversation and it will be easy as well

from my experience when I lived in the United States I really it was really

for me but I try to make Just at least one friend. And I had a host family.

They're from the United States. So I just like actively went out with them.

helped me a lot with my English as well. So I would say, well, it's kind of

different story here, but always be out of your community and then try to jump

into the Japanese communities to make a friend and then have an opportunity to

speak Japanese.

Even if you're here and you're surrounded by English speakers, then it

doesn't... help so it really doesn't matter where you are you can be you can

in japan you can be in america or wherever you are yeah the more you speak

better at the end any advice to those who just started learning japanese as a

japanese tutor okay like first of all just congrats your journey your decision

on like learn japanese

Learning life in this educational ambient, I think it's very positive. You

a lot of things, right? You understand better yourself sometimes.

Japan, it's a weird country, really. We live in a bubble without knowing that we

are. But that means that we have a very weird concept of life, tradition, and

culture. So enjoy it. And I think with each expression that you learn in every

class, you find a new piece of Japan, a piece of culture.

that can be really interesting.

Interesting, because learning the language is also including learning the

culture, right?

Exactly. Don't forget to enjoy learning.

Don't stress too much. Don't be afraid of making mistakes.

Just try to use them as much as you can.

And if you can communicate, that's all that matters, I think.

The biggest thing is to have a courage.

You will be coming to Japan, which is a completely different culture, language.

Living setting is completely different in Tokyo, especially.

So it's good to have a courage to live here.

And then courage to learn or use Japanese.

And that's probably the fastest way to learn a language as well. So it's not

necessarily like study skills or anything, but I would say it's more like

mindset that I would always recommend my students as well to be passionate, to

have a courage.

I think that curiosity is very important.

That mindset is especially very effective for me.

I think it's surprisingly important to take the time to do it.

By studying even in a small place,

you can reach a great level.

Okay, thank you for watching so far. How was it that was interesting?

I hope this video will help you if you're learning Japanese right now. And

if you're coming to Japan, I just published my Tokyo guidebook. So if

interested, please just check in the description.

Okay, anyway, thank you for watching. If you like this video, click the like

button. Please subscribe to my channel. If you have any questions you want me to

ask people in Japan, please leave it in the comments too. See you next time.