What's it like learning standard level Japanese? 🇯🇵 - Lifestyle Monday
Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,
What's it like learning standard level Japanese at sixth form? This is a question that I get asked a lot so I'm going to answer it for you today.
For me at least, when it comes down to this course, I really enjoy the Japanese lessons but I do find the language quite difficult to grasp. If you don't already know, I do actually have a strong Japanese heritage. My dad is half Japanese and although he spent most of his life living in England, he was actually born in Kyoto, Japan. However, he was unfortunately not taught how to speak Japanese so when I was given the opportunity to study the language at a beginner IB level at college, I took the opportunity to do so. I think what I find most difficult about Japanese is learning all the alphabets. I would say I'm beginning to understand more words in Hirigana but I do find myself mixing up a couple of the letters in Katakana and I can barely recognise anything that's in Kanji, apart from the days of the week. Really, some may say that I might be putting myself down a bit, but I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily the best at Japanese. I am improving of course but I just also find that Asian languages are so different to European languages in general and that can be quite challenging when you're just starting to learn the language.
However, what I do like about Japanese is that there's not really any grammar. Apart from putting verbs at the end of the sentence and remembering what particle to use and when, if you can remember the sound of a word, it's really all that matters. There's no perfect or imperfect tense like in French or four ways of saying the word "the" like in German. You're mostly just relying on the phonetic sounds of letters to formulate your Japanese words in Hirigana and your foreign words in Katakana. You can also just remember the pictorial meaning of some of the symbols in Kanji, without necessarily knowing how it sounds so in this sense, the language is a lot easier to learn than others.
However, I do find it a bit frustrating when you get those really passionate learners of Japanese who seem to know a lot more than I do about Japanese but I know that's just because they really like the language and they've spent a lot of personal time learning it. You can't really compare yourself to others in these sorts of situations. In my opinion, I have a good Japanese teacher who is really good at explaining how Japanese works and she really makes sure that we try to consolidate everything that we do. She isn't Japanese herself but I think that that kind of inspires us to work harder at the language.
Overall, it is difficult to learn Japanese at standard level but I think that I can only improve with time. It's only been the first term but it feels already like i've been learning this language for a long time, which is a good thing.
Can you speak Japanese? What other languages can you speak? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be sure to reply to them. I ♡ hearing from you!
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See you next time,
Bye,
XOX, Juliette
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