Japanese in 13 weeks

I’ve been studying Japanese for four months now and I had to work really hard for it. It has been incredibly difficult, complicated, sometimes it felt like forever studying. Learning Japanese is tough for a native English speaker, but I was motivated to learn it to improve my ease and independance living in Japan. After two months of studying I wrote a progress report about how the language barrier affected my life and how much Japanese I’d learnt in 8 weeks (see here). Now after finishing my 13 week course I’m recording my progress again and thinking of future goals. Let’s take a look at what has improved (Note: Week 1 I knew nothing):

Right: all the kanji I learnt. Left: All the non-kanji vocab (spoken)

While fluency in Japanese is not my goal right now (see here), here are my goals to keep improving in my Japanese without a formal course.

1.    Speak well enough to feel confident travelling independently around Japan. I feel like I am almost there! Now I just need to take a trip and see! So that still remains my top goal.

2.    Second is to use the next 3 months while I do an internship in Tokyo as my chance to use each grammar point and vocabulary item in daily life. I think that by doing this I will retain the information I learnt in these 13 weeks for much longer. Learning things in a meaningful way is also more fun!

In my local café, about one week ago, a really sweet staff member who has known me since I got here in July 2014, came and sat down after her shift and we spoke in only Japanese for one whole hour (she speaks no English). This was really incredible for me, a real breakthrough. We needed to use an electronic dictionary for some words but we had quite a detailed discussion for my first time in Japanese about how old we were, our living situations, where she used to live, where I was moving to, how living with parents was different in Australia and Japan, at what ages we wanted to settle down and how that was different in our two cultures. We spoke about a shared interest in acting among other things and finally we organised to meet up in a coming weekend with our partners and go to the Christmas Markets nearby. This was the first time I realised what the last 13 weeks of my life had changed in me. In such a short time, I went from not being able to say anything to her, to being part of a one hour conversation without preparing anything. It had allowed me to connect with this super sweet girl of a totally different and rich culture. I was more proud of that moment than any number of exams I could have aced.

My experience in learning several other languages is that it has always been a very gradual process. This experience was unique because it was among the first sustained conversations I ever had in Japanese and it went for 1 hour. That moment helped me appreciate my progress in a more dramatic way than I probably ever had until now! It was like a land-slide victory in language learning.

While I am living in Tokyo I will write another update about how the application of my goals actually works out! For now, let me know about what languages you want to learn or the experiences you’ve had doing so?