Japanese as 2nd Language Simplified

The 1st Sentence

Ok. Now, we are ready to start!

The very first sentence that I want you to learn is this.

Watashi-wa America jin [des(u)]

Watashi-wa	America	jin	[des(u) \| yo \| dayo \| ja \| etc.]
I am	America	human	[normal \| girlish \| kiddish \| elderly ]

Sorry, if you are not American nor human. This is just an example, so forgive me.

“Watashi” literally is “I”. The tag “-wa” makes the word the subject. Thus, “Watashi-wa” means “I am”. “America” is just “America.” In English, to mean a human being from America, you would say American. If it were a human from England, it is going to be “English”. If you are from Japan, it is going to be “Japanese”. Wow, that’s complex! In case of Japanese language, it is simply the name of the country + the word meaning “human”, which is “jin”. So, if you are a French, the sentence just becomes:

Watashi-wa France jin [des(u)]. etc.

If you are a cat, which is “neko” in Japanese, it will be :

Watashi-wa France neko [des(u)].

Simple, is it not?

The last part in the square bracket can be omitted. Japanese native speaker usually would not, but you can. FYI, it adds nuance to the sentence. des(u) is a normal form, while if you use “yo” instead, it will sounds girlish etc. You do not have to learn these for the time being.

Some notations

In any book like this, one cannot escape from having local notations to explain the concepts. Throughout this blog/book, I will use the following.

General Notation

notation	example	explanation
-tag	-wa, -no	This is going to be tha tag that I wrote earlier. It will go with the word stem to make the word meaningful.
(vowel)	(u)	When Japanese is written in Roman characters, we sometime write a vowel which is not pronounced or omitted. (This is because those Roman representation is character by character replace ment of hiragana or katakana.) Just remember that a single vowel, “a”, “i”, “u”, “e”, “o” inside the braces are not pronounced. (i.e., silent.)
[omittable]	[des(u)]	You can omitt whatever inside the square bracket. Native Japanese would not omitt it because these will add politeness/friendliness etc. to the sentence, but in BJ, you do not need it.
{opt1 \| opt2 }	{dayo \| noyo}	You can use either form. In many cases, they are going to be in square bracket as well.

Romaji (Roman Notation)

When Japanese is written in Roman Alphabet, we usually organize them into 5 vowels and 9 consonants. Five vowels are:

	Pronounciation
a	Like “a” in "Ah!”
i	Like “i” in “itch”
u	A shortend versin of “oo” in “oops”
e	Like “e” in “etching”
o	Like “o” in “Oh!”

These are conbined (can also be used alone) with consonunts to make the equivalent to Japanese phonetic characters (hiragana and katakana).

Consonants are as follows. Pronounciation are mostly self explanately. I have marked “r” in yellow background because it is an exception. I do not why Mr. Hepburn used “r” for this. Pronounciation wise, “L” is much closer.

	Pronounciation
k	Like in “k” in “kite”
s	Like in “ship”.
t	Like in “tunnel”
n	Like in “nuts”
h	Like in “hummer”
m	Like in “music”
y	Like in “you”
r	Like “L” in “Lion”
w	Like “w” in “way”
g	Like “g” in “gaze”
z	Like “z” in “zone”
d	Like “d” in “done”
b	Like “b” in “big”
p	Like “p” in “pop”

The combination produces following table. Unfortunately, there are several eceptions. These are marked with . Hard to read pronounciations are shown in <>.

	a	i	u	e	o
(none)	a	i	u	e	o
k	ka	ki	ku	ke	ko
s	sa	shi	su	se	so
t	ta	chi	tsu	te	to
n	na	ni	nu	ne	no
h	ha	hi	hu	he	ho
m	ma	mi	mu	me	mo
y	ya		yu		yo
r	ra	ri	ru	re	ro
w	wa				wo
g	ga	gi <ghi>	gu	ge	go
z	za	zi <gee>	zu	ze	zo
d	da	di <dge>	du <zu>	de	do
b	ba	bi	bu	be	bo
p	pa	pi	pu	pe	po
py	pya		pyu		pyo

Well, I guess you can sort of make out the pronounciation from these.

One day, I may put some sound file to each of them, but not now

Diarect

There are so many diarects in Japan. Some of them are so distant apart that one cannot understand what the other is saying. This is natural, because, although we say “Diarect”, it may just be another lanugae. For example, language distance between Tokyo Diarect and Okinawa Diarect is more distant than English and German. They are different language.

Here, we will learn Tokyo Japanese. Why? Because this is the language for TV and Radio, every Japanese understands this diarect. Besides, I can only speak Tokyo Japanese. I can sort of understand Osaka Japanese, but that’s not my native lanugage, you know

The 1st Step: Change your mind

The very first step for effective Japanese learning is to CHANGE YOUR MIND.

Well, I think this is true for most language, but Japanese language is uniquely positioned to take advantage of these, which I will explain later.

So, what I want you to make note of are these:

(1) Do not bother to try to speak perfect Japanese.

You are a foreigner, aren’t you?

It is ok as long as the person you are speaking to barly understands what you are trying to say. Broken Japanese is ok. Do not bother to speak correctly.

(2) Do not be scared by the number of characters.

Actually, you do not even have to learn Japanese characters in the begining.

I intend not to introduce Japanese characters till pretty late. And even after I have done that, it is not going to be “lots of characters.” Well, you may say, “I just cannot learn 15000 characters! It is impossible. Why is this language so crazy?”

The answer to this question is: “You know, characters are different from what you imagine from English letters. Characters are more like words than letters. Characters are made up of radicals. These are more like letters in English language. There are 214 radicals. Some of them are esoteric and you do not have to learn. Perhaps, learning half of that will do. Do you still think that’s impossible?”

Think of it. Leaning thousands of characters are equivalent to learning thousands of words. Well, you need this for every language. So this is not the point to be shocked.

And, as I have stated earlier, this does not come in until you have advanced quite a bit.

(3) Speaking a Broken Japanese is very simple.

I assure you. Broken Japanese (BJ) is one of the simplest language. This actually is due to the gramatical characteristics of Japanese Language that the order of word does not matter much.

English is a word order based language. If you change the sequence of the word in a sentence, it will either mean something different or make it completely broken and not understandable. Japanese is different. Japanese is “particle” or “tag” based language. Each word is followed by a tag that states the role of the word, such as Subject or Object. Thus, changing the word order does not change the meaning. Now you are freed up from an effort to line up the words in the correct order. It is going to be much easier that way.

Did you get those?

If you do not believe, then try to fool yourself. Speak loud “Japanese is Easy” twenty times. There is a reason for doing this. Have you ever heard of a word “Meta-recognition”? This is a cognitive psycology jargon, but it is worth noting of.

According to the work by Umemuro^* et al, if a person is made to believe the task that s/he is doing is “easy”, he will learn very quickly, while if s/he believes it is “hard”, the learning become painful and slow. This kind of pre-condition is called meta-recognition.

So, do this. Believe that ”JAPANESE is EASY”. Indeed, it will be easy, you know!

Preface

I have seen many people wishing to learn Japanese and failed. It is a pity. As long as spoken language is concerned, Japanese is one of the easiest language on earth, I think. But for these students of Japanese language, situation seems to be quite different. They say “Oh, Japanese have so many characters!”, “That inflection of particles are like hell!”, etc. In the past four weeks, I have seen three people like that. An American, a Korean, and an Australian. This is not good.

This blog is an attempt to rectify the situation.

I have thought of making the articles more structured, but it is unlikely that I will get much time to write these in structured manner. Instead, I have decided to write as blog, and later, reassemble the articles to more logical order. I think that is going to be more effective.

So, Let’s Start!!!

Japanese Simplified

Contents

Tags	Case	Examples
-wa, -ga	Subjective (nominative)	Bob-wa France jin [des(u)]. = Bob is a French man. Bob-ga Shusho [da]. = Bob is the Prime minister.
-no	Possesive (gentive)	Bob-no = of Bob.
-wo	Objective (accusative)	Bob-wo = Bob.
-niyotte	Abalative	Bob-niyotte = by Bob.
-ni	Dative	Bob-ni = to Bob
-i	Adjective	kawai-i neko. = pretty cat.
-ku, -mo	Adverb	sugo-ku kawai-i. = extremly pretty. tote-mo kawai-i. = very pretty.
-ru	Verb (present & future form)	Sage-ru = lower it.
-ta	Verb (past form)	Sage-ta = lowered it.

Japanese	English
watashi	I
anata	you
age	give
Balentain	Valentine
Choko	Chocolate