Guide to Grammar in 'Japanese for Busy People'

When I learned hiragana, I was in Japan taking an accelerated course in Japanese. That was a bit like trial by fire. I didn't use a lot of gimmicks, but I did use flashcards that I made by myself. As a teaching associate at UCLA, our students learned first to read hiragana the first quarter. By the second quarter, they were supposed to be able to write. 

At the back of the book, "Japanese for Busy People," there should be a chart. I would enlarge and photocopy to make simple flashcards. 

Online you can visit Quizlet to quiz yourself. You can also use RealKana.com. I suggest learning one row at a time and maybe two or three the first week. The next week, try three rows. By week three, try to learn rows up to ma through mo. Then in the fourth week, finish off your list. 

Once you've done that pay attention to what happens when you put two dots in the upper right side of the kana. In the case of ka through ko, the kana becomes ga through go. Similar things happen when you use ten-ten (dot-dot) for sa through za, ta through do and ha through ho. For the ha through ho row, notice you can also add a small circle to the upper right part and you get a "p" sound. 

To practice, try using a puzzle like the one below. When I was teaching class, I would divide the students into two groups and one by one, students would be matched against each other to find the words I said on the board. Remember that traditionally, Japanese is read up to down from right to left. A macron represents a long vowel. 

Find the following words: aoi, akai, aki, ika, eki, ue, kaki, kao, Keiko, kiku, koe, kūki, ōkī 

えかおかあ 
あおおいお 
きけきうい 
くいいえか 
うこいきき 
きこかくあ 

Now try this one: Akasaka, aoi, asa, ashi, eki, kagi, kaku, kaze, Keiko, kiku, koe, koshi, kūki, ōkī, sake, shio, shiso, sushi, zō 

しこきいかそおいあ

すしさこぎきあこか

しえけえおくおかさ

かきぞくおあいぜか

くあううきさししけ

Now take the two lists of words and try to put them in the order that they would come in Japanese.

Before we go on to the first chapter of "Japanese for Busy People," lets look at the page of useful daily expressions. There are a few things that you should note. Watch to see when some of the letters are either 1/2 or a third smaller than the other letters. This means the two kana are combined and only given one beat such as じゃ(ja) or ちょ(cho). In the case of a small "tsu" this means there's a double consonant as in いってらっしゃい(itterasshai) or ちょっと(chotto). Listen carefully to your CD and you'll hear a glottal stop. 

1. Notice that in this case there is a long o sound and it is expressed with an ou. おはようございます。You will see this happen again in number 14, 16, 19 and 20.
2. こんにちは　In this case, leave a beat for the "n" sound. In Japanese, it is it's own syllable. Also while in most cases は is pronounced "ha," in this case it is pronounced "wa." You'll see this happen again in number 3.

Just How Hard Is Japanese Language Learning?

I learned Japanese as an adult and attained enough fluency to get around Japan easily and eventually become a teaching associate at UCLA for their beginner classes and even teach my own classes. 

Learning Japanese isn't impossible for an adult, depending upon your skill level, dedication and flexibility. First, I feel that many people have to overcome their fear of Japanese. 

Japanese is not necessarily the hardest language in the world. That would be like saying that the Japanese are somehow intellectually superior to everyone else and that learning English is easy. Ask any second language learner. English is not easy. English is easier if you speak and read a language that has many common denominators. 

If your native language comes from the same language group or has historical ties with that language or culture, learning your target language will be easier. For instance, although English is not a romance language. That is, we don't mean that English is not related to gothic novels or Harlequin romances, but rather that English has not been derived from Latin or Neo-Latin languages. However, historically, French was spoken in the courts of English kings. Further France's proximity to England has also resulted in cultural and linguistic exchanges beyond that. 

In the case of the United States, cities and states along the Mexican border, some of which at one time were a part of Mexico, have been influenced by the Mexican culture and thus have an influx of Spanish words in common usage. 

Spanish and French are both Romance languages and share many common root words. Think of the word for one: uno for Spanish and un for French. There are, of course, more examples, but lets get back to Japanese. 

Japanese historically shares linguistic roots with Mongolian and Korean. That doesn't help the native English speaker, but it makes learning Japanese easier for the Mongolian speaker in some respects and for the Korean speaker in many ways because of proximity and some shared history. Both were heavily influenced by the Chinese although Chinese grammar is closer to English than the Japanese. 

Japanese borrowed their writing system from China as did Korea. Both Korea and Japan adapted the Chinese writing system to suit their individual languages. Chinese is a subject-verb-object language (SVO) like English. For both Chinese and Japanese, the order of the words determines their function within the sentence. This is not true for Japanese. For Japanese, the verb usually comes last. The order of the preceding words is interchangeable, but post-positionals, also called particles indicate how the preceding word functions. 

Consider the difference between English and Japanese: 

• Cat eats fish.
• Fish eats cat.
• ねこ　は　さかな　を　たべる。neko wa sakana o taberu.
• さかな　を　ねこ　は　たべる。sakana o neko ha taberu.

The post positionals expressed in romaji (romanization) as wa and o indicated who is eating whom. In both cases, the cat is eating the fish. Notice that the verb taberu (to eat) ends both sentences. 

For the native Chinese speaker and the native Korean speaker, if they are literate, then they can both read Chinese characters. Many of these will have the same meaning in Chinese, Korean and Japanese although the pronunciation will be different. There are false friends--words that look the same but have different meanings. For instance, the Japanese word for a letter (as in something that one mails to another person) means toilet paper. So looking at the Chinese character in Japanese wont help the Chinese speaker in this case. That happens in many languages. 

There are even differences between dialects of the same language such as British English and American English. Words such as fag, suspenders and gob mean different things in America compared to England. Similar things have happened in the Chinese character usage between Japan and China. The Japanese have adopted different words for the days of the week while the Chinese have not. 

As a native speaker of English, you do have some advantages. Since Japan opened up to Europe and America in the 1850s, Japan has adopted many foreign words, called gairaigo. That means words like cake, dance, orange and ice cream have been brought into the Japanese language, but fitted into the confines of the language. Yet other words such as boot for the hood of a car and jumper for an item of clothing, have been taken from British English. Then there are words taken from French, German, etc. 

There are also some false friends. The Japanese took the first two syllables from "personal" and then from "computer" and made them into paso con. The Japanese also took the word "handicap" and shortened it into "handi" which might confuse speakers of English into thinking the Japanese mean "handy." 

That brings up another issue. The Japanese language incorporates three writing systems: kanji (or Chinese letters), hiragana and katakana. The Chinese characters can often be read in more than one way, but at the beginning, you don't need to worry about this. I do recommend that you learn hiragana first, then katakana and then kanji. What's important to understand before you start learning Japanese is that the language is based on syllables and both hiragana and katakana are syllabary systems. That means that each writing kana symbol represents a syllable. This is very different from English. 

Japanese is not the only syllabary language. Chinese and North American Cherokee and the African language Vai are also languages using syllabaries. For Japanese, this will be important when you pronounce long vowels. Think as if you had a metronome. A short vowel has one count. A long vowel gets two counts. In Japanese, the "n" (ん）also gets one count. By seeing the writing system, you'll begin to understand a few things such as the counts/syllables each word has and not confuse yourself with how you'd pronounce it in English. You'll also come to understand why "k" sounds become "g" sounds and the relations between "h," "b" and "p" sounds. 

Not only should you recognized the hiragana, you should also strive to learn the traditional order. Just like we have an alphabet and it has an order, so does hiragana and katakana. Learning with will eventually help you in verb conjugation and using a Japanese to English dictionary. 

So that may all sound like bad news to you, but here's the good news. Japanese verbs do not conjugate for first person, second person or third person (singular or plural). Nouns in Japanese are not masculine or feminine (as in French and Spanish) nor neutral (as in German). Once you learn to write in hiragana, you don't have to worry about capitalization of proper nouns.