On Learning the Japanese Language (Nihongo) in Manila, Philippines : An Introduction

こんにちは! 今日、私は日本語を学習について話します!  

Were you able to read the characters right on top of this? (If you were, let me know in the comments section down below!) I feel like there are tons of weeabs like me (lolol) people out there who would really like to learn Nihongo (the Japanese language), but just have no idea where to start.

I’ve decided to write this blog entry, since I rarely do get to find any blog posts online about being able to learn Nihongo in the Philippines. Although I’m not exactly “sensei-worthy” about Nihongo, nor am I any N-level/JLPT certified student, I still want to share my own experiences on the formal learning process, as well as actual classroom set-ups that I found very helpful in getting a good foundation on Nihongo.

Also, I realized that this topic is actually very extensive. I don’t want you guys to get overwhelmed about all the topics involving studying Nihongo, so I’ll be breaking this down into several blog posts–starting with this introductory one. For this post, I’d like to focus first on just my general learning experience.

The First Question I Asked Myself: “Where do I start?”

Before enrolling at any Japanese language school, I wanted to test out if I was capable of learning everything through self-studying. Why spend money on a language school, if you can just learn it on your own, right? Well, to find out if I could handle everything with self-studying, I started out by doing some research online on what the general scope was of the entire study I was going to be dealing with. In truth, Nihongo is such a big topic to handle since you do have to study different kinds of alphabets (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) involving thousands of characters (kanji has about 2,500 characters in total). In the end, I narrowed it down to starting with research online on topics that people usually start with, and that left me with: familiarizing myself with the overall concept of the Japanese alphabet.

Nihongo is very much different from the English alphabet, since the Japanese characters represent phonetic (of relating to speech sounds) equivalents. To be more specific, the symbols/characters reflect sounds in specific syllables (e.g. “a, ka, sa, ta, na”–which I will explain more on the following blog posts), compared to the English alphabet wherein you completely separate consonants (e.g. b, c, d, f, etc.) from vowels (e.g. a, e, i, o, u).

On Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji

Moving on to the symbols, Nihongo consists of the following classifications in their characters: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are the more basic ones you should start with, as these are the more simplified characters in terms of writing, meaning, and pronunciation, as compared to kanji, which involves more extensive explanations.

Basically, when you start out with hiragana and katana, you are just more or less learning how to spell words with a phonetic alphabet. Once you reach the study of kanji, you will realize that there are different meanings assigned to each and every character, and the meanings between those characters change when you mix up the combinations of one character with the other. I know it’s sounding a bit complicated, but I’ll be writing more extensively about the differences of the three in a different blog post, since I think it’s going to be too much information to take in for a single blog post. (Stay tuned for that!)

In the meantime, I think you can also try out first the approach I did with familiarizing myself with the language. Go ahead and try to hit those Google searches! I think self-preparation and familiarization is key before jumping onto the whole study. If you have some random side questions popping up right now, I think it’s best if you search about them on your own for some familiarization and preparation. Otherwise, feel free to leave your questions at the comments section down below!

My Experience on Studying in a Classroom Set-up

By now, you can tell that Nihongo is a study to take very seriously; and, it really does take a lot of commitment and discipline. That’s why there are people who even enroll in complete university courses on the Japanese Language (for example, in De La Salle University), since the study is indeed very extensive.

I realized after a bit of self-studying that it was going to be difficult to gain a full grasp of the foundations of the language. Though the internet can provide you with many answers, there will always be the doubts that pop up in your mind, such as: “what if I missed out on a tiny detail on this topic?”; “is this approach in speaking considered too formal? or too informal?”; etc.

I find getting formal education on the foundations essential since it can get a bit challenging to understand certain things. For example:

• Why words are spelled and pronounced in certain ways (e.g. double consonants versus regular ones)
• The structure of their grammar (this one is the most challenging, in my opinion)
• When katakana and hirgana is used
• What word usage is considered formal or informal
• Their colloquial terms or cultural tendencies to shortcut words (e.g. PC is computer in the Philippines, while they call it pasokon in Japan)
• The principles behind kanji
• Etc.

As you can see, there are a lot of basic things, such as the whole cultural context behind the language, in order to mentally prepare for understanding what else is left for you to understand.

For my personal experience, I ended up enrolling at the Nihongo Center Foundation (NCF) in Makati, since I had a friend who had also studied there and mentioned how she had a good learning experience there. Although, there are several other options you can choose from with regards to language schools. I’ll share this more in detail in a separate blog post since, again, I’d like to dissect the different aspects of studying Nihongo into different blog posts.

Although I only studied for an Elementary level, I was able to get some tips and advice from my senseis and classmates on what learning materials, websites, mobile applications, and study pacing practices would work best for one just starting out in Nihongo and would like to reach up to a decent conversational equivalent (which is around N3 level in JLPT), or even higher. I’ll be sharing more about those useful apps, websites, etc. on another blog post.

Books I Currently Use

After completing 64 hours under the Elementary 1 course of the NCF, I actually did want to continue on to the next level. But after familiarizing myself with the learning process, I felt that I could just that apply the same learning process on my own, as long as I had the same textbooks we used as reference during Elementary 1 class.

I was deliberating on whether I should continue my studies with a different (but still as effective) textbook. I was mainly comparing the books Genki with Minna no Nihongo, but came to the conclusion of just continuing on with Minna no Nihongo, since I was already familiar with the learning pattern from my classes back at Elementary 1 class.

I’ll give a detailed book review on a separate post, but I wanted you to get a gist of useful book titles you can start searching on your own, as early as now.

Minna no Nihongo Book I: (L- Japanese Book; R- English Translated Book with Explanations)

Apart from these Minna No Nihongo books, I also have some other review books that I use for studies. I’ll be sharing that once I post about the book review, so stay tuned for that!

Additional Practice

I found my previous trips to Japan very useful on conversational practice (you can check out my blog entries on my Tokyo trip here, and my Nagoya trip here). Also, there were situations wherein I was able to practice reading, although, I was not as well-versed on kanji during the time I was there. So, it was still very challenging for me to read random signs, menus, posters, etc. (You will probably notice this in my future vlog entries.) Sorry to burst your bubble, but majority of the text on visuals that you will see in Japan will actually be in kanji (the struggle is real haha).

Aside from having practiced during my travels, I find reading raw (untranslated) manga and fashion magazines very useful for practice. Some fashion magazine favorites of mine would be Nylon JP, ViVi Magazine, Larme Magazine, Zipper Magazine, and much more! Find something that interests you, and try practicing from there. For example, if you’re a fan of Japanese dramas, try watching some with English subtitles. Little by little, you’ll get used to the words used in conversations, and you can pick up certain context from the English subtitles. Another example would be by listening to Japanese music. Try searching the lyrics both in English translation and in romaji (roman letters). You’ll eventually find yourself familiarizing (even if just a little) yourself with some Japanese words.

And, there you have it! That’s pretty much the gist of my overall learning experience with Nihongo. As you can see, there are still several other aspects for me to share about learning Japanese/Nihongo, since it’s a very in-depth study. I don’t think there’s really a shortcut to learning it (unless you have photographic memory). It really does take time, commitment, and a lot of practice. Almost everyday, I still try to find a way to find some form of reading practice or another. So, I hope this was able to motivate you (if it hasn’t backfired haha) to start learning the Japanese language, or, if you’re already learning, to improve in your Nihongo studies. 🙂

Anyway, all of this is just based on my personal experience. If you have any additional suggestions, recommendations, study hacks, etc., feel free to comment below! I’d love to get more ideas on study practices, or anything related!