Tashiichaan’s Start to Learning Japanese

I’m always curious on how people are led to take Japanese lessons. I asked a random person that question, and she anwered rather bluntly, ”People just love the things from Japan – they’re popular! Sushi… anime… Sony.” 

For me, I had years and years of doubts on learning Japanese… until I got this ultimate urge last month. It was mostly (or entirely) due to the Japanese dramas I started obsessing by coincidence – Hanazakari no Kimitachi e, and Hana Yori Dango.

Trust me, I was never a J-drama fan (or even a hardcore K-drama one), but somehow watching people ramble on and on in barely-comprehensible Japanese just had me resolved to learn it. People whom I confided to about my newfound interest asked me, “Whyyy Japanese?!”

I simply replied, “Because. I want to be able to understand, read, write and speak Japanese, so I can watch J-dramas and animes without having to rely on subs!”

Of course, my honest answer is actually, “I want to go to Japan and study/work there and hopefully meet someone famous there, like Matsumoto Jun!”

…until I found out the price of enrolling for Japanese classes. *shockhorror!*

So, I decided to take the alternative - learning Japanese online. I was skeptical, at first, because to me it’s harder to absorb materials that I read rather than listen. I’m not known to be very attentive, by the way! But using J-dramas (and Jun-kuuun)  as my motivation, I gave the 1st basics lesson a go. It’s… not as hard as I thought, but I had to reread the same sections a couple of times.

It’s rather easy to grasp the basics of learning Japanese (because of years of watching anime… maybe?). The language is very flexible with its sentences – it can be very vague and incomplete but at the same time you can grasp the meaning easily. Also, you learn certain simple words (えき eki – train station, おかね okane – money). I learn random words by watching anime and J-dramas wth English subs – that way I can somehow compare the sentences and pick up the meaning and the words!

Learning Japanese characters is fun too. Due to the fact that I can read and write Mandarin, I can roughly derive the meaning from kanji (Japanese characters of Chinese origin) characters, and I can write kanji without any problem. With that experience, I have lots of fun and ease writing hiragana and katakana (Japanese phonetic symbols). To learn how to write the characters, I’d practise by writing it about 50 times (one whole page) until I can write with ease, before moving on to the next character. 

Tashiichaan’s progress in learning Japanese
I’ve completed Basics Lesson 1! Okay, I’m mostly focusing on mastering writing and reading Hiragana right now. I think it’d be easier, since I roughly understand the basics of Japanese grammar. Understanding Mandarin is such a huge advantage in the process of learning Japanese… xD.