OdinHades said:
Nah, I know that I will have to learn for at least a decade to become fluent, but that isn't my goal right now. For the next two years, I just want to understand the basics of the language, just so that I can get around in Japan, talk to people, understand them and also understand what's going on in japanese movies and games. From there I will continue to learn the language basically forever. I handled it in the same way with my english . Once I had the basics figured out, I just started to watch movies and play games in english. In the beginning I had to look up a lot of words, but with time I more and more was able to just understand new words simply out of context. And even if I have trouble to perfectly express myself in english every now and then, I would say my skills in that language are quite respectable by now. |
That's exactly what I wanted to do. I learned English with series, movies and books and thought that I could do the same in Japanese. But it's not possible.
The level required to be able to understand what you read or watch is so much higher than in English! The entire structure of the language is completely different from European languages, the vocabulary based entirely on kanjis... I've lived and studied here for a year now, I still don't have the level to read books without heavy research. You can't just "look the words in a dictionary" like English if you don't know hundreds of kanjis very well, and all the grammar forms able to change the entire meaning of a word or sentence, and which obviously don't look like anything you know. One of my friends who worked in Japanese here for 4 years can barely play games in Japanese, he still doesn't understand everything (and he got the JLPT N1). Even Japanese people from my experience have a lot of trouble with kanjis and less used grammar or vocabulary... In English, you can use books to learn how to speak, in my opinion it's the opposite in Japanese. You will be able to speak well before you can read (there are a lot of books that Japanese kids are unable to read...). Some anime should be easier though, because they tend to use simple words and grammar.
It should take you less that 2 years to survive in Japan, don't worry about that. And I hope you'll stay motivated for as long as you want after that. But don't think about learning it like English, you might hit a wall at one point that will discourage you. That's what I did, and I've had huge motivation issues since then (even if I'm living in Tokyo!). So good luck to you, it's definitely possible and you can do it, but just don't think about it like English, keep your expectations on a longer schedule!
