Learning Japanese was one of the best things I have done in my life, all the efforts, hardships, challenges matter in the long run, and this is my journey of how I started learning Japanese language.
From educational standpoint, I come from a background of No foreign language exposure from start, where traditional courses like engineering, accounting, etc, were considered normal, anything apart from that was not considered normal at all, and was seen as being too risky. But during first year of my graduation, which by the way, was also in commerce field, I got exposure to Japanese language through anime. I saw an anime, named Death-note, and I fell in love with that anime. The story, the characters, the music, everything was a masterpiece, and that made me feel respect for the creator, and I thought how cool is that, a person has created such a masterpiece. Then I started doing some research online, about Japanese anime, and as I saw more of them, I was completely in love with Japanese way of thinking, and their intellect. That was the point where I started learning Japanese language, because I wanted to understand their culture in such a way, that can help me understand more and more about their way of thinking.
The first challenge to learn Japanese language was to actually understand where to start, should I start from learning the scripts first?, or should I start from learning some common vocabulary?, where should I start?, And that question made me procrastinate a bit, And these questions sometimes are overwhelming also, because Japanese language learning takes time, and what If the time I am giving is not worth it?, But I was lucky that I found a simple answer to that being, the love for Japanese language is enough of a reason to start and go with it.
Then after doing a lot of research on this topic, I had a lot of options to start from, then I followed the principal of starting from anywhere, and letting the flow decide, and that’s the point where I made a mistake as well. I started Japanese language by watching YouTube videos, and learning from there, and all those videos are majorly focused on teaching Japanese grammar, which is enough of a headache on itself, and most of the YouTube channels don’t provide correct methodology of learning Japanese language. But, then I went a bit back, and I made a decision of learning Japanese language by learning scripts first, so that I can start reading all the books by myself. And that decision was a really good decision, because after reading a Book named “Minna no Nihongo”, and solving most of it by myself, I was ready to give N5 level exam, but before that, I had one more challenge, which was learning kanji.
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To learn kanji, I started watching a lot of YouTube videos again, and I followed their advice, of learning Japanese language by writing it again and again, but those videos made my Japanese learning journey even worst. For 1 week, I wrote a lot of Japanese kanji, again and again, but I wasn’t even able to recognize them, when I tested them using a book called “Goukaku dekiru”. And I was completely demotivated because of this. But then I found a video, From a channel named “Nihongomax” in which Mr. Ravi explained that kanji’s should not be learnt by writing, the only thing needed to learn kanji is ability to recognize them in real life and in sentences, and that can only be learnt by reading sentences again and again. And that advice actually changed my study routine forever, because from that point, when I started learning Japanese in this way, everything started improving drastically. And it’s very logical as well, because sentences contain everything, from vocabulary to grammar, sentences are made of that only, and it is common sense also, because in the end we are supposed to make sentences only. I read a lot of different N5 level sentences and after doing this for around one month, my Japanese language improved on another level.
And for listening part, I have a tip for everyone to follow, and a mistake to avoid as well. Usually, we tend to try watching very complex things without any subtitles, and we don’t understand anything in the language we are learning, but that’s a big mistake to make, because it can make us feel demotivated. A better thing to do is, reading all the sentences you are learning in loud voice. Because when we speak in loud voice, we listen the language we are learning in loud voice as well and that actually helps a lot in listening.
By doing all this, regularly and consistently, I was able to score 153 marks out of 180 in N5 exam. And I am very happy with my result considering the fact that I learnt Japanese by myself, but here, I want to add one tip as well. I made a lot of mistakes while learning Japanese language and that made me lose a lot of time and energy doing wrong things, and those things could have been avoided under guidance of someone. And having someone guide you in this journey, can give you optimism and motivation, even when you feel like giving up, and when I realized this, on N3 level, I joined a Japanese language institute near GTB nagar named Nihongomax, and I studied under Ravi sensei, Yes, the same person whose video helped me improve my kanji, and I passed N3 level very easily under his guidance.
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The last thing, I want to add is, what I did when I felt demotivated in between this study, and the simple answer to this is, I didn’t do anything, I just kept going because of my love for Japanese language. And today, after all those efforts, I can speak Japanese fluently, without hesitation, I can watch any anime without subtitles, and I read Japanese books easily as well.