I’ve Studied Japanese for 18 Years and This Summarizes Everything I Know

A quick list of all the key areas to cover to get your Japanese skill up to practical fluency

Photo by 紺色らいおん on Photo AC

For many English speakers — one of the largest areas of struggle when learning Japanese is surely the writing system. The complex writing system mixes up 3 different scripts — hiragana, katakana, and kanji — and I often see beginners requesting help by writing in Roman letters (romaji).

But I would actually argue that many people struggle with the following:

• Pronunciation — many English speakers think they’re pronouncing correctly and think that Japanese people discriminate against them by pretending not to be able to understand them.
• Polite and Honorific speech — some people think it is weird to have polite and “casual” forms for what essentially is the same thing and cannot wrap their minds around it.
• Subject and Pronouns — leaving out the subject or changing pronouns depending on the situation is a big part of sounding natural in Japanese.
• Non-verbal communication — bowing or reading-in between the lines is equally important. What is meant is more important than what is being said.
• Katakana words — thinking of…