11 Typical Mistakes People Make When Starting to Learn Japanese
And that you could easily avoid
Japanese is among the most learned languages in the world. As a result, the internet is full of resources to learn it.
I’ve been learning Japanese for more than a decade and met countless people who tried to learn it too. Most quickly felt overwhelmed and gave up in a matter of weeks. The rest somehow improved but I’ve seen some mistakes being repeated over and over again.
They can all be fixed later but the sooner you know them, the easier it is to fix them and make leaps of improvement in the language.
Mistakes are a natural process of learning a language. It’s okay to confuse the pronunciation of the word かわいい (cute) with こわい (scary) at first. Enough repetition will fix that. But some others can fly under the radar and plague your Japanese skills.
Become aware of them so you can work on fixing them as soon as possible.
Overusing pronouns
Most languages make extensive use of pronouns. Every conversation is filled with “You”s and “I”s. Japanese isn’t one of those.
First of all, the word “you” is almost never used. Using it, even among friends, can be considered rude. Instead, the word “you”…
