JLPT & Japanese studying tips

I finally had time yesterday to review my Japanese, and also to study for the JLPT(Japanese Language Proficiency Test) which is coming up in about two weeks. Well, to make a long story short, I’ve been studying Japanese for a little over two years now. Unfortunately, the community college I go to only offers four semesters of Japanese(Elementary Japanese 1 and 2, and Intermediate Japanese 1 and 2), all of which I’ve already taken. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the money to transfer to a four-year college and major in Japanese, but maybe I’ll be able to get some scholarships or something together. But in the meantime, I’m relying on self-study so I don’t forget all that I’ve learned.

In the summer I spent a month studying Japanese at Kyoto Sangyo University as part of an international extension program, and that helped a whole lot. But a month really wasn’t enough, and by the time the feel of language was really starting to seem natural to me, I had to leave. And nowadays I’m so busy with finishing up my last few semesters of college and also with my part-time job, that my time to study Japanese has been steadily decreasing. I used to spend at least a few days a month doing nothing but studying, but now I’m lucky if I have time to spend one day every couple of months.

Luckily, I do have one good advantage. Since I’m such a big anime fan, I’m exposed to Japanese pretty much every day, through fansubs, music, books, etc,. Even though I’m not living in Japan, I hear the language spoken all the time, and that’s a major help in retaining all that I’ve learned. But really, the only way true way to learn Japanese from scratch is to either attend classes with a teacher who is fluent, or to live in Japan for many months. Whether I’ll be able to have these privileges in the future sometime is still unknown, but I’m trying my best to be optimistic =)

And since it’s on my mind, I want to offer some quick study tips for anime fans who want to learn Japanese. I’m not sure if these will help everyone, but they helped me.

1) It took me a relatively short time to learn kana. First I studied a chart of all the characters and practiced writing a few simple words. But what really helped is how I brought my love for anime into it; I spent a couple of hours or so one day just writing the names of anime characters in kana. I would go series by series and write the names of all the characters I could think of. At first I had to look at my chart a lot, but after a while, I was beginning to memorize more and more of the kana symbols. So why practice with anime characters’ names as opposed to regular Japanese words? Because if you’re an anime fan, the writing will have a lot more meaning to you and therefore should stick in your memory better. Again, I’m not sure if this will work for everyone, but it did for me ^^

2) If you have any anime/manga-related books in Japanese(that have furigana), try reading them. Even if it takes you 10 minutes to get through one page and even if you can’t understand what you’re reading, it will still help. And again, if you’re an anime fan and what you’re reading is anime/manga-related, you might be more motivated to read it and get into it as opposed to some regular Japanese text.

3) And probably the easiest tip I can offer is to watch subtitled anime(or any other Japanese program or movie) as much as you can, which I’m sure many of you do. Even if it’s just through anime, hearing the language spoken by native speakers on a daily basis will really help with your pronunciation and comprehension. You’ll probably find yourself learning a lot of common anime words like “bouken”(adventure) and “tamashii”(soul), that are pretty useless in everyday conversation, but hey, it still helps =P And listening to j-pop or other Japanese music will also help, though probably not as much as hearing actual conversation. A great thing to do is to follow along with the words to a song, either from the lyrics provided by most fansubbers, or by looking up the full lyrics on sites like AnimeLyrics.com. Listening to the song while following along with the kanji, roumaji, and/or English translations is a fun and helpful activity that I’ve done many times, and I’ve not only enhanced my Japanese, but I’ve memorized the words to many of my favorite anime songs as well =D

4) And if you want a start to learning to Japanese, I’ve written a beginner’s level guide on the main AnimeYume site. You can check it out here.

Well, I probably won’t have time for another Japanese self-study session until after the JLPT on December 3rd. For those of you wondering, the test is held once a year across the US and there are 4 levels to the it, with 4 being the easiest and 1 being the hardest. I’m pretty confident I could pass Level 3, but I’ll be taking Level 4 this time just to be safe =) I probably would’ve taken Level 4 last year, but like an idiot I forgot about the registration deadline. Anyway, wish me luck! I’ll be sure and post about how the test went!