Process and Reason Behind Learning Japanese

Why Japanese?

After going to Japan during my Spring Break of 2024, I noticed how Japan and my interested career fields were aligned. For me, I’ve always been interested in the field of robotics. While I’m currently not sure what field of robotics I’m interested in, I do know that I do want to work in robotics due to my passion and the future growth of the robotics industry. While doing some research, if you search some of the top robotics companies a majority of them originate from Japan. For example you might have heard some of these names: FANUC, Yaskawa Electric, Epson, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi Electric, Omiron, and a lot more.

With such a strong presence of robotics in Japan, it almost appears that Japan is heavily related to my future career. Whether I want to work in a company in the United States or in Japan, it is almost certain that there would need to be communication and learning from companies that are from Japan. Japan has so much robotics technology that could be learned and having a langauge barrier would make it difficult for me to learn more. In addition to Japanese, I’m fluent in Chinese which would make me a strong asset to work with companies in the Asia region.

How did I start learning Japanese?

Initially, I wanted to take some Japanese classes offered at USC. While this was a good idea, I did not want to spend too much of my time learning a new language and having to worry about doing Japanese homework where I could instead be learning other stuff. To solve this problem, I decided maybe it was a good idea to self learn Japanese. Not only can I self learn whenever I want, but the pace that I learn would be dependent on myself.

To begin, I bought a textbook from a bookstore that most universities and people recommend for those who are self learning Japanese. I bought the Genki 1 3rd Edition An Integrated Course In Elementary Japanese.

After 3 months of buying it, I completely finished the book (with some exceptions that I will explain later). And here is my honest review of the book.

How I Self Studied Japanese

Prior to studying each lesson, I would first understand all of the vocabulary words in the lesson (around 40-50). The best way that I’ve been doing this is utilizing Anki which would allow me to refresh and learn new words. I recommend this Anki Deck as it has all of the sounds with each deck. After learning all the words, I would do all of the textbook exercises then the workbook exercises. I recommend doing all of the textbook and workbook exercises on Seth’s Genki Study Resources. It has all of the questions on a digitalized version where you can type your answer which means you don’t need to manually check your answers with the answer key. While learning the new grammar was difficult, I utilized Tokini Andy who does great grammar lessons on each grammar topic. He even adds his own twist to the grammar topics. After I finished those, I would listen to the dialogue at the beginning of this lesson. This is to makes sure that I understand all of then necessary things I needed for this lesson. For extra practice, I utilized MyKikitori that has extra listening practice for each lesson in the Genki 1 book.

After continuing this for all 12 lessons, I made sure to continue to all of my vocabulary words through Anki so that I don’t forget any of them. In addition, towards the end of the 12th lesson, I started to utilize Bunpro to practice my grammar as it’s difficult to memorize all of the grammar patterns and I continue to need practice. In addition, to start introducing myself to native Japanese content I have been listening to Japanese podcasts by Nihongo Con Teppei. This playlist gets updated everyday by the channel and he speaks at a slow but not too slow rate for my to understand some of the words. Although currently I only understand around 30% of what he says it’s a good way to introduce myself into native Japanese content. There’s no word for word translation on the podcast, but if you install Language Reactor extension on google chrome it has the ability to transcribe everything word for word and even allowing you to hover over the Japanese words that you don’t understand and give you the definition.

All of this work takes strong motivation, but so far I’ve been enjoying the process. One of the things that I did skip in the Genki textbook is the last writing section. For me, since I know Chinese I know most of the Kanji in the book. This was the main reason why I skipped the Kanji section of the book, but despite that I know I will go back and finish those sections soon.

What I plan to continue on doing?

Currently, I’m working on the second volume of the book which is Genki 2 Third Edition. I do plan to continue to same process as what I’ve mentioned above but the only sad part is that MyKiKitori only has lessons up to Lesson 12 of Genki 1. Despite this, I’ll be continuing my Japanese learning process and hopefully I’ll be able to pass N3 Japanese. 頑張って! (Good luck!)