Japanese Major

kenf1234
Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:17:47 +0000

Well, first, you don’t need to major in Japanese in order to study the language or even go abroad. In fact, I’d recommend majoring in something else and working Japanese into that.

Learning Japanese is difficult for several reasons. First, of course, is the writing system. The key to that is constant practice. Don’t write a new character once, not ten times, but a hundred+ times until it is second nature. I used to practice on a chalkboard in addition to using paper/pencil. As you learn more characters this becomes less necessary, but for at least the first year you need to do a tremendous amount of practicing. The number of characters you need to learn increases over time, which I found made it more difficult. Vocabulary never really becomes easy to acquire.

The other difficulty with Japanese is the grammar is different than English. The way to deal with this is to practice sample sentences and try to create sentences in Japanese. Creating English sentences in your head and the trying to translate them isn’t going to work, since the word order is different. So try to think in Japanese as soon as you can, trying to shoehorn English into Japanese won’t work.

Fortunately, Japanese is quite easy to pronounce.

Japan is a wonderful country, going abroad there is pleasant and fascinating. ICU (International Christian University) in Tokyo has a wonderful exchange program/Japanese language program.

Anyway good luck!