Silence is sometimes considered golden. In Japan, silence is communication. Speech is often considered unnecessary and sometimes even seems to obstruct harmonious interpersonal relationships. Accepting silence as an alternative to saying what you want to express can be a frustrating ordeal for non-Japanese living in Japan wanting to speak Japanese. As it is considered illogical not to express yourself with words it can takes years getting accustomed to the Japanese way of silent communication.

The Japanese are very cautious not to hurt the feelings of others, nor do they wish to cause trouble for others. They tend to surmise other people’s possible reactions before giving opinions or taking some sort of action. This can result in Japanese doing things they don’t want to do. For example, not leaving a job they are unhappy with because they don’t want to cause trouble for their co-workers. Japanese like to achieve mutual understanding by nonverbal cues rather than by blunt or outright questions or heated discussions. It is all about avoiding confrontation and conflict.

To the Japanese, silence in conversation ( if there is such a thing) can often convey a far more profound meaning than just…let’s say…eloquence. Western society would see this non-verbal communication as more of a social problem of the Japanese in general. Japanese traditionalists see this silent communication as a highly prized skill. The Japanese language has many proverbial expressions concerning the effectiveness and wisdom of nonverbal communication. “Ishin-denshin” can be taken to mean “Using cultural telepathy” or “mind to heart communication”. “Haragei” is other meaning “art of the belly”. By the unique technique of “haragei” a person makes the other party understand his real intentions without verbal interaction. This ability is regarded as indispensable to influential figures, particularly in political circles.

Unlike most other nations, Japan is a highly homogeneous society, where nonverbal forms of communication can be easily developed and conveniently used in various situations. As Japanese have traditionally depended on “ishin denshin” for much of their communication they are generally turned off by people who, by their standards, talk excessively. In contrast to the Japanese, Westerners, particularly Americans, are noted for being big talkers, with the result that these two widely differing modes of behavior often clash. And believe me they do clash.

In this internationalized world, more and more Japanese think it urgently necessary to change their tendency to implicitness and silence which can cause misunderstanding in inter-cultural communication. Likewise, it does pay for foreign businessmen and politicians to make a point of letting their Japanese counterparts know that they are aware of the “ishin deshin” method of communicating, and that they want to have a mind-to-heart understanding with them.

In order to speak like a Japanese native you have to learn, at times, not to speak at all. This requires a certain amount of patience and faith. “Ishin Denshin” is something you can really only experience by living with Japanese in Japan. When I lived with my wife’s family there was very little conversation between family members. I found it quite challenging to sit through meals and not talk. It took a long time to feel comfortable in a shared state of silence. So, if you want to speak like a Japanese keep in mind that less said will often resonate more than blurting out what you think or feel.

My pet hate Japanese word is juice, in katakana. In Japanese “juice” basically means soft drink. It can even mean canned coffee. How could they get this word so wrong. So if a Japanese offers you “juice” in Japan don’t be surprised if you are given a glass of coke.

Snack is an other word Japanese give new meaning to. Instead of relating to eating food the word is all about drinking. In Japanese “snack” means bar. But not just any bar. Snack bars are small drinking places usually for the older generation where Japanese can drown their sorrows with whisky or beer and belt out some enka. These places are very popular with men as they are sort of a hostess bar where you are charged quite a lot to drink with female company. Enka is traditional Japanese music – usually songs about lost love. These places are probably the most depressing places you could ever visit in Japan.

Viking is one of my favorite’s. It is pronounced “Bye -king”. Japanese most likely wouldn’t know who the Vikings were. Yet, at least one Japanese picked up on their eating habits and coined the phrase to mean buffet. Viking means “all-you-can- eat”. It can also mean “all-you-can-drink”.

Ice comes close. It means ice cream. This is an example of how Japanese will take English words and shorten them or abbreviate them. Japanese generally like to communicate with the least amount of words. They will take a foreign word shorten it, give it a new meaning, and eventually it slips into main stream vocabulary.

When you first learn or discover these words you will feel dumbfounded. You will either feel amused or annoyed. It is quite hard to believe that the words I just taught you are meaningful and common words in the Japanese language. It certainly took me a while to accept and use them. One of the most frustrating things is many Japanese believe that they are speaking English when using these loan words. Good reason enough not to even consider teaching English in Japan.

If you would like to learn real Japanese words then take a look at Japanese Japanese Fast

Do you have the ability to hold short conversations, but know if you were to go to Japan you wouldn’t be able to survive?

I lived in Japan for 10 years and know what is like to be stuck at a medioca level.  It took me a few years but I made progress and broke through the “basic speaker” barrier. Unfortunately most students don’t, never reaching a proficient speaking level of Japanese.

And I can understand way. It takes most students many months or several years just to learn the basics. For most people, progressing to an intermediate level seems either to time consuming or near impossible. Maybe, this is where you are at the moment. And you know what more study isn’t always the best answer. What I have discovered is that to actually engage in a conversation with a native speaker you need to experience the language. Normally, this would require you to live in Japan for some time.

However, I realize that most of you are not in the position to jump on a plane and spend the next year living in Japan. Maybe you are living in Japan, but suffer from the Eikaiwa syndrome, where you are teaching English, living with English native speakers and have little money or time to afford lessons. My wife and I have come up with a solution. An Intermediate Japanese language learning program founded on real life experience. A course that would let you learn the Japanese language as if you were actually in Japan.

Most of my feedback has shown me that students didn’t want to focus on grammar or text books and just the basics of the language. Students wanted to be taught real Japanese that would help them with life in Japan. You won’t have to go through the basics again with our course. We dive straight into real Japanese and explain the culture of the Japanese language.

In short our program Speak Japanese Fluently:

• Teaches functional Japanese that is real and alive in Japan
• Gives You the confidence to speak Japanese to native speakers
• Saves money and time, and limits frustration and confusion
• Explains confusing and greatly misunderstood cultural aspects of the language
• Helps students to actually practice effectively
• And cuts out and avoids all the unnecessary text book study garbage

If you are serious about moving ahead with your Japanese – and really want to hold conversation with native speakers then Speak Japanese Fluently is what you need.

Try our program and if honestly believe the program isn’t for you just send me an email and your money will be returned.

Competitive research is becoming an important factor in the development of our product. Without getting too detailed we want to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and obviously make a better product. This has meant we have looked at several competitors and purchased products.

We looked at Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone and Rocket Japanese. Which is the best one?

Well before we get into that let me tell you what we looked for in each product.

• Value for Money
• Ease of Use
• Realistic conversation examples
• Japanese cultural references
• Enjoyment Factor

Rocket Japanese

At this stage we are only recommending Rocket Japanese. I believe it to be the best product online to learn Japanese  In fact, at one stage we were considering promoting the product aggressively instead of making our own. The core of the product is the 14 and a half hours of audio lessons. The lessons cover all the fundamentals of basic Japanese – from introducing yourself to getting around on public transportation, and ordering food in a restaurants. They take a friendly radio style approach with their teaching method. At times I do feel the lessons go on a bit and sometimes the dialogue seems too scripted. However, over all the audio lesson are very good and teach Japanese you would actually use.

Each audio lesson comes with grammar and cultural notes in a down-loadable PDF format. The reference material also contains instructions and explanations on written Japanese. Even if you don’t want to buy any products I recommend you at least subscribe to their Email course. It is great value – you get lots of sample lessons. Sign up ASAP.

Pimsleur

Pimsleur claims that you can learn a language in 10 days. I know that a lot can be learned in ten days with multimedia products and cutting edge learning methods, but learning Japanese in 10 days with the Pimsleur method doesn’t seem possible.  I think Pimsleur is somewhat dated and is in need of  upgrade and update. In order to speak Japanese I believe you need a certain amount of cultural understanding of Japan. This is something missing with Pimsleur.  Pimsleur claims that their CDs have been scientifically sequenced to rapidly lock language material into your brain after just one listening and that you can absorb Japanese effortlessly without any reading, writing or computer use. Sounds too good to be true. Learning Japanese requires effort – it takes more than ten days.

Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone is the most expensive language program out there. I would probably make some good money promoting their products. They have 3 levels they individually sell  starting from around $260. Buying all three levels at once is the best option, but you will have to fork out $550 dollars. The product comes in a CD-ROM format, with audio CDs. This means it is software heavy. This can be good for some things such as learning vocabulary and Hiragana and Katakana. However, in general I don’t believe learning a language through software is the way to go. You end up stuck in front of a computer learning just the basics.  Rosetta Stone don’t provide any samples of their audio lessons on their site. You have to sign up to get a demo. There are promotion movies at their site. However, as I watched them they gave me the impression that I would get sick of using the software after about half an hour.

So if you are looking for a product to help you speak Japanese in a short amount  of time we recommend Rocket Japanese.

When living in Japan I met hundreds of English teachers who could speak Japanese, but never at a fluent level. They were taking classes, studying for the Japanese Language ProficiencyTest, and investing quite a lot of money on text books and audio programs. They studied hard but just couldn’t get to a fluent level. Then occasionally I would met someone from Turkey or India. They would speak the language like a native. Yet, they had taken no classes or purchased little in the way of study material. These speakers of Japanese wouldn’t learn or study the language in the traditional sense. They wouldn’t spend time learning hiragana or katakana. They certainly wouldn’t learn kanji or study grammar. In fact they would no nothing about the language except they could speak fluently. They would just soak up and use the language from their environment. They learnt the language from example and experience. The fastest and most effective way to study anything, especially a language.

In order to speak Japanese fluently you need to surround yourself with Japanese speakers and also not speak your native language. If you put yourself in a situation where you are forced to speak the language daily your Japanese will improve in leaps and bounds. If you spend too much time on rules about the language you will become knowledgeable about the structure of language and whatnot, but your speak ability will progress very slowly.

To develop the ability to speak you must observe how Japanese interact and then basically model what you see over and over. You have to become a bit of a actor and become Japanese. Japanese has to become a part or most of your life. Now, the problem is not many of us can just drop what we are doing and  fly of to Japan. So how can you learn to speak Japanese without studying the language?

Surround yourself with as much Japanese as possible. Immerse yourself in real language as much as possible. This means making Japanese friends, getting a Japanese girlfriend or boy friend, watching Japanese television and listening to Japanese radio. You need to listen to Japanese speaking the real thing. Don’t listen to podcasts that are designed to teach you Japanese. There is too much in the way of explanation and unrealistic examples. Most of what is taught is too formalized anyway. Focus your life on mimicking Japanese. Speak to yourself in Japanese. So now you know what you need to do if you want to speak Japanese fluently. If you follow my advice you end up saving yourself a whole lot of time and money.

Most students learn Japanese the wrong way for several months or even years. Text book lessons at school and university can only give you a basic understanding of the Japanese language – grammar structure, vocabulary, the kana syllabaries and maybe a few hundred kanji. Learning how to speak Japanese involves a lot of cultural understanding and social conformity.

Japanese use very few words to express their thoughts and feelings. You’ll hear Japanese say the same things all the time. More often than not Japanese express interest, surprise, happiness and other emotions with only a few quirky phrases and sometimes with wordless cries and grunts. If you watch a game show you’ll audiences scream out the same wordless expression in unison when something shocking is presented to them. Very bizarre.

You’ll discover that for the most of their time Japanese don’t speak politely at all. For example, Japanese has no equivalent for “Pardon”. Instead when something is misunderstood in a conversation the confused listener will just blurt out “Ha!”. Sometimes my wife speaks to me and I have to control myself from feeling a little abused or offended. She’ll “rudely” blurt out one word and expect me to understand whatever it is she is trying to tell me. I used to get home from work and the first thing she would say to me as I walked in the door would be an aggressive “Gohan ha?”. This basically means something like “Do you want dinner?” or “Have you had dinner?”. However, if you translated the expression it would be just “Dinner!!?” . It would often give me the impression that my wife wasn’t happy to see me return home and that getting dinner was something she wanted to get quickly out of the way.

To be Japanese you got to do what everyone else does. I am often amazed at how easily Japanese can be assimilated and culturally conditioned. The peace sign is a classical example of this. Every time a Japanese has a photo taken of themselves they will do the peace sign. I found this to be extremely frustrating when having photos taken with Japanese. I went to great lengths to prevent my 4 year old son from being peace sign brain washed while he attend kindergarten in Japan.

To speak Japanese like a native you’ll need to have a split personality. You can be yourself for most of the time, but when you meet acquaintances or work colleagues you will have to put on a bit of an act and meet certain social criteria – being polite or ass kissing.

And finally speaking Japanese will mean you won’t be able to say what you feel or believe for part of the time. The worst thing you can do is cause any kind of conflict or trouble for anyone. So you have to learn to hold back your real thoughts and bite your tongue. So the challenge for speaking Japanese is learning what Japanese are and how they behave. Accepting the culture and learning not to be always yourself is what  it takes to be a good speaker of the Japanese language.

Because Japanese was originally a spoken language and very different from Chinese, modern Japanese is a hybrid of classical Japanese and classical Chinese pronunciations expressed in Japanese phonemes. This is reflected in the names of the “readings” for kanji: readings that come from classical spoken Japanese are called kunyomi, and readings that come from classical Chinese are called onyomi.

A problem with these readings is that it is not always clear when to use which reading. There are no rules that state that a kanji is read in a particular way when used on its own, or when part of a word. The only real way to make sure you are using the right reading for a kanji when encountered in a context that you had not seen it in before, is to look it up – while sometimes one can guess whether a kunyomi or onyomi is used, it is typically impossible to be certain.

This is a frustrating aspect of learning Kanji. Looking up kanji can be very time consuming and will tempt you to give up reading Japanese altogether. The best way to learn Kanji and vocabulary is in context. Depending on each Kanji, in most cases you will find one “dominate” reading that will appear in compounds (combined Kanji words) a large percentage of the time. More often than not you only need to know one reading for some kanji. This is while trying to memorize several readings for hundreds of Kanji in no context is pointless and time wasting. If you are going to learn Kanji, then try to learn Kanji by reading it in context.

We can distinguish two main functions of romaji, namely phonetic transliteration, and syntactic transliteration. The first tries to mimic what Japanese sounds like to the western ear. The second tries to mimic the order that is found in the kana tables. Romaji can,to a degree, accurately reflect the pronunciation of Japanese, thus making it easy to read as the reader’s brain can instantly turn the words into internally vocalized words. It can also,to a degree,  accurately reflect what the kana is supposed to look like. However, Japanese   with written romaji becomes hard to read because what is written and how it should be internally vocalized are two completely different things.

 
So why use romaji to teach Japanese, when one can use Japanese script instead? I guess the idea is that the phonetic scheme lets non-Japanese readers understand written “Japanese” easily without having to know how to read real Japanese to make sense of it.  However, why would you want to understand written Japanese without having to know how to read real Japanese?
Students of Japanese learn romaji because they don’t really want to learn Japanese or they have the false idea that romaji is Japanese. In the end it is either poor teaching on the part of the teacher or laziness on the part of the student. The idea that kana is difficult to learn is also false. Learning kana, Hiragana and Katakana, is not something that will take months, if one will be studying Japanese anyway. It takes about a week to memorize hiragana to a level that continued practice (which is what someone who’s studying will be doing anyway) and exposure to Japanese texts will perfect for you, even if you don’t really try.
Ideally, students should never be exposed to romaji at all in their educational material, save when the pronunciation for the kana is explained. However, when it is used, it should be remembered that students will understand that Japanese written in western letters does not accurately reflect the way it is written in Japanese.

If you want to learn how to read Hiragana in 14 days please check out our product Read Hiragana Fast.