Japanese characters are so beautiful and complex that reading and writing Japanese quickly can seem like an insurmountable task. There are over 50,000 characters, but that doesn't mean you need to learn them all. Most native Japanese speakers only know two phonetic alphabets and about 6,000 kanji characters. While it may take years to learn to read or write Japanese quickly, you can quickly learn basic Japanese not only by going to a language school in Japan, but also by setting your priorities right.
Quick reading in Japanese
Start reading Japanese texts written for children. Instead of diving into complex text with a lot of kanji, start with books that help you master hiragana and katakana first.
- You can start with translated versions of books, such as Disney books. This way, you can easily compare the translation with the original text to understand the structure of the sentence.
- Look for books by Mari Takabayashi while learning hiragana. Her children's books are written entirely in Hiragana, but they will challenge your knowledge.
- Guri and Gura is also a very famous series of children's books in Japanese that you can try reading when your language level improves. They will help you expand your vocabulary.
- Try reading manga. Once you feel comfortable reading children's books, move on to manga, which requires more advanced language skills.
How to learn Japanese - brief instructions
- Learn hiragana.
- Learn katakana.
- Enable Japanese keyboard.
- Watch anime, Japanese films or dramas for at least 20-60 hours (with Russian subtitles).
- Read the entire grammar tutorial at this link. This is a very simple and understandable textbook, the best guide for beginners who are not familiar with the Japanese language at all. This point is the most important. PS. For a very small number of users the site does not open. In fact, the site works fine. If you encounter such a problem, try logging in through a VPN / proxy / tunnel or from another Internet. If you are not well versed, then simply install any browser extension for VPN.
- Install the Rikaichan add-on - this is a very good dictionary that allows you to point to the desired word on any website, and the add-on itself will find the end of this word and give its translation according to the dictionary and tell you what form this word is in.
- Start using dictionaries.
- Learn Kanji. The 100 most popular kanji allow you to read 36% of the kanji in the text, 200 - 50%, 400 - 66%, 600 - 75%, 800 - 81%, 1000 - 85%, 1500 - 92%, 2000 - 95%, 2530 - 98.0 %, 3000 - 99.0%. You don't need to know 100%. The best site for learning kanji is .
- Watch another 50-150 hours of anime/films/dramas with Russian subtitles (can be done in parallel with points 5-8).
- This item is described in full instructions below. The point is very broad.
Don't waste time learning to speak Japanese
If your goal is simply to learn how to read and write Japanese quickly, an audio course or classroom session where you practice spoken Japanese will only slow down your progress. It is possible to learn a language without having to speak it. It doesn't matter if you know how to pronounce words. It is important that you know the meaning of the character and how to use it correctly in a sentence.
Instead of speaking practice, spend all your study time building your kanji vocabulary, studying grammar, and practicing writing kanji.
Consonants
They are deaf and voiced. They tend to change the voicing in two-part vocabulary constructions: for example, the first word begins with a voiceless sound, but as part of a complex one it turns into a voiced one. For example, [s] turns into [z]: yama + sakura - yama-zakura.
Let's find out how to pronounce Japanese letters.
k – pronounced like the Russian “k”. g – hard back-lingual nasal voiced, it resembles the nasal ŋ in English being; p, b – similar to Russian [p], [b]; t, d – pronounced as [t], [d]; ts, z – sounds like [ts]; r – non-vibrating “single-beat” sound between [р], [л]; s, h – [s] and soft intermediate between [сь], [ш]; m – analogue [m]; n – similar to [n]; j, dz – close to the English [ʤ] in the name Jim.
Expand your vocabulary by learning Jōyō Kanji
Most words in Japanese are kanji characters borrowed from the Chinese. Jōyō Kanji is a list of 2,136 Chinese characters that the Japanese government popularizes as the most important for understanding the Japanese language.
- Blog about kanji. Learning kanji can take many months or even years. Having a blog allows you to go back and remember the words you've learned.
- Please be patient. Learning hieroglyphs will take a lot of time and repetition. Studying at a language school in Japan will help you reduce your time and learn Japanese faster.
Onnoe and kunnoe reading in simple words
In the Japanese language there are 2 types of readings: onnoe, or on'yomi (音読み), which is also called Chinese reading, and some Russian Japanese scholars call it "upper", and kunnoe, or kun'yomi (訓読み), which in Russian can be called Japanese reading or " bottom." As you might guess, on-readings are those readings that were originally in the Chinese language, but were adapted to Japanese phonetics. Kun readings are translations of hieroglyphs into the original Japanese language. The character 訓 itself, used in the word "kun'yomi", means "translation, commentary." Thus, according to onny readings, words of Chinese origin, or kango (漢語), will be read, and according to kun readings, words of Japanese origin, or wago (和語), will be read and written.
Usually onny readings in dictionaries are written in katakana, and kun readings in hiragana. In most Russian-language textbooks, Chinese readings and Japanese are distinguished by a horizontal line, hence the colloquial division of readings into “upper” and “lower” arose.
When you study a hieroglyph, you need to remember the following characteristics:
1) Writing, order and direction of strokes
2) On-readings
3) Kun readings
4) Value range
5) Key
6) You should also pay attention to the combinations in which this or that hieroglyph is used
Why are we talking about readings, and not just reading?
There can be from 1 to 3 Chinese, or on, readings for one hieroglyph. This number is associated with repeated borrowings of hieroglyphs in later centuries and from other dialects of the Chinese language. For example, the character 人 has two Chinese readings: jin (ジン) and nin (ニン). When talking about nationality, the Chinese reading jin (ジン) will be used, for example, in the word “Japanese”: 日本人 (nihonjin). When talking about the number of people, this character will be read as nin (ニン), for example, “five people” 五人 will be read as gonin. It is for this reason that when studying hieroglyphs it is worth paying attention to combinations, and if a hieroglyph has several on-word readings, then it is necessary to remember in which case which of these readings is used, it is important to know about the kun and on-word readings.
As for Japanese or kun readings, firstly, they may not exist at all. Like the character 福, which means happiness, there is only one Chinese reading, fuku (フク), and there are no other readings. Of course, such hieroglyphs are convenient because we do not have to choose from several reading options. On the other hand, some characters number up to a dozen or more kun'yomi. The most striking example of such a character, frankly speaking, inconvenient for memorizing, is 生 - “to live, to be alive”, the readings of which are sei (セイ) and shou (ショウ).
Let's look at his kun readings:
1) u-mareru (う・まれる) – to be born
2) u-mu (う・む) – to give birth
3) i-kiru (い・きる) – live, be alive
4) i-kasu (い・かす) – to keep alive, to use optimally
5) i-keru (い・ける) – do ikebana
6) na-ru (な・る) – bear fruit, bear fruit
7) na-su (な・す) – to give birth, to form
ha-eru (は・える) – to grow, to grow (about plants, hair)
9) ha-yasu (は・やす) – grow, let go (beard, wasps)
10) mu-su (む・す) – to grow, become overgrown (with moss)
11) nama (なま) – raw, unprocessed
12) ki (き) – unrefined
The bad news: there are not even 10, but 12 readings. The good news is that there are not many characters with such a huge number of kun readings in the Japanese language. The standard is, as in the case of on-line readings, about 2-3 readings.
The next point worth paying attention to is okurigana (送り仮名).
You may have noticed that, for example, in the reading u-mareru (う・まれる), “to be born,” in the hiragana notation there is a dot inside the word, and in the Latin notation there is a dash. In this case, this dash (dot) means that the tail -mareru (まれる) will be written after the character. It looks like this: 生まれる (u-mareru). That is, the character itself only covers the reading u- (う), which is the root of this verb. Next comes the inflected verb ending. Since it changes, we cannot “keep” it inside the hieroglyph, therefore, in all verbs and adjectives, endings that will change depending on indicators of tense and politeness, these endings will go beyond the hieroglyph. Such endings, which are written after the hieroglyph, but are still part of the reading, are called okurigana. In fact, okurigana is a very convenient guide: if you see that after a character comes hiragana, then this character will be read according to its Japanese reading.
4) Combinations with や、ゆ、よ
The formation of a new syllable with these vowel sounds occurs in Japanese as follows: Base syllable of the form [sogl + い] + smaller ゃ、ょ、ゅ = New syllable
For example,
き(ki) + ゃ(я) = new syllable きゃ (kya) in the voiced version: ぎ(gi) + ゃ(я) = new syllable ぎゃ (gya)きゃ
kya → ぎゃ gya きゅ kyu → ぎゅ gyu きょ kyo → ぎょ gyo
しゃ xia (shcha) → じゃ jia しゅ shu (schu) → じゅ ju しょ sho (shche) → じょ jo
ちゃ cha (with [h]) → ぢゃ jia ちゅ chu (with [h]) → ぢゅ ju ちょ cho (with [h]) → ぢょ jo
ひゃ hya → びゃ bya ひゅ hyu → びゅ byu ひょ hyo → びょ byo Try to write the rows with み、に、ぴ yourself in the same way
The pronunciation of the entire syllable and the meaning of the entire word depend on the value of や、ゆ、よ.
ひやく→ read “hiyaku” / “jump”: The sign [や] is read independently as a separate syllable. ひゃく→ read “hyaku” / “jump”: The sign [ゃ] is not read independently, it is part of a new syllable
びょういん → reads “byo:in” / “hospital” (about long sounds in the next paragraph) びよういん → reads “biyo:in” / “beauty salon”
じゆう → read “jiu:” / “freedom” じゅう → read “ju:” / “ten”
3) Formation of voiced and voiceless consonants
[゛] – nigori. It is added to signs with a voiceless consonant sound, converting it into a voiced sound.
[゜] – maru.
Forms signs with the consonant [n].
Maru is placed only at the は row. These signs are placed above the main symbol. か → が ga き → ぎ gi く → ぐ gu け → げ ge こ → ご go
さ → ざ za し → じ ji (with buzzing) す → ず zu せ → ぜ ze そ → ぞ zo
た → だ da ち → ぢ ji (with buzzing) つ → づ zu て → で de と → ど do
は → ば ba ひ → び bi ふ → ぶ bu へ → べ be ほ → ぼ bo
は → ぱ pa ひ → ぴ pi ふ → ぷ pu へ → ぺ pe ほ → ぽ po
Vowels
There are long and short vowels. In transcriptions, longitude is indicated by two signs: a colon or a bar. All sounds in Japanese have the same duration. If you pronounce one in 0.3 seconds, then syllables of two sounds should also last 0.3 seconds. If there is an extension sign, then you need to spend 0.6 seconds on such sounds. If you do not respect the duration, you will confuse your interlocutor, leaving no chance of understanding you.
あ[a] – stressed “a”, as in “poppy”; い[i] – Russian “and”; う[y] – in transcription it is denoted “u”, but it sounds midway between “u” and “s”; え[e] – Russian “e” after hard consonants; お[o] – stressed “o”.
Immersion
Input > Output
If you understand well what we are describing in this paragraph, then learning any language will no longer be an insurmountable obstacle for you. This is a very simple idea and it lies in the following: consuming information in a foreign language is much more important than using this language. That is, listening and reading are much more important than speaking and writing. This is especially important to understand in the initial stages of training. Let's figure out why this is so.
Imagine how children learn their native language, for example, Russian. Do they read textbooks on the Russian language and study its grammatical structure? Do they take classes and fill in the gaps in sentences with words? Do they take turns repeating new words and sentences in front of the mirror? In no case. They live in an atmosphere of the Russian language, everyone around them speaks Russian, they read simple books in Russian and after a few years they already master it many times better than a foreigner who has been taking Russian language courses for the same amount of time. How does this happen? It’s very simple - our brain is already tuned to learning languages . If you watch a movie in a foreign language, you may not understand anything at the moment, but your brain spends its energy trying to decipher the new language. If you watch 10 more films (or better yet, watch the same film 10 times), then you will understand the language better. Much better than if you spent the same time cramming the grammatical structure of the language. Therefore, your main task when learning Japanese is this: surround yourself with Japanese as much as possible and cram into yourself as much information in Japanese as possible. Not textbooks and courses, where everything has already been chewed for you, but precisely the information that the Japanese themselves use.
Listen and read, even if you don't understand
Start devouring the Japanese language. Start watching anime with Japanese subtitles, start listening to Japanese podcasts, start reading manga in Japanese, find Japanese music that interests you and listen to it. This is how you will begin to truly learn the language. We are stopped by the discomfort that appears if we do not understand something. You need to get used to this discomfort while learning a new language, otherwise you will not achieve success and any meaningful progress. Listen to exactly what you like in life and is not related to Japanese. If you like football, watch videos about football in Japanese. If you are a programmer, listen to a podcast about programming. Yes, at first you will not understand anything, but over time you will begin to understand. Thus, in a few months, instead of searching for information on the RuNet, you will be able to Google in Japanese and find something interesting for yourself. With each new listen, you get closer to a good command of the Japanese language. If you watched some anime in Russian, then watch it again, but only in Japanese. You already know what the plot is and roughly remember what the characters are talking about?
In addition to actively immersing yourself in Japanese, you can also play something in the background. For example, if you are sitting in a quiet room, you can turn on something in Japanese and continue doing your thing.
In the first couple of months of this pastime, you do not need to scrupulously look up the translation of each new word with a dictionary. Just soak up the Japanese and you'll figure out everything else later. If you constantly listen to native speakers, then you simply technically will not be able to speak it incorrectly, because you are listening to the native Japanese in your environment.
By the way, an important note specifically for the Japanese language. In Japan, men and women speak differently. Something like Russian masculine and feminine genders for words, only more complicated. So it’s better to listen to the speech of a person of your gender, otherwise you risk ending up in the position of a man who describes himself in feminine terms or vice versa.
Create a Japanese atmosphere
Our environment influences us as much as our inner thoughts. If you get home after work and are faced with the choice of spending 30 minutes on Kanjiway or watching YouTube for 30 minutes, what would we base our decision on? Not just on your desires and “willpower”, but also on what surrounds you at the moment. What will we choose if in your room somewhere in the corner there is one Japanese tutorial that you have already stopped noticing, and the YouTube tab is so conveniently a couple of clicks away? Or conversely, what would you choose if there are many factors in your room that remind you of your goal to learn Japanese?
Here are some examples of how you can make your atmosphere as Japanese as possible:
- Buy some paper books in Japanese
- Hang Japanese posters on the walls. Including a poster with 2136 joyo kanji
- Switch your phone and computer to Japanese
- Write down all the learned kanji on a piece of paper (30-50 pieces per sheet) and hang them on the walls
- Write down grocery lists and any small notes using Japanese
- Manga wall
- (for the especially hardcore) Establish a VPN connection with Japan so that all sites and contextual advertisements are displayed in Japanese
Is it necessary to do all this? Well, of course not. It's much more important to actively absorb information through books, movies and podcasts, but this approach will greatly help you stay on track and not deviate too much from it. Surely you already have those books in Japanese that you would like to read, but don’t understand them at all yet. Put them in a prominent place and they will remind you of why you are learning Japanese.
Let's go back to the YouTube example. Now, if you walk into a room after work that has Japanese posters, Japanese books, and a computer running in Japanese, how much more likely are you to avoid wasting 30 minutes on fleeting pleasures?
If you well understood what we described in this article, then you probably noticed a live hack: you can watch Japanese YouTube 
Do at least a little, but every day
Set yourself a minimum bar and make sure you meet it every day. We emphasize that this should be the minimum bar, do not overestimate it. Let it be five kanji. Or three. Or even one. At Kanjiway we have a streak system that makes sure you meet our minimum benchmark every day. This is about 10 reps, that is, repetitions of the information covered. Of course, on average you should learn more than the minimum level. The point of the minimum bar is that you achieve it every day . If at some point in your life you have a lot of things to do and you cannot devote 30-120 minutes a day to the Japanese language, but you do a streak, then in a few months you will understand how great you are for continuing to learn at least a little bit. The same as if you saved N rubles a day for the last few years. Everyone has bad days in life and the most important thing in them is to slow down a little, but under no circumstances stop.
Are textbooks needed?
The short answer is yes. The real answer is no. The long answer is - not really.
Textbooks will help you learn Japanese, but don't start with them (as we said, start with kana and kanji). The approach to learning a language with the help of textbooks is more correctly described not as learning a language for its use, but as learning a language for its linguistic study. It's more like learning to drive a car, which starts with learning about the internal combustion engine and thermodynamics. Did you need a textbook when you were learning Russian? You don’t need a textbook for Japanese either, but it will help if you use it correctly.
Our advice is to learn 1000 kanji, 500 words and 200 sentences, and then connect any textbook to your taste in order to better understand what exactly you have learned and what you should learn next.
The secret of the approach that we describe in this article is that you will learn most of the grammar automatically , simply through constant contact with the language. Moreover, in reality, not all phrases that we use in everyday life obey grammatical rules or simply common sense. For example, complete the sequence: one year, two years, three years, four years, five...? Five years? Five years? Another example: Spaniards live in Spain, Italians live in Italy, Japanese live in Japan, and Turkey live...? Turkish?
When you start learning a language by studying the laws of the language, you often figure out how you can cram the learned vocabulary into the studied grammatical structures, after which you proudly come to Japan and declare that “I am Turkish from Turkey, I have been studying Japanese for the last five years.” Therefore, use textbooks as an aid to learning Japanese, not as a basis. Your foundation is your hours of watching anime with Japanese subtitles and reading Japanese books.
When to learn to speak?
You don't have to learn the pronunciation of all the words from the very beginning. Don't concentrate on this, devote your energy to learning kanji. If you listen to Japanese a lot, over time you will automatically remember how to pronounce a sentence correctly, just like with grammar. Come back to this question 2-4 months after you start learning and decide for yourself how important pronunciation is to you right now, but in the initial stages of learning, understanding the language is much more important than using it.
Likewise, you don't need to learn the pronunciation of kanji from the very beginning (and they often have more than one pronunciation) - leave it for later and over time you will see that there is no need to devote as much time to them as you usually devote to them.
5) Longitude of sounds
a) Sounds [o] and [u]
are lengthened by the sign [う],
while [う] is not read separately, but only “pulls” the previous sound (increasing the duration of the sound).
The “long” sound sounds twice as long as usual. On our website, we will denote the longitude of a sound with a colon during transcription! Be careful in future reading lessons.
そう → so: / so くうこう → ku:ko: / airport こうこう → ko:ko: / high school しんよう → shinyo: / trust りょこう → ryōko: / travel りゆう→ ryu: / reason Exceptions are words , where [o] is lengthened by the sign お: おおきい → o:ky / big とお → to: / ten とおい → to:y / distant
b) Sounds [a], [i], [e]
are lengthened by signs with the same sound [あ], [い], [え] respectively ちいさい → ti:sai / small いいえ → i:e / no ええ → e: / yes ねえ → ne: / so, listen
c) Sound [e]
can also be lengthened with the sign [い]: せんせい → sensee: / teacher せいと → se:to / student けいたい → ke:tai / abbr. mobile phone
Phonetics in Japanese
The phonetics of the Japanese language can seem complex and confusing to beginners. The fears are partly justified: it arose and was formed not according to the usual algorithms for the development of literature, in other cultural conditions. It will not be possible to find similarities in the pronunciation or spelling of Russian and Japanese words, as, for example, in the Slavic or Romance groups. However, researchers admit that the Japanese-Ryukyuan family of languages is not the most difficult to study.
The habit of following the rules of logic, inherent in the nation, was reflected in the language of the Land of the Rising Sun. There are no cases here where “o” is written, but “a” is pronounced: a Japanese person will never read “harasho” instead of the written “good”. And the situation typical for the French language, when “onion” is read instead of “oignon”, can drive him crazy!
In Japan, they speak Hyojungo, the generally accepted literary language of the country. But in everyday life, the regional dialect is more often used. Differences in pronunciation do not affect the life of society, since school instruction is conducted exclusively in hyojungo. We will analyze the standard version of phonetics.
Pronunciation in hyojungo is clear and understandable. Almost all syllables are open - they consist of a consonant and a vowel. Closed syllables are less common and always end in n. Phonetically, the languages differ: Japanese does not have some of the sounds that are in Russian. Some are something intermediate between two consonant letters (for example, “r”, “l”).
Unlike Europe, there is not one, but three types of generally accepted writing: hiragana, katakana and hieroglyphs - kanji. The first two alphabets have the same sound, but are written differently.
Hiragana is the “native” syllabary alphabet for the written designation of words of Japanese origin: particles, inflected parts of adjectives, verbs, nouns. Katakana is the alphabet of “borrowings” used to denote words that came from other cultures: proper names, nouns with foreign roots, technical and scientific terms, concepts. Kans (syllables) have a certain sound and are a common alphabet, the same as the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet. Print media often use all three types of writing, giving rise to the concept of "mixed writing".
Another type of writing is Romaji. It is not used as widely as the other three varieties, but it allows texts to be written in Latin.
Japanese phonetics has 22 sounds - 15 consonants, 2 semivowels, 5 vowels:
1) Reduction of sounds [and] and [y]
If the sounds [i] and [u] in Japanese are located between 2 voiceless consonant sounds (for example, [k], [s], [p], [t]), then they are reduced, that is, they are partially not pronounced :
ひと → reads “hto” (and NOT hito!), the sound [and] is partially reduced / translation of the word: “man” した → reads “sta” (and NOT sita!) (the sound “s” should be pronounced closer to “shch” , while the sound itself should be pronounced briefly. In the first lesson, we explained in detail the features of the pronunciation of Hiragana sounds); the sound [and] is partially reduced / translation of the word: “bottom, below” ふとい → read “ftoy” (and NOT futoy!), the sound [u] is partially reduced (drops out) / “thick” あした → read “ashta”, sound [ and] is partially reduced / translation of the word: “tomorrow” ふた → reads “fta”, the sound [u] is partially reduced / translation of the word: “lid” よろしく → reads “eroshchku”, sound [and] is partially reduced / translation: “hello”です → read “des”, the sound [u] at the end is partially reduced / translation: verb link “is, to be”
