I also went back for a school trip in 2011 and went to Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima etc. There’s also the part about being able to produce it. And I’d say that’s all you need to do. It’s a smart way to go about it, and it reveals something that is pretty interesting, which is this: Having a large vocabulary helps, but is not necessary for fluency. If you want to understand about 95% of what you read, just 1000 kanji will get you there. Because of multiple readings of kanji, your 2,136 journey to kanji-fluency is actually many times more difficult. Yes. Even the Emperor doesn't know all the words in Japanese let alone you. So far, so good. I Planned to Become Fluent in Japanese in 1 Year — 4 Comments Dan on 11/21/2016 at 11:59 pm said: Nice article. What I can tell you is that it does get easier the longer you stick with it. This character means “moon” or “month.” It can be pronounced つき,げつ, or がつ (tsuki, getsu, gatsu) depending on how it is being used in a word. If you want to do anything in Japanese that isn’t strictly speaking and listening, you’re pretty much out of luck (with the possible exception of books meant for toddlers). Once you can recognize them, you can start combining them. That hardly seems as bad as learning 2,000+ kanji from scratch, right? So to wrap up reason #1: Japanese has multiple words where other languages only have a single word and the reason is because the different Japanese words show varying levels of respect towards the listener. See, you’ve used this Japanese word enough so that you don’t need to start at the base and conjugate/inflect it all the way down from the base to its final form according to the rules. You’ll then get even more input and conversation practice because they’ll speak to you at a normal native level with the … Merciful are the handful of kanji with just one or two readings. You would have to know all the jouyou kanji, 10,000 words, and know hundreds of grammar patterns. So, in reality, you only need to know in the neighborhood of 200 stroke orders to be able to write most kanji. Recognize them and then learn-learn them as you’re exposed to more and more Japanese over time, absorbing the readings with vocab instead of by brute force. Perhaps the brain needs some time to make the necessary connections that lead to understanding. Learn Kanji (Chinese characters). Fluency is Not The End, It’s Actually The Beginning! It’s a good question to ask because it can give you a solid language learning goal to work towards achieving each and every day. That’s when I can’t help but feel I know so little. Some people go all out. Studying alone can be jarring, and difficult to keep dedicated to, especially if … There’s a whole community of people learning languages where these two concepts are the rule. Native: 10,000-30,000+ words. Learning them more in depth than that will take much, much longer, and it’d be hard to put a hard number on that. Now, this gets complicated for a couple of reasons. I’ve heard multiple people describe the Japanese language as “endless” and the more I learn, the more I think they are right. 月曜, 満月, 月給, etc. While the first two points get a lot of attention, the third point is equally, if not more, important. I like Japanese funny variety shows, so I call myself fluent when I found myself able to understand Sanma-san’s words, 100%, in his TV programs. How do you say it? As the different pronunciations arrived in Japan, they simply got appended to the list of possible readings. These larger characters can be compressed into “radicals”—little graphemes that are then combined to make a larger kanji. Then when you are in an environment where you are immersed in the language, be it a self-created environment or you’re actually in Japan, the knowledge you’ve gained up until that point will work as a launch pad for your abilities to improve. Congrats, you’ve “learned” 2,136 kanji. Until now it feels daunting. Isn’t 5,000 words a lot more manageable than 35,000? Small images or stories will help the kanji stick in your brain faster and longer. Oh no…. Now you’ll need to combine them to make compound words, just like we have in English with “laptop,” “fireplace,” or “sunscreen.”. I used to want to rush through to fluency – like most people I suspect. When I was starting my language learning journey, I was obsessed with this idea. The high level of precision in the Japanese language. This is the most important part of sentences. Let’s say you want to look up a kanji in a dictionary. He discovered that it is incredibly difficult for a language learner to ever know as many words as a native speaker. For one, if you want to polish your Japanese, all the books at an intermediate or higher level will assume you know kanji. Especially in today’s world with computers dominating communication, people forget kanji more and more all the time. At this point, I knew about 3500 words (from my core 6k deck), and already knew about ~1000 Kanji (from the kanji deck), and was about halfway through Genki two. the top 5,000… I’d be fluent, right? One thing that you can start doing right now that I believe will help you is to get the actual transcripts of the show’s dialog and combine reading it with listening to it. In other words, we could give Steve a boost of 1300-2200 hours bringing his number up to 2200-3100 hours of study time in order to fairly compare it with Richard and Sarah. Well, these are the Chinese and Japanese readings, respectively. Even native Japanese, super smart, PhD’s can’t write down every kanji they recognize. However, it is an interesting question to consider how many words would we actually need to accomplish some basic communication tasks. Katakana are, typically, used to write foreign words and names, as well as to provide emphasis, similar to italics. This doesn’t mean treating Japanese like a math equation such as: Rather it means that when you think, “I didn’t want to eat it” in English, and you want to say it in Japanese, you just go straight to “食べたくなかった” without going through that whole 5-step process I explained earlier. Then learn some compound words that use those kanji. You simply know that “didn’t want to eat” = 「食べたくなかった」 and you use it instantly. It takes skill. But it’s all too sporadic and fast for me to be able to piece together to make any sense. Pretty neat! How do you do it? Language bookstores are full of publications like “500 most common [insert language] verbs”. 10,000 gets you to N1 on the JLPT exam and covers most of your bases with fluency. By knowing the stroke order. The core vocabulary should be the words that people use in regular day to day conversations. Nifty! Writing kanji on a computer uses a sort of auto-complete system. I picked a random set of phonemes: HO-U-KO-U. It can test only a limited amount of knowledge and as a written test, it cannot evaluate speaking ability (which seems like a major short falling). Is it a good idea? How to say "what" in Japanese, plus all the Japanese question words you need to know if you want to speak Japanese. There are a ton of them in Japanese and they all have a slightly difference nuance! Smith already came on Monday.”. This fact has often lead people who want to become fluent quickly to the conclusion that you should study the top 2,000 frequently used words first in order to gain the maximum benefit from your study time. Kana are super simple, and many are the same between hiragana and katakana (for example へ and ヘ). For polyglots, it is between 1,000-2,000 words. The disappointment comes when I watch a program in Japanese, or when I venture into something else other than my usual beginner materials. At that rate, it would take you 440 weeks, or around 8 and a half years to reach a “general professional proficiency” level. You’ll learn them organically as you traverse the seemingly endless landscape of Japanese vocabulary. (Monday, full moon, monthly salary). Then learn a bunch of super-simple kanji that use those radicals. Don’t give up man, go out there and learn 日本語! Kunyomi is typically used when the word has kana attached to it to make a word. How do you know the number of strokes? This would mean that you can not only communicate what you need to, but you can understand and enjoy pretty much everything that you come into contact with. They can replace kanji entirely, writing out the word as pure sound, or form words in their own right, or function as grammatical units all by themselves. I agree that you do not need to know how to read a language to be fluent. Speaking fluent Japanese is easy. Then rinse and repeat with harder radicals and more complex kanji. (2) – The high level of precision in the Japanese language. Japanese words for fluent include 流暢, ぺらぺら, 爽やか and よどみのない. To pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test N1, which is considered fluent Japanese? Students of Japanese who actively study for a few hours per day are typically ready to attempt the advanced-level Japanese tests (like the JLPT N2—that’s Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 2) after about two and a half or three years. But what exactly are onyomi and kunyomi? One of the things that I was shocked to discover was just how much gets lost during translation for manga and anime! The 2,136 kanji are just the foundation for the rest of Japanese. You know it already! How many words do you need to be “fluent” in a language? 5,000 will allow you to handle daily life, but you’ll be extremely limited. So, what actually are kanji anyway? It’s not worth the effort. You could learn the way Japanese school children do, but that’s super inefficient and it takes them years and years of hard, grueling work. The words in Japanese are usually ordered: Subject + Object + Verb instead of the normal English word order: Subject + Verb + Object. I think that in order to come to a satisfying answer, we have to take a couple of things into consideration. ), hiragana and katakana (collectively known as “kana” and numbering less than a hundred), and finally kanji. But this one answer uses different words in Japanese depending on the social status of the person you’re talking to. It’s not an easy language with the different alphabets and honorifics. And I’m even going to leave you with some tips on how to get to whatever definition of fluency you want to reach. 二, and many are the Chinese and Japanese readings, respectively Nice article as many do! 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