Benny Lewis's Blog, page 98

24 quirky cultural tidbits about Japan from this Westerner’s perspective

After almost eleven years of travelling the world, I finally had the time to learn some Japanese and visit this unique country.

I had a whirlwind adventure over several weeks, and am right now in as opposite a culture as I can imagine, in Texas (to launch my book Fluent in 3 months when it gets published in just a few days!)

While here my girlfriend and I have had time to reflect on the many things that are different in Japan. After living in over two dozen countries and even absorbing some of their cultural habits, most of what I discuss here truly is unique to Japan (some may be true in neighbouring countries though).

Here are 24 things that come to mind when we reflect on going to Japan. Enjoy!

1. Cuteness overload

You know the way anime have characters with incredibly large eyes? I don’t know how they do it (Genetic engineering? Mutants from another dimension? The anime characters somehow jumped out of the TV) but Japanese cats and dogs in real life tend to have bigger eyes than in the west.

It just makes them too adorable. You will be overcome with the urge to “awww!” if you walk by a pet store, much more so than in the west.

As well as this, signs on public transport to remind you to hold on to the standing support, and even serious signs on roads, often look a little too much like the style used in Manga comics, right down to the surprise dashes and single droplet of sweat on their forehead.

I felt like the construction site warning guy is about to yell Kamehameha.

2. Remote control heated toilets

Honestly, I’m spoiled now. The welcoming feeling of a warm, toasty seat during your private time makes going to the bathroom in Japan a surprisingly enjoyable experience. Now that I’ve left Japan, nothing but cold seats await me, and that’s just… a bummer.

I was expecting heated seats before arrival, but I didn’t know that a complex control panel could let you adjust the heat based on your rear-quirements.

What surprised me though was that some places have the strangest extra “features” with their toilets, like:

Detachable wireless remote controls – because we all know how often we like to control our toilet from a distance
A button to make water flowing noises (without wasting any of the real thing), so that anyone around you can’t hear what you’re doing
Bidet features for both men and women, including heat, pressure level, and position
Automatic flush when you get up, so you don’t have to pull that pesky lever
And even a button to lift the seat up for you and then put it back down, with automatic flush for us guys. A wonderful combination of pointless and brilliant!

Then there were features that I just couldn’t figure out, like external faucets on top of the toilet to fill it back up again – they looked like a mini-sink.

Who knew you could have so many buttons when in the west we just have a flushing option!

3. Heated other things

Heated seats on trains (very nice touch in the winter!)
Heaters next to tables in restaurants, and under tables with blankets to hold in the heat
Shoe heaters for when it’s wet and snowy
Onsen, or hot springs to bathe in. (Single sex only though!)

4. Futuristic or weird technology

One of the first things you will see when you arrive in Japan, if you splash out and get a taxi (not advisable more than once for anyone on a budget…), is that the driver presses a button and you feel like you have your very own ghostly butler to welcome you to your ride as the door magically opens and the boot/trunk opens very wide for your luggage. Both automatically.

Other than that though, unexpected electrical gizmos included:

Moving robots in the shape of people, directing traffic
Talking thermostats when you change the water temperature

And there was even a talking electricity panel! When I was in Valencia (Spain) before this trip, there were a couple of times when we might use the oven and the microwave at once and the power of the entire apartment went off instantly, since we were over our limits. In our place in Tokyo though, when we were using too many electric devices, the apartment told us to go easy on them! A voice from above was watching over us…

The funniest though was when we went to eat sushi in a sushi-go-round with no need for human interaction. We ordered extra food from a digital display in front of us, and until we had to pay we had ordered lots of food not on the sushi-go-round. It arrived in style too! It came directly from the kitchen on a mini “Shinkansen” train!

5. Extremely hygienic

Wet naps/moist towels provided in every restaurant, and even in arcades when you would touch controls, to wash your hands easily
In one place we found that there was a special mouthwash fountain, beside the water fountain, so that you could keep your breath fresh and minty.
Across the entire country, people wear facemasks to keep germs at bay
But as well as the above, I couldn’t decide if taxi drivers looked like they were ready for surgery, or if they were like Bugs Bunny with their white gloves.
Most places have a special tray for you to put your money in and receive it from, so that you don’t have to hand it to anyone who could get your germs.

6. Bowing wars and other respectful customs

I never did get the hang of how bowing works in Japan – I would bow back if someone bowed to me, but then they’d bow to me again. Apparently, a person of lesser status should bow longer/deeper.

As such, you can have “bowing wars” where you fight for your right to be the lower status person, and come out with more “respect”, and keep on bowing until the bitter end. Once I was prevented from getting into an aisle in a 7-11 because a bowing war was going on so long there from a group of people in front of me, with everyone refusing to give in.

As well as this, particular etiquette needs to be shown for things we think less of in the west. Chopsticks need to be placed very precisely in the rice bowl, and your shoes must be taken off before you enter most establishments (probably a good addition to the hygiene point above), with special parts of the house just for taking off shoes.

We got so used to this custom that it felt strange to enter a house with shoes on when we got into America…

7. Punctuality: Run or you’ll be crushed by steel doors

One of the first shocks we got when we arrived in Japan, jetlagged and ready for bed, was that the elevator tried to eat me alive. It had given me an entire three seconds to enter it, and thought that I was such a slow poke that it would close in on me. When even toilets have sensors to see if you have gotten up or not, I’m surprised lifts don’t!

In the west, you can usually get on an elevator at your own pace, but in Japan if you don’t have someone holding the door-open button, get ready to be crushed by steel if you don’t run in.

And run people do! They run everywhere. All over the country, we’d see people running past us (not for sport; they’d be in suits or suit dresses) probably 47 entire seconds late for their meeting. Apart from the relaxed island of Okinawa, I felt that time was running out as people ran past me, and this probably explains why elevators demanded that I charge into them post-haste!

It just goes to show how punctual Japan is! When I was getting Japanese lessons via Skype in Spain, famous for its mañana attitude that I’ve gladly adopted, I would get messages one minute after the class was due to begin, wandering if everything was OK, with instructions for how we’ll be rescheduling today’s class.

The best of their punctuality is the trains though. I was amazed that it seemed like you had about twenty seconds to get on, before the train slammed shut and zoomed out of its station already. Don’t dilly daddle when it’s time to get on!

8. Lack of space

The space-time continuum really has its work cut out in Japan. As well as running out of time, people also get to run out of space.

In a relatively small country that’s 73% covered by mountains, and yet has a population of 127 million people, space is really an issue! So you have to squeeze as much as you can into as little space as possible.

You have drive-on conveyer belt car parks, one single faucet in a bathroom that works as both the sink and the shower through lever switches, that sink would of course be puny, a single spork for us westerners to save on silverware space, and always smaller living space (for premium prices).

I actually hit my head really bad when trying to leave a building once since I was well over the door’s limit – reminding me as I nursed a pounding headache that at least the Japanese are a little shorter so that the lack of space doesn’t feel as bad to them. I’m not even tall, and my feet were almost always hanging off my beds…

9. Certain things very convenient!

Since we travel with everything we own, we figured that trains may make it hard to bring a decently sized suitcase on board, so we shipped it on to wait for us in Tokyo after our trip, and it was just $15 per 23kg/50lb suitcase for the service! Nice to have something in Japan that wasn’t incredibly expensive… (though the visit is totally worth the cost!)
When we sat down in some restaurants, they provided a special basket for us to store handbags and coats/scarves if they couldn’t be hung up.
Umbrella stands everywhere
USB charger stations in unlikely places like the back seat of taxis
One place had a very clever de-steamer built into the mirror; it was nice to be able to shave immediately after a hot shower even with all the doors closed. Not sure what technology is used there, but we need it everywhere in the world.
Trains had a special slot in the back of the seat in front of you to hold your ticket. Pretty clever for quick access when the conductor came!

10. No trash cans… anywhere

Something that was certainly not convenient though was the complete and utter lack of trash cans. If you bought something in a 7-11 and walked a few blocks and decided to dump its packaging, you’d have a long search for anywhere to put it. Out in the streets, we’d see nothing for miles, and then the tiniest of receptors when we did.

And yet, it was indeed one of the cleanest countries in the world. People just carry their trash around with them! Recycling is a very complicated process and most buildings we stayed in had an array of options of how to dispose of things. Getting rid of rubbish was always such a mess!

11. Incredibly expensive

I was warned about this, and while it is possible to save money in Japan if you are a visitor there it’s really hard. Most foreigners I met who were not spending so much money had arranged for long-term contracts on accommodation. Passers-by had to deal with a tourist industry that is simply not that prepared for a western budget mindset.

Despite this, I did get not too expensive accommodation through sites like agoda, and eating at street vendors or basic restaurants wasn’t that bad, although not an option for me nearly all the time as a vegetarian (which makes life cheaper in the west, but way more expensive in Japan).

Travelling Japan cheap is possible, but you need to do a lot of research to save money.

For instance, I almost always get some data on my mobile phone to let me work, use Google maps and instagram photos when I’m out. The absolute cheapest option I could find in Japan was almost $40 for just two weeks of 2GB limited Internet. And that was without having an actual phone number to text and call with!

I met someone who had actually gone for the several hundred dollar option (per month) of having a portable 4G wifi router with no data cap – which it turns out is a lot of people’s only source of Internet, since it isn’t installed in many buildings.

And the taxis! Yikes!! I was in a hurry once (very Japanese of me…), and saw that getting the metro would have taken too long, so I got a 10 minute taxi ride a not-so-long distance and was so frustrated to see it cost me almost $40 for that single trip. And when my week-long JRail had expired, that $40 was the same price per person to get from downtown Tokyo to the airport on the train. I don’t even want to know how much a taxi to the airport would have cost…

12.Kanji galore

I was in Japan, so I certainly expected to see lots of Kanji, but I was surprised that in Tokyo (which I expected to be more tourist friendly) there was no romanization of station names on maps that you needed to refer to for the price.

Each time we wanted to get from one point of Tokyo to another, it involved looking at a mess of maps of various strata of subway, and then scouring for the Kanji of the destination station. Luckily a lot of the placename characters are used in Chinese too, so my small amount of Chinese Hanzi that I was confident of came in really handy.

But of all places, I was surprised Tokyo was the one that required the most Kanji of a tourist. In the rest of Japan (including Kyoto’s public transport) I could find the Roumaji almost always. Signs that I needed to read would have a romanized Japanese to help me figure out other aspects of travel, and Kanji was only really an issue when we wanted to buy food (in which case the hack I got that worked surprisingly well was to combine reading the Kana, with using the Pleco app actually designed for Chinese on the Kanji). I was living an almost Kanji-free existence for several weeks in Japan until I got to Tokyo!

For the record, I still maintain that those learning Japanese should learn it Kanji-free until they are a confident speaker. Then it becomes a way more manageable task. Now I’ll add that you should go to Kyoto to ease yourself in Kanji-lovers and those of you with a “read before you speak” language learning philosophy, go straight to Tokyo!

13. So many people!!

Remember what I said about squeezing people into tight spaces? You start to get used to people just being everywhere, especially in the bigger cities.

Getting a metro even outside of rush hour was a chaotic wave of human pushing past us. You can get an idea of how busy it can get in this video of the famous intersection (Shibuya):

14. Unique “cafés”

Tokyo had a host of very strange cafés where you get to hang out with everything including owls. I was around Shibuya and saw the weird sign 猫カフェ in neon lights, and had to see what was inside.

I didn’t find the residents of the “cat café” nearly as cuddly as you would think. They are so jaded with humans giving them attention that they pretty much ignore you! Next time, I’ll stick to the plan of going to crazy cat ladies’ houses when I want to see so many felines roaming around indoors.

15. Pachinko

Pachinko is everywhere. I went into one of these casino-like smoky venues and blew 1,000 yen (about $10) doing something that looks like pinball, with a thousand balls being spat out at a time. You hold a lever that shoots the balls at the distance you control, and try to get them into a particular place. And then you win… or you lose… or lights shine and bells ring.

I probably should have read the rules somewhere before gambling away a grand!

16. Japanese style living quarters

While plenty of hotels do tend to lean towards western style, we managed to stay in more traditional Japanese style places with sliding doors (makes you wonder if you’ve missed a hidden room!) and kneeling tables.

The most confusing part was when we arrived in one and couldn’t find the bed anywhere, until we realized that there was no actual bed, but a fold out thick blanket for the floor stored on a shelf. This way you can take better advantage of more limited space and have a living room or dining room that converts into a bedroom in an instant.

17. Familiar things that are different in Japan

Taxi lights are red if the taxi is available, and green if taken (?)
Theme songs in stores are repeated over and over again, even if the audio is only 2 minutes long. “Yamada Denki”‘s theme will be stuck in my brain forever.
If you are a couple travelling, you will have to work hard to get a double bed, since single beds in bigger rooms are the norm. Either couples sleep separately, or most travellers are business men… either way pulling single beds together was part of the routine when we arrived in many places
The GPS in our car rental was a little too considerate: “You have been driving for two hours. You might consider taking a break.”
The funniest one though, was when we arrived in one apartment we rented and the owner buzzed to meet us. I went to the intercom, and pressed the big red button to let him in. I really should have read the emergency Kanji on it though, since the alarm sounded and the police were called! Apparently the “danger, I’m being stabbed to death!!!” button is right on the intercom device. Luckily the owner stopped it before we had a second run in with Japanese police!

18. When visiting Japan, there is a total sense of safety

One thing that I have never seen anywhere else is that people in restaurants leave their wallets and expensive smartphones on the table when they go to the bathroom. And they would go together, so nobody in the party would be there to guard them and their money and expensive electronics would be out in the open unguarded.

I’ve never come across such great confidence in strangers!

19. Single Japanese coins that are worth five dollars

Japanese coinage goes up to 500 yen (about $5) and notes begin at 1,000 yen (about $10). After a few weeks in Japan and mostly using notes, I realized that I had about $50 in the small coin section of my wallet. Cha-ching!

Oh and don’t forget that “yen” is actually pronounced “en” in Japanese.

20. Fish fetish

Travelling as a vegetarian in Japan is HARD. We cooked at home as often as we could, because explaining that I want something with no fish in it was a concept that apparently requires a PhD in Japanese, since “I don’t eat fish. Please don’t give me fish. For the love of god, just do what you normally do, but don’t add the fish” just doesn’t cut it. Usually the reply was more of a confused “… but then it wouldn’t be delicious!” rather than trying to work with me.

They sprinkle fish on their fish, and serve them with fish on the side.

Once I ordered broccoli. Just broccoli. That’s all it said on the menu. A nice little side-dish to keep me going. Well, it’s not really broccoli unless it’s covered in Katsuobushi, of course.

It’s not impossible to travel as a vegetarian in Japan, but you feel a huge sense of achievement when you finally get a meal that didn’t swim its way onto your plate. When you do eat there though, then I have to say that Japanese food is delicious. Even how they cook western food was stunning.

21. Baseball

Apparently the biggest sport in Japan… is Baseball! I met people who worked at baseball stadiums, saw teams walking to practice with their socks pulled up over their trousers and with the signature caps.

Its popularity even knocks sumo wrestling out of the park! Who would have thunk it?

22. Reading Japanese maps? Not for the faint of heart

I have a really good sense of direction from travelling so much, and it’s a good thing! Almost every time I consulted a map printed in a metro station (in Tokyo! Not elsewhere) I’d soon be groaning in frustration, and wondering if I was going to die in that station.

Local station maps don’t seem to be printed north-south for up to down, and are displayed in the orientation that the guy who hung them up felt like at the time.

And if you can figure out the orientation, then apart from major avenues, you have the nightmare of the Japanese block (not street) naming convention. Don’t get me started!

Every time I was cursing how different it was, I swore to myself I’d go spend a few hours figuring it out with online research, eventually find where I wanted by asking people or seeing if Google maps had it, and then forget that anywhere else on earth would dare use anything but street names, and repeat the process all over again next time.

23. Japanglish

My Japanese definitely isn’t wonderful. After two months, I reached a stage of being able to have basic conversations and then I got too busy with book preparations (yep, it takes a lot of work to launch a published book – it’ll be worth it, you’ll see ). My level went down a bit in that time and I was disappointed to have less than what I wanted, but I still had what I needed to get around, and was glad of it.

Very few people spoke English, and when those even in touristy places approached me or welcomed me anywhere, despite my very white Irish face, they would spring into Japanese immediately (which I read as a promising sign that other whities in Japan are doing pretty good with their Japanese projects!)

I got great practice, and was especially pleased that in Japan you can indeed rely on English loan words through Kana, as long as you pronounce them in a Japanese way.

If the option was there, I would select English or take the English menu whenever possible. The resulting “Engrish” was very strange whenever I did that. A couple of times I had to push aside the English and refer back to the Japanese to understand something better, and signs would VERY often tickle your linguistic funny bone.

Since we did a lot of driving around Japan, my favourite was our GPS, which (shit as it was – it got us lost several times; so much for me adding “Japanese phone numbers as excellent GPS locator replacements” to this list) would translate “Coming up” or “Just ahead” as “Shortly after”. So we’d be driving for 20 minutes and suddenly I’d hear “Shortly after, turn left!” thinking that I missed a bit before. And robo-GPS-lady would constantly tell me to “Be careful…”, and I thought it had a puppy-in-the-road detection system, and it would continue “… road merges ahead”.

24. Enthusiastic welcomes and very friendly people

In Japan, you are greeted with the same enthusiasm when you enter many stores, as the person in this photo is giving you – no I mean the white guy. Everywhere you would get a Mexican wave of every worker in the Family Mart enthusiastically yell;

IRASSHAIMASE!!!!!!!!!!!!! [いらっしゃいませ！Welcome to the store]

And the moment you glance at anything in a market the vendor will strike up conversations with you. Great if you want to practise some Japanese!

Ultimately, while the quirks of Japanese technology, cats, toilets, food and hygiene made the experience more than unique enough, the reason I went in the first place, and what defines my travels is the people I meet along the way.

The Japanese are very friendly, and incredibly welcoming and I was so pleased to confirm this for myself! It’s a very different world, and a country that I highly recommend many of you try to visit yourselves some day. When I think back on my time in Japan, I’ll remember the friendly welcomes, warm smiles and incredible hospitality more than anything else.

If I’ve forgotten any of the most curious parts of the country, do let me know in the comments below! And don’t forget to share this article with any Japanophiles out there!

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24 quirky things about Japan from this Westerner’s perspective

After almost eleven years of travelling the world, I finally had the time to learn some Japanese and visit this unique country.

I had a whirlwind adventure over several weeks, and am right now in as opposite a culture as I can imagine, in Texas (to launch my book Fluent in 3 months when it gets published in just a few days, don’t forget to check out the US giveaway or UK giveaway while you can before they are taken down in a week!)

While here my girlfriend and I have had time to reflect on the many things that are different in Japan. After living in over two dozen countries and even absorbing some of their cultural habits, most of what I discuss here truly is unique to Japan (some may be true in neighbouring countries though).

Here are 24 things that come to mind. Enjoy!

1. Cuteness overload

You know the way anime have characters with incredibly large eyes? I don’t know how they do it (Genetic engineering? Mutants from another dimension? The anime characters somehow jumped out of the TV) but Japanese cats and dogs in real life tend to have bigger eyes than in the west.

It just makes them too adorable. You will be overcome with the urge to “awww!” if you walk by a pet store, much more so than in the west.

As well as this, signs on public transport to remind you to hold on to the standing support, and even serious signs on roads, often look a little too much like the style used in Manga comics, right down to the surprise dashes and single droplet of sweat on their forehead.

I felt like the construction site warning guy is about to yell Kamehameha.

2. Remote control heated toilets

Honestly, I’m spoiled now. The welcoming feeling of a warm, toasty seat during your private time makes going to the bathroom a surprisingly enjoyable experience. Now that I’ve left Japan, nothing but cold seats await me, and that’s just… a bummer.

I was expecting heated seats before arrival, but I didn’t know that a complex control panel could let you adjust the heat based on your rear-quirements.

What surprised me though was that some places have the strangest extra “features” with their toilets, like:

Detachable wireless remote controls – because we all know how often we like to control our toilet from a distance
A button to make water flowing noises (without wasting any of the real thing), so that anyone around you can’t hear what you’re doing
Bidet features for both men and women, including heat, pressure level, and position
Automatic flush when you get up, so you don’t have to pull that pesky lever
And even a button to lift the seat up for you and then put it back down, with automatic flush for us guys. A wonderful combination of pointless and brilliant!

Then there were features that I just couldn’t figure out, like external faucets on top of the toilet to fill it back up again – they looked like a mini-sink.

Who knew you could have so many buttons when in the west we just have a flushing option!

3. Heated other things

Heated seats on trains (very nice touch in the winter!)
Heaters next to tables in restaurants, and under tables with blankets to hold in the heat
Shoe heaters for when it’s wet and snowy
Onsen, or hot springs to bathe in. (Single sex only though!)

4. Futuristic or weird technology

One of the first things you will see when you arrive in Japan, if you splash out and get a taxi (not advisable more than once for anyone on a budget…), is that the driver presses a button and you feel like you have your very own ghostly butler to welcome you to your ride as the door magically opens and the boot/trunk opens very wide for your luggage. Both automatically.

Other than that though, unexpected electrical gizmos included:

Moving robots in the shape of people, directing traffic
Talking thermostats when you change the water temperature

And there was even a talking electricity panel! When I was in Valencia (Spain) before this trip, there were a couple of times when we might use the oven and the microwave at once and the power of the entire apartment went off instantly, since we were over our limits. In our place in Tokyo though, when we were using too many electric devices, the apartment told us to go easy on them! A voice from above was watching over us…

The funniest though was when we went to eat sushi in a sushi-go-round with no need for human interaction. We ordered extra food from a digital display in front of us, and until we had to pay we had ordered lots of food not on the sushi-go-round. It arrived in style too! It came directly from the kitchen on a mini “Shinkansen” train!

5. Extremely hygienic

Wet naps/moist towels provided in every restaurant, and even in arcades when you would touch controls, to wash your hands easily
In one place we found that there was a special mouthwash fountain, beside the water fountain, so that you could keep your breath fresh and minty.
Across the entire country, people wear facemasks to keep germs at bay
But as well as the above, I couldn’t decide if taxi drivers looked like they were ready for surgery, or if they were like Bugs Bunny with their white gloves.
Most places have a special tray for you to put your money in and receive it from, so that you don’t have to hand it to anyone who could get your germs.

6. Bowing wars and other respectful customs

I never did get the hang of how bowing works in Japan – I would bow back if someone bowed to me, but then they’d bow to me again. Apparently, a person of lesser status should bow longer/deeper.

As such, you can have “bowing wars” where you fight for your right to be the lower status person, and come out with more “respect”, and keep on bowing until the bitter end. Once I was prevented from getting into an aisle in a 7-11 because a bowing war was going on so long there from a group of people in front of me, with everyone refusing to give in.

As well as this, particular etiquette needs to be shown for things we think less of in the west. Chopsticks need to be placed very precisely in the rice bowl, and your shoes must be taken off before you enter most establishments (probably a good addition to the hygiene point above), with special parts of the house just for taking off shoes.

We got so used to this custom that it felt strange to enter a house with shoes on when we got into America…

7. Punctuality: Run or you’ll be crushed by steel doors

One of the first shocks we got when we arrived in Japan, jetlagged and ready for bed, was that the elevator tried to eat me alive. It had given me an entire three seconds to enter it, and thought that I was such a slow poke that it would close in on me. When even toilets have sensors to see if you have gotten up or not, I’m surprised lifts don’t!

In the west, you can usually get on an elevator at your own pace, but in Japan if you don’t have someone holding the door-open button, get ready to be crushed by steel if you don’t run in.

And run people do! They run everywhere. All over the country, we’d see people running past us (not for sport; they’d be in suits or suit dresses) probably 47 entire seconds late for their meeting. Apart from the relaxed island of Okinawa, I felt that time was running out as people ran past me, and this probably explains why elevators demanded that I charge into them post-haste!

It just goes to show how punctual Japan is! When I was getting Japanese lessons via Skype in Spain, famous for its mañana attitude that I’ve gladly adopted, I would get messages one minute after the class was due to begin, wandering if everything was OK, with instructions for how we’ll be rescheduling today’s class.

The best of their punctuality is the trains though. I was amazed that it seemed like you had about twenty seconds to get on, before the train slammed shut and zoomed out of its station already. Don’t dilly daddle when it’s time to get on!

8. Lack of space

The space-time continuum really has its work cut out in Japan. As well as running out of time, people also get to run out of space.

In a relatively small country that’s 73% covered by mountains, and yet has a population of 127 million people, space is really an issue! So you have to squeeze as much as you can into as little space as possible.

You have drive-on conveyer belt car parks, one single faucet in a bathroom that works as both the sink and the shower through lever switches, that sink would of course be puny, a single spork for us westerners to save on silverware space, and always smaller living space (for premium prices).

I actually hit my head really bad when trying to leave a building once since I was well over the door’s limit – reminding me as I nursed a pounding headache that at least the Japanese are a little shorter so that the lack of space doesn’t feel as bad to them. I’m not even tall, and my feet were almost always hanging off my beds…

9. Certain things very convenient!

Since we travel with everything we own, we figured that trains may make it hard to bring a decently sized suitcase on board, so we shipped it on to wait for us in Tokyo after our trip, and it was just $15 per 23kg/50lb suitcase for the service! Nice to have something in Japan that wasn’t incredibly expensive…
When we sat down in some restaurants, they provided a special basket for us to store handbags and coats/scarves if they couldn’t be hung up.
Umbrella stands everywhere
USB charger stations in unlikely places like the back seat of taxis
One place had a very clever de-steamer built into the mirror; it was nice to be able to shave immediately after a hot shower even with all the doors closed. Not sure what technology is used there, but we need it everywhere in the world.
Trains had a special slot in the back of the seat in front of you to hold your ticket. Pretty clever for quick access when the conductor came!

10. No trash cans… anywhere

Something that was certainly not convenient though was the complete and utter lack of trash cans. If you bought something in a 7-11 and walked a few blocks and decided to dump its packaging, you’d have a long search for anywhere to put it. Out in the streets, we’d see nothing for miles, and then the tiniest of receptors when we did.

And yet, it was indeed one of the cleanest countries in the world. People just carry their trash around with them! Recycling is a very complicated process and most buildings we stayed in had an array of options of how to dispose of things. Getting rid of rubbish was always such a mess!

11. Incredibly expensive

I was warned about this, and while it is possible to save money in Japan if you are a visitor there it’s really hard. Most foreigners I met who were not spending so much money had arranged for long-term contracts on accommodation. Passers-by had to deal with a tourist industry that is simply not that prepared for a western budget mindset.

Despite this, I did get not too expensive accommodation through sites like agoda, and eating at street vendors or basic restaurants wasn’t that bad, although not an option for me nearly all the time as a vegetarian (which makes life cheaper in the west, but way more expensive in Japan).

Travelling Japan cheap is possible, but you need to do a lot of research to save money.

For instance, I almost always get some data on my mobile phone to let me work, use Google maps and instagram photos when I’m out. The absolute cheapest option I could find in Japan was almost $40 for just two weeks of 2GB limited Internet. And that was without having an actual phone number to text and call with!

I met someone who had actually gone for the several hundred dollar option (per month) of having a portable 4G wifi router with no data cap – which it turns out is a lot of people’s only source of Internet, since it isn’t installed in many buildings.

And the taxis! Yikes!! I was in a hurry once (very Japanese of me…), and saw that getting the metro would have taken too long, so I got a 10 minute taxi ride a not-so-long distance and was so frustrated to see it cost me almost $40 for that single trip. And when my week-long JRail had expired, that $40 was the same price per person to get from downtown Tokyo to the airport on the train. I don’t even want to know how much a taxi to the airport would have cost…

12.Kanji galore

I was in Japan, so I certainly expected to see lots of Kanji, but I was surprised that in Tokyo (which I expected to be more tourist friendly) there was no romanization of station names on maps that you needed to refer to for the price.

Each time we wanted to get from one point of Tokyo to another, it involved looking at a mess of maps of various strata of subway, and then scouring for the Kanji of the destination station. Luckily a lot of the placename characters are used in Chinese too, so my small amount of Chinese Hanzi that I was confident of came in really handy.

But of all places, I was surprised Tokyo was the one that required the most Kanji of a tourist. In the rest of Japan (including Kyoto’s public transport) I could find the Roumaji almost always. Signs that I needed to read would have a romanized Japanese to help me figure out other aspects of travel, and Kanji was only really an issue when we wanted to buy food (in which case the hack I got that worked surprisingly well was to combine reading the Kana, with using the Pleco app actually designed for Chinese on the Kanji). I was living an almost Kanji-free existence for several weeks in Japan until I got to Tokyo!

For the record, I still maintain that those learning Japanese should learn it Kanji-free until they are a confident speaker. Then it becomes a way more manageable task. Now I’ll add that you should go to Kyoto to ease yourself in Kanji-lovers and those of you with a “read before you speak” language learning philosophy, go straight to Tokyo!

13. So many people!!

Remember what I said about squeezing people into tight spaces? You start to get used to people just being everywhere, especially in the bigger cities.

Getting a metro even outside of rush hour was a chaotic wave of human pushing past us. You can get an idea of how busy it can get in this video of the famous intersection (Shibuya):

14. Unique “cafés”

Tokyo had a host of very strange cafés where you get to hang out with everything including owls. I was around Shibuya and saw the weird sign 猫カフェ in neon lights, and had to see what was inside.

I didn’t find the residents of the “cat café” nearly as cuddly as you would think. They are so jaded with humans giving them attention that they pretty much ignore you! Next time, I’ll stick to the plan of going to crazy cat ladies’ houses when I want to see so many felines roaming around indoors.

15. Pachinko

Pachinko is everywhere. I went into one of these casino-like smoky venues and blew 1,000 yen (about $10) doing something that looks like pinball, with a thousand balls being spat out at a time. You hold a lever that shoots the balls at the distance you control, and try to get them into a particular place. And then you win… or you lose… or lights shine and bells ring.

I probably should have read the rules somewhere before gambling away a grand!

16. Japanese style living quarters

While plenty of hotels do tend to lean towards western style, we managed to stay in more traditional Japanese style places with sliding doors (makes you wonder if you’ve missed a hidden room!) and kneeling tables.

The most confusing part was when we arrived in one and couldn’t find the bed anywhere, until we realized that there was no actual bed, but a fold out thick blanket for the floor stored on a shelf. This way you can take better advantage of more limited space and have a living room or dining room that converts into a bedroom in an instant.

17. Familiar things that are different

Taxi lights are red if the taxi is available, and green if taken (?)
Theme songs in stores are repeated over and over again, even if the audio is only 2 minutes long. “Yamada Denki”‘s theme will be stuck in my brain forever.
If you are a couple travelling, you will have to work hard to get a double bed, since single beds in bigger rooms are the norm. Either couples sleep separately, or most travellers are business men… either way pulling single beds together was part of the routine when we arrived in many places
The GPS in our car rental was a little too considerate: “You have been driving for two hours. You might consider taking a break.”
The funniest one though, was when we arrived in one apartment we rented and the owner buzzed to meet us. I went to the intercom, and pressed the big red button to let him in. I really should have read the emergency Kanji on it though, since the alarm sounded and the police were called! Apparently the “danger, I’m being stabbed to death!!!” button is right on the intercom device. Luckily the owner stopped it before we had a second run in with Japanese police!

18. Sense of safety

One thing that I have never seen anywhere else is that people in restaurants leave their wallets and expensive smartphones on the table when they go to the bathroom. And they would go together, so nobody in the party would be there to guard them and their money and expensive electronics would be out in the open unguarded.

I’ve never come across such great confidence in strangers!

19. Single coins that are worth five dollars

Japanese coinage goes up to 500 yen (about $5) and notes begin at 1,000 yen (about $10). After a few weeks in Japan and mostly using notes, I realized that I had about $50 in the small coin section of my wallet. Cha-ching!

Oh and don’t forget that “yen” is actually pronounced “en” in Japanese.

20. Fish fetish

Travelling as a vegetarian in Japan is HARD. We cooked at home as often as we could, because explaining that I want something with no fish in it was a concept that apparently requires a PhD in Japanese, since “I don’t eat fish. Please don’t give me fish. For the love of god, just do what you normally do, but don’t add the fish” just doesn’t cut it. Usually the reply was more of a confused “… but then it wouldn’t be delicious!” rather than trying to work with me.

They sprinkle fish on their fish, and serve them with fish on the side.

Once I ordered broccoli. Just broccoli. That’s all it said on the menu. A nice little side-dish to keep me going. Well, it’s not really broccoli unless it’s covered in Katsuobushi, of course.

It’s not impossible to travel as a vegetarian in Japan, but you feel a huge sense of achievement when you finally get a meal that didn’t swim its way onto your plate. When you do eat there though, then I have to say that Japanese food is delicious. Even how they cook western food was stunning.

21. Baseball

Apparently the biggest sport in Japan… is Baseball! I met people who worked at baseball stadiums, saw teams walking to practice with their socks pulled up over their trousers and with the signature caps.

Its popularity even knocks sumo wrestling out of the park! Who would have thunk it?

22. Reading maps? Not for the faint of heart

I have a really good sense of direction from travelling so much, and it’s a good thing! Almost every time I consulted a map printed in a metro station (in Tokyo! Not elsewhere) I’d soon be groaning in frustration, and wondering if I was going to die in that station.

Local station maps don’t seem to be printed north-south for up to down, and are displayed in the orientation that the guy who hung them up felt like at the time.

And if you can figure out the orientation, then apart from major avenues, you have the nightmare of the Japanese block (not street) naming convention. Don’t get me started!

Every time I was cursing how different it was, I swore to myself I’d go spend a few hours figuring it out with online research, eventually find where I wanted by asking people or seeing if Google maps had it, and then forget that anywhere else on earth would dare use anything but street names, and repeat the process all over again next time.

23. Japanglish

My Japanese definitely isn’t wonderful. After two months, I reached a stage of being able to have basic conversations and then I got too busy with book preparations (yep, it takes a lot of work to launch a published book – it’ll be worth it, you’ll see ). My level went down a bit in that time and I was disappointed to have less than what I wanted, but I still had what I needed to get around, and was glad of it.

Very few people spoke English, and when those even in touristy places approached me or welcomed me anywhere, despite my very white Irish face, they would spring into Japanese immediately (which I read as a promising sign that other whities in Japan are doing pretty good with their Japanese projects!)

I got great practice, and was especially pleased that in Japan you can indeed rely on English loan words through Kana, as long as you pronounce them in a Japanese way.

If the option was there, I would select English or take the English menu whenever possible. The resulting “Engrish” was very strange whenever I did that. A couple of times I had to push aside the English and refer back to the Japanese to understand something better, and signs would VERY often tickle your linguistic funny bone.

Since we did a lot of driving around Japan, my favourite was our GPS, which (shit as it was – it got us lost several times; so much for me adding “Japanese phone numbers as excellent GPS locator replacements” to this list) would translate “Coming up” or “Just ahead” as “Shortly after”. So we’d be driving for 20 minutes and suddenly I’d hear “Shortly after, turn left!” thinking that I missed a bit before. And robo-GPS-lady would constantly tell me to “Be careful…”, and I thought it had a puppy-in-the-road detection system, and it would continue “… road merges ahead”.

24. Enthusiastic welcomes and very friendly people

In Japan, you are greeted with the same enthusiasm when you enter many stores, as the person in this photo is giving you – no I mean the white guy. Everywhere you would get a Mexican wave of every worker in the Family Mart enthusiastically yell;

IRASSHAIMASE!!!!!!!!!!!!! [いらっしゃいませ！Welcome to the store]

And the moment you glance at anything in a market the vendor will strike up conversations with you. Great if you want to practise some Japanese!

Ultimately, while the quirks of Japanese technology, cats, toilets, food and hygiene made the experience more than unique enough, the reason I went in the first place, and what defines my travels is the people I meet along the way.

The Japanese are very friendly, and incredibly welcoming and I was so pleased to confirm this for myself! It’s a very different world, and a country that I highly recommend many of you try to visit yourselves some day. When I think back on my time in Japan, I’ll remember the friendly welcomes, warm smiles and incredible hospitality more than anything else.

If I’ve forgotten any of the most curious parts of the country, do let me know in the comments below! And don’t forget to share this article with any Japanophiles out there!

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24 quirky things about Japan from this Westerner’s perspective is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

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Is Japanese Hard? Why Japanese is easier than you think!

Of all the resources that I came across in Japanese, my favourite by far was John Fotheringham’s Master Japanese: The Beginner’s Step-by-Step Guide to Learning Nihongo the Fun Way. He takes the kind of approach that I like and is incredibly encouraging to beginner Japanese learners.

This is a breath of fresh air when most experienced learners were more interested in “putting me in my place” by “warning” me about the mountain of work ahead, and making sure I was aware that Japanese was the one true hardest language in the world.

Usually I like to write these posts myself, as I did for Chinese and Hungarian, but I’ve been so busy with my Fluent in 3 months book launch that I only had the time for two intensive months in my own Japanese project, so I made sure John came back to the blog a second time (he previously wrote How to Learn 2,000 Kanji in 3 Months: Mission Possible) to share these incredibly helpful words to those of you who are hesitant to take on Japanese. Check it out!

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“Japanese is really freaking difficult.”

“Japanese is really freaking vague.”

“Japanese is really freaking illogical.”

These statements have three things in common:

They are widely believed by many would-be Japanese learners.
They get in the way of learning the language.
They are completely bogus.

To succeed in your Japanese mission, you must ignore the cynics, defeatists, killjoys, naysayers, party poopers, pessimists, sourpusses, and wet blankets. Japanese is not nearly as challenging as the Debby Downers would have you believe, and is in fact easier in many key ways than supposedly “easy” Romance languages like Spanish.

Why Japanese is Easier than You Think

Here are but a few of the many ways Japanese is comparatively easy, especially for native speakers of English:

There are heaps of English loan words in Japanese.

If you grew up speaking English, congratulations! You won the Linguistic Lottery! From day one in Japanese, you will have a massive pre-existing vocabulary to draw on thanks to the thousands and thousands of English words borrowed into the Japanese language to date. These “foreign loan words”, or gairaigo (外来語), offer native speakers of English a massive head start, allowing you to understand and communicate a great deal of information even with shaky Japanese grammar and zero Kanji knowledge. Here is a small taste of the Japanese arsenal English speakers already have at their disposal:

“mic” → maiku (マイク)
“table” → teeburu (テーブル)
“Internet” → intaanetto (インターネット)
“romantic” → romanchikku (ロマンチック)
“driveshaft” → doraibushafuto (ドライブシャフト)

Or for even more, check out the video Benny and some other learners made themselves, singing entirely in gairaigo (外来語):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5c06I8rHO8

You will of course need to learn the “Japanified” pronunciation of English loan words, but the phonetic patterns are highly predictable and consistent. All you need to do is learn Katakana (something you can do over the weekend), and then familiarize yourself with how English sounds are transferred into English. A few key patterns to help you get started:

English loan words adopt the consonant-vowel, consonant-vowel pattern found in Japanese. So you can be sure that any English consonant clusters, such as the ‘dr’ in “drive” will get extra vowels added in the middle. In this case, ‘d’ becomes do.

In Japanese, no words end in a consonant (with the exceptions of n), so if an English loan word has a consonant sound at the end (e.g. “mic”), you can be sure that the Japanese equivalent will have a vowel tacked on: maiku.

Once you have the phonetic patterns down, a powerful language hack is at your disposal: When in doubt about how to say a given word in Japanese, just say the English word you know using Japanese syllables. More times than not, you will be understood. Even if a given English loan word is not actually used in Japanese, chances are good that people will have “learned” (i.e. memorized but not really acquired) the English word in high school or university. Since most Japanese learners of English add little Katakana reading guides above English words to approximate their pronunciation, they will better recognize English words when wrapped in Japanese pronunciation. Or even more so when written out on paper. This habit may be bad for their English, but is at least good for your ability to communicate.

Lastly, I should point out that there are occasional differences in meaning between English loan words and their Japanese derivations. But radical semantic changes are few, and even when there are significant gaps, the comedic effect is usually enough to make the words stick on their own. Perfect example: I loved telling all my friends back home that I lived in a “mansion” while in Japan. It was the truth! What they didn’t know is that the loan word manshon (マンション, “mansion”) actually refers to an apartment, not a palatial residence.

There are no pesky noun genders in Japanese.

Unlike most Romance languages, Japanese does not have “masculine”, “feminine” or “neuter” nouns. Buddha be praised! In Japan, you can just order your dark beer instead of trying to remember whether the noun “beer” is feminine or masculine as you would have to in Spanish:

“Let’s see… I really want a dark beer. Cerveza is feminine I think… Or is it masculine? It seems masculine. Just think of all the dudes with beer bellies. But it ends with an ‘a’ so I think it should be a feminine noun. Okay, assuming it is indeed feminine, I need to use the feminine form of the adjective for “dark”… Hmm… I think it’s oscura…”

Meanwhile, the waiter has come and gone and you are left to wait in thirsty frustration. Halfway around the world, the Japanese learner is already on his second round of gender-free kuro biiru (黒ビール).

Japanese verbs don’t have to “agree” with the subject.

In Japanese, there is no need to conjugate verbs to match their respective subjects. Anyone who’s learned Spanish or French should really appreciate this advantage. Take the verb “to eat” for example. En español, you have to learn 6 different verb forms for just the present tense (one for each pronoun group), plus all the myriad tense variations. In Japanese, you only need to learn one single verb form for each tense. No matter who does the eating, the verb taberu (食べる, “eat”) stays exactly the same!

“I eat.” → Yo como. → Taberu.
“You eat.” → Tú comes. → Taberu.
“He / She eats.” → Él/Ella come. → Taberu.
“We eat” → Nosotros comemos. → Taberu.
“You (pl., fam.) eat” → Vosotros coméis. → Taberu.
“You (pl.) / They eat.” → Uds./Ellos comen. → Taberu.

You do have to learn different verb tenses in Japanese, and there are different levels of formality to consider, but hey, at least matching pronouns and verbs is one less thing to worry about when you’re starting out. Don’t look a gift linguistic horse in the mouth!

You can leave out subjects & objects if they are clear from the context.

Japanese is what linguists call a “pro-drop” language, meaning that pronouns and objects are often left unsaid if the “who” and “what” are obvious to the listener and speaker. For example, if someone asks you if you already ate dinner, you can simply say tabeta (食べた, “ate”), the past-tense of taberu (食べる). Both parties already know the subject (“I”) and the object (“dinner”), so all you need is the verb. Less really is more!

Each Japanese syllable can be pronounced only one way.

Japanese is a syllabic language, made up of 45 basic syllables. While the number 45 may sound more intimidating than the 26 letters found in English, keep in mind that each Japanese syllable can be pronounced only one way. This is in stark contrast to English, which despite having fewer letters actually contains far more sounds. Depending on the word (and where in the word it lies), most English letters can be pronounced myriad different ways. Take the letter ‘e’ for example:

It can be pronounced as a “short e” (ĕ or /ɛ/) like in e mpty.
It can be pronounced as a “long e” (ē or /i/) like in k e y.
It can be pronounced as a “long a” (ā or /ei/) like in resum é .
It can be pronounced as a “schwa” (/ɘ/) like in tak e n.
It can be silent (especially at the end of words) like in ax e .

Complex stuff!

Pick any Japanese Kana on the other hand, and no matter where it’s used, it will be pronounced one—and only one—way. The Japanese ‘e’ sound for example (written え in Hiragana) is always pronounced as a “short e” (ĕ or /ɛ/). It doesn’t change if the syllable comes at the beginning, middle, or end of a word.

Japanese harbors few new sounds for English speakers.

The vast majority of Japanese sounds have direct (or at least very similar) equivalents in English. This is great news for the Japanese learner, but tough times for Japanese learners of English. Consider yourself lucky! You’ve already mastered English’s notorious ‘l’ and ‘r’ distinctions, for example, and will never have to endure the embarrassment of saying “erection” when you meant “election”!

There are only two Japanese sounds you will likely struggle with in the beginning:

The Japanese ‘r’ sounds: ra (ら), ri (り), ru (る), re (れ), and ro (ろ). It sounds somewhere between an ‘r’ and ‘d’, pronounced with a quick flip of the tongue somewhat like the rolled ‘r’ in Spanish. You can find a similar sound in American English buried in the middle of the word “water”. When sandwiched between vowels, we Yanks turn the poor little ‘t’ into what’s called a “flap”, which is precisely what the Japanese ‘r’ sound is, too.
The Japanese ‘tsu’ sound (つ). We actually have a similar sound in English (the ‘ts’ in words like “rats”), but the difference is that we never pronounce such a sound at the beginning of syllables in English as they do in Japanese.

But worry not! Your ears and mouth will eventually get the hang of these sounds with enough listening and speaking practice. Just do your best to imitate native speakers, and make sure to record yourself to better gauge your pronunciation and monitor your progress over time. You may even want to use software like Audacity to see how the waveform of your speech compares to that of native speakers. As Peter Drucker said, “What get’s measured gets managed.”

Japanese “recycles” lots of Kana.

As any good citizen knows, we should do our best to reduce, reuse, and recycle. To fulfill its civic duty, Japanese greatly reduces the number of potential Kana you need to learn by recycling a small set of basic symbols to represent a much larger number of sounds. The key to this linguistic efficiency is the use of little double slash marks called dakuten (濁点, “voiced marks”). As the name implies, these diacritic marks transform each of the “voiceless” sounds in Japanese into their “voiced” counterparts. Here are a few examples (note that the only difference between the Kana on the left and right is the dakuten in the upper-right corner):

ka = か → ga = が
sa = さ → za = ざ
ta = た → da = だ

Just think: without these little marks, you would have to learn dozens of additional Kana symbols. Thank you dakuten!

Japanese is not a “tonal” language.

Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, etc., Japanese is not a tonal language. Hooray! The Japanese language does sometimes differentiate meaning using a high-low distinction (what linguists call “pitch accent”), but the good news is that you do not need to learn a specific tone for each and every syllable like you do in languages like Chinese.

And in the fairly infrequent cases when pitch is used to distinguish meaning, the context will almost always do the heavy lifting for you. For example: Even though the word hashi can mean “chopsticks” (箸), “bridge” (橋), or “edge” (端) depending on the pitch accent (high-low, low-high, and flat in this case), you will know that somebody wants you to pass the “chopsticks” when at a restaurant, not a “bridge” or the “edge” of the table.

Kanji can be learned extremely quickly if you use an adult-friendly method.

A lot of digital ink has spilled in the blogosphere bemoaning how difficult it is to learn Kanji. Yes, the task will certainly take you time and effort, but the journey will be far shorter if you use smart, adult-friendly “imaginative memory” techniques laid out in books like James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji (RTK). Armed with the right attitude, methods, and materials, a motivated adult learner can master the meaning and writing of all standard use Kanji in a matter of months, not years or even decades as is usually the case with traditional rote approaches. Learning all the Kanji readings will take longer, but knowing just the basic meaning of all standard use Kanji (常用漢字) is a huge head start as Heisig argues in the introduction to RTK:

“When Chinese adult students come to the study of Japanese, they already know what the kanji mean and how to write them. They have only to learn how to read them. In fact, Chinese grammar and pronunciation have about as much to do with Japanese as English does. It is their knowledge of the meaning and writing of the kanji that gives the Chinese the decisive edge.”

For more about how to learn Kanji effectively, see my post: How to Learn 2,000 Kanji in 3 Months: Mission Possible.

Phonetic & semantic patterns allow you to guess the pronunciation and meaning of new Kanji.

Contrary to popular belief, most Kanji are not pictographs. The vast majority are in fact “pictophonetic” compounds comprised of two chunks: a “phonetic indicator” that points to the character’s pronunciation, and a “semantic indicator” relating to its meaning. This may sound complex, but is actually very good news for language learners!

Learning the most common phonetic and semantic chunks (or “radicals”) enables you to make educated guesses about the pronunciation and meaning of new characters. For example, all of the following Kanji share the same phonetic chunk, 工 (“craft”). It is pronounced kou (こう), and low and behold, each of the following Kanji it contains are all pronounced kou:

紅 (“crimson”)
空 (“empty”)
虹 (“rainbow”)
江 (“creek”)
攻 (“aggression”)
功 (“achievement”)

Chances are good that if you come across a new Kanji that includes the 工 phonetic chunk, it too will be pronounced kou.

These chunks also give you valuable story points that can be used to craft super sticky mnemonics. This is the foundation of the “imaginative memory” approach used in RTK. Let’s look at the Kanji 虹 (“rainbow”) as an example. On the left side, we have the semantic chunk 虫 (“insect”). On the right, we see 工, which we saw above means “craft”. So now all we have to do is create a mental story that combines “insect”, “craft”, and “rainbow”:

A massive cloud of multicolored insects (butterflies to be exact) are crafting a magnificent double rainbow across the entire sky.

Eat your heart out Double Rainbow YouTube Guy! [Benny's edit: I met him! ]

Knowing Kanji allows you to guess the meaning of new words.

Once you know the meaning of all the standard use Kanji, you can usually guess the meaning of compound words they combine to create. Know the character, guess the word. An equivalent power in English would require extensive knowledge of Latin, Greek, and a host of ancient Germanic dialects. I don’t know about you, but my West Saxon is a little rusty…

Here’s an example to show you how easy things can be:

Suppose you encounter the word 外国人 (gaikokujin) for the first time but don’t have a dictionary handy. Even the most basic knowledge of characters enables you to figure out its meaning: 外 = outside; 国 = country; 人 = person. Aha! It must mean foreigner!

The Japanese Language is Not Vague, But Japanese Etiquette Often Requires Vagueness

We can thank the Japanese themselves for helping to perpetuate the myth that Japanese is a vague language. As Dr. Jay Rubin recounts in his excellent book Making Sense of Japanese, a member the Tokyo String Quartet once shared in an NPR interview that English allowed him and other Japanese members of the ensemble to communicate more effectively than in Japanese. They had begun speaking in English once a non-Japanese member joined the group and were amazed how much easier it seemed to communicate in English despite not being native speakers. Dr. Rubin points out that the problem is a matter of culture, not linguistics:

“While he [the quartet member] no doubt believes this, he is wrong. The Japanese language can express anything it needs to, but Japanese social norms often require people to express themselves indirectly or incompletely.”

Directness in communication is usually frowned upon in Japanese culture, while it is often the primary goal in most English speaking countries (except among politicians and lawyers of course, but they’re just meat popsicles in suits). Anyone who has lived in Japan or done business with a Japanese company knows that this difference in communication style can be a major source of frustration and cross-cultural miscommunication. As things go, it’s usually the cultural—not language—barrier that causes tempers to flair, negotiations to break down, and relationships to fail…

So as you learn to speak, read, and write Japanese, make sure to give just as much attention to the “language” left out of the conversation and off the page. Realize that few Japanese people will ever say “No” outright, opting instead for statements like “It’s under consideration”, “I’ll give it some thought”, or “It’s difficult at this time”. Know that when someone says “Chotto…” (ちょっと, “a little”) and then breathes in through their teeth as they as they rub the back of their head, that they are expressing apprehension or disapproval but are culturally forbidden to say what exactly they are “a little” (or likely, “very”) unsure about.

Japanese is as Logical as Any Human Language

I have little patience for the ethnocentric belief that “Japanese is illogical”. It makes the false assumption that English is somehow more intuitive or well-structured by comparison, when in fact, no natural languages are “logical” per se. With the exception of purposefully designed languages like Esperanto, languages evolve organically over great expanses of time, inevitably leading to some strange exceptions and goofy contradictions. Look no further than English’s many fun peculiarities:

“There is no egg in eggplant, and you will find neither pine nor apple in a pineapple. Hamburgers are not made from ham, English muffins were not invented in England, and French Fries were not invented in France. Sweetmeats are confectionery, while sweetbreads, which are not sweet, are meat. And why is it that a writer writes, but fingers do not fing, humdingers do not hum, and hammers don’t ham. If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn’t the plural of booth be beeth?” ~Richard Lederer, Crazy English: The Ultimate Joy Ride through Our Language

And then there are incredibly weird English pronunciations, as Benny has read a poem about!

One could of course compile such a list for any language, including Japanese. My point is simply that Japanese is no less logical than English. Both have their quirks, but both also have a finite set of rules and exceptions easy enough for even a child to master.

Bottom line: it is perfectly natural to compare and contrast Japanese with English, but avoid making value judgements. Languages are the way they are; why they are that way is an interesting question for historical and comparative linguists, but has little to do with acquiring a language.

Conclusion: Don’t Create a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy!

If you believe Japanese is difficult, vague, and illogical, it will be for you. But if you focus on the easy, concrete, logical bits first, you will learn much faster, and have a hell of lot more fun along the way.

To be clear, I’m not saying the language won’t pose some unique challenges to the native speaker of English. It certainly will. But so does Spanish. And Pig Latin. And Klingon. All languages have their particular pros and cons, and in the early stages of a language, it’s far better to focus on silver linings than dark clouds.

This isn’t blind optimism or sugar coating; it’s an intelligent way to work with—not against—human psychology. Small wins early on help build the confidence, motivation, and fortitude you will need to carry on when the path up Japanese Mountain grows steep.

Happy hiking!

- Thanks John! Let us know your comments below, and keep in mind that this post isn’t a request to “prove” Japanese’s difficulty. As John points out, you can argue that any language is the hardest if you talk/write long enough. In my own experience, Japanese has been a very logical language and I would say it’s as much/little work as any European language, and I didn’t run into a single aspect of the language worth crying over in my intensive two months.

More on my experience in Japan and using Japanese coming next week. For now, make sure to check out John’s blog Language Mastery, thanks!

----------------------------
Is Japanese Hard? Why Japanese is easier than you think! is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

Why Japanese is easier than you think

Of all the resources that I came across in Japanese, my favourite by far was John Fotheringham’s Master Japanese: The Beginner’s Step-by-Step Guide to Learning Nihongo the Fun Way. He takes the kind of approach that I like and is incredibly encouraging to beginner Japanese learners.

This is a breath of fresh air when most experienced learners were more interested in “putting me in my place” by “warning” me about the mountain of work ahead, and making sure I was aware that Japanese was the one true hardest language in the world.

Usually I like to write these posts myself, as I did for Chinese and Hungarian, but I’ve been so busy with my Fluent in 3 months book launch that I only had the time for two intensive months in my own Japanese project, so I made sure John came back to the blog a second time (he previously wrote How to Learn 2,000 Kanji in 3 Months: Mission Possible) to share these incredibly helpful words to those of you who are hesitant to take on Japanese. Check it out!

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“Japanese is really freaking difficult.”

“Japanese is really freaking vague.”

“Japanese is really freaking illogical.”

These statements have three things in common:

They are widely believed by many would-be Japanese learners.
They get in the way of learning the language.
They are completely bogus.

To succeed in your Japanese mission, you must ignore the cynics, defeatists, killjoys, naysayers, party poopers, pessimists, sourpusses, and wet blankets. Japanese is not nearly as challenging as the Debby Downers would have you believe, and is in fact easier in many key ways than supposedly “easy” Romance languages like Spanish.

Why Japanese is Easier than You Think

Here are but a few of the many ways Japanese is comparatively easy, especially for native speakers of English:

There are heaps of English loan words in Japanese.

If you grew up speaking English, congratulations! You won the Linguistic Lottery! From day one in Japanese, you will have a massive pre-existing vocabulary to draw on thanks to the thousands and thousands of English words borrowed into the Japanese language to date. These “foreign loan words”, or gairaigo (外来語), offer native speakers of English a massive head start, allowing you to understand and communicate a great deal of information even with shaky Japanese grammar and zero Kanji knowledge. Here is a small taste of the Japanese arsenal English speakers already have at their disposal:

“mic” → maiku (マイク)
“table” → teeburu (テーブル)
“Internet” → intaanetto (インターネット)
“romantic” → romanchikku (ロマンチック)
“driveshaft” → doraibushafuto (ドライブシャフト)

Or for even more, check out the video Benny and some other learners made themselves, singing entirely in gairaigo (外来語):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5c06I8rHO8

You will of course need to learn the “Japanified” pronunciation of English loan words, but the phonetic patterns are highly predictable and consistent. All you need to do is learn Katakana (something you can do over the weekend), and then familiarize yourself with how English sounds are transferred into English. A few key patterns to help you get started:

English loan words adopt the consonant-vowel, consonant-vowel pattern found in Japanese. So you can be sure that any English consonant clusters, such as the ‘dr’ in “drive” will get extra vowels added in the middle. In this case, ‘d’ becomes do.

In Japanese, no words end in a consonant (with the exceptions of n), so if an English loan word has a consonant sound at the end (e.g. “mic”), you can be sure that the Japanese equivalent will have a vowel tacked on: maiku.

Once you have the phonetic patterns down, a powerful language hack is at your disposal: When in doubt about how to say a given word in Japanese, just say the English word you know using Japanese syllables. More times than not, you will be understood. Even if a given English loan word is not actually used in Japanese, chances are good that people will have “learned” (i.e. memorized but not really acquired) the English word in high school or university. Since most Japanese learners of English add little Katakana reading guides above English words to approximate their pronunciation, they will better recognize English words when wrapped in Japanese pronunciation. Or even more so when written out on paper. This habit may be bad for their English, but is at least good for your ability to communicate.

Lastly, I should point out that there are occasional differences in meaning between English loan words and their Japanese derivations. But radical semantic changes are few, and even when there are significant gaps, the comedic effect is usually enough to make the words stick on their own. Perfect example: I loved telling all my friends back home that I lived in a “mansion” while in Japan. It was the truth! What they didn’t know is that the loan word manshon (マンション, “mansion”) actually refers to an apartment, not a palatial residence.

There are no pesky noun genders in Japanese.

Unlike most Romance languages, Japanese does not have “masculine”, “feminine” or “neuter” nouns. Buddha be praised! In Japan, you can just order your dark beer instead of trying to remember whether the noun “beer” is feminine or masculine as you would have to in Spanish:

“Let’s see… I really want a dark beer. Cerveza is feminine I think… Or is it masculine? It seems masculine. Just think of all the dudes with beer bellies. But it ends with an ‘a’ so I think it should be a feminine noun. Okay, assuming it is indeed feminine, I need to use the feminine form of the adjective for “dark”… Hmm… I think it’s oscura…”

Meanwhile, the waiter has come and gone and you are left to wait in thirsty frustration. Halfway around the world, the Japanese learner is already on his second round of gender-free kuro biiru (黒ビール).

Japanese verbs don’t have to “agree” with the subject.

In Japanese, there is no need to conjugate verbs to match their respective subjects. Anyone who’s learned Spanish or French should really appreciate this advantage. Take the verb “to eat” for example. En español, you have to learn 6 different verb forms for just the present tense (one for each pronoun group), plus all the myriad tense variations. In Japanese, you only need to learn one single verb form for each tense. No matter who does the eating, the verb taberu (食べる, “eat”) stays exactly the same!

“I eat.” → Yo como. → Taberu.
“You eat.” → Tú comes. → Taberu.
“He / She eats.” → Él/Ella come. → Taberu.
“We eat” → Nosotros comemos. → Taberu.
“You (pl., fam.) eat” → Vosotros coméis. → Taberu.
“You (pl.) / They eat.” → Uds./Ellos comen. → Taberu.

You do have to learn different verb tenses in Japanese, and there are different levels of formality to consider, but hey, at least matching pronouns and verbs is one less thing to worry about when you’re starting out. Don’t look a gift linguistic horse in the mouth!

You can leave out subjects & objects if they are clear from the context.

Japanese is what linguists call a “pro-drop” language, meaning that pronouns and objects are often left unsaid if the “who” and “what” are obvious to the listener and speaker. For example, if someone asks you if you already ate dinner, you can simply say tabeta (食べた, “ate”), the past-tense of taberu (食べる). Both parties already know the subject (“I”) and the object (“dinner”), so all you need is the verb. Less really is more!

Each Japanese syllable can be pronounced only one way.

Japanese is a syllabic language, made up of 45 basic syllables. While the number 45 may sound more intimidating than the 26 letters found in English, keep in mind that each Japanese syllable can be pronounced only one way. This is in stark contrast to English, which despite having fewer letters actually contains far more sounds. Depending on the word (and where in the word it lies), most English letters can be pronounced myriad different ways. Take the letter ‘e’ for example:

It can be pronounced as a “short e” (ĕ or /ɛ/) like in e mpty.
It can be pronounced as a “long e” (ē or /i/) like in k e y.
It can be pronounced as a “long a” (ā or /ei/) like in resum é .
It can be pronounced as a “schwa” (/ɘ/) like in tak e n.
It can be silent (especially at the end of words) like in ax e .

Complex stuff!

Pick any Japanese Kana on the other hand, and no matter where it’s used, it will be pronounced one—and only one—way. The Japanese ‘e’ sound for example (written え in Hiragana) is always pronounced as a “short e” (ĕ or /ɛ/). It doesn’t change if the syllable comes at the beginning, middle, or end of a word.

Japanese harbors few new sounds for English speakers.

The vast majority of Japanese sounds have direct (or at least very similar) equivalents in English. This is great news for the Japanese learner, but tough times for Japanese learners of English. Consider yourself lucky! You’ve already mastered English’s notorious ‘l’ and ‘r’ distinctions, for example, and will never have to endure the embarrassment of saying “erection” when you meant “election”!

There are only two Japanese sounds you will likely struggle with in the beginning:

The Japanese ‘r’ sounds: ra (ら), ri (り), ru (る), re (れ), and ro (ろ). It sounds somewhere between an ‘r’ and ‘d’, pronounced with a quick flip of the tongue somewhat like the rolled ‘r’ in Spanish. You can find a similar sound in American English buried in the middle of the word “water”. When sandwiched between vowels, we Yanks turn the poor little ‘t’ into what’s called a “flap”, which is precisely what the Japanese ‘r’ sound is, too.
The Japanese ‘tsu’ sound (つ). We actually have a similar sound in English (the ‘ts’ in words like “rats”), but the difference is that we never pronounce such a sound at the beginning of syllables in English as they do in Japanese.

But worry not! Your ears and mouth will eventually get the hang of these sounds with enough listening and speaking practice. Just do your best to imitate native speakers, and make sure to record yourself to better gauge your pronunciation and monitor your progress over time. You may even want to use software like Audacity to see how the waveform of your speech compares to that of native speakers. As Peter Drucker said, “What get’s measured gets managed.”

Japanese “recycles” lots of Kana.

As any good citizen knows, we should do our best to reduce, reuse, and recycle. To fulfill its civic duty, Japanese greatly reduces the number of potential Kana you need to learn by recycling a small set of basic symbols to represent a much larger number of sounds. The key to this linguistic efficiency is the use of little double slash marks called dakuten (濁点, “voiced marks”). As the name implies, these diacritic marks transform each of the “voiceless” sounds in Japanese into their “voiced” counterparts. Here are a few examples (note that the only difference between the Kana on the left and right is the dakuten in the upper-right corner):

ka = か → ga = が
sa = さ → za = ざ
ta = た → da = だ

Just think: without these little marks, you would have to learn dozens of additional Kana symbols. Thank you dakuten!

Japanese is not a “tonal” language.

Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, etc., Japanese is not a tonal language. Hooray! The Japanese language does sometimes differentiate meaning using a high-low distinction (what linguists call “pitch accent”), but the good news is that you do not need to learn a specific tone for each and every syllable like you do in languages like Chinese.

And in the fairly infrequent cases when pitch is used to distinguish meaning, the context will almost always do the heavy lifting for you. For example: Even though the word hashi can mean “chopsticks” (箸), “bridge” (橋), or “edge” (端) depending on the pitch accent (high-low, low-high, and flat in this case), you will know that somebody wants you to pass the “chopsticks” when at a restaurant, not a “bridge” or the “edge” of the table.

Kanji can be learned extremely quickly if you use an adult-friendly method.

A lot of digital ink has spilled in the blogosphere bemoaning how difficult it is to learn Kanji. Yes, the task will certainly take you time and effort, but the journey will be far shorter if you use smart, adult-friendly “imaginative memory” techniques laid out in books like James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji (RTK). Armed with the right attitude, methods, and materials, a motivated adult learner can master the meaning and writing of all standard use Kanji in a matter of months, not years or even decades as is usually the case with traditional rote approaches. Learning all the Kanji readings will take longer, but knowing just the basic meaning of all standard use Kanji (常用漢字) is a huge head start as Heisig argues in the introduction to RTK:

“When Chinese adult students come to the study of Japanese, they already know what the kanji mean and how to write them. They have only to learn how to read them. In fact, Chinese grammar and pronunciation have about as much to do with Japanese as English does. It is their knowledge of the meaning and writing of the kanji that gives the Chinese the decisive edge.”

For more about how to learn Kanji effectively, see my post: How to Learn 2,000 Kanji in 3 Months: Mission Possible.

Phonetic & semantic patterns allow you to guess the pronunciation and meaning of new Kanji.

Contrary to popular belief, most Kanji are not pictographs. The vast majority are in fact “pictophonetic” compounds comprised of two chunks: a “phonetic indicator” that points to the character’s pronunciation, and a “semantic indicator” relating to its meaning. This may sound complex, but is actually very good news for language learners!

Learning the most common phonetic and semantic chunks (or “radicals”) enables you to make educated guesses about the pronunciation and meaning of new characters. For example, all of the following Kanji share the same phonetic chunk, 工 (“craft”). It is pronounced kou (こう), and low and behold, each of the following Kanji it contains are all pronounced kou:

紅 (“crimson”)
空 (“empty”)
虹 (“rainbow”)
江 (“creek”)
攻 (“aggression”)
功 (“achievement”)

Chances are good that if you come across a new Kanji that includes the 工 phonetic chunk, it too will be pronounced kou.

These chunks also give you valuable story points that can be used to craft super sticky mnemonics. This is the foundation of the “imaginative memory” approach used in RTK. Let’s look at the Kanji 虹 (“rainbow”) as an example. On the left side, we have the semantic chunk 虫 (“insect”). On the right, we see 工, which we saw above means “craft”. So now all we have to do is create a mental story that combines “insect”, “craft”, and “rainbow”:

A massive cloud of multicolored insects (butterflies to be exact) are crafting a magnificent double rainbow across the entire sky.

Eat your heart out Double Rainbow YouTube Guy! [Benny's edit: I met him! ]

Knowing Kanji allows you to guess the meaning of new words.

Once you know the meaning of all the standard use Kanji, you can usually guess the meaning of compound words they combine to create. Know the character, guess the word. An equivalent power in English would require extensive knowledge of Latin, Greek, and a host of ancient Germanic dialects. I don’t know about you, but my West Saxon is a little rusty…

Here’s an example to show you how easy things can be:

Suppose you encounter the word 外国人 (gaikokujin) for the first time but don’t have a dictionary handy. Even the most basic knowledge of characters enables you to figure out its meaning: 外 = outside; 国 = country; 人 = person. Aha! It must mean foreigner!

The Japanese Language is Not Vague, But Japanese Etiquette Often Requires Vagueness

We can thank the Japanese themselves for helping to perpetuate the myth that Japanese is a vague language. As Dr. Jay Rubin recounts in his excellent book Making Sense of Japanese, a member the Tokyo String Quartet once shared in an NPR interview that English allowed him and other Japanese members of the ensemble to communicate more effectively than in Japanese. They had begun speaking in English once a non-Japanese member joined the group and were amazed how much easier it seemed to communicate in English despite not being native speakers. Dr. Rubin points out that the problem is a matter of culture, not linguistics:

“While he [the quartet member] no doubt believes this, he is wrong. The Japanese language can express anything it needs to, but Japanese social norms often require people to express themselves indirectly or incompletely.”

Directness in communication is usually frowned upon in Japanese culture, while it is often the primary goal in most English speaking countries (except among politicians and lawyers of course, but they’re just meat popsicles in suits). Anyone who has lived in Japan or done business with a Japanese company knows that this difference in communication style can be a major source of frustration and cross-cultural miscommunication. As things go, it’s usually the cultural—not language—barrier that causes tempers to flair, negotiations to break down, and relationships to fail…

So as you learn to speak, read, and write Japanese, make sure to give just as much attention to the “language” left out of the conversation and off the page. Realize that few Japanese people will ever say “No” outright, opting instead for statements like “It’s under consideration”, “I’ll give it some thought”, or “It’s difficult at this time”. Know that when someone says “Chotto…” (ちょっと, “a little”) and then breathes in through their teeth as they as they rub the back of their head, that they are expressing apprehension or disapproval but are culturally forbidden to say what exactly they are “a little” (or likely, “very”) unsure about.

Japanese is as Logical as Any Human Language

I have little patience for the ethnocentric belief that “Japanese is illogical”. It makes the false assumption that English is somehow more intuitive or well-structured by comparison, when in fact, no natural languages are “logical” per se. With the exception of purposefully designed languages like Esperanto, languages evolve organically over great expanses of time, inevitably leading to some strange exceptions and goofy contradictions. Look no further than English’s many fun peculiarities:

“There is no egg in eggplant, and you will find neither pine nor apple in a pineapple. Hamburgers are not made from ham, English muffins were not invented in England, and French Fries were not invented in France. Sweetmeats are confectionery, while sweetbreads, which are not sweet, are meat. And why is it that a writer writes, but fingers do not fing, humdingers do not hum, and hammers don’t ham. If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn’t the plural of booth be beeth?” ~Richard Lederer, Crazy English: The Ultimate Joy Ride through Our Language

And then there are incredibly weird English pronunciations, as Benny has read a poem about!

One could of course compile such a list for any language, including Japanese. My point is simply that Japanese is no less logical than English. Both have their quirks, but both also have a finite set of rules and exceptions easy enough for even a child to master.

Bottom line: it is perfectly natural to compare and contrast Japanese with English, but avoid making value judgements. Languages are the way they are; why they are that way is an interesting question for historical and comparative linguists, but has little to do with acquiring a language.

Conclusion: Don’t Create a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy!

If you believe Japanese is difficult, vague, and illogical, it will be for you. But if you focus on the easy, concrete, logical bits first, you will learn much faster, and have a hell of lot more fun along the way.

To be clear, I’m not saying the language won’t pose some unique challenges to the native speaker of English. It certainly will. But so does Spanish. And Pig Latin. And Klingon. All languages have their particular pros and cons, and in the early stages of a language, it’s far better to focus on silver linings than dark clouds.

This isn’t blind optimism or sugar coating; it’s an intelligent way to work with—not against—human psychology. Small wins early on help build the confidence, motivation, and fortitude you will need to carry on when the path up Japanese Mountain grows steep.

Happy hiking!

- Thanks John! Let us know your comments below, and keep in mind that this post isn’t a request to “prove” Japanese’s difficulty. As John points out, you can argue that any language is the hardest if you talk/write long enough. In my own experience, Japanese has been a very logical language and I would say it’s as much/little work as any European language, and I didn’t run into a single aspect of the language worth crying over in my intensive two months.

More on my experience in Japan and using Japanese coming next week. For now, make sure to check out John’s blog Language Mastery, thanks!

----------------------------
Why Japanese is easier than you think is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

When projects don’t go as planned (Biting off more than you can chew)

What a whirlwind few months!

Rough start, but a good first two months

Back in September after announcing my Japanese project, I jumped in and started speaking spontaneously my first weeks, and was able to share a prepared speech pretty confidently.

But I quickly ran into a hitch of being desperately sick, just when I was starting to build momentum. A week out of action, also meant a further week catching up on work so I couldn’t study full-time for almost two whole weeks!

That was a serious setback, but I brushed it off and was shortly after singing in Japanese, having more Skype conversations, and then at around the two month point, I was speaking at a basic conversational level. I was actually somehow managing to catch up on that lost time, and at a decent point to spring forward to my ultimate target.

Things don’t always go according to plan

But unfortunately, I have not reached my goal of fluency in Japanese.

Those early setbacks certainly didn’t help, but the main reason my mission remains incomplete (for now) is that I broke one of my own cardinal rules: Focus on one major project at a time.

My new book (UK/US), which I had managed to keep top secret for a year and a half, spent three months (in Berlin) writing without anyone realizing what I was up to, and naïvely thought my work on it was pretty much done, started to make serious demands on my time.

Launching a traditionally published book actually turns out to be an extremely complicated affair.

This is when I had to make a tough choice.

Ultimately, success in my Japanese project would have meant a better experience in Japan, but the book is much bigger than my single projects. It’s a chance to reach potentially millions of aspiring language learners, and I wanted to make sure people get the quality book they deserve, and that it is promoted in the best way possible to reach even more people out there who could be polyglots-in-waiting without even knowing it yet.

The book had to win.

I even thought that maybe I could get another 2 final intensive weeks of studying done while in Thailand for one final boost, but that is when I had yet another illness, as well as my computer completely dying on me!

Good grief!

If I wasn’t a man of reason, I’d say that evil fairies had sprinkled bad astrology curses all over my lucky tarot cards. It wasn’t the universe working against me, but it was a series of unfortunate setbacks, all while amazing opportunities for my book were cropping up, so I’m in no place to complain.

Lesson learned: Don’t bite off more than you can chew

I like to take the positive out of whatever I can. This project didn’t go according to plan, and I didn’t get to invest three months into it, but I did get to reach a pretty good level after 2 months, and use that to enhance my experience to travel through Japan.

The irony here, is that I have a section in the book specifically about how success in a language project requires your absolute unfiltered focus.

But I bit off more than I could chew, and didn’t put the full three months I had initially planned into it. It was a mistake to think I could handle something as demanding as intensively learning a language over three months to a high level, while also launching a book across two continents, and putting finishing touches on that book.

Fail fast, and fail often

I have to say that I’m very sorry to those of you who were expecting more videos, and the cultural updates from reaching a high level in Japanese that I like to do in these projects. I’ve had such a mountain of work (and still do, especially after taking the time to truly explore Japan – for instance, my pending emails/comments is now into 5 digits…) that I haven’t been able to even update the blog consistently.

I never promised that I’d reach that fluency goal, (I said from the start that this was an aim), but I did promise that I would try my best, and spreading myself thin over two big projects was not quite doing that, so in that regard, I messed up.

But despite this – I don’t have any regrets. I’ve always said that people need to fail fast and fail often, and I’ve had plenty of hiccups in the past. It’s the best way to learn. As well as this, there are no true “failures” when you are actually using a language and making real progress;

Aim for the moon, because even if you miss, you may land among the stars. 

So I didn’t reach my target, but this project was still another learning experience that left me with a hell of a lot of Japanese learned! I am proud of what I accomplished during my first two and after seeing how I could speak in this video, I hope you all can be inspired by what you can achieve in a really short period of intensive study!

And it turns out that Japanese is not that one true elusive hardest language in the world, and the very next post will be a blast of encouragement for would-be Japanese learners. And next week, I can share some cultural observations after this fascinating and wonderful visit to Japan!

We all have permission to mess up once in a while!

As with all setbacks, it’s just a chance to dust yourself off, re-evaluate things, and pick yourself up from where you left off.

I’m of course focusing much more on the book now, so that it launches in the best way that it can in just a couple of weeks (the UK giveaway and US giveaway are still going strong, so grab them while you can!), since I’m very passionate that this can make a huge difference to so many aspiring language learners’ lives.

After focusing on that, I’m getting right back on the language learning horse and focusing on maintaining and improving each of my long-term languages, and looking at future intensive language learning options after this year.

One thing that is certain; this is not the end of the world

And most importantly, if you’ve had a language learning project that didn’t go according to plan, keep in mind that even experienced polyglots like myself mess up and don’t reach our targets. It’s not about how hard you fall, but about how high you bounce back up, and I have a lot of bounce in me ready to take on the rest of this year’s projects doing the absolute best that I can.

Who’s with me?

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When projects don’t go as planned (Biting off more than you can chew) is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

How Diplomats Learn Foreign Languages

Since many of you may be curious to find out the process behind how diplomats learn languages, I invited Shawn to share how that works on the blog today!

Shawn Kobb has been with the U.S. Foreign Service for nearly 8 years and has served in Ukraine, The Bahamas, Washington DC, Afghanistan, and soon Austria. He maintains the blog www.ForeignServiceTest.com which aims to help people pass the notoriously difficult entrance test to the Foreign Service. Over to you Shawn!

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Let’s be honest. I can take it. Americans aren’t exactly known for our foreign language ability. Often, we speak English and we simply expect the rest of the world to do so as well. There are many reasons why this problem has developed, but that’s not the purpose of this article.

As with all stereotypes there is both a bit of truth here as well as many exceptions. I’m an American diplomat (or Foreign Service Officer as we’re officially known) and it is not only helpful in my job to learn foreign languages, it is required.

Although American diplomats are not required to speak any languages other than English upon joining the service, we are required to become fluent in at least one foreign language within the first five years. Fluency in at least two foreign languages is required in order to reach the highest ranks and, in reality, most American diplomats speak three or more foreign languages with at least some proficiency.

In fact, for lovers of language learning, one of the greatest benefits of a job in the U.S. Foreign Service is not only that we have the opportunity to be trained in foreign languages, but that we’re paid to do so. I’m currently in training for my fourth overseas deployment. I’ll be headed to Vienna in the summer of 2014 and right now 100% of my time is spent learning German — and being paid to do so.

The U.S. Department of State runs its own mini-university for diplomats known as the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). Although subjects as wide ranging as management, public speaking, and consular services are trained there, the largest section is reserved for foreign language instruction.

The Foreign Service Institute trains diplomats in more than 80 different language and walking through the halls can feel like a whirlwind global tour. Classroom after classroom of students speaking French, German, Mandarin, Norwegian, Georgian, Portuguese, Korean, and countless other languages fill the air with a veritable United Nations of speech.

The vast majority of the teachers are native speakers of their language of instruction and are able to teach the culture of their homeland at the same time as we learn their language. It is common to see various parties in the halls of FSI celebrating Chinese New Year or Ramidan or Ukrainian independence.

Routine at the FSI

All of the language departments run their sections slightly different, but here is a general overview of what American diplomats do on a daily basis in language training.

We spend a minimum of five hours of classroom time working on conversation, interview techniques, reading, and making presentations. Almost all classroom time is done in the foreign language, particularly after the first few weeks of initial instruction. Classes rarely have more than four students per teacher.

In addition to classroom time, students have access to many language laboratories to take advantage of multi-media tools including vocabulary programs, videos (I’m a fan of Deutsche Welle’s various web series), the ability to record yourself and… *shudder*… listen to yourself later, and many other advantages of technology. The labs are always staffed by teachers as well so getting questions answered is never difficult.

In addition to class time, we generally receive homework every day. This gives students a chance to refine some grammar points and drill certain structures outside of the classroom. I have to admit, this is generally less useful than conversation, but it does help to improve our skills and gives you a chance to review anything you with which you are having difficulty.

Specific goals through examinations

Unlike many studying a foreign language, diplomats have a very specific goal at the end of training; we must pass an exam before we can head on to our overseas assignment.

While daily conversation skills will be important to our lives, the test requires a specific high level of ability in some very challenging subjects. Typically in our final exam, we will be expected to converse at length in topics such as the environment, the political system of the United States, education, military, and countless other topics that the more casual language student may not be interested in.

In addition to speaking on these complicated topics, we must also interview a native speaker in the foreign language and then translate it to English. This portion in particular can be challenging because one must control the conversation carefully or else the interviewee can quickly take charge and overwhelm you in a flood of words. There is also a reading portion to the exam that is weighted equally with the speaking portions. This means simpler programs such as Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone just won’t cut it.

The U.S. Foreign Service uses a scale known as the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR). The score diplomats are required to reach often depends on the language studied as well as the job you’ll be fulfilling. However, most of the time we must score a 3 in speaking and a 3 in reading. For those of you familiar with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, this equates to approximately a C1.

How long do we have to reach this score? That depends on the language. If you’re studying Spanish, French, or other Romance languages you are typically given around four months. For German it is a bit longer. For Russian longer still, and for languages that have significantly different grammar structures or writing systems than English, such as Chinese, Korean, and Arabic, it can be a year or more.

Can it be done? Of course it can. I don’t know the exact pass rate, but I’d say it is quite high.

FSI really does everything it can to not only prepare diplomats for the test, but also for daily life. Often students are given the chance to do an immersion trip to further boost their training. I’m hoping to head to Germany in the near future for a 24/7 week-long plunge into the language to fine tune my skills.

Independent learning a must

Is all of this enough? Yes, but…

If you actively participate in class, if you do the work, if you engage and take it seriously, you will do fine on the test. Will you be mistaken for a native when you get to post? Of course not, but you’ll be able to navigate daily life. However, I’m also a big believer of taking training into your own hands.

I figure out what works for me in class and work hard on that, but I also supplement with my own techniques. I identify verbs that I really want to master and make cards with their use and make certain I use them multiple times that day in class. I find articles in German online that are interesting to me and practice my reading, at the same time learning key new vocabulary. I go to websites like FluentIn3Months.com and see what tips I can learn from other language students.

It is my career and my education. I don’t want to simply sit passively and let the language wash over me. I need to take action and make the program work for me. Oh yeah, and did I mention I’m getting paid while I do this?

If you have any questions about how we learn languages differently to traditional or independent learners, feel free to ask in the comments!

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How Diplomats Learn Foreign Languages is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

Is the “Pillow” Really the Best Place to Learn a Language?

Happy Valentine’s Day! Well, at least it is for me, because I finally have someone to celebrate it with. To jump on the theme of love and relationships, let’s tackle the question; Does having a significant other who speaks your target language, help your language learning skills?

The answer isn’t as simple as you might think! Emily Liedel who writes at The Babel Times is going to take on that question for us! Over to you Emily!

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If you’ve been learning a foreign language for very long, you’ve probably heard the “conventional wisdom” that having native-speaker lover is the best way to advance. You might even have had the thought yourself. Believe me, when I was living in Russia and feeling cold and lonely, there were moments when I thought that if only I had a Russian boyfriend, I would not only be less lonely but I would also learn so much more.

That was 10 years and several languages ago. Now I know that shacking up with a native speaker is by no means a foolproof way to advance your language learning, although it may help with the cold and the loneliness. In my own experience (and based on years of observations of other couples), sometimes having a native-speaker partner can actually hurt.

I’ve met some people who were astoundingly fluent in their partner’s language. I’ve also met people who can’t speak a word of their partner’s language. I even know a few couples who seem to be able to communicate with each other even though neither one has a very strong command of the other’s language. Here are some thoughts about what factors in a romantic relationship can help or hinder your language goals.

How A Native Speaker Spouse (or boyfriend/girlfriend) Can Hold You Back

He/She Will Take Over

My husband is from Nicaragua and his native language is Spanish. The first time we visited Spain, I spoke a little (very, very little) Spanish, most of which I had learned from listening to audio tapes. Unsurprisingly, my husband did everything language-related in Spain. He ordered in restaurants, asked for directions and bought train tickets. This was very convenient for me. It also meant that I got zero practice speaking Spanish.

The Correction Factor

It is very, very rare for a regular person to get frustrated with you for making a mistake while speaking their language. It’s also quite unlikely that you will take it personally if they correct you. But if it’s your significant other, things are different.

I think my husband corrects my Spanish a lot – even excessively, and it makes me not want to speak Spanish with him. I’m not usually that shy about speaking Spanish – I have done quite a bit of public speaking in Spanish – but talking to my husband is different and more stressful. I also feel like he gets frustrated with my mistakes. Maybe I’m particularly sensitive, but I don’t think so, because I’ve seen this same dynamic play out in a lot of couples.

People act differently with their romantic partners than with friends, other family or strangers. Of course, a lot depends on both partners’ personalities, but I am certain that I am not the only person who feels more sensitive about corrections from my husband than from other people.

What if He or She Wants to Learn Your Language?

If you want to practice your Russian/Spanish/Whatever Language, then shouldn’t your partner be able to speak your native language with you? Does that mean your whole relationship is going to a never-ending language exchange tug-of-war?

For both the benefit of your relationship and both partners’ language goals, you have to figure this question out. Maybe your partner already speaks awesome English or whatever your native language is. Maybe he or she is totally uninterested in learning your language (which is good for your language learning but probably does not bode well for your relationship). Either way, this is an issue that you need to consider. It is especially difficult if there is an imbalance in language abilities, because you will tend to use whatever language is easiest for both of you to communicate in.

Yes, A Native-Speaker Lover Can Help. Here’s How:

You Talk to Him/Her All the Time

If you are speaking with your partner in the target language, you are getting a lot of practice, because you are probably spending a lot of time with him or her. More speaking = more improvement.

Family Time

In my opinion, you actually will get more language-learning benefit from your partner’s friends and family than from him or her directly.

First of all, your in-laws are less likely to be interested in learning your language. While that might be quite vexing in a spouse, I don’t think you’ll mind if your mother-in-law has no interest in learning English (or whatever language) for your benefit.

Speaking with someone one-on-one is of course good for learning a language, but participating in group discussions – the kind that happen over holiday meals or drinks with your partner’s old school pals – will help you take your language skills to the next level.

If your partner is dating (or married to) you a foreigner, he or she is probably not 100 percent typical, no matter where he or she is from. But his or her family and friends probably are. Spending time with them will give you both linguistic and cultural insights into your partner’s language and culture that might not be accessible otherwise.

My husband and I rarely speak Spanish together, but we both speak Spanish with his parents and extended family. I don’t think my relationship with my husband has improved my Spanish dramatically – but my relationship with his mother has.

Motivation

A desire to understand your spouse’s culture and family is a powerful and very concrete reason to learn a language. Learning your spouse’s language will allow you to fully participate at family events and communicate with your in-laws. I think that a lot of people struggle with language learning because they don’t really think the language will be relevant to their life. In most cases, the ability to speak your spouse’s language will have a clear positive impact on your life that is absolutely obvious to you.

Other Considerations:

Dominant vs. Native Language

My husband’s native language is Spanish. But he moved to the US when he was eight years old and he is more comfortable speaking English than Spanish. Ultimately, that is the reason we don’t speak Spanish together very often. Just keep in mind that if your partner is hesitant to speak his or her native language with you, it might be because he or she is actually more comfortable in another language. This can be the case even for people who moved countries as an adult.

What Language Did You Meet In?

There’s a lot of inertia in relationships. Unless you try very hard to change, you’ll likely keep speaking whatever language you and your partner started speaking to each other in at the very beginning of your relationship.

Last Thoughts on Romance and Language

When I was living in Russia, I had a Canadian friend who was married to a Russian man. When the two met (at a bar in Quebec), my friend didn’t speak any Russian. She decided to learn Russian after meeting her husband, but she didn’t learn from him. She went to live with her in-laws in Russia for three months and spent every day talking to her mother-in-law in the kitchen, aided only by a dictionary. She insisted on going alone, so that her husband could not translate for her. When I met her, she was studying in a Russian university for a semester – while her husband stayed in Canada. She spoke excellent Russian – but most of it she had learned while in Russia without her husband.

The people I have met who speak their spouse’s language well have always made an effort – outside of their time with their spouse – to learn the language. Having a spouse who spoke their target language might have helped, but it has never replaced studying.

So if you happen to be dating or married to someone who speaks the language you are learning, great. Try to speak to him or her in your target language as often as possible. Hang out with his or her family and friends. But study away as usual, and make sure not to let your partner translate for you, finish your sentences or order for you in restaurants too often. Also, grow a thick skin.

But fantasies of fast-tracked language learning are no reason to fret if you’re single (or to dump a partner with the same native language as you)! If someone suggests that you should be doing more learning “in bed,” remember that hooking up with a native speaker is by no means a foolproof road to fluency. It isn’t even a shortcut.

Emily is from Portland, Oregon and has lived in Switzerland, Russia, Spain and France. She speaks German, Russian, Spanish and French, and is learning Mandarin and Arabic. She writes about language learning and living abroad at The Babel Times (www.thebabeltimes.com). Emily lives in Portland with her husband and two chickens. She is currently preparing for a long trip to China and is trying to reconcile her love for long-term trips abroad with her interest in gardening.

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Is the “Pillow” Really the Best Place to Learn a Language? is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

5 Reasons to Learn an Endangered Language

While I continue my train travels through Japan with updates coming next week, today’s guest post is from long-time Fluent-in-3-months reader and travel enthusiast Myles.

When he was 20 years old, he could only speak English, but after three years of living abroad, and immersing himself as much as possible, he now speaks fluent Dutch and Mandarin Chinese. He is currently learning Spanish, French and Iñupiaq Eskimo, the language of his hometown in northern Alaska. He is also an advocate for endangered languages, especially for those in the United States and Canada.

I can appreciate his words, because I myself tried to learn a language native to the Americas, Quechua, and speak my own country’s language, Irish. I really feel there are many reasons more people should consider giving less popular languages a try!

Read more of Myles’ stuff over on his blog From Alaska to China! Over to you Myles…

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When I tell people that I am trying to learn Iñupiaq, the native language of my hometown in Northern Alaska, invariably I hear a long, drawn-out, “Whyyyy?” “Not many people speak the language, so what’s the use of learning it?” “Almost all the people who can speak English anyways, right?” “I thought you were a white guy?”

All these questions are of course ridiculous and to prove all the naysayers wrong, here are 5 reasons why learning an endangered language is not only a supremely gratifying endeavor, but it’s one that can be done more easily than you think! I have experienced this by attempting to learn Iñupiaq, but these reasons can apply to any endangered language!

1. Learning an Endangered Language Helps Preserve Our World’s Heritage

You may be thinking, endangered languages aren’t spoken by many people, right? So what’s the use? In fact, about half the world’s approximate 6,000 languages are endangered and are spoken in communities, both rural and urban, in every corner of the world. Some of these languages, such as Mayan and Coptic, were once spoken by great empires.

When a language dies out, often a lot of aspects of culture are lost with it. Poetry, songs and myths don’t transfer easily to another language, and a lot of scientific knowledge can’t be accessed by the larger languages. Most estimates predict that at the current rate of language loss, 50% of the world’s languages will be extinct by 2100, and with it, a lot of the world’s culture and heritage will be lost too.

Although this may sound like a lot of bad news, lots of promising news for endangered languages is coming in fast. Communities all around the world are stemming the tide and creating new generations of speakers. Success stories include Maori, Cornish, Hawaiian and Massachusett, the latter of which went extinct 200 years ago, and now has hundreds of first and second-language speakers, accumulated in just the last few years. Even in my home of Alaska, the Alutiiq language has recently reported a rise in the number of speakers of the language.

By investing in an endangered language, you can help to preserve the world’s diversity, which is a pretty exciting concept to think about when you start learning!

2. Learning an Endangered Language is Just Like Learning Any Other Language

Many language learners complain that many endangered languages have unfamiliar grammar and vocabulary. Iñupiaq, for example, is a highly agglutinative language, which is fancy linguist way of saying that it uses very long words that have sentence-like meanings. For instance, the word niġpalugniaŋitchuŋa means “I will not eat too much.” This, coupled with the fact that Iñupiaq vocabulary looks nothing like English vocabulary, makes learning the language seem like a daunting task.

However, this approach to the language will guarantee that you never learn it. Like Benny Lewis says with his “Speak From Day One” approach, no language is inherently harder to learn than any other. Indeed, he has shown that learning languages with notoriously “complex” grammar, like Turkish, German or Czech, or languages with completely unfamiliar vocabulary for English speakers, like Chinese or Hungarian, can be easy with the right attitude and a willingness to get out of your comfort zone.

Learning Iñupiaq is about finding people who speak the language or are learning the language and speaking from day one, just like with any other language. And like every language, Iñupiaq has aspects to it that would make European language learners jealous. (For example, it has no irregular verbs and just three vowels!) Like Benny says, learning grammar is for mañana, so just get out and talk to some new people!

3. Literally Anyone and Everyone Can Learn an Endangered Language

A lot of people who are not heritage language learners, might think that learning an endangered language is only for those whose ancestors spoke the language. This is patently untrue.

In 2008, when Mary Smith Jones, the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language passed away, many expected the language to be gone forever. However, a young French teenager, using materials he obtained from the Alaska Native Language Center, learned to speak fluent Eyak and is now working with linguists to revive the language in Southcentral Alaska. Despite the fact that he is a Frenchman and had no previous knowledge of the language or culture, he was able to learn this endangered language fluently. The great thing about our globalized world is that everyone can learn from anyone; it’s really just about reaching out.

Personally, I am learning the Iñupiaq language by just putting myself out there, and the fact that my parents are not from the community doesn’t deter me one bit.

4. Learning an Endangered Language Can Bring Back the Dead

Well, not literally, obviously. But learning an endangered language can teach you things about culture from the past and present that you might never have known. Let me give you an example from what I’ve learned from Iñupiaq.

I remember being told as a kid about the Iñupiaq origin story, which involves Raven as the creator of the earth and all the celestial bodies. Light only appeared when Raven stole it from an old man and his wife, but Raven dropped it as he was fleeing. Suddenly, it exploded and was dispersed in units of light throughout the universe. When I learned that siqiniq, the word for sun, was made of up the stem siqi-, ”to splatter, to splash outwards” and -niq, which signifies a completed action, I was immediately able to draw the connection to the Iñupiaq origin story (which seems to be similar to the theory of the Big Bang interestingly). Learning an endangered language can teach you so much more about your past and present culture.

5. Learning an Endangered Language is Easier Now Than Ever Before

If you are still not convinced that learning an endangered language is worth your while, let me tell you that learning an endangered language in today’s world is easy.

Many people think the spread of technology is bad for endangered languages. I disagree. Never before in history has there been such a wealth of resources for those wanting to connect with other language learners and speakers.

Young people are texting in their native tongues. iPhones have keyboards in Cherokee and other native languages. Young people are posting raps on YouTube in their own languages. Modern technology has given us the opportunity to access information and connect with people like we never could before.

Although there are likely no other Iñupiaq speakers on my continent (I am currently living in Belgium, of all places), I can learn the language much better today than in years past. I’m using all sorts of online resources including Facebook groups, Youtube videos, Skype sessions, and iPhone apps to tap into a vast network of fellow language learners and teachers. Learning an endangered language is just like learning any other language, and there are people one click away who are eager and willing to help you out.

For those interested in learning an endangered language, whether it be because it is part of your heritage or simply because you want to learn more about our world, there are endless resources online that you can access. italki.com has a great number of languages to choose from, and Duolingo recently announced that their new “Language Incubator”, that may soon help to preserve endangered languages like Basque and Maya. To find an endangered language near your community, you can consult UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.

In short, there are resources out there, you just have to seek them out. If you are serious about learning an endangered language, don’t start tomorrow. Start today. Learning a language is about getting your feet dirty, whether it’s Iñupiaq, Mandarin or Silbo Gomero. Together we can work together to help thousands of languages across the globe become stronger again.

If you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments section below, check out my blog, or see some more links underneath for further reading!

About Iñupiaq:
Online dictionary: http://www.alaskool.org/language/dictionaries/inupiaq/dictionary.htm
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inupiat_language
Useful Phrases in Iñupiaq: http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/inupiaq.php
Iñupiaq font download: http://www.alaskool.org/language/inupiaqpb/getfont.htm
There is even a wikipedia in Iñupiaq!: http://ik.wikipedia.org/

About endangered languages:
National Geographic Enduring Voices: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/enduring-voices/
Endangered Languages Fund: http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/
Living Tongues Institute: http://www.livingtongues.org/
Endangeredlanguages.nl: http://www.endangeredlanguages.nl/

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5 Reasons to Learn an Endangered Language is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

What’s the difference between “Fluent in 3 months” and the “Language Hacking Guide”?

Mini-announcement: The day the book comes out, there will be a public Google On Air Hangout that you are all welcome to join. It will take place at 6pm Central time (since I’ll be in Austin, Texas during SxSW to launch my book as an official part of the event).

I’ll announce other Hangouts with time, for those of you in timezones outside the US, but see the Giveaway packages to join me in very small or one-on-one groups to chat with me more directly at times more convenient for you over the next month. Otherwise sign-up to the free public hangout next month!

[Sorry for the limited updates recently, while I dealt with travel issues. Some fascinating guest posts, and then my own non-book updates coming soon. I'm still in travel mode in Japan for the moment though, and about to jump on a train for the next week!]

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Ever since I announced the book, and followed it up with the HUGE language learning giveaway (US here, UK here), one of the most frequent questions people have asked me is what the difference is between Fluent in 3 months and the Language Hacking Guide.

So, for those of you wondering, here are the answers!

Language Hacking Guide: Idea to reality in just SIX WEEKS

The great thing about self-publishing is the speed with which it can take place. I had an idea to write an e-book, I got on it immediately and took a few weeks off my work as a translator, wrote out about 30,000 words, had a friend or two read it for me to edit it, and BAM, released it to the world.

Six weeks – that’s all it took! It was six weeks working mostly full-time, but it’s still a pretty short time span. That was also in 2010, when I had four years less experience learning languages (and no experience at all in non-European languages).

Even so, it was the result of seven years of language learning experience, and the one place (at the time) where you could get my language learning advice explained in a concise way, since the blog turns into a narrative too often to be read from start to finish. It was something I was very proud of, and thought the message was explained very well.

And that message was simply How to get started.

People need encouragement and a way to get speaking, and getting those first steps right is half the battle and what I wanted to focus on, so the book doesn’t go beyond reaching that basic conversational level, and to remain concise it focuses on my best tips to do so.

Since I was happy with the way the message was laid out, the main updates I made over the years involved adding extra content to the digital package, like interviews with other polyglots, worksheets to carry out language related tasks, and some quick videos. I was also so pleased to add dozens of translations of the book by native speakers!

Fluent in 3 months – published by HarperCollins

What about my upcoming book Fluent in 3 months though? Someone suggested by email that it’s a copy-and-paste of my e-book in print form and I nearly fell off my chair! The differences are HUGE.

It’s been almost two entire years of work since I decided to go down the path of having Fluent in 3 months published. Unlike e-books, which literally anyone can publish in an instant, having a book published, especially by a major respected publishing house is a very different kettle of fish.

First, I had to find an agent, who could communicate with the publishers on my behalf, since doing it myself I would have crashed and burned from the get-go. Luckily, I know one I already wanted to work with.

Months of emailing to-and-fro and we finally got the proposal right. I thought “I’m Benny, I have a big blog, I speak multiple languages, I want to write a book, sign with me!” would be fine, but the proposal was incredibly long and detailed to fit particular professional standards I never would have thought of. My agent made sure everything was perfect.

Next, we had to get into discussions with 26 publishers!! We talked about the approach they would take to promote it, how interested they were in the concept, the advance, and many other factors, until finally HarperCollins came out on top as the most interested and got the contract. Getting to this stage alone took about 8 months!

I wrote the first draft of the book over three months while in Berlin. Focusing on the book 100%, actually seven days a week. As much as I love Berlin, I unfortunately didn’t have much of a social life on this visit, since I had to focus so hard on keeping progress up with the book, as I had insisted on a self-imposed delivery deadline of June 1st in my own contract.

Differences: Size, content, depth, variation of opinions, and quality!

Since I had more time to write that first draft, the published book itself is at least twice as big as the e-book. I also had more time to research facts, interview more people, and explain things better.

But the content is completely different. The only overlap would be that chapters 3 and 5 in Fluent in 3 months discuss similar topics to the Language Hacking Guide, but with years more experience to expand on them.

Rather than going into just how to start with learning a language though, Fluent in 3 months shares absolutely everything I could put into a book about language learning. A better explanation of how to get started, heaps of encouragement for anyone doubting their language learning potential, how to go on from basic conversational to fluency and mastery, a chapter just about cultural integration (something I feel is missing from every other language learning book, and incredibly important), how to reduce your accent and even get confused for a native speaker, and of course how to speak multiple languages.

Each point gets its own chapter (see table of contents here), and I wrap the book up with a chapter dedicated to tools and resources.

Another major difference between my old e-book and this new published book, is that I share the story of as many language learners as I could. This book is not about promoting “the Benny way” to learn a language, but to get new and struggling language learners off to the best head-start that I feel is possible.

I offer my advice of course, but insist that there are many ways to succeed, and refer to many other polyglots throughout the book so that you can get inspiration from all of us, and investigate them further to see if perhaps their approach suits you more. I am actually thrilled to use this book and the exposure it gets to provide a platform to promote other polyglots, who don’t have the same marketing skills that I have, but still have very relevant and helpful advice the world should know about.

Finally, the book itself just reads way better because after that first draft, pretty much every single sentence was scrutinized and ultimately improved by dozens of editors, academic linguists, other polyglots, a rhetorician, and even some beginner language learners, to make sure everything was clear. To fit the standards that Collins insists on in its language learning books, the quality of this book is the best you could possibly hope to find!

This rewriting part alone has actually taken more time to go through than originally writing the book, so I’d say it’s at least six months of full-time work, if not much more. This time ate into my Japanese learning project, which was a pity, but this book had to be the best it could possibly be, which is an important thing to prioritize.

You’ll see when you read it, that it’s still my voice and encouraging message, but given in a very concise straight-to-the-point and helpful way with the best possible examples and explanations.

A way to instantly update a printed book?

The one catch about a print book is that it stays the way it is for years. I thought long and hard about this problem, since I’ll likely learn a few more tricks and will definitely find more good resources, or find new interesting language learners I’d want to share with book readers and realized that I can actually link the book to online free updates.

As such, the book has tonnes of links inside of it to refer to free updates that every reader can access, and I can keep adding to this with time. I tried to keep the contents of the book itself as “evergreen” as possible, and make most if not all of the advice timeless.

These online updates are free of course, but only accessible to those who have the book, through using special codes available only to book owners

The final print updates were sent in a month ago, so for now it’s definitely 2014 relevant, and if cool resources get added, they’ll be on the free updates page for the book!

Those update pages also allow me to expand the book to be more versatile and multimedia, so video clips of interviews with polyglots, and other media resources can be played by following the links!

“Speak from day one” package getting an upgrade

Building around that core of how to get started through my online additions to the Language Hacking Guide was limiting though, since there are many other questions to handle in language learning.

That’s why I’m actually retiring the Speak From Day 1 package in its current form. It can no longer be bought online, but people who want access to that in-depth How to get started package, can still get it as part of the UK/US Giveaway. You’d receive it effectively instantly (Andrew replies to all emails within a few hours), and have something to keep you busy until the new print book comes out.

Since I’d have to sell about 400+ print books a day to make what I make from just a couple of online ebook sales (authors typically get 5-10% of the actual price of the book; most people don’t know this), this effectively means that for the next month while running the giveaway, I’m not going to earn more than a couple of dollars a day. If it helps boost the overall status of the book, it’ll be worth it though.

What I’ll do in March, is offer a new package (that will be a completely free upgrade for everyone who bought the Speak from day 1 package or Language Hacking Guide up to January) that will expand on each chapter of the book, with hours of videos, mini-ebooks including tens of thousands of words of content that had to be edited out of the main book for space constraint purposes, and other premium additions.

This way the blog will continue to be supported through online sales (it actually costs me at least $1000/month to keep this blog and its forum and other free extras alive through server and programmer costs, so I have to pay for that somehow… your support is definitely appreciated!), but many of you can get my best advice for just a few dollars with the print book too.

The Language Hacking Guide and all of its translations etc., will continue to be available as part of the bigger newer package though.

For now, previous Speak From Day 1 purchasers can look forward to those free updates on March 11th, and anyone who owns the book can look forward to plenty of other free updates to the book when they get their copy!

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I hope this post answers people’s questions about if the new published book was just my old e-book with a pretty cover It’s actually the result of years of work and preparation, and something that I just can’t wait to get out into the world and hear your thoughts on.

Don’t forget to sign up to the Giveaway package (UK version / US version), which will continue to run for just this month and be taken offline before the book is published.

Any other questions about the book or updates etc., feel free to ask them in the comments below!

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What’s the difference between “Fluent in 3 months” and the “Language Hacking Guide”? is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

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The bumpy road of travel, and the benefits that come about from it [First week in Japan]

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Time to give you my update from Japan!

I got into Okinawa just over a week ago, and have been settling in, exploring that beautiful island paradise, and have just got into Kyoto, where I’ll be spending the next 2 weeks.

While Japan is wonderful, and in this post I can tell you some fantastic experiences I’ve had since I got here, you may have noticed the blog (and my Facebook, twitter, Instagram etc.) has been quiet lately, and with good reason!

In the last few weeks, I have managed to:

Get food poisoning and feel absolutely miserable, incredibly sick and stuck indoors
Have my computer, the most essential item I travel with, die on me for good… while I was on an island far from someone who could repair it, or even a place to buy a new one
Lose some cherished possessions, including the hat you’ve seen me wear in my videos/photos since I started the blog!
Take a 3AM flight to Japan, and arrive so exhausted that I could barely check into a hotel in Japanese (that’s lesson 1 in every course!)
Realize that I have 5 minutes to find a specific building or I’ll be sleeping outside that night
Another day, find the right building but have the police called in and forbid me from entering it, and be stuck out in the cold at 1AM with nowhere to go
Have the most ridiculous work backlog (no computer, constant travel and a sickness will do that!) that thousands of emails are awaiting a reply, all while I’m launching a published book, and supposed to be intensively wrapping up the last 2 weeks of intensively learning Japanese

Each one of these is not that big a deal in itself, and almost always turns out to be a funny story, or be a cloud followed by a very silver lining, but while it’s happening, the glamorous travel lifestyle doesn’t feel that great!

It puts things in perspective, and right now I’m appreciative to be in good health, have my own computer again, not be so tired, extremely glad to not be alone for when times get rough, and be confident that I’ll have a roof over my head (for at least the next week…)

So let me share some of these anecdotes with you, and we’ll see how they turned out not that bad in the end!

First task in Japan: Buying a new laptop

As I said above, you’d expect the “first” thing you do in a country to be getting a taxi, checking into your hotel, or buying food, but for me it was the somewhat more complex task of buying a new computer.

While I was in Thailand, the computer I’ve had for the last 2 years finally decided that it’s had enough of being shoved into backpacks, dropped, used non-stop for days, forced to render half hour long 1080p HD videos, and more, so it just died unceremoniously.

Fixing it where I was turned out to be impossible. Waiting until I got to Japan wouldn’t have helped; the spare part I needed would take a month to ship there too. I had to sell it and work off a Bluetooth keyboard from my smartphone.

So of course, a priority task as soon as I got to Japan was to get me some of that Japanese technology! I got my 3AM flight from Phuket to Okinawa (the only affordable flight time, with a 6 hour layover in Shanghai), arrived incredibly tired and still recovering from food poisoning, and could barely think with lots of Thai and even now some fresh Mandarin rolling around in my brain. I did a miserable job of getting a taxi and checking into the hotel, using nothing resembling Japanese.

But after I dumped my bags off, the first thing I did was go to the computer store! I knew the laptop I wanted, after heaps of research, and even knew how much this store would charge me. Somehow, in the sleep deprived daze I was in, it had slipped my mind that the computer would be in Japanese (Kanji and all) though, so I had to hang around a while longer.

This was my first true experience using Japanese in person! I worked with the store clerk to change the computer’s language settings, he ran through all parts of the computer to confirm it worked and listed off all the technical specifications that I had to confirm were what I wanted. Buying a high-end computer is no time to nod politely and feign understanding, so I had to tune in and make sure I understood everything. I asked him to repeat a few times and was glad to hear a lot of Katakana words that resembled English to help me.

And then I left the store with my shiny new computer. Success!

The kindness of strangers

The hotel was just to settle in – what I was really looking forward to, was renting a car and driving around this gorgeous paradise island.

Picking up the car was easy, but driving it off just had the confusion that the indicator and the window wiper were in the opposite position to what I was used to. Driving on the left is fine (that’s how we do it in Ireland; I go from left to right no problem between where my license is from, and where I’ve done road trips), but it took me a few minutes to get used to not cleaning my window when I wanted to just let someone know I was going to overtake them…

The island was so gorgeous that you can’t help but pull over and marvel at its beauty, and that’s precisely what we did!

But then I re-read my notes and realized that the place I had booked – a cheap apartment rental for a couple of days, would have its reception in a different building close at 6pm. At 5:30pm, we pulled into the town, and a lack of Internet (data-enabled SIM cards are a bit of a hassle to get temporarily in Japan – although I found out when I was returning the car that I could have rented it with 4G enabled wifi… doh!) meant that we had no idea where the street it was on was actually located.

We pulled in and walked around a little to ask some people. Nobody had heard of the apartment rental company, but they had heard of the street. It turns out it was still quite a drive away. They explained how, but their explanations had so many turns and street names to remember that I felt dazed just listening to it.

I looked at my SIM-less phone to see that I now had five minutes to get to that building, or I’d be stuck on the north of the island far from hotels, hostels or any kind of tourist-friendly accommodation. I had a map of the general area, and wanted to vaguely know which road it was on, and my Irish charms in Japanese must have pulled through because a very kind lady said that she’d drive ahead of me to show me exactly where it was!

After following her across a bridge, down a road several minutes and then through multiple turns, there’s no way I would have been able to remember it from directions. I arrived just in time to see the guy closing up and he gladly gave me my key and I had a place to stay for the night!

From that base we explored the island, and agreed that it was the only paradise we had been to that wasn’t trying to be a paradise. There were very few tourists, and yet the sea was incredibly blue, the land was fantastically green, and the people were so friendly. It also has a spectacular aquarium worth checking out. It was a wonderful experience!

There is also a lot of culture to discover. This is the island where Judo was born, and Okinawans have their own culture and language, but unfortunately the few days I had weren’t enough to dive into this.

From rags to riches in Kyoto

I also should mention that Okinawa was nice and warm, since it’s a totally different climate to mainland Japan. That’s why when our flight touched down in Kyoto I was hit by the reminder that it was indeed still winter in a lot of the world!

A confused taxi driver dropped us to where I was supposed to be, and through a serious of unfortunate events (at least I can say none of them were our fault! That’s a story for another day) 3 hours later we were still outside, still tired from travelling all day, and now shivering in the cold and being interrogated by local police.

When I was learning how to share my travel plans through Japanese over Skype, this wasn’t quite the situation I had in mind to get to demonstrate those skills…

Definitely not a great start in Kyoto! There was a problem with the apartment we were supposed to stay in, and the owner felt so bad about all the hassle that he upgraded us (no extra charge) to a penthouse apartment with a view over the city, balcony and tonnes of space for our time in Kyoto instead. A shitty first night in exchange for an amazing 9 days? I’ll take it!

The Japanese project

All of this chaos over the last month has eaten away at the time I was supposed to have free to get back into Japanese. I had done about 2 months of intensive work last year and was supposed to wrap it up before getting to Japan, but with travel, work, book launch logistics, health and other issues, that just didn’t happen.

As such, I’ll have to travel Japan (starting a national week-long train ride from next weekend, absolutely needing to work for the next week now that I have a computer again, so that I can focus on enjoying the country fully in a week) with advanced beginner or lower intermediate Japanese rather than having had the full three months to push myself on to fluency. I’m really sorry to everyone who was waiting for my level to go up, but for now it’s going to remain at about the level you saw me converse in over Skype in this video.

After I finish some work I must do, I want to use all my time in Japan to appreciate the country, rather than studying the language. I’ll have to use what I have now, and see how far it takes me!

If anyone ever asks me what the hardest part of learning Japanese was, my genuine answer will be “3AM flights, food poisoning the week I was supposed to be studying again, health issues again earlier in the project, launching a published book taking up most of my time, and my computer crashing so I couldn’t Skype any more”. And you thought I’d say Kanji

While this is frustrating, I can say that my 2 months’ worth level of Japanese has helped me charm locals to driving out of their way, give sufficient information for a police report (no, I’m not quite on Japan’s most wanted list. I’ve had enough run ins with the law in other places!), discuss technical specifications of a computer I was going to buy, and tell a few locals how much I appreciate their kindness.

I look forward to exploring the country and seeing what other adventures I end up having! I should hopefully record another video or two before I leave Japan, over the next weeks!

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And in case you were wondering, I lost my hat when I was travelling hectically and left several things behind somewhere (not sure which city, or even country, at this stage!) – but it was old and battered, and I whimsically found a new similar one anyway, which you can see me wear in my book (UK/US) intro videos.

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The bumpy road of travel, and the benefits that come about from it [First week in Japan] is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

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