My score was 258 out of 400  (240 is passing). I just barely passed, but I’ll take it.

My scores were:

Vocab/Kanji – 74/100

Listening –  56 / 200

Reading/Grammar – 128 / 200 

My overall score is about what I was expecting based on all the  practice tests I did, but the scores for the individual sections were a little different.  On all the practice tests, I would consistently get about 85% on the Vocab/Kanji, 75% on the listening, and 55% on Reading/Grammar.  However, on the actual tests I made a few careless mistakes on vocab and I also ran out of time and left a couple questions blank, and my listening score took a hit because I had trouble hearing the questions over the noise of the 300 people in the classroom turning the pages of the test booklet in unison.  But my reading score was helped out by a few lucky guesses.  

I took the test after studying Japanese for 3.5 years, although my first two years of study were not very productive.  Starting out, I didn’t really know how to study Japanese well.  If I could start again knowing what I do now, I probably could learn everything from those first two years in 6 months.  So I’d guess that I passed 2kyuu with about 2 years worth of efficient study.

Since I took the test in December, I haven’t had much motivation to study, but soon I’m going to start commuting to Tokyo for my new job, so I’ll have about 2 hours on the train each day.  If I can use that time to study, I might be able to make good progress towards 1kyuu.  I think a good goal might be to try for taking the 1kyuu in Summer of 2010.

After the intensive Peace Corps language training, I worked with a tutor for about a year, mostly on grammar, and practiced speaking with A-Yo constantly.  Generally, it worked out well (aside from being unable to write with any speed or accuracy).  So without further ado, here are some tips for learning Russian, if you are ever so inclined!

1) Learn the Cyrillic alphabet…it isn’t that hard.  If you’ve had any exposure to Greek (in science class or fraternities (!)) then you know half the letters already, and most of the other half are similar to English.

2) Learn which syllables to stress when learning words and conjugations/declensions. Proper stress makes a big difference in the meaning for some words (for example, мука = torture / мука = flour) and affects pronounciation for some letters (e.g. the letter “o” is pronounced like an “o” when in the stressed syllable and like an “a” when in the unstressed syllable – молоко (milk) is pronounced “ma-la-ko”, not “mo-lo-ko”).  Having proper stress when speaking goes a long way towards giving you a good accent.  People with no clue about stress butcher the language.

3) Try to read lots of texts. It is a great way to learn new vocab.  Even simple stuff like newspaper articles and children stories are helpful.

4) Learn the grammar tables. Yes, it sucks learning all the different declensions and conjugations, but it helps you speak with fluency and be understandable.  You don’t have to go for 100% accuracy right away or know all the various exceptions or more obscure uses.  Practice the most common ones first and then fill in the blanks as you go.

5) Don’t worry about mistakes in grammar. When speaking, try to be accurate, but don’t get hung up on one word in the sentence you can’t figure out the ending for.  give you best shot and go on.  Listen to whomever you are talking to and maybe you’ll get a hint about what ending or case to use.

6) Don’t get bogged down with verbs of motion at the beginning. Yes, having different words for going by car, by foot, or while carrying something and having to consider whether it is a one time event or a regular occurrence is difficult, especially compared to English where you can use “to go” for just about anything.  Just give it your best shot at first, and try to get the main ones down first (i.e. Ходить / Идти and Ездить / Ехать) and then work to expand from there.

7) Listen to who you are speaking. It can give you good clues about what grammar form to use when you reply.  If some asks “Кому ты дал мяч?” (To whom did you give the ball?) bells should be going off in your head DATIVE CASE!  and you can answer “моему другу” (to my friend) or “моей сестре” (to my sister).

Marry a Russian. It really helps your language skills!  And you have access to borsch every day of the year!

The relative difficulty of the grammar, pronunciation, politeness, and vocabulary of Japanese compared to other languages is often debated, but ultimately these are among the common elements shared by most all languages, and no matter what language you learn, you have to deal with them. Kanji, on the other hand, requires a massive amount of work in addition to the effort you would usually put into learning a language.

Not learning kanji leaves you at a huge disadvantage when it comes to aquiring new Japanese. If you go to the store and you see 牛乳 written on a milk carton or 砂糖 written on a bag of sugar, you have no way to learn the new words. You either have to hear the words or encounter them in hiragana: ぎゅうにゅう…さとう. Learning kanji requires a lot of work to become competent in what is normally a very basic step in most other languages — being able to read and write.

After about a year and a half, I hadn’t made a lot of progress.  I would estimate I knew around 300-400 kanji to varying degrees of mastery, depending on whether I could read, write and/or recognize the characters.

In early spring 2007, I started studying using the book Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig  (There is a free sample of RTK online that you can check out).  This book breaks with many of the traditional methods for learning kanji.  The typical way to study kanji — the way I had been studying up to that point — involves learning kanji in roughly the same order that Japanese children are taught.　Typically, one learns kanji based on how useful they would be to know.  Learning in order of usefulness might seem like common sense, but Heisig takes a different approach that I found to be much more effective.  In the book, kanji are arranged not by their usefulness, but by how efficiently they can be learned.  As a result, the ordering of the kanji in RTK can seem a little odd. For example,  “gall bladder” 胆 is taught very early, while more useful characters like “go” 行 or “horse” 馬 are not taught until much later.

However, this makes sense because 一 ・ 月・日 are taught very early in the book.  Once those are known, it is very easy to put them together to get 胆.  In my first post, I mentioned my difficulty with 歳, but I had a much easier time learning it in RTK.  Once I had learned the pieces making up the character, 一・小・戊 ・止,  the kanji was no longer a meaningless squiggle of lines to cram into my head via repitition, but something I could actually remember.

When your doing RTK, it is important to practice writing the kanji and to test yourself to see how well you are retaining them.  RTK can’t just be read; it has to be studied with a pen in hand.  For reviewing I recommend either the excellent site Reviewing the Kanji or the spaced repitition program Anki.

Another key feature of RTK is learning how to write the 2000 daily use kanji before attempting to learn vocabulary and readings.  This turns off a lot of people new to RTK, but I found the approach to be very helpful.  Instead of getting bogged down worrying about the many readings of the characters,  I could  keep moving forward learning how to write new kanji.  

Once I learned how to write all 2000 of the daily use kanji, acquiring new vocabulary became much simpler.  Before RTK, kanji was an obstacle to learning new vocabulary since new words often contained unfamiliar kanji.  It was like studying English words before learning the alphabet, hoping to pick it as you go along.  ”cat”….”c – a – t”… three letters down, 23 to go!  After learning “cat”, you could easily learn “act”, but when you see “car” or “cab”, you would have to shift gears from learning vocabulary to learning the letters “r” and “b”.  In English, this problem would work itself out fairly quickly since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet; however, there are thousands of kanji.

For anyone starting to study Japanese this is what I would recommend:

1. Learn hiragana and katakana
2. Learn some basic grammar and vocab to get a feel for the language.
3. Do Remembering the Kanji.  While doing RTK, it should be your main focus, but it’s ok to multitask a little — continue learning some grammar or listen to Pimsleur Japanese to work on speaking and listening.
4.  Go crazy learning vocab and grammar.  
5. ???
6. Profit!

I’ll write more about points 4, 5, and 6 in a later post dicussing my post-RTK studies.

I first came to Japan a little more than 3 years ago. When I arrived, I knew next to no Japanese. My knowledge was limited to a few greetings and a vague familiarity with the two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana. Now I am approximately at the level of the JLPT 2kyuu. I took the test earlier this month and either barely passed or barely failed, but however the test turns out, my level is in the ballpark.

When I started studying Japanese, I didn’t really know how to study. Looking back now, I think my first two years here were a wasted opportunity. My studying was inefficient and largely ineffective, so this first post isn’t a place to look for good advice, but rather a cautionary tale of what not to do.

One of the first mistakes I made was to buy the romaji version of the textbook Minna no Nihongo. One of the teachers at the free Japanese class in town recommended it because I could barely read the hiragana version. However, as anyone who seriously studies Japanese will tell you, romaji is nothing but a hindrance to learning Japanese. It took me only a week to realize I had bought a totally useless book. Although I wasted 2000 yen, I learned a good lesson — you just have to tough it out with real Japanese. Hiragana will take care of itself. For most people, katakana takes a while longer since the script appears relatively infrequently, but that too will come in time.

Which brings me to the next obstacle in learning Japanese — kanji. Once I got my hands on a proper version of Minna no Nihongo, I began the exercise in frustration that is learning kanji.

Simple kanji can be learned easily enough.

口　mouth (Hey it looks like a mouth!)

山　mountain (Hey, it looks like a mountain!)

However, one very quickly bumps up against two major problems: 1) Simple kanji with multiple readings. 2) Basic words with difficult kanji.

The first point can be illustrated by the character 下 which has a general meaning of “down”. If you were learning English, the word would take very little time and effort — only 4 letters. fairly easy pronunciation, and a simple meaning. In Japanese, 下 confronts you with a multitude of readings: した　げ　さがる　しも　さげる, among others. Now, I think this is all very basic, but at the time it was overwhelming. Almost every character, no matter how simple, seemed to come with with a multitude of readings. For example, consider “up, down, left, right” 上・下・左・右, words a beginning student would surely want to learn. I can think of 15 readings for these characters off the top of my head うえ・じょう・かみ・あげる・あがる・のぼる・した・しも・さがる・さげる・おりる・みぎ・ゆう・ひだり・さ. For a beginning student, I think it is very difficult to sort through all this to figure out what is important.

A second problem is that simple concepts often have difficult kanji. The first chapter of Minna no Nihongo teaches “How old are you?” 何歳ですか. It is easy to learn how to say it なんさいですか/nan sai desu ka, but the character 歳　is pretty daunting for a first chapter also covering such topics as “This is a pen” and “The dog is brown”. I can’t count how many times I wrote 歳 trying to remember it. Eventually, I got to where I could recognize the character, but I could never remember how to write it for very long. That modest progress for only one character came as the result of an unreasonably large amount of effort.

Starting out, different aspects of Japanese — reading, writing, speaking, listening — competed for my time and attention. If I focused exclusively on speaking, I’d remain unable to read anything, even if I made progress with vocabulary and grammar. So I ended up working on reading and writing as well, but that slowed my acquisition of new language to a crawl.

So, overall, it was a pretty rough start.