Japanese might be one of the hardest languages to learn for native speakers of English in the world. But people haven’t stopped learning it; in fact, more and more people take it as a challenge to learn what is accredited as one of the world’s most difficult languages. And what makes it more attractive? Anime and video games primarily, besides, the popularity of the Japanese culture, movies and music. Japanese is designated as a language isolate which literally means it has no resemblance to any other language and thus doesn’t belong to any specific language family, The name of the family that Japanese is classified under is the Japonic family. It doesn’t have any other language except Japanese in it!
Let’s now see what you can do every day to improve your Japanese skills.
Before we dive into understanding how you can improve your Japanese skills daily, we need to understand what These skills are. There are four major skills that an individual is required to master to achieve proficiency in the language. These four skills are listening skills, reading skills, speaking skills and writing skills. Starting with listening and reading skills, these are by far the easiest skills to master. They do not require too much practice and they can be practised by an individual on their own. On the other hand, speaking skills and writing skills aren’t as easy. Speaking skills tend to be exceptionally hard for those who fear speaking with others and writing skills are generally considered to be extremely tough by almost everybody.
To make matters worse, speaking and writing skills cannot really be practised on your own. You generally always require another individual to help you out with these skills. Now that we understand what the major skills are and what are the pros and cons of these skills, we can now start to evaluate how you can improve your Japanese skills daily. Let’s begin with listening and reading. To improve these two, you simply need to be a little more aware of your surroundings and search for good resources. Take a trip to the library. Find literature related to the Japanese language of different eras and by different authors. Practice reading this daily. On the other hand, try listening to Japanese music or Japanese podcasts. You can also find conversations in Japanese on YouTube. You can probably listen to them as well. This sums up our reading and listening skills.
Now let’s tackle the rest of the two skills separately. Starting with writing skills. If you have collected a good amount of Japanese resources, then you can use the same reading resources to improve your writing skills. While reading all your Japanese resources, you can try the shadow technique of copying what you are reading. In this manner, you will begin to get used to writing the language. Eventually, you can also try framing your own sentences and writing on your own. Moving on to speaking skills. There are no two ways to improve this skill. You have to practise it, you have to speak in Japanese. In the beginning, you can try speaking to yourself while looking in the mirror or you can try simply reading out loud. Eventually, when you start framing your own sentences, you can practise learning simple sentences of introduction and other common events and try conversing with others.
Finally,
Japan is also known as Nippon or Nihon and the language Nihongo! The chief reason it has such a name is courtesy of the early Portuguese explorers in China who recorded its name as “Jipangu” on the basis of the word they heard by locals that sounded; like ‘Cipan.’ in Mandarin. Japanese happens to be the official language of Japan and it has minority status in the Republic of Pulau. It is spoken in a much lesser numbers in California and Hawaii.