3 Best Ways to Learn Japanese

    Learning Japanese is never easy to learn and considered one of the most difficult languages by many English speakers because of the three different writing systems, which are hiragana (平仮名), katakana (片仮名) and kanji (漢字). Other than that, in contrast to English grammar that uses Subject-Verb-Object word order, Japanese grammar stresses on the Subject-Object-Verb word order and it makes a lot of English learners feel difficult when learning Japanese. In addition to that, gender differences, politeness, dialects and Business Japanese which consists of three different levels of politeness (from low to high): Teineigo (丁寧語), Kenjougo (謙譲語), Sonkeigo(尊敬語). When all these grammar rules blend together, it makes the process of learning Japanese much more difficult, especially when we are not learning systematically. I would greatly recommend everyone to learn Japanese with a formal "sensei", but in addition to that, I am also going to share three best ways to learn Japanese by yourself!

     JapanesePod101.com is a podcast channel that contains thousands of lessons about the grammar rules and new vocabulary, makes it one of the best ways to self-learn Japanese. You can even search the lessons on Youtube and spend some time to follow. There are some podcast contents which are really good and it significantly enhances your listening skill and it makes it the best way for me to learn Japanese.

        

    Reading manga is actually another way for me to learn Japanese. At the nascent stage of learning Japanese, it is not so important to understand the meaning of every single phrase, but rather the understanding the flow of the manga content is much more important. I will jot down every single word that I do not understand and refer to online dictionary after reading the whole chapter of manga. This significantly increases the efficiency of learning Japanese and it does not make your whole process mundane due to repeated searches of vocabulary in the dictionary. 

     Listening to the Japanese music could actually help you relax your mood, and in the meantime helping you to learn Japanese! That's really cool! Understanding the lyrics of a piece of Japanese music can help you to learn a lot of Japanese vocabulary that you have never encountered before and it makes listening music my most preferred way to learn more vocabulary. 

    All these methods are my most preferred way to self-learn Japanese. If you know any other efficient ways to learn Japanese as well, feel free to share in the comments! 

Credit: The above pictures are taken from Google and JapanesePod101.com