Is two years enough time to learn functional Japanese?

Japanese is an East Asian language spoken by about 128 million people, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family, and its relation to other languages, such as Korean, is debated. Japonic languages have been grouped with other language families such as Ainu, Austroasiatic, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals has gained widespread acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is a topic–comment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic (or moraic) scripts, hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名). Latin script is used in a limited fashion, such as for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals.

Japanese is a rather tough language. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of USA places the Japanese Language in Category 5; the toughest to learn languages for an English speaker, that requires 2200 hours of a total to be learnt to a proficiency level as under “Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)” and “Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)”

Two years can be a good time to learn Japanese well enough to get around in a Japanese speaking country if and only if you work towards attaining fluency and proficiency in Japanese with the right methodology and the right resources. 

There are three keys to learning Japanese and really any language…

Set realistic, measurable, short and long term goals, plan your 2 years and study regularly, only then you can consider two years to give you reasonable learning. While the correct methodology will empower you in 12 months to a reasonable learning ability, not taking the correct measures might take you way more than 2 years, or it might even take forever.

You would need to spend time learning it every day. Earmark at least 20 hours a week to begin with gradually raising it to 25 and so on and so forth. Studying consistently! Learning on weekends will do no good as compared to learning every day. Identify the real need, the driving reason, your motivation or your passion to learn the language. Only a real passion, with lots of hard work, will be able to help you achieve your target goal. If you won’t be learning it every day, two or more years, nothing will be enough. Regularity is important. You can take an intensive course in the first month, get to a decent level, and then forget everything during the next 23 months if you don’t come back to the language!

Immerse yourself in the Japanese environment wherever you are. Create a small Japanese corner at home. Put up important pics with their Japanese names. Label all objects at home with the respective Japanese words so that you do not have to translate from your native language into Japanese and you can identify those objects with their respective Japanese names. Find yourself a conversation partner somebody in and around your neighbourhood, who can talk to you in Japanese and help you improve your Japanese. If however, you are unable to find one I recommend you volunteer for Japanese community services to find a Japanese speaker who could help you or go shopping in a Japanese store, that would force to read labels of in Japanese, besides talking to the staff in Japanese and who knows you may be able to get a Japanese speaker who is willing to help you improve your Japanese from the customers! If none of these work then I suggest you go online to sites such as conversationpartners, languagepartners, Hello Talk, Italki to find a conversation partner for yourself, who can help you improve your spoken language and correct you. Listen to Japanese music only, write a daily journal or diary in Japanese gathering all those words which are used in most common conversations every day. Listening is ALWAYS key, you could opt for reliable online audio resources such as audiobooks, Japanese podcasts, News in slow Japanese, Japanese radio and many more.

Join online courses such as Lingodeer to make a head start!

Start the first half of the year listening to the language in as many audio forms that you can lay your hands on, speaking the language, laying greater emphasis on proper speech and accent, and the rest half in identifying the alphabets and the accent marks. Japanese is hard to speak properly and you need to put plenty of time into training your mouth to make the sounds, so join a conversation group or two. Start the next half of the year intensively studying grammar.

Further sharpen your learning with apps such as Anki, Duolingo, The Sensei: Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese, WaniKani, Obenkyo, Lang-8’s HiNative-Language Learning, The Kanji King: Kanji Recognizer

Google translate, Dictionary Imiwa or Japanese(by Renzo Inc.), etcetera. For tracking your progress you can use an app similar to ‘toggl’ to track your time on different tasks. Duolingo has a “streak of activity” feature that helps with this, and you can use sites like these to hold you accountable.

Little is known of the language’s prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. During the Heian period (794–1185), Chinese had considerable influence on the vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) included changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language, and the first appearance of European loanwords. The standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo (modern Tokyo) region in the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th century–mid-19th century). Following the end of Japan’s self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly. English loanwords, in particular, have become frequent, and Japanese words from English roots have proliferated.

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