FEATURE
エ マ E MMA “My suggestion would be not so much to avoid all the dry and boring textbooks but turn the content of the language into something that interests you.”
Kayo Yamawaki
Emma Cuthbertson
financial newspaper. But you actually don’t need to be able to read everything. Just try to learn a few of them at a time and after a while you will begin to make some sense of all those hieroglyphics you see all around you.” Whatever aspect of Japanese a learner chooses to focus on, success lies in persistence, according to Rogers. “Studying like crazy, then taking time off for extended periods, and then trying to come back hard never works,” he says. “It’s like exercising, really. After a while, you burn out and lose motivation.” Iioka urges learners to examine why they want to study Japanese in the first place. “You may be a student who wants to enter college or a professional who wants to take the JLPT. Then you need to learn kanji and all those grammar rules. But, more commonly, people just want to learn Japanese for everyday living. It all depends on what you want to achieve. This must become your starting point,” she says. “Mastering Japanese is incredibly difficult,” Cuthbertson says. “If you know for certain you are only going to spend two or three years in Japan and you are working full-time, my advice would be not to waste your time. Then again, if you only want to achieve a certain fluency in everyday
conversation, of course, you should go for it. You can actually make a lot of progress quickly, as the basics are probably easier than other languages. “In any case, my suggestion would be not so much to avoid all the dry and boring textbooks but turn the content of the language into something that interests you. What I do with my teacher is to take the grammatical exercises you usually find in those books and put them in sentences which I can remember. For example, during the Wimbledon season every grammatical example related to tennis. You may also want to choose something you particularly like and read everything you can find on that subject in Japanese. I personally love Haruki Murakami. I’ve read all his books in English, so now it’s easier for me to tackle them in their original language.” Rogers, too, recommends linking the learning process to personal interests. “You will learn both vocabulary and basic sentence structures this way, and as your vocabulary grows, you will be able to create longer and more complex sentences,” he says. In the end, Riordan says, the payoff was well worth the hard work and early-morning college classes. “I’ve built my career making investment decisions based upon my ability to understand the nuances of Japanese,” he says, “and I’ve gained access to a famously inscrutable but infinitely fascinating culture and people.” For Rogers, the benefits of fluency are multifarious. “Pure and simple, life is better in Japan if you can speak the language,” he says. “You have more options for work, friends and relationships, more diverse social groups, and understanding the language will truly help you to understand Japan and Japanese people so much better.” o Simone is a Yokohama-based freelance journalist.
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