4 Tips for Beginner to Advanced Level Japanese Language Learners
（今回は動画のご紹介ですので、書き起こしのみとなります。ご了承ください。The following is a transcript of the video linked above. There is an assumption that readers are able to read Hiragana. If you are unable to, please follow along with the video!）
In this video, I’m going to share with you 4 tips for learning Japanese. These are great for beginner and advanced level learners. I grew up bilingual, I'm now a translator and I teach both Japanese and English to non-native speakers, and these are things that I think about constantly - so I hope you find them useful too.
1. Particles Allow for Flexible Grammar
Unlike English, which has fairly strict word order, Japanese is more flexible because it uses particles. If we have a sentence like "The dog drank the water" in English, we can rearrange the nouns and say, "The water drank the dog" but no matter how you look at it, these two sentences will never have the same meaning. Japanese works differently. Because we have particles that come immediately after the noun or noun phrase that specify the function of that noun or noun phrase, there is more flexibility for word order. Let's go back to the sentence we were just looking at. In Japanese, we would say, 犬が水を飲んだ (いぬがみずをのんだ). Even if you flip around the nouns like we did in English and say 水を犬が飲んだ (みずをいぬがのんだ), the sentence still means the same thing. You might notice that it feels less natural - which it is because there is a preferred order in Japanese - it's still grammatically correct.
Let's look at a more complex sentence.
私が 母の メモ帳に メッセージを 書いた。 (わたしがははのメモちょうにメッセージをかいた) - I wrote a note in my mother's notepad.
If we split the sentence after every particle, we end up with 5 parts - 4 nouns and one verb. We can reorder 5 times for a total of 6 possible orders, and still have the sentence maintain the same meaning.
私が メッセージを 母の メモ帳に 書いた。 (わたしがメッセージをははのメモちょうにかいた)
母の メモ帳に 私が メッセージを 書いた。 (ははのメモちょうにわたしがメッセージをかいた)
母の メモ帳に メッセージを 私が 書いた。 (ははのメモちょうにメッセージをわたしがかいた)
メッセージを 私が 母の メモ帳に 書いた。 (メッセージをわたしがははのメモちょうにかいた)
メッセージを 母の メモ帳に 私が 書いた。 (メッセージをははのメモちょうにわたしがかいた)
You'll notice that the verb, 書いた is always at the end of the sentence, and 「母の (ははの)」 and 「メモ帳に (メモちょうに)」 are always kept together in that specific order.
Although there are some restrictions and there are preferences, as a translator and language teacher, I'm constantly thinking about word order, and what is best for each particular situation. I also find that my beginner and elementary level Japanese students also ask questions about word order as well - so it's something to keep in mind no matter what level your Japanese is at.
2. Rhythm
You probably already know that the rhythm of Japanese is very different from English. English is a stress-timed language, whereas Japanese is mora-timed. It's pretty common to say that Japanese uses syllables because it's often easier for people to understand, but a mora is actually not the same as a syllable. I won't get into the details at the moment, except to say that a mora is essentially a rhythmic unit of timing. In Japanese, most of the time, one kana is one mora. If we take あいうえお there are 5 mora. The small tsu (小さい「つ」) and long vowel sounds all take one mora each as well. The exceptions come into play when you have small kana like the small ya, yu, yo, which aren't a mora on their own. One easy way to count mora and keep a good rhythm going is to clap your hands, tap your leg, or something like that. Let's take a look at a few words:
空（そら） - Sora, the word for sky, has 2 mora
しょっぱい - Salty, has 4 mora. しょ っ ぱ い - the small yo gets grouped with the shi before it to make one mora, and the small tsu is another mora on it's own. Pa and i are pretty straight forward - they're one mora each.
郵便局（ゆうびんきょく） - Post office, has 6 mora - ゆ う び ん きょ く = Long vowels are two mora, so the ゆ and う are one mora each, the small yo is grouped with the ki before it, so we end up with 6 total.
Japanese rhythm is not a problem for me, since I grew up speaking both languages, but I have met native English speakers who are advanced Japanese learners who have a difficult time with the rhythm of Japanese. Other mora-timed languages include Gilbertese, Slovakian, Ganda, Classical Latin, and Ancient Greek. If you speak French, Italian, Spanish, Icelandic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Turkish or Korean, it will help you with the concept and rhythms of mora.
One great way to improve your rhythm of speaking Japanese is to shadow. Shadowing is a great tool for a variety of reasons, and this is one of them. I wrote a bilingual blog post about shadowing, so I'll leave the link in the description below. There are also lots of videos and other resources for shadowing, so I recommend you check them out.
3. Pitch-Accent
Although region, dialect, and context influence the pitch accent, standard Japanese is considered to have 4 main pitch accent patterns when words are spoken in isolation. But - note that the pitch accent pattern includes the particle. They are 頭高 (あたまだか)、中高 (なかだか)、尾高 (おだか)、 and 平板 (へいばん).
頭高 (あたまだか), meaning "head high", is where the accent is on the first mora. It starts high, then drops on the second mora, and levels out.
中高 (なかだか), meaning "middle high", is when the accent is on a middle mora - not the first or the last, but somewhere in the middle.
尾高 (おだか), meaning "tail high", is when the final mora in a word takes the accent, and the pitch drops for the following particle.
平板 (へいばん), meaning "flat", is when the pitch starts low, rises a little, but levels out without ever reaching the height of an accented mora.
Often, Japanese pitch accent is presented as a binary pitch - high and low, so the 4 patterns I just described to you would be written with H L patterns.
Let's take a look at some examples to understand this better.
はし can mean chopsticks, bridge, or edge, depending on the accent pattern and context. If you just hear the word by itself, it may sound like there are only two possible pronunciations HAshi and haSHI, but we can know which accent pattern the 3 words fall into when a particle follows. Let's use が as our particle.
haSHIga (橋が) - means bridge (尾高 (おだか))
haSHIGA (端が) - means edge (the particle has the same pitch as the final sound of the word - 平板 (へいばん))
HAshiga (箸が) - means chopsticks (頭高 (あたまだか))
What makes pitch accent fun is that most non-native speakers will learn the pitch accents of standard Japanese, but if you learn what's considered to be "non standard" Japanese, you may learn a different series of pitch accent patterns, since region and dialect heavily influence pitch accent.
4. Adjusting Your Speech
Last but not least - Adjusting your speech so that your tone, grammar, and vocabulary match the circumstances is incredibly important. In order to speak with someone in an appropriate manner, you need to know what their status is, and what your relationship is to them.
When you speak to a baby, when you speak with your friends and close family, when you speak with a stranger on the street, and when you speak with your boss or a client, you need to adjust your speech accordingly, in every situation. This is really important.
When non-native speakers learn Japanese, you'll learn a standard level of formality with です・ます. This can be used with strangers on the street, or someone you want to speak at an average level of politeness. It may sound strange to speak to a baby like this, and it can be rude to speak to your boss or a client like this.
Let's look at some examples.
Usually, “hand” is 手 (て), but most adults will say おてて when they want to say "hand" to a baby or small child. If they're working on training a dog, they'll likely use お手 (おて)。
Let's say you're talking about eating. In a casual setting you might say 食べる (たべる), in a setting of average formality, you'll probably say 食べます (たべます), but if you're in a formal or business setting, you'll use either 召し上がる (めしあがる) or 頂く (いただく), depending on whether you're the one eating, or someone of higher status is eating.
Types of formality in Japanese include (but are not limited to) 丁寧語 (ていねいご)、尊敬語 (そんけいご)、and 謙譲語 (けんじょうご).
Formal, or business Japanese isn't always easy, and determining which level of formality to use in conversation is something that even people who have only ever lived in Japan are constantly needing to do. As someone who uses Japanese with friends, family, and for work all the time, this is something I do as well. But over time, and with practice, it gets much easier.
