If I’ve learned something about Japanese in recent days, it’s that it is a beautifully complex language.
I spent almost the entire day studying. I was bound to, with JLPT coming up literally tomorrow.
The day started with mom and I sitting at a Lawson a 4 minute walk from home that we’d just discovered had sitting space. Konbinis with seating are one of the best study places in my opinion, because your munching options are far wider than you’d have at a restaurant. They’re also a lot more chill about what you buy so even if you’re not eating for an hour or two, nobody’s going to care unless the cafe is too full to allow other buying customers to sit, which thankfully today it wasn’t.
We’d already sent dad and bua off on the Hakone loop — a day-long tour we’d already done Mama and his family were here, and something we both agreed was a must-do for anyone visiting Tokyo. It was far enough (2 hours one way) and long enough (6 hours on the loop) that mom and I had close to 10 uninterrupted hours to study.
We were preparing individually for the most part so far — we were at different stages of the Genki books it made sense to — but it just so happened, beginning with one passage that I invited mom to read out of the kanji chapter that I was working on, that we ended up working through the comprehension passages of each subsequent chapter together, acting as each other’s motivators and being more productive than either of us would’ve been on our own. I usually always find that I study better on my own, so this was a surprise.
It was quite a thorough revision of everything that we’d learned so far. We’d begun with kanji chapters from near the beginning of Genki 1 and worked our way up to about halfway through Genki 2 by the end of the day. Several workstations were involved, ending at a McD because that’s all that was open that late.
I’d been struggling recently with figuring out the most effective study strategy right before the exam — there obviously wasn’t enough time to cover the entire syllabus — but this turned out to be probably one of the best.
Japanese is such a complicated yet such a logical language that barring the pressure of an exam (contrary to what i’ve been saying about it being a motivation to study, it still exists and especially near the end) it’s actually so fun to study.
What makes Japanese feel so different from every other language I’ve studied is the writing system. It obviously doesn’t use the Latin alphabet like the European languages I’ve learned, but I know Hindi too and I’ve dabbled in a bit of Russian. These languages at least use phonetic alphabets. You learn the letters, then combine them to make words.
Japanese is a whole different beast.
You’ve got three scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The first two I’ve more or less got the hang of and can read fluently-ish now. Kanji, on the other hand, is a rabbit hole. They’re logographic characters borrowed from Chinese, each representing ideas and meanings, and each with multiple readings (ways to say them) depending on the context they’re used in.
Kanji are built from radicals — smaller components that give clues towards their meaning. So it’s less like reading an alphabet and more like deciphering intricate pictograms. You can’t just sound things out. Speaking and listening feels completely disconnected from reading and writing.
It’s complex, but kind of thrilling.
The N3 is way above my current skill level, and I’m forgetting a lot of what I learn simply because I haven’t formed the base to create the right mental models at that level yet. Mom’s in a similar situation with the N4 too, but there’s talk of mom and dad planning coming back to Japan once they retire, so it’s clear we don’t want to stop learning Japanese.
Today, we crafted an effective and engaging long-term study plan that we want to commit to after this trip: WaniKani for kanji (properly this time, one level at a time), Genki for grammar, and a good mix of things we actually enjoy — music, manga, Netflix with transcription tools to make it digestible. Something fun. Something we can keep up with even once the hype of being physically in Japan dies down.
We’re giving this test a shot now, but we’ll come back better prepared six months from now to pass it for real.
Barring a short break to stretch our legs (even during which our minds were craving getting back to studying) and one more to meet dad and bua when they returned from Hakone, giving them the keys to go home and moving from one McD to another, we just read. Stories and letters and articles and whatnot, whatever Genki told us to read, we did. We read until our brains couldn’t read anymore. And then we headed home.
Onkar was meant to meet us in the evening, but his friend’s wedding celebrations naturally ran over and he ended up just going directly back to his hotel. We caught up over the phone, and it was through that call that we learned there are actual full-length JLPT mock exams available. So far, we’d just been fumbling through the handful of sample questions we’d found on the official website, but a real mock would undoubtedly be helpful to get a feel of what’s coming.
The exam’s at 12:30 p.m. tomorrow, and our fried brains both agreed it would be best to wake up around 8am to do our mocks than attempting them now.
The studying isn’t over yet. We have one more day left to push. I’d need more days like today to really cover N3, but we’ve studied the best we could so far and knowing that we’ll do our very best tomorrow, with the finish line in sight, we slept.