Elementary Japanese (Japanese 101)?

Question

What level of difficulty should I prepare myself for?

Also, what should I expect to learn in this course? Will I have to learn script in this introductory course? If so, how hard is it to master?

Answer 1

To be honest I don't actually find Japanese that hard once you get past the alphabets (except for Kanji) it comes quite easy. It's like learning any other language really.

Japanese requires lot's of revision in order to master in my opnion because you need to memorise 3 alphabets: - Katakana and Hirigana which has 46 symbols and Kanji which is like thousands. But the characters are kinda like images which should help you memorise it.

However it is a fun language to learn I've been doing it for 2 years :p Good luck.

さよなら!

Answer 2

Japanese itself is pretty difficult, but a 101 course shouldn't be too complex. They'll probably teach you writing and pronunciation of the Japanese alphabet, counting, telling time, commonly used words and phrases, etc.

The alphabet comes in 2 forms, hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is a smoother style of writing and is used for traditional Japanese words. Katakana is not as smooth and is used for foreign words. Romaji is Japanese using the English alphabet (this is most commonly used in the beginning courses and will be phased out in the more advanced ones).

The alphabet can be difficult to memorize, but books will usually use pictures that look like the symbols you're writing to make them easier to remember (like the character for "nu" will look like a pair of chopsticks holding "noodles"). Once you start getting into Kanji (Chinese characters), it will get a lot harder. Many of them look very similar but will have completely different meanings. And sometimes the meanings depend on the context of the sentence in which they're used.

Ultimately, Japanese is very challenging but it's a lot of fun to learn.