If you’re interested in teaching yourself Japanese, a good way to start would be to familiarise yourself with the way Japanese sounds. To the untrained ear, it sounds just like other Asian languages. Thankfully there’s plenty of music, shows, podcasts, and video blogs on the inter-net that you can listen to for reference. Soon you’ll be able to break down the consonant and vowel sounds used in Japanese, which aren’t a lot—in fact even less than those used in English! Not only that, soon you’ll also be able to tell Japanese from Chinese and Korean, languages it most resembles.

After familiarising yourself with how it sounds, learning Japanese syllables would be the next step. Syllables, not individual letters, are the building blocks of Japanese words. There are 5vowels and 15 consonants, which is quite a small number. The number of possible sound sused in Japanese is made even less by the fact that syllables always end with vowels. There are no sounds made from consonants put together making Japanese phonetics quite limited compared to English hence easy to master.

This brings us to the Japanese writing system, which is divided into three scripts. First is the Kanji script which, like Chinese, utilises ideographs. Each character in this system represents a single word and there are around 1,000 Kanji characters. These characters are used to represent words borrowed from the Chinese. Next is the Hiragana script which is used for verb inflections. Lastly, the Katakana script is used for loanwords from other languages ab-sorbed into Japanese. The Hiragana and Katakana scripts are syllabic and have a combined number of less than 200.

You can teach yourself Hiragana and Katakana first. The good thing is that once you have mastered pronouncing the syllables, you’ll have effectively learned how to pronounce any Japanese word.

Another characteristic of Japanese is its emphasis on politeness and formality. The teineigo (polite language), sonkeigo (respectful language) and kenjMgo (humble language) are used rather casual speech when speaking to or speaking about persons of higher authority such as teachers and elders. As someone learning

how to speak Japanese, it would be wise to teach yourself teineigo or polite language.

Feeling a bit lost regarding how to learn Japanese? If you plan on teaching yourself Japanese fast, you can focus more on the script because grammar will be quite simple. There are only past and present tense; there is no need to conjugate verbs or modifiers according to gender or singular/plural form. There is also no strict sentence structure, except that verbs usually go last. Just memorise what are called "particles" which denote the function of anoun or pronoun in a sentence, and with even a small vocabulary you will be able to hold conversations using simple and grammatically correct sentences!

Although learning Japanese, especially teaching yourself Japanese, does have its challenges, I think all in all it is easy to learn. Pace yourself well, know your strengths and weaknesses, and figure out what aspects to focus on.