Sound Like a Native Speaker

An important part of learning a language is the pronunciation. If you aren't pronouncing the words correctly, speakers of the language won't be able to understand you, which rather defeats the purpose of learning the language.

Some, like Gabriel Wyner of FluentForever to be the very first thing that you ought to learn, even before starting to learn vocabulary. Personally, I like to learn the pronunciation alongside some initial vocabulary, just so I've got something to try to pronounce, rather than just memorising letters and sounds. I've found  that actually using a language is the best way to remember it and improve it in all aspects of language learning, including pronunciation. However, Wyner's point that if you learn to pronounce a language incorrectly, then you have to learn the same thing again and having two pronunciations in your head can be confusing is definitely valid - it's best to just learn everything the right way from the beginning.

The best way to learn proper pronunciation is to listen to native speakers. And since moving to a country where your target language is spoken or enrolling in an immersion course aren't always options (and television and music too difficult to understand yet), I've found that the best resource for learning proper pronunciation of a new language is Forvo.

Forvo is a free-to-use site that provides a collection of recordings of words in a language spoken aloud by native speakers. There are both single words and phrases, so if you want to know how a specific thing is pronounced, Forvo is a fantastic resource. The site even tells you where the speaker is from, so if you're learning French, for example, you can see which ones were from France and which from Canada. It doesn't get more specific than that, so if there's a dialect or accent difference between, say, north and south Japan, recordings in both would be labelled the same way, but the pronunciation is still that of a native speaker of the language, which is more than you might have on your own.

If you want to download the files (which I do, so I can load them into flashcards that I make with Anki - more about that later), you will have to create an account, but again, it's free. I've found Forvo to be a fantastic learning resource, especially for languages that don't have the most phonetic of pronunciations (French) or for languages that have sounds that don't exist in English (Korean). It's also nice to hear how a native speaker might break normal pronunciation rules or on which words a native speaker would enunciate less. Plus, it ties learning pronunciation to learning words, so there's context for the sounds you're learning.

The Importance of Neat Handwriting

When I was learning Japanese at university, my sensei taught us that handwriting was very important in Japan. If you had messy handwriting, she said, people would assume that you would have similar lack of care in other areas of life and that you might not be the sort of person they'd want to date or hire. It's not like in English where if you write illegibly, people may just assume you're a doctor.

Every character has a proper stroke order, however, and following that exactly helps with making your handwriting neater and my sensei insisted that Japanese people could absolutely tell if you'd used the wrong stroke order, even if it otherwise looked correct to you.

Really, neat handwriting does make communication easier. It meant my professor could read my writing and properly mark my exams. It meant being able to read Japanese more easily once I moved there. If the entire point of writing is communication, then prizing neatness makes sense. Except in calligraphy, where I can't read much of the cursive - but that's more an art form anyway. 

Calligraphy is beautiful, and in the future may actually be the only time people actually write out kanji anymore. Thanks to modern technology, many Japanese people don't have as much need to write kanji, instead reading, texting, and typing it.

 Forgetting the kanji isn't something that happens only to foreigners. If you think about it, when was the last time you actually wrote anything in English? It's just not something people spend as much time doing because they can just e-mail or text it instead.

This does make learning Japanese a lot easier for foreigners. Learning to recognise and read kanji takes a lot less time than learning them well enough to write them from memory, so you can become functionally literate in Japanese much more quickly. When you type in Japanese, so long as you know the reading of the word, your phone or computer will provide you with a list of kanji to choose from - you only have to be able to recognise them.

Many Japanese learners can cut out writing kanji from their studies altogether and can get on in Japan just fine most of the time. Thanks to the prevalence of texting, even if you're living in Japan, it can be considered more advanced study rather than an immediate need. Although if you are living in Japan, you may find that there is some need for being able to write in Japanese, such as addressing envelopes at the post office.

Learning to Read (in Japanese)

Japanese is my fifth language, so I'm no stranger to learning a language. Japanese is, however, the first language I'd learnt that had a different writing system from English. In French, Spanish, and German, it was just a matter of adding accents, cedillas, and umlauts when needed, and there were perhaps a few different letters, like ch, ll, and ñ in Spanish, but nothing wildly different from English.

Japanese does occasionally use Roman letters (called romaji), which all Japanese people do learn, although it's mostly used for typing on a computer (you type in romaji and the computer changes this to kana/kanji). But mostly, it's used for the benefit of those who don't speak Japanese - you'll see it on signs in train stations and on streets, and in Japanese-English dictionaries and Japanese textbooks. Most Japanese people don't really use it except for stylistic reasons.

If you're wanting to learn Japanese, it would thus benefit you to learn the kana and kanji instead, unless you're planning to only speak Japanese and never read or write it. But really, it's worth it. Most decent Japanese text books will stop providing romaji after the first chapter or two so you don't grow dependent on it.

In my own Japanese course, I notised when trying to learn hiragana that my eyes were drawn to the romaji, because they were more familiar to me, until the textbook stopped providing them and I was forced to learn the kana or fail my class. If the romaji had continued to be provided, most likely it would have actually hindered my learning of Japanese. As it is now, I can read Japanese faster and more fluently in kana and kanji than I can in romaji.

Learning Japanese writing can look intimidating. To start, you've got the kana (hiragana and katakana) - two syllabaries (one character per syllable, rather than one per sound like in an alphabet), which means that not only have you got more characters, but also you have to figure out which to use when. The hiragana are used for grammatical functions in a sentence and for any native Japanese words that haven't got kanji, while the katakana are used for loan words and for emphasis. They're actually rather easy to learn - there are loads of apps and YouTube videos out there that will teach you both of those and they should only take a week or so of studying before you're reasonably comfortable with them.

The kanji are where Japanese gets difficult. These are the Chinese logographic characters and there are thousands of them. As of 2010, there are 2,136 regular usage kanji - these are the ones that students are expected to know before leaving school and that are allowed to appear in publications like books and newspapers without furigana (the hiragana reading) printed next to (or above) it. There are many more than that, but you won't see them quite as often and you'll have the reading provided to help you out. But still, 2,136 is a lot of characters to learn just to read a newspaper.

I'm not trying to be discouraging - honestly, I've found learning kanji to be rather fun, even while it's been challenging. There even more videos and websites and apps for learning kanji than there are for kana, as well as many suggested learning methods. I'll get into those later on - I'm still figuring out which method works best for me as well.

New Accents

Just a month after Meghan Markle became the Duchess of Sussex upon marrying Prince Harry, already it's making the news that she seems to be adopting a British accent. I did watch the clip and she hasn't - she's just got a slightly British cadence to her speech, but her pronunciation still sounds American to me.

It's always fascinated me how some people can be really good with accents and others not at all. My best friend is on one end of that spectrum - she lived in New Zealand for six years and has no hint of a Kiwi accent, although she does now use a lot of New Zealand English. On the opposite end of that spectrum, two of my friends from the UK moved to Florida in secondary school and within six months had completely lost their British accents, although they still retained a lot of British English words and phrases for a long time.

So I think it would be completely understandable if the Duchess of Sussex did develop a British accent - she lives in the UK now and is surrounded by mostly British people. It would only be natural for her to pick up the accent. Some people pick up accents quickly, without even meaning to. And really, I don't think there's anything wrong with just wanting to, either, whether that's to fit in or just for fun.

I can pick up a new accent just by visiting a place for a week or so. My brain just wants to imitate what it's hearing - pronunciation is also usually the first thing I pick up when learning a new language for this reason. My grammar and vocabulary will be terrible, but I will sound really good speaking it. My brain just wants to imitate what I'm hearing around me. Sometimes this gets absorbed into my already rather hotch-potch idiolect and sometimes it's temporary.

Bustle has a really nice article (here) about 'wandering accents' and what they mean. Apparently imitating someone's accent is an act of empathy and just means that you want to understand and be understood.  And apparently you pick up accents more easily and learn languages better if you're a musician - well, that explains a lot. Thank you mum and dad for violin, piano, and singing lessons when I was a kid.

There is a downside, however - sometimes people think you're mocking them or will mock you for it (like people did to Madonna when she moved to the UK). I often feel really self-conscious about it for this reason and will really only speak normally (well, normally for me, at least) around my boyfriend and my best friend. Usually I'll try to be more aware of how I'm speaking so at least I don't do it by accident. I began speaking more precisely when I taught English in Japan, so that my lower-level students could understand me more easily. Thus, any accent I speak in tends to be a bit over-enunciated, including my 'native' one.

This actually results in me sometimes being asked where I'm from, even in my home country. Oddly, most people who ask me this most often think I'm from Russia, although I have no idea why. I've never even been there and I've done the Ancestry DNA thing - I have no Russian heritage, either. Although I was pleased to discover that I'm a lot more Celtic than I had thought. Perhaps I should learn Welsh or Irish next, then?

Learning a Language for Travel

With English now such a global language, should you bother learning a language for travel? My answer to this question is always 'yes, absolutely', but I love languages (I speak six, although I'm only truly fluent in English) and learning them, so I may be a bit biased. Sometimes it's just not possible to learn an entire language for a week-long trip. But while learning the local language may not be necessary to have a great trip, it can make things a lot more fun.

Some of my favourite experiences travelling have only occurred because I spoke the language. I lived in Japan for several years after university and got to meet some wonderful people there that I never would have been able to talk to without knowing Japanese. The train conductor in Nikko who was so excited to have foreigners on his train that he wanted to take a picture with us. The elderly couple hiking a mountain with their cat in a sling who helped us find our way back to the path we needed. Another elderly couple out hiking who gave use cookies because we were foreign and had travelled all this way to visit their country. The Hiroshima bombing survivor who wrote the memorial poem on a monument that we'd been admiring and who told us stories about the war and about not being able to use English terms in baseball. Only that last conversation had any English at all and that was because I was translating for my mum and aunt.

I've since moved back home and now go with my boyfriend on big international trips - big because of the length and the number of places we visit, not because of how war away we go. Some of our 'big' trips have been rather close to home. Our last trip was to Scandinavia (with a quick day trip to Tallinn). Since there wasn't going to be any way that I could learn Finnish, Estonian, Swedish, and Norwegian all before the trip, this ended up being the first time in my life I'd been to another country without knowing its language first.

I was able to pick up a few words here and there as we travelled, but for the most part had to use exclusively English. Fortunately, nearly everyone everywhere we went spoke excellent English and when they didn't, the interaction didn't really require much speaking (such as buying my new favourite skagen sandwich at a convenience store). This experience really just made me want to learn all four languages more - if I hear a language a lot, I want to learn it so I can understand it. I ended up learning Japanese at university because a friend got me started watching anime. I started teaching myself Korean for similar reasons (Korean dramas) even before I met my boyfriend (whose parents were both born in South Korea).

Now that I've got personal experience with both options, I think I still prefer making sure I know at least some of the language beforehand. Sure, it's easier to rely on English, since so many people speak it across the world, but I find it to be a courtesy to at least try to speak the local language, even if it's only a few phrases. It feels wrong to me to go somewhere else and then make them accommodate me and my inability to speak their language. Even just trying to read a phrase from a guide book can go along way towards people appreciating your efforts, even if they have to speak English with you anyway.