How to Learn Japanese for Lazy People!

Lazy isn’t always a bad thing. Bill Gates once said, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”. So that’s what we’re going to read bout today! An easy way to learn Japanese!

Effortless Japanese Learning

Yes, you didn’t read it wrong. Effortless! How we can achieve it, you asked? It’s by making use of our natural brain behavior.

What you use, you retain. What you don’t use, you lose.

It’s harsh, but as we cannot make rain to go up instead of falling down, we cannot also change this fact. That is why it’s kinda wasteful to learn writing Kanji (since you will not be able to use it often to retain what you’ve learned so hard) and it’s very hard to retain any new kanji/vocabulary you’re trying to learn since you only encounter so little of them.

The definition of “use” here, is that you use it regularly. Not use it vigorously a day, once every a few weeks or month.

Since we cannot change it, we need to think of a good use for it. And thus where we can get our method for effortless learning.

BEFORE YOU START

This Japanese effortless learning requires you to:
– Understand basic Japanese material (at least N4). This is because you need to at least understand about particles, basic conjugation, and basic grammar pattern to have an effective effortless learning session.
– Make a routine for your effortless Japanese learning session. A little bit but regularly is better than to have a lot but with a long delay and random time.

Alright so here are what you need below.

Shadowing Book

Do you remember how your baby sister/brother/cousin learn from the first time? They will be imitating sounds they hear. And that’s what we’ll be going to do for effortless learning. The key here is to IMITATE! Since there’s a very low chance that you have a native speaker you can imitate and learn from we need something to aid. 

• Shadowing book
This one is a formal but practical training book. The words and sentence you’re going to learn are mostly very useful conversational words that you’re going to use on everyday basis. Although there are other options below, but this book is very very recommended.

There are 3 versions of the book, but the one you need to have are only the first two.

• Shadowing (Beginner – Intermediate) (CD Included)
• Shadowing (Intermediate – Advance) (CD Included)
• Shadowing (Employment/Part-time/School/University Enrollment interview) (CD Included)

The shadowing book materials are very good and practical, but if you’re not fond of books, you can also use phrasebook app such as this one (android)

Japanese Song

We love songs! We sing it even if we don’t know what it meant! But the hard part of learning from a song is that most of them are so poetic and use slang/uncommon vocabularies that are difficult to find. But you can learn a lot from Japanese children song! There are a lot of them on youtube and in fact, most of the song are language learning tools as what we also have in English.

As what you can see in the video above, you can understand more about Japanese culture such as onomatopoeia. What is that? The BU BU BU, PON PO PON, KON KON and NYAO are the sound of the animals mentioned. Things like these are what you won’t learn in formal Japanese learning way, but are being used often in manga/movie/etc.

This song below is great to help you remember verbs!

Japanese Anime and Japanese Movie/Drama

Yes, the one we love so much that inspired us to learn Japanese. But there’s a specific method you need to do with them. You need to cut what you watch into small parts and then imitate them over and over again while also paying attention with the pronunciations and what they mean by looking on the subtitle. You’ll succeed when you’re able to understand it well without the subtitle. Try to use movie with everyday life theme though, since action/fictional one will have a lot of hard and unusable vocabularies.