If possible, I'd rather learn how to speak Japanese first before learning how to read the kanji. I already know the hiragana and katakana, however.

In 2013, I went to Japan and loved it, but I would have liked to be able to communicate with people other than basic stuff like hello, etc. I might be going again next year, so I want to take this opportunity to learn how to speak. I won't be really needing to use kanji so I'd rather save that for the future if I ever wanted to become fluent in the language in every possible way.

Is it possible, and if so, what's the best way to learn to speak first?

Of course its possible, children do it.
You can use any online learning materials if you use the rikai-chan extension to read the kanji. You would probably even pick up some of the easier kanji without even trying.
Audio lessons like Pimsleur or Japanesepod101.com would probably be good too.

You might also want to look at what benny lewis did. Here was a thread about it: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=11164
It turned into a huge sh*t storm, but his method is focused for just learning to speak.

I feel you. I have the same desire to speak/understand and not much immediate need to read/write. However I recently started learning to read kanji because I think it will make the overall process easier and more fun. Basically, I ran into the problem that native speech is too fast for me and I would like to leverage the written language(subtitles, etc) to help make sense of(e.g. look up) what people are saying. Of course there is material out there that you could use to learn spoken Japanese without the written word, but I'm not sure the time and effort required to hack together a method was going get me speaking any sooner than simply learning kanji.

If you still want to go the no-kanji route, here's what I was doing. First, I learned kana like you did. Then I got a core 6k deck and started learning a few thousand vocabulary words with furigana on the front and english on the back. Then, I found a tae kim grammar deck with kana on the front and english on the back and did the first 2/3 of that deck. Then I added core sentences for the words I'd learned to the mix. That got me pretty far so that I felt like I could recognize most of the words in an NHK easy audio track, but it was WAY too fast for me to process individual words. This is the point where I really wanted to have a written script in front of me so that I can confirm what I'm hearing and read through it slowly enough that I could understand every word and how grammar is working.

Of course you could hack something together where you could add furigana, convert it to kana or romaji, but that seemed to add up to a lot of time wasted that I could just put into learning kanji.

Once I started learning kanji, I realized that kanji is a lot easier to learn recognition style(kanji on front, english on back) than vocabulary. It only took me an hour a day for a little over a month to learn RTK lite. Now I can stumble through reading an NHK easy article before I listen to the audio track and understand a lot more.

Whether or not you decide on learning kanji, you might consider incorporating something like the listening/reading method. I can imagine a few different variations where you have a parallel english/kana or english/romaji text to follow along with the audio. I have done a few short experiments with parallel texts and jdrama and it seems to help a lot with understanding what you are listening to.

Anyway, good luck. Let us know how things go.

Zarxrax Wrote:Audio lessons like Pimsleur or Japanesepod101.com would probably be good too.

Pimsleur was the first thing I studied, but it really didn't get me that far and I wouldn't recommend it. I've heard good things about michael thomas japanese, but have only listened to a few tracks. Both audio courses have the same problem though - no written materials. And neither of these will get you very far as it's not very many hours of instruction. Japanesepod101 takes care of these problems as there are many hours of material to study and includes written materials including line-by line audio. My problem with jpod101 is that it has too much english banter and peter-san seems to be on some heavy anti-depressants, but you could probably learn a lot from jpod101 if you want an audio-centric course.

If you make enough progress with spoken Japanese, you'll eventually want to learn to read and write. Especially if you ever set foot in a Japanese language class. The written language is a big pain but at least kanji are somewhat interesting. I feel you though. I started out thinking I would just learn to speak and understand it since I only wanted it for anime. But as I got into it, I saw how many learning resources I was missing out on and it just started bothering me.

That said, I read an introduction to a Japanese textbook and the author talked about how you need to learn to speak Japanese before you can read it. I don't know that he meant fluently like a native however. It's been a while since I read that and your post reminded me of that.

One further point (at least for me) is that, without kanji, learning Japanese vocabulary is a brute force memorization process since most words have no relationship to their counterparts in western languages.

I am pretty sure that, for a native English speaker, learning the French word "position" is nothing comparable to memorizing 立場 in Japanese! On the other hand, the meaning of the kanji is pretty transparent and you are likely to be already familiar with their (here kun) reading if you have encountered, for instance, the verb 立つ and/or the name 場所. The more words you learn, the more often this type of beneficial situation is going to occur.

On the downside, I sometimes find myself struggling to put some kanji together mentally while speaking in order to recall a word I need to use. Obviously not "making my Japanese flow"… but still better than missing the word altogether. And on the long term, I hope that practice will take care of such cases and the word will naturally pop up in my mind without unnecessary diversion.

yogert909 Wrote:

Zarxrax Wrote:Audio lessons like Pimsleur or Japanesepod101.com would probably be good too.

Pimsleur was the first thing I studied, but it really didn't get me that far and I wouldn't recommend it. I've heard good things about michael thomas japanese, but have only listened to a few tracks. Both audio courses have the same problem though - no written materials. And neither of these will get you very far as it's not very many hours of instruction. Japanesepod101 takes care of these problems as there are many hours of material to study and includes written materials including line-by line audio. My problem with jpod101 is that it has too much english banter and peter-san seems to be on some heavy anti-depressants, but you could probably learn a lot from jpod101 if you want an audio-centric course.

Yeah, I rate Pimsleur, MT, and JP101 highly but they all have their problems.

-Pimsleur is really good for training reaction times for oral fluency and really internalising some basic grammar structures. Unfortunately it doesn't teach you a lot of vocabulary considering all four levels take at least 60 hours to get through. I haven't counted but my guess would be a few hundred words, not very impressive for a four month course. This is my favourite of the three because speaking well is my #1 goal, but the only way you'll be able to handle a wide variety of situations is by supplementing vocab.
-MT has you building sentences from scratch in quite an interesting way, it only uses 100-200 words but they are well selected and you can really use most of them, and the course is organised really well into 3-10 minute lessons so it's really easy. However the two "students" are not helpful at all, still making basic mistakes like forgetting to attach か to the end of questions by CD3 of the Advanced course. I understand the method and that the students on the CD really are learning the language for the first time, but listening to silly mistakes over and over again (and it does get to the point where one of them is giving mostly incorrect answers) is just not conducive to learning good Japanese. In my opinion the course becomes more about the students on the CDs than the one listening to them, it can be quite frustrating.
-JP101 has a plethora of awesome content covering so many different situations, but the older lessons are not so good and it's all so badly organised that I can't imagine many people coming to it without having been told which order to listen to the series in would last long with it.

I think they're all quite valid but I wouldn't want to make the mistake of going into one of them without first understanding what I'm going to get out of it.

Sure, do it. In a longer time frame, say five years or so, learning kanji is worthwhile. But if your goal is to speak a lot better when you got to Japan next year, I'd say not learning kanji is the far more efficient option.

I skipped studying kanji and still haven't gotten around to it. I think there are good arguments for doing it this way.

Mind you, my focus was very much listening and reading, not speaking or writing. But you need to understand before you can speak anyway or there's not much point. Once you have understanding, speaking and writing come from practice, and there are plenty of places out there that can hook you up with Japanese people to practice with.

Anyway, I highly recommend subs2srs for gaining vocabulary and listening practice. Paired with the Japanese Anki addon you get furigana and so the kanji ceases to be an obstacle. Pimsleur is deathly boring - would not recommend.

You absolutely can learn to speak Japanese without learning Kanji.

It's not the most efficient long term strategy, because you have to learn Kanji anyway, and learning it early helps in a couple of ways, especially once you're past the intermediate level:
1.helps with understanding the way words are created/"agglutinated", and therefor makes it easier to remember a lot of words, and
2. it allows you to read native materials - if you like reading, that is a great and straight forward way to learn a language.

However, being efficient is not the same thing as being effective. It is the same thing for a robot, but we aren't robots, we are emotional beings. We need motivation and emotional gratification to be effective. And learning to speak before Kanji is great for motivation and gratification, because it allows for quick early progress and the earlier enjoyment of Japanese content.

In conclusion, doing Kanji up front is the more efficient option, and delaying Kanji until you're an advanced listener/ furigana reader of Japanese could be the more effective option.

This is a good place to jump in....

I have a kanji learning book that claims in the introduction that "without a sound knowledge of kanji" it's impossible to have a proper command of the language, and you won't be capable of anything more than "superficial" conversation. I don't know if that's true, maybe it's just to sell more copies of his book. Any thoughts?

Here's a question: what about Japanese blind people, who don't know/use kanji but read in braille? Presumably the braille books are simply the equivalent of the books for sighted people with no reduction in vocabulary.

john555 Wrote:This is a good place to jump in....

I have a kanji learning book that claims in the introduction that "without a sound knowledge of kanji" it's impossible to have a proper command of the language, and you won't be capable of anything more than "superficial" conversation. I don't know if that's true, maybe it's just to sell more copies of his book. Any thoughts?

Here's a question: what about Japanese blind people, who don't know/use kanji but read in braille? Presumably the braille books are simply the equivalent of the books for sighted people with no reduction in vocabulary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille_kanji

john555 Wrote:This is a good place to jump in....

I have a kanji learning book that claims in the introduction that "without a sound knowledge of kanji" it's impossible to have a proper command of the language, and you won't be capable of anything more than "superficial" conversation. I don't know if that's true, maybe it's just to sell more copies of his book. Any thoughts?

That's pretty simple to debunk. This would mean that before Japan brought kanji over from china, Japan did not have a well developed language and were unable to communicate effectively. Does this sound at all plausible?

I tried to learn Japanese without Kanji for the first few years. I don't recommend it. It makes it extremely difficult to find good learning materials. I felt like a parapalegic trying to learn swimming. Its possible but...

The exception would be if you have a real Japanese environment to learn in (eg. a group of Japanese friends). Otherwise I think that doing speaking only you will most likely run out of level appropriate materials in a few months at best

juniperpansy Wrote:I tried to learn Japanese without Kanji for the first few years. I don't recommend it. It makes it extremely difficult to find good learning materials. I felt like a parapalegic trying to learn swimming. Its possible but...

I wrote way too much. This is exactly what I was trying to say.

Zarxrax Wrote:That's pretty simple to debunk. This would mean that before Japan brought kanji over from china, Japan did not have a well developed language and were unable to communicate effectively. Does this sound at all plausible?

Not really. But it still sounds more plausible than the notion that the people of Japan speak the same language they spoke 1250 years ago.

And, even if let's say they did speak the same exact language, a person from 1250 years ago would be an idiot compared to even someone who's barely literate today. Our knowledge has vastly expanded since then, and it's all contained in writing. You can't access that knowledge, and the words used to communicate it, without knowing how to read.

Fact is, you can easily identify an illiterate in any language, once you strike up a conversation about something other than everyday life. They're not gonna have the vocabulary or understanding of someone who can read. That's simply because most knowledge can only be accessed by reading it.

Add to that the fact that, unlike most other languages, Japanese writing DOES in fact help to understand some words, and your progress as an illiterate will be slowed to a crawl, if not halted, after you reach a certain level, no matter how hard you try.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to blind people who use Braille. They can read, and these days they have the tools to access most written materials. And, if they don't, they can use the version of Braille I linked to, which is able to represent Kanji.

juniperpansy Wrote:I tried to learn Japanese without Kanji for the first few years. I don't recommend it. It makes it extremely difficult to find good learning materials. I felt like a parapalegic trying to learn swimming. Its possible but...

The exception would be if you have a real Japanese environment to learn in (eg. a group of Japanese friends). Otherwise I think that doing speaking only you will most likely run out of level appropriate materials in a few months at best

I can't agree with that. Sure, above a certain level, you're stuck, because the spoken language isn't as rich as the written one, but as far as materials for learning everyday Japanese, there's a massive amount of audio, video, and furigana aided writing for that, available for free online.

I don't know about volume, but in terms of the quality of the audio and video materials, Japanese might be the second best language on the Internet, behind English. It's ridiculous how rich the Japanese Internet is.

Stansfield123 Wrote:I can't agree with that. Sure, above a certain level, you're stuck, because the spoken language isn't as rich as the written one, but as far as materials for learning everyday Japanese, there's a massive amount of audio, video, and furigana aided writing for that, available for free online.

Sweet! If you know what these resources are please post them. Its what the OP is looking for haha

>I can't agree with that. Sure, above a certain level, you're stuck, because the spoken language isn't as rich as the written one, but as far as materials for learning everyday Japanese, there's a massive amount of audio, video, and furigana aided writing for that, available for free online.

Proper immersion in real life comprehensible input like baby speech, ejections, and dual-media lingual direction has been proven time and time again to be the fastest way to acquire the ability to fluidly think in a language. People are definitely hurting themselves if they don't study the writing system, yes, but comprehensible real life input is and has always been the only way that works for every last person. If it doesn't, they have a severe mental deficiency and probably can't speak straight in general. Having extra resources available that help speed things along does not mean that directed comprehensible input is not the fastest foundation for acquiring mental fluidity in a language.

The position that general writing being somehow inherently more rich makes it the ideal learning domain and everything that matters is an induction fallacy.

I started out at the very beginning of my Japanese journey with the idea that I wasn't going to bother with kanji any time soon as I really felt more interested in the spoken language.

I changed my view on that fairly quickly for a number of reasons. One being that the path I chose - based on watching anime with Japanese subtitles - brought me rather forcibly into contact with kanji.

I also quickly realized how fundamentally bound up they are with the language and how they actually make the vocabulary much easier and more intuitive.

(The argument that the spoken language existed before kanji and therefore kanji are not closely bound up with Japanese is actually rather flawed. A lot of the language consists of Chinese-derived words and concepts that come from the same source as kanji that represent them. The language as it is now and as it has been developing for centuries is intimately connected with kanji).

None of this is to say you can't or shouldn't learn the spoken language only. Actually if I could have found a good way to do that I might have done it. I am not sure what a good way is. Courses like Pimsleur really only scratch the surface of the language.

What one wants for real immersion learning of the spoken language is an immersion environment, and outside of being in Japan that isn't very easy to acquire without using techniques and materials that use some writing (it isn't necessarily easy to acquire in Japan, but people do it).

Anyway I am certainly not trying to discourage you. Just sharing my experiences. If you find a good way to do it, I'm all ears!

If you decide to compromise on the kanji a bit, I would say that you definitely don't have to go the RTK route of learning tons of kanji before you even start.

My approach has been "learn words, not kanji". I always learned kanji in context, in words, as I came across them. I encountered the different readings as I went along. I don't think I've ever "learned a kanji" just as a kanji.

___
NOTE: While I actually would have liked to learn "early" Japanese as a spoken language the way children do, I would also say that this will only take you so far.

At a certain stage you start running into a lot of words that are juggling a few syllables in various different ways and you tend to understand what the word is by saying "Oh hanketsu 判決 that's the han/ban of 裁判 and the ke(tsu) of 決心. And the thing is everyone sees it in this kind of way. Japanese children all start learning kanji from an early age and the country has 99% literacy.

This means that while children certainly learn the basics of the language before they get to elementary school, from that point on their understanding of the language starts to be bound up with kanji.

However, you were only talking about learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji, not skipping kanji altogether. And I agree that if you could do that it would be the most natural way to learn.

CureDolly Wrote:and the country has 99% literacy.

I'd love to look into that a little more closely. My country claims to have nigh nineties percent literacy too. But it's only because the "literacy" standards are so low that a trained rock could pass.

If you define literacy as the ability to read and understand most written text in a language (let's go with 51%, meaning you give them a piece of literature of average difficulty to read, and then quiz them to see if they know what they read), I doubt any country gets above 75%.

Stansfield123 Wrote:I doubt any country gets above 75%.

No country has higher than a 75% literacy rate? Bwahahaha. Man, I know you're admitting that you're making that number up, but wtf dude.

Tzadeck Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:I doubt any country gets above 75%.

No country has higher than a 75% literacy rate? Bwahahaha. Man, I know you're admitting that you're making that number up, but wtf dude.

He's probably talking about functional illiteracy.

[Zgarbas]

I have a few friends who learned how to speak without knowing kanji. They did so by living in an almost Japanese-only environment for 2-5 years, having come to Japan without knowing the language. They can get by in everyday situations*, but I noticed that whenever they hear a word they don't know they're utterly stuck, as they can't picture compounds, so as soon as they're out of their comfort zone it goes downhill; they also rely heavily on the fact that their friends rephrase or add in English and gestures whenever it's obvious that they didn't understand something. I'd rate them maybe a solid B1 level at most. It's not impossible, but I wouldn't recommend it. I should note that all of them had experience learning 2-4 other languages beforehand. It depends on what you want. If you just want to make some light travel conversation then it shouldn't be a problem, but I would still recommend learning maybe the most common 100-200 kanjis at least.

*highly subjective reference.

Tzadeck Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:I doubt any country gets above 75%.

No country has higher than a 75% literacy rate? Bwahahaha. Man, I know you're admitting that you're making that number up, but wtf dude.

I wouldn't be surprised if 75% is too high. It's hard to qualify because very few countries do real literacy studies. Usually the literacy figures are created by just assuming that anyone who has finished a certain level of school is literate. (It also depends on what you mean by "literacy".)