What's it like to be a Step Up Japanese student? Student Interview - David

David has recently completed the STEP 3 course. We talked to him about what it's like to be a Step Up Japanese student, what the lessons are like, and his favourite things about the Japanese language.

And he tells us about using his Japanese to help some lost property in Japan find its owner!

Watch the video, or scroll down to read a transcript:

Why did you start learning Japanese?

[It was] after going to Japan for the first time.  It was an interesting trip, and it made me realise that I wanted to be more involved in Japan, and Japanese culture and language. 

I started at Step Up Japanese midway through what was then called the Beginner course [now STEP 1], and have carried on through STEP 3.

What are the classes like at Step Up Japanese?

We play a variety of games, only ever using the Japanese language. I find it difficult to play games only in Japanese, but I really relish the chance to speak only Japanese. It really makes me have to think in a way that maybe I wouldn't have the opportunity to, if I wasn’t taking the course.

I find the grammar of the Japanese language to be quite interesting. I enjoy learning the rules, and all the exceptions to the rules. 

How do you practise Japanese outside of class?

I enjoy Tadoku, as it gives me the opportunity to understand Japanese without the pressure of understanding every single word. Tadoku is the practice of reading lots and lots of books, with the focus being on skipping things you don’t understand.

Have you gone to any Step Up Japanese events?

During my time as a Step Up Japanese student, I’ve taken part in quite a few events. I really enjoy when we get together, and do karaoke, barbecues, and various other Japan-related things. And I also enjoy…ending up down the pub afterwards :-)

How have you actively used your Japanese?

When I went back to Japan, after starting lessons, I found that I could make pleasantries with people.

And there was an occasion when I was on a train and found some lost property. I had to take it to someone who worked at the train station and explain what train I’d just gotten off, and where it had come from, and where the train was headed.  I had to look up some of the words, but being able to piece together a sentence and explain to this man what was going on, it felt really good.

Ok, let’s talk in Japanese!　

日本について何が好きですか。
(What do you like about Japan?)

日本はとても面白い国です。日本のゲームが大好きです。
(Japan is a very interesting country. I love Japanese games.) 

好きなゲームは何ですか。
(What games do you like?)

 太鼓の達人が好きなゲームです。とても楽しいです。
( I like Taiko no Tatsujin [the Japanese drumming arcade game]. It’s really fun.

日本語の文法は面白いです。日本に行って、とても楽しかったです。
(I find Japanese grammar interesting. And when I went to Japan, it was really fun).

Would you recommend Step Up Japanese?

I would recommend Step Up Japanese to friends and family – and have.

I really enjoy classes, I really enjoy the teacher, [and] all of the students as well. It’s just a really friendly bunch, and I’d like for more people to be part of the Step Up Japanese family.

Huge thanks to fellow Step Up Japanese student Daniel Sheen for making this video!

Useful Apps to Download Before Your Trip To Japan (2019 Update)

If you just love missing your bus because you waited in the wrong place, overpaying for things because you can't remember the exchange rate, or wandering around for hours looking for a wi-fi spot in vain - stop reading now, because this one's not for you.

I'd like to share with you some super-useful apps to download before you travel to Japan!

Whatever you've got planned in Japan, these apps should get you well-prepared.

1) Norikae Annai - in English!

Norikae Annai is Japan's most-downloaded travel app. It's easier to navigate than Hyperdia, much more nicely designed and more user-friendly. The catch used to be that it was only available in Japanese. But now it’s available in an English version too, called Norikae Annai - Japan Transit Planner.

Norikae Annai - Japan Transit Planner: App Store | Google Play

2) Tokyo Subway Navigation

I LOVE the Tokyo Subway Navigation app, because as well as transfer information it also has a fully offline, pinch-and-zoom map of - you guessed it - Tokyo's metro system.

Good for getting to grips with (what often seems like) the world's most complex underground rail system!

Tokyo Subway Navigation: App Store | Google Play

3) Apps for Free Wi-Fi

Even if you don't want to be connected all the time, you'll probably want wifi at some point on your travels. Japan Travel by Navitime is an app with an offline map showing free wifi spots. It also has free downloadable offline maps of all the major cities in Japan.

Japan Connected-free Wi-Fi, similarly, has an offline map showing free wifi.

(Or you could just do what I do on holiday and stand outside McDonalds pretending to wait for someone while actually using the free internet. That's cool too, right?)

Japan Travel by Navitime: App Store | Google Play

Japan Connected-free Wi-Fi:  App Store | Google Play

4) XE Currency

Not Japan-specific, but definitely useful.

Until the exchange rate hits a nice easy number like 100 yen to the pound, you'll probably want a currency converter so you can figure out how far your spending money's going to go. And the XE converter works offline, too.

XE Currency: App Store | Google Play

So that's what's in my "essential Japan travel apps" folder! What's in yours? Let me know in the comments.

First published March 2016; updated 15 October, 2019

Watching Japanese TV Every Day for a Month (Or, What to Do When Things Don't Go To Plan)

In my second year of university, when I should have been revising for my Japanese exam, I borrowed the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫 Mononoke-hime) from a friend and watched that instead. It was way too fast for me, and I didn’t understand anything. I think I literally caught about two words.

It definitely didn’t help with my exam. If anything it just left me feeling a bit discouraged. I should have watched Mononoke with subtitles. Or, probably, I should have watched something easier.

I gave up on watching Japanese films for a while after that. But later on, I discovered Japanese TV, and found it a fun and interesting way to develop my listening skills.

As one of my monthly challenges this year, I decided to watch Japanese TV every day for a month. I thought this would be easy – I already watch quite a lot of Japanese TV.

But just like my exam “revision”, it didn’t exactly go to plan…

Week One – A Promising Start

I spent the first week of September helping my brother move house. I had the week off work, I wasn’t doing any lesson prep or teaching, and I had good chunks of time to myself each day. It was easy to watch an episode or two of Japanese TV every day.

I watched The Naked Director (全裸監督 zenra kantoku), a Netflix series about the life of Japanese adult video director Toru Muranishi. These episodes are 45 minutes, so I’d watch one a day, or half an episode a day if I was short on time.

Tip: Don’t feel obliged to watch whole episodes. Half an episode is better than nothing.

Watching Japanese TV every day was going to be easy, I thought.

Week Two – Branching Out

Back home in Brighton, the following week, I watched some of Atelier (アンダーウェア andāwea, meaning Underwear), another drama series. Atelier is about a young woman, Tokita-san, who works for a high-class lingerie shop in Tokyo’s Ginza district. It’s a gentle, chocolate-boxy show about Tokita’s relationship with her intimidating boss.

I started watching Atelier when it came out in 2015, got bored and came back it this month. I watched about six episodes again this time, and then got bored again.

One of the great things about Netflix, of course, is that it has a wide range of shows, so you can jump about and find something you like. You don’t have to commit to watching in the same way that you would if you were buying a TV series or paying to rent it from a DVD shop (remember those? I do.)

Tip: If you get bored, stop watching and try something else!

I moved on to Netflix’s Terrace House (テラスハウス, terasu hausu).

(Interestingly, テラス (terasu) is the Japanese word for a balcony, so the “terrace house” of the title is a fancy modern house with a balcony, not a UK “terraced house”, which is a house built as part of a row of houses.)

Terrace House is a housemate-format reality TV show. Unlike other house-based shows, though, it’s slow-moving and meditative. There are no “evil” tasks or conflict-inducing rule changes.

The housemates are allowed to come and go as they please. They go to work. Not much really happens. No one is voted out, and mostly they seem to sit around talking about what to have for dinner.

It’s delightful, and from my students I know it’s pretty popular among learners of Japanese.

The format of Terrace House is great for comprehension, too. You watch the intro, which previews the action and shows you what’s going to happen. Then the action happens. Then the studio cast discuss what’s happened. Then we preview what’s coming up on the next episode. This is great for comprehension, because key points are repeated.

It’s a bit like this sketch:

Of course, reality TV is great listening practice for natural speech. It’s how real people speak, in fairly real situations. If you find natural speech fast or difficult to follow, try watching with subtitles.

Tip: turn the subtitles on. It’s not cheating to watch with subtitles! If you’re at intermediate level or above, try watching with Japanese subtitles.

I also watched a beautiful film, 聲の形 (koe no katachi, A Silent Voice), which was recommended to me by several of my students. It’s an animated teen drama, following the relationship between a deaf girl and a hearing boy, and exploring themes of bullying, disability and redemption.

If you liked Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (君の名は, kimi no na wa), you should definitely watch A Silent Voice:

Things were going well!

Week Three – Forgetting

I went vegetarian when I was ten. A few months later, my friend’s sister decided she was going to be vegetarian too. But then the next week, out for a meal, she forgot and ordered spaghetti bolognese. Once her meal came, she remembered that she was supposed to be vegetarian and was quite upset.

I found this totally baffling. How could she forget something so important? How could someone forget that spaghetti bolognese isn’t vegetarian? Why didn’t her parents question it when she ordered? None of this made sense to me.

I was similarly surprised, in the middle of the third week of September, to remember that I was supposed to be watching Japanese TV every day. I hadn’t watched any Japanese TV for four whole days. Not only that, I even hadn’t noticed I hadn’t done it. I just completely forgot.

I’m usually a pretty organised and disciplined person, so this was an unpleasant surprise. September is a busy month for me, as my new courses start, and this year was particularly busy, as I had other things going on too.

But what to do now?

When you realise you’ve “failed” at a challenge you've set yourself, you basically have two choices.

Option one is to give up. There was no way for me to turn back time and achieve what I set out to do – to watch Japanese TV every day in September. So, I figured, I could just quit, and take it easy for the rest of the month.

Option one was pretty tempting, especially when I started to think about why I had managed to forget that I was supposed to be doing this challenge.

I think the key problem was that watching Japanese TV is not really a challenge for me. I don’t mean that it’s not difficult – obviously I don’t understand everything. Or that I have nothing to learn – I do.

But I already watch TV most days, and I watch quite a bit of Japanese-language TV, so watching Japanese TV every day was not enough of a change in habit. I did it for half the month, and then I forgot I was supposed to be doing it.

The other monthly challenges I’ve done have been harder, and yet I managed them. Speaking Japanese without being in Japan required planning, effort, early mornings and occasional bribery. Reading Japanese books every day, I needed to have a book on me at all times. Even playing Japanese video games every day required me to work out when I was going to squeeze 20 or 30 minutes out of each day.

But watching Japanese TV when I get home from work just feels a bit too similar to watching English-language TV when I get home from work.

Tip: don’t make your goals too easy, or you may find that they’re not motivating.

Option Two was to keep going, and see how it went. I figured that even if I didn't clock up the hours I was hoping for, it would probably still be more Japanese TV than I would have watched otherwise.

I decided to keep going.

Week Four - Taking a Detour

At the weekend, I watched five episodes of Terrace House (2.5 on Saturday, 2.5 on Sunday. See, the half episodes do add up).

I also watched another Japanese film, Tokyo Sonata:

Japanese TV started to crop up everywhere. A colleague asked if I was into Kore-eda films. The new term started, and I overheard my new beginner students talking about Terrace House. My STEP 2 students swapped recommendations for easy Japanese shows to watch. I went for a walk with a friend, and she told me she’d been exploring the Japanese side of Netflix.

As for me? I might watch Princess Mononoke again some day, now that I can understand it.

It’s good to make a plan for your language learning, but it’s ok if the plan doesn’t work out. Taking a detour can be more interesting anyway.

Learning Japanese is Easier Than You Think

People LOVE to say that Japanese is difficult. Like all languages it has its challenges - but it also has some key things that make it easy peasy.

1. Pronunciation

The Japanese phonetic system is pretty simple - much simpler than many other languages. Each hiragana character has one - and only one - sound. For example, ら / ラ / ra always sounds the same, no matter what word it’s in:

ラ ム ネ

ra mu ne

ど ら え も ん

do ra e mo n

Compare that to English, where “meat” and “bread” have the same letters “ea” in the middle, but with totally different pronunciation.

And, unlike Mandarin or Cantonese, there are no tones* in Japanese! Hurray!

*Japanese does have pitch accent. Put simply, all syllables in Japanese are either high-pitched or low-pitched. But this is much simpler than tones in Chinese languages. If you’d like to learn more about Japanese pitch accent, I really recommend the Japanese Phonetics by Dogen series on YouTube.

2. Loanwords

Japanese has thousands of words borrowed from other languages - and most of these modern loanwords come from English. How do you say "ice cream” in Japanese? AISU KURIIMU. Tennis? TENISU. Smartphone? SUMAATOFON.

So there’s a whole bank of Japanese words that you already know. Well done you.

↓ Words like "biiru"

3. Straightforward grammar

Japanese word-order has a certain Yoda-like quality at times:

わたしはコーヒーを飲んでいます

watashi wa koohii wo nonde imasu

I, coffee am drinking

BUT making simple questions in Japanese is dead easy. You take your sentence:

日本に行きます

nihon ni ikimasu

I go to Japan

and stick the magical question word “ka” on the end:

日本に行きますか

nihon ni ikimasu ka

Will you go to Japan?

No need to change the word order. Just add か. 

Let’s try that again!

これはたこやきです

kore wa takoyaki desu

This is takoyaki.

これはたこやきですか

kore wa takoyaki desu ka

Is this takoyaki?

Making simple Japanese questions - as easy as adding “ka”.

4. Particles

Particles are short Japanese words that connect parts of a sentence together. They turn a sentence like “I study home evening” into one that sounds like “I study at home in the evening”.

But I’m going to let you in on a secret.

If you don’t know what particle to use, 90 percent of the time you can get away with not using one at all.

People will still know what you mean - and Japanese people drop particles in speech half the time anyway.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t learn how to use particles (it’s good to know the difference between いぬがたべる “the dog eats” and いぬをたべる “I eat my dog”). But remember: you will still be understood without them.

5. No articles…and no plurals!

Japanese doesn’t have equivalents to the English “a” or “the”. There’s no need to say “where is THE book?” in Japanese. You can just say:

ほんはどこ？

hon wa doko?

Where is book?

AND there are no plural forms.

りんごがあります

ringo ga arimasu

I have an apple / some apples

See? The Japanese language. Easier than you thought.

What do you find easy (or difficult) about learning Japanese? Let me know in the comments!

First published November 20, 2015
Updated September 17, 2019

Say Good Morning to the Room - The Importance of Aisatsu (Greetings) in Japan

By the entrance to the conference room, there was a flip chart with a message: “Please sign in here, and then go through the door and say good morning to the room”.

“OHAYO GOZAIMAAASU!” I yelled. (GOOD MORNING!)

We had practiced this yesterday. “In Japanese workplaces,” they told us, “you must greet the room enthusiastically when entering.”

As I took my seat, I noticed that some trainees had been given a piece of card by staff as they entered.

A member of staff took to the podium. “Well done everybody on your amazing greetings this morning. You sounded so energetic and loud!

“Those of you who’ve been given a card, your greetings were not quite as genki (energetic) as they could have been. Have a think about that.”

I was at a week’s training for my new job as Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Nagoya.

I wasn’t sure about the method of handing out cards to let some people know their greetings weren’t up to regulation enthusiasm standards. But I got the message - greetings are important.

Fast-forward three months, and I was teaching in Junior High school. Every morning, I’d take my shoes off in the entryway to the school and change into my indoor slippers. I’d slide open the door to the staffroom, and greet the room: “OHAYO GOZAIMAAASU!”

“Ohayo gozaimasu!” other teachers would say back, at varying volumes and with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Good morning!

A few minutes later, the vice principal passed by my desk:

フラン先生は、挨拶がいつも元気ですね。

Fran-sensei wa, aisatsu ga itsumo genki desu ne.

(“Your morning greetings are always so cheerful!”)

そうですか。ありがとうございます。

Sou desu ka. Arigatou gozaimasu.

(“Is that so? Thank you.”)

I smiled all day.

2019 Summer Party!

Thank you so much for coming to our 2019 student summer party this year! We had a sunny, relaxing day on Brighton beach and even went for a paddle in the water.

I hope you enjoy these sunny photos of this happy day!

How to Practise Japanese by Playing Video Games Every Day

Earlier this year, I was telling a friend about the various monthly challenges I set myself to practise Japanese.

“What are you going to do in July?”

“I might try writing every day, like a diary or something? Or I might watch Japanese TV every day…”

“Fran, watching TV every day doesn't really sound like a challenge.”

“…or I might play video games every day.”

“That definitely doesn't sound like a ‘challenge’ to me.”

“…all the more reason to do it, right?”

Who says challenges have to be challenging? I played Japanese video games for about 20 minutes a day for a month. Here’s what I learned: six reasons to play video games in a foreign language. 

This is not really a “how to” post. I’m not going to tell you how to “learn Japanese in a week just by playing video games” or to claim this is a “quick route to fluency” (it’s not, namely because there is no quick route to fluency, just an endless and potentially very enjoyable road trip).

Instead, I’m just going to share some reflections on the very fun experience that was playing Japanese video games every day.

In July, I played the second and third Gyakuten Saiban (逆転裁判) games. (I’ve played games one and two before, a few years ago.)

The English title for the series is Ace Attorney. I mostly use the Japanese names here, because I play the games in Japanese, and I don’t know the English names.

I also played some bits of Life is Strange, another story-based game. Life is Strange isn’t a Japanese game, but as with a lot of video games, you can just switch the language to Japanese. But mostly I played a lot of Gyakuten Saiban, so I’ll talk about that here.

What is Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney)?

Gyakuten Saiban is a Japanese visual novel adventure game based in and around courtrooms. In the games I played, you play as Naruhodō Ryūichi (his name in the English-language version is Phoenix Wright), a defence attorney who fights for justice for his clients.

Put simply, the aim is to win all the cases by shouting “objection!” at appropriate points, finding contradictions in evidence, and therefore ensuring your defendant is found “not guilty”.

What kind of language level is it?

The Gyakuten Saiban games are suitable for students of Japanese at the advanced level. If you’ve played the game in English before and have intermediate level Japanese, you could probably give it a good go.

If you’re a beginner, this one’s not for you. Try tabikaeru (旅かえる, ‘Travel Frog’) instead.

Practicalities

I started playing on Nintendo DS, but switched to playing the iOS port, on an old iPhone 5.

I played the game every day for at least 20 minutes, by putting the phone in my bag and playing it when I was waiting somewhere, on a bus, or having lunch. Probably, if I’d tried to play the DS every day, I would have forgotten and left it at home.

I don’t really like phone games, but the iPhone has no connectivity. So it functions as a little hand-held, and without the distraction of phone notifications going off.

Six Great Things About Playing Japanese Visual Novel Games 

1) Vocabulary you would not otherwise encounter

Just off the top of my head, here is a short and incomplete list of words I have learned from playing Gyakuten Saiban:

検事　　けんじ　　　　public prosecutor​

異議　　いぎ　　　　　objection

刑事　　けいじ　　　　police detective

拘置所　こうちしょ　　prison

裁判所　さいばんしょ　court

裁判官　さいばんかん　judge

矛盾　　むじゅん　　　contradiction, inconsistency

逆転　　ぎゃくてん           turn-around, reversal

This is not useful vocabulary for my day-to-day life (unless I have a run-in with the Japanese judicial system anytime soon). 

But it’s precisely because this vocabulary is not particularly common, that I hadn’t encountered it before.

Just like books, video games introduce you to new and interesting vocabulary you might not encounter in everyday life.

And sometimes, understanding that vocabulary will be entirely necessary in order to progress in the game…

2) Solving riddles

The great thing about Gyakuten Saiban, from a language-learning perspective, is that the gameplay mostly revolves around finding contradictions in evidence.

For example, a witness on the stand says they saw the victim being stabbed in the chest. But the autopsy result shows that the victim was stabbed in the back!

In order to move on in the game, you have to find this contradiction and present the evidence in order to show that the witness is lying.

You don’t need to understand everything that’s going on at all times, but you do need to understand (in this example) the words for “chest”, “back”, “cause of death” etc.

In this way, playing a text-based video game in Japanese is a little like taking a test (a really fun one). The game is testing your understanding of what’s going on. If you don't understand, you can’t go any further.

(Image source: Nintendo)

3) A non-boring way to learn vocabulary

Video games are a great way to learn new vocabulary in a fairly natural way.

Let’s look at another example from Gyakuten Saiban. You’re examining a crime scene. You select an item in the scene, and the game tells you what that item is called. If the item is useful, you’ll probably see it again, and its name will be mentioned again and again, cementing the word in your mind.

If it’s not a useful item in the game, you might not see it again, but that’s ok too. We’re here to play the game, not to memorise a boring list of useless vocabulary. 

And if the word is one that the writers think may be unfamiliar to the player, there’s usually a younger character around to help out…

4) The younger assistant role

Naruhodo, the main character, has an assistant and friend named Mayoi (Maya, in the English version).

Shu Takumi, creator of the games, explained the presence of Mayoi as follows:

“I thought that, rather than investigating alone, it would be more fun for the player to have someone with them from whom they could get advice.”
(Source)

Mayoi is a great character – a good friend to Naruhodo, and a really fun sidekick character. Their interactions are one of my favourite things about the games. She’s also young and sometimes naïve, which means she serves an important practical purpose.

She asks Naruhodo how names and difficult kanji are read. And when new or difficult concepts come up, Mayoi is there to ask what things mean and to require explanation. This is super helpful.

(Image source: Famitsu)

5) Video games are basically books

Gyakuten Saiban is a visual novel game. There’s really quite a lot of reading required.  

But the text is accompanied by visual explanations – pictures and animated sequences, so I think it’s easier to understand than a conventional novel. 

And compared to most books, it’s very dialogue-heavy. Almost all of the text is dialogue. That’s good, because dialogue is how people speak.

You can learn a lot by reading narrative stories, but you won’t learn how people speak unless you’re exposed to a lot of dialogue and conversation.

6) You don’t have to understand everything

This game is very pun-heavy. Honestly, I don’t get all the puns. But that’s ok. When you learn a foreign language, you need to be prepared to not understand everything. I probably wouldn't get all the puns in English either.

As Katie Harris from Joy of Languages puts it:

“Tolerate ambiguity. When you’re listening in a foreign language, you’re going to spend a lot of time not getting stuff – that’s normal. If you have a tendency to get frustrated when you don’t understand things, you’re going to make life unnecessarily difficult for yourself. Accept ambiguity as a natural part of language learning and you’ll be able to remain calm and keep moving forward.”

(from Improve Your Listening in a Foreign Language - The Ultimate Guide)

Katie’s talking about listening, but I think we could confidently swap out “reading”  here and the idea definitely still applies. Not understanding everything you read and see is totally normal. 

…and if you get really stuck, there’s always the walkthrough.

There’s another word I learned:  

攻略　こうりゃく　walkthrough

I really might watch TV every day in September, though. Who says challenges have to be challenging…?

(Top image source: Nintendo)