Len Walsh

This excellent book is great value. The kanji (Chinese characters) used in Japanese seem impossible to learn at first (there are thousands of them), but this book gives a glimpse of where they came from and how they can be learned. Spend a few hours reading this book, and you will be able to recognise and know the meaning of a couple of hundred kanji. It shows how fascinating the kanji are, and whets your appetite for the far more detailed (and long) method in “Remembering the Kanji”.

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James Heisig

The first task is to learn the two phonetic syllabaries used in Japanese. Each has 46 basic symbols (plus a few extras). They’re not too hard to learn — I learned the hiragana in about a week by rote memorization. But then I bought this book and learned the katakana in about one hour!

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AJALT are the people who publish the Japanese for Busy People books, so if you like those books you might want to investigate their Japanese language classes. After some investigation, I have heard that their classes are good but are geared more toward executive learners. This means that the class size is small and the lessons are provided in smaller doses with less homework.

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I investigated quite a few Japanese language classes in Tokyo. I heard some recommendations for the Japanese Language Institute (Nichibei Kawai Gakuin) in Yotsuya. I heard that this school is very good for conversation and quite reasonable for the price. However, apparently the workload is heavy and if you get behind in class, there is no remedial help to get you back on track.

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In Tokyo, I started with an excellent one-month intensive course at MLC. I like their blurb:

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I was living in Sydney before I moved to Tokyo. Apart from a lot of self-study, I enrolled in a night school Japanese language course run by the University of Sydney. It was a nice gentle introduction to Japanese, and good practice in speaking and listening to a native speaker. But I wouldn’t recommend doing this for more than about ten classes.

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Here’s an excellent description of what it’s really like to study this fascinating language. This piece was written by Dan Barrett, a student at an American college. The original website has now disappeared, so I have preserved his article here.

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The Content Developers of Japan (CODE-J) is a more technical group than the Tokyo PC Users’ Group, focused on software development. They have a mailing list; the member are mostly people who are working in software development in Japan. Here’s their mission statement:

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The Tokyo PC Users Group say they are Tokyo’s biggest English-speaking computer group,, “a club for technology enthusiasts of all sorts, from beginners to seasoned pros.” They have regular monthly meetings, have a website and run their own newsgroups. From the website:

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Lots of sites provide generally useful information about working and living in Japan. These will help you get a good feel for what it’s like to be living and working in Japan, or looking for work. Here are a few such websites that I found helpful. It’s worth reading them regularly for a while so you can keep up with job-related news and get a good view of how things change over time.

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