Learn Japanese for Travel, Work and Study

The sound system is small and clean. Five vowels — a, i, u, e, o — each short or long, a dozen consonants, and syllables that are nearly always a consonant plus a vowel, so the language falls into even beats: “a-ri-ga-tō”. There are no tones, though a light pitch accent distinguishes a few pairs, and no “l” — the Japanese r sits between an English r and l. Vowel length matters: “obasan” is an aunt and “obāsan” a grandmother. Rōmaji, the Latin transcription, is used to learn the sounds and to type, and is otherwise rare in Japan itself.

The writing is the long project. Hiragana, forty-six rounded signs each standing for a syllable, is learned in a week or two and writes grammar endings and native words; katakana, the angular twin, writes foreign loanwords — “kōhī”, coffee, “konbini”, convenience store — and is learned in another week. The kanji take years: around two thousand characters in common use, each with a meaning and usually two or more readings depending on the word, and a Japanese sentence mixes all three scripts without spaces, so the scripts themselves show where the words begin and end. Children's books and learners' material print small hiragana above the kanji to show the reading.

The grammar is regular and back to front. The verb comes last — “I sushi eat”, “watashi wa sushi o tabemasu” — and everything before it is marked by particles: “wa” for the topic, “ga” for the subject, “o” for the object, “ni” for direction and time, “de” for means and place. There are no plurals, articles or gender, two irregular verbs in the whole language, and adjectives that conjugate like verbs. Counting uses counters chosen by the shape or kind of thing — flat things, long things, small animals, people — and the subject is dropped whenever context supplies it, so a Japanese sentence often consists of a verb and a feeling.

Politeness is grammar, not decoration. Every verb has a plain form, used with family and close friends, and a polite “-masu” form, used with everyone else, and above these sits keigo — honorific forms that raise the listener and humble forms that lower the speaker — used with customers, superiors and strangers in formal settings, which Japanese people themselves learn properly only when they start work. Names take “-san” for anyone, “-sama” for customers and letters, “-sensei” for teachers and doctors, and first names are for family and childhood friends. Directness is avoided: a “no” is “chotto…”, that's a bit…, and a learner who says “iie” to an invitation sounds like a slammed door. Standard Japanese is the Tokyo variety taught everywhere; Kansai, around Osaka and Kyoto, has a famous accent and comedy register, and the regions keep dialects that television has softened.

Japanese is in the slowest group for English speakers on the US Foreign Service Institute's scale, with Chinese, Korean and Arabic, at some 2,200 classroom hours before professional working proficiency — and it is often named the slowest of the four, because the kanji, the keigo and a vocabulary with no cognates all have to be learned together. The spoken basics come quickly: pronunciation in a week, the two syllabaries in a month, a polite conversation about everyday things in six months. The kanji set the pace of reading, at a few hundred a year for a diligent learner; the politeness levels set the pace of working life, since a foreigner can be fluent and still sound rude in an office until the keigo is in place.

Japan is easy to visit without Japanese and hard to live in without it. Signs, trains and menus in the big cities carry English, and Japanese people read English far better than they speak it, so a visitor is helped by writing things down. Shops, restaurants off the tourist streets, doctors, the ward office and the landlord speak Japanese, and so does nearly every workplace: the English-speaking jobs are in a handful of global companies, start-ups and universities, and the rest of the economy asks for the JLPT N2 as the sign that a foreigner can work in the language. Universities teach most degrees in Japanese and admit foreign students on the EJU and the JLPT; a growing number of programmes run in English and want no Japanese at all.

• Sumimasen does everything: Excuse me, sorry, thank you, may I have your attention, I'm about to squeeze past: one word, said with a small bow, carries a visitor through the day.
• Emoji is Japanese: “E” is picture and “moji” is character; the word has nothing to do with “emotion”. Karaoke is “empty orchestra”, tsunami “harbour wave”, and honcho, tycoon and skosh are Japanese too.
• Yoroshiku onegaishimasu: Said on meeting someone, on joining a team, at the end of a request and at the start of a game: roughly “please treat me well”, and genuinely untranslatable. Learners use it a dozen times a day.
• Four is death here too: “Shi”, four, sounds like death, so Japanese say “yon” instead, hospitals skip room four, and gifts never come in sets of four.
• Counting with shapes: Two sheets of paper are “ni-mai”, two bottles “ni-hon”, two cats “ni-hiki”, two people “futari”: the counter changes with the thing, and learners keep a list in their pocket for a year.
• A language of sound effects: “Doki doki” is a pounding heart, “pera pera” is speaking fluently, “gorogoro” is lazing about; Japanese has hundreds of these and adults use them without irony.
• Before and after the meal: “Itadakimasu” — I humbly receive — before eating, and “gochisōsama deshita” — it was a feast — after, said to the cook, the waiter or the empty room.

Japanese has one certificate that everyone uses: the JLPT, the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test, set by the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services and sat in July and December at centres in Japan and in some ninety countries. It runs from N5, a few hundred words and the two syllabaries, through N4 and N3 to N2, everyday Japanese and most newspaper text, and N1, the level of an educated adult reader; it tests reading, vocabulary, grammar and listening and has no speaking paper, and the certificate does not expire. Beside it stand two purpose-built tests: the JFT-Basic, an online test of basic Japanese at roughly the A2 level created for the skilled-worker visa route, and the EJU, the examination for Japanese university admission, whose Japanese section most universities score for foreign applicants. The BJT measures business Japanese for those already at N2 and above.

The visa system names levels. The Specified Skilled Worker status, Japan's route for foreign workers in care, construction, food service and a dozen other sectors, requires the JFT-Basic or the JLPT N4 or higher before the visa is issued; the Highly Skilled Professional points system awards points for N1 and N2; and naturalisation is assessed in Japanese at the Legal Affairs Bureau, at a level officials describe as that of a primary-school pupil, with no formal exam. Employers treat N2 as the threshold for working in Japanese and N1 as the mark of a professional user; universities ask for an EJU score and commonly N2, with N1 for the humanities. With steady classes most adults pass N5 within six months and N4 within a year; N3 takes about two years, N2 three, and N1 is a project of four years or more, set by the kanji.

Japanese self-study has a large and devoted toolkit, because so many people start with anime and stay for the language. The core is a dictionary that gives readings and example sentences, a spaced-repetition system for the kanji and their readings, a grammar explained for English speakers, and real Japanese at a learner's level — the public broadcaster publishes the news in easy Japanese with the readings shown above every kanji, and Japanese drama and animation with Japanese subtitles do the rest. What the tools cannot supply is politeness in practice, which needs a Japanese listener.

A tutor is where Japanese becomes a spoken language rather than a decoded one. The JLPT has no speaking paper, and many learners reach N2 unable to hold a conversation; a tutor gives the speaking practice the exam does not demand, corrects the long vowels and the pitch that no learner hears in their own speech, and — above all — teaches the politeness levels in use, which is the part of Japanese that decides how a foreigner is received in an office or a family.