Learning English, Japanese and Chinese: what worked and what I’d skip

In 2019 the mahjong news site 麻雀ウォッチ (Mahjong Watch) interviewed me, and the interviewer said they had been studying English since compulsory school and still couldn’t speak it at all. My answer was that they had never had enough chances to speak, and that what matters in the end is output and correction, over and over. Then the line I still stand by: “To learn a language, it’s fine to fail. Keep stepping forward and moving on.” (The interview is in Japanese.)

The rest is the longer version: what worked for me, what I’d skip, and some notes for people learning Japanese.

Where I started

I grew up in Buenos Aires with Spanish as my first language and taught myself English from about the age of ten. Japanese came at eleven or twelve, from a website that taught it from the basics. I wanted to translate the Japanese music, games and anime I liked, so the first goal was simply hiragana and katakana.

The formal part came later. Between 2009 and 2011 I earned certificates in Japanese and Chinese at the University of Buenos Aires’ language center (CUI). I then took a degree in literary and specialized translation (2012–2015) and taught Japanese at the same center for a year. My first trip to Japan was in 2011, about three months in Amagasaki, next to Osaka. I moved to Osaka in 2016, and today I work in Japanese and English.

Chinese is the odd one out. Same center, same kind of certificate, and it is still basic. I’ll get to why.

Input you actually enjoy

You need an absurd amount of input, and the only way I know to get that much is to enjoy it. When the same interviewer asked for my tip, I said to jump in: listen to music, force your way through books, watch dramas. None of that feels like study if you would have chosen the material anyway.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Classes have their place, and I did years of them. They give you structure; they just can’t give you the volume.

Pick material you’d consume in your own language, because if you don’t care about the story you won’t reach episode ten. Go through it twice. On the second pass the plot no longer eats your attention, so the language has room to stick. And translate a small piece: a three-minute song shows you every gap in your grammar, and since you like the song, you’ll want to fix them.

Output early, and ask to be corrected

Reading gives you the feeling of understanding. Writing a paragraph or saying a sentence out loud tells you whether the feeling is real.

Start before you’re comfortable. Write short things for an actual reader, say the sentence you’re unsure of, and ask for corrections in a way that gets you one: “Is this natural?” usually gets a polite yes, while “How would you say this?” gets an answer. Keep the corrections somewhere you’ll see them again, because the same mistake tends to come back.

Mahjong gave me real things to write

The most useful practice I ever did didn’t look like study. On 6 October 2009 I registered on Tenhou, the online mahjong site, and started a Spanish and English blog, Tonari no Riichi, the same day. A Spanish riichi book followed in 2010. From 2010 to 2017 I wrote English articles for Osamuko.com; I also translated guides for ReachMahjong in 2011, subtitled an episode of TOHAI in English and worked on Tenhou’s English translation. Since 2024 I interpret a live M.League broadcast into English, simultaneously, on pro Kei Nakabayashi’s YouTube channel.

Why it worked: a real reader notices when you’re wrong, and a narrow field forces you to be exact. Mahjong Japanese is a small, dense vocabulary. You can’t translate a strategy article if you’re vague about 放銃 (hōjū, dealing into someone’s winning hand) or 押し引き (oshi-hiki, the decision to push or fold).

If you don’t play mahjong, find your equivalent: a hobby with a community in the language, and something in it worth translating for people who can’t read it yet.

What I’d skip

Studying with nothing attached. This is my Chinese. It never took off, and my guess is that Japanese always had something pulling it along (music and games first, then mahjong, then work) while Chinese only ever had the classroom. If a language doesn’t connect to something you do, expect it to fade.

Waiting until you’re ready. My impression is that Japan has a lot of perfectionists: failing is embarrassing, so people don’t speak, and because they don’t speak, they can’t. At Qiita Conference 2024 Autumn, Shusaku Uesugi and I gave a keynote about unconventional careers, and one of our points was that what you want to build matters more than perfect English. That holds for any language.

Word-for-word translation in your head. Translation training teaches you above all to translate meaning, not words. Doing it word by word while you listen makes you slow, and it produces the stiff sentences people notice. Learn what a phrase is for; the word-by-word mapping can wait.

Collecting apps. A streak tells you that you opened an app. One source of input you enjoy and one regular way to speak or write is a complete system, and you add something only when one of them runs dry.

If you’re learning Japanese

Kanji

There are 2,136 jōyō kanji, the official list for general use, and nobody learns them well as a list. Learn words, and the kanji come with their readings in context. Put recognition ahead of handwriting: you’ll type far more than you write by hand, and the IME does the writing as long as you can pick the right candidate. The JLPT doesn’t test handwriting either. Learn the common radicals early (氵 for water, 言 for speech); they let you guess at words you haven’t met yet.

Keigo

Keigo (honorific language) has three layers: teineigo, the polite です/ます form; sonkeigo, which raises the other person; and kenjōgo, which lowers you and your side. Learn them in that order, and learn the fixed phrases as single blocks: お世話になっております, 恐れ入りますが, 承知しました.

The rule that trips people up is about sides. When you talk to a customer, your own boss is on your side, so the honorifics go: 「田中は席を外しております」, not 「田中部長はいらっしゃいません」.

Business Japanese

Japanese puts the verb at the end, and business writing puts the request at the end of the paragraph, after the courtesy. Read for the last clause. 〜いただけますと幸いです reads like “I’d be happy if…”, but it’s a request, and you should treat it as one. 検討いたします (we’ll consider it) is sometimes a polite no. The everyday phrases and how decisions get made are in the article on working in Japan.

Typing

Use a Japanese IME from the first week, with romaji input, which is how most people in Japan type on a computer. A few rules save a lot of confusion: nn gives ん, a doubled consonant gives a small っ (kitte becomes きって), wo gives を, the hyphen key gives the long vowel mark ー, and the square brackets give 「」.

Treat conversion as a reading test. If you type いじょう and can’t choose between 以上 and 異常, you don’t know the word yet. My keyboard and IME settings are in a separate article.