I learned Japanese in 1971. Here’s how I would do it now

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• 00:00

  Today, I want to talk about Japanese, how I learned Japanese over 50 years ago,

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  and how I would learn it today.

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  So in 1971, I was assigned by the Canadian government to our embassy in Tokyo.

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  And I remember that relatively quickly, I was interacting with Japanese people, even gave speeches in Japanese.

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  But I had the benefit that I had studied the characters in my Chinese learning.

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  And I think for anyone who wants to learn Japanese, I think it's tremendously beneficial to learn the characters.

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  And I'm going to talk a little bit about that.

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  And I'm going to talk about five things that I would do in learning Japanese.

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  And the emphasis on all of these is to simplify.

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  So first of all, why suddenly am I doing a video in Japanese?

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  My wife and I were watching a series on Netflix called The Wasteland or something like that.

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  And the name in Latin letters was Fumochitai.

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  And I had no idea what Fumochitai was, although I speak Japanese quite well.

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  So I had to look it up.

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  And it's, if you look at the characters, Fumochitai, barren land, and Fumo, like no hair, Chitai, land belt. zone.

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  So that gives you an idea of the extent to which phonetics alone,

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  and therefore hiragana alone, is not enough to convey meaning in Japanese.

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  And that's why learning the characters is so important.

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  So how do we learn characters?

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  Well, I had the benefit of learning characters ahead of time when I learned Chinese,

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