Learning Japanese is tough 1. Many things about the language seem pretty easy–pronunciation and vocab, for instance–but putting it all together and making something that people will understand come out of your mouth is quite the challenge.
Luckily, we have the internet to help us! 2 There are some great resources to help you study Japanese. 3 And many many more to make you laugh at studying Japanese. Here are two youtube videos that are among the latter, but… there is some truth in them. If you are a student of Japanese you will probably find them at least a little funny, if not, they will probably strike you as very very strange.
Either way, enjoy learning how to speak Japanese without saying a word:
Hope you enjoyed the article. If you spotted any mistakes or just want to say hey, be sure to email me or leave a comment. Thanks for reading!
- Seriously. There are many listings of hardest languages for English speakers to learn, but Japanese is always near the top. According to this wikipedia article, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State considers it the hardest! ↩
- If you can avoid being distracted by facebook for five seconds ↩
- Like this one. ↩
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow now I’m prepared to visit Japan! ehhhhhhh
This is perfect for me! I feel so ready.
These videos are very entertaining! Do they have the equivalent in Japan for speaking English without saying a word? It really is true that learning the body language and little verbal cues really makes you come across more fluently in a language than the language itself. I can’t quote any studies off the top of my head, but I remember learning about this during my communications research classes as an undergrad.
Anyway, thanks for sharing!
haha not that I know of, but that would be interesting too
Dave, I just stumbled upon your site, did some browsing and found these very helpful videos ; ) Now all the time that I was going to use studying Japanese I can devote to something else!
Thanks!
You’re welcome ^^