Sample chapter from Bamboozle Free Japanese

Want to learn Japanese?
Put off by the scary writing?
Hate all the confusing grammatical terms being used?

Welcome to Bamboozle Free Japanese.  Below is a sample chapter from my Kindle book Bamboozle Free Japanese.

Learn Japanese without being bamboozled !

Spoken Japanese is in many respects a simple language to learn. Sure its very different from English but it is simple and generally well structured – unlike English. It is possible to start speaking useful Japanese very quickly. The written language is a different story. Unfortunately beyond teaching the basics, most books start forcing you to learn the written language which takes many years for even the Japanese to learn. I can read quite a lot of Japanese and yet I still feel intimidated by the written language.

Another problem is that Japanese language books get technical. By technical I mean they start mentioning words I learnt at school but have forgotten like adjectives and verbs. Many of these language books start using words I'm pretty sure I never learnt at school like participles, conjugates, copula, present imperative etc. I wish I had paid more attention in class as I'm sure if I understood these technical terms, it would make learning other languages much simpler but I guess you're like me and you can't remember it either.

Japanese kids learn to speak without all this technical knowledge about grammar and they can't read Japanese and yet they can speak it just fine. That's not to say I won't cover grammar. Grammar is fundamental to language – you need it as without it you'll just know a bunch of words. It's just that I won't get all technical.

School gave me a phobia of learning foreign language grammar. My aim is make learning Japanese grammar feel very natural and enjoyable.

Kids learn through experimentation (trying and doing) and through repetition. We will do both of these things. Please don't skip the exercises – this is trying and doing.

I decided to write this book because I felt virtually all the language books or internet resources I looked at to improve my Japanese were intimidating or left me feeling overwhelmed. So this book sets out to teach you spoken Japanese in a bamboozle free way.

My promises to you are:

• No scary writing
• No technical grammar speak
• Keep it simple

The learning techniques I will use are:

• Build on what you know
• Small incremental steps
• Lots of repetition
• Lots of re-enforcement

Lets Begin

You already know quite a few Japanese words. There are lots of Japanese words which have found their way into the English language and there are many English words which the Japanese have adopted too.

To give you some confidence that you can learn Japanese we'll learn 24 words right now in under a minute.

Japanese origin words which you probably know:

sushi, karaoke, bonsai, origami, tycoon, kimono, satsuma, sake, judo, karate, kamikaze, tsunami

English origin words:

ice-cream, beer, coffee, cabbage, milk, butter, restaurant, cider, sandwich, salad, toilet, tomato

How hard was that to learn 24 words!

Now you just need to learn how to pronounce these words correctly. There are many words common to English and French yet the pronunciation is different between these closely related languages. The same is true of Japanese – the same word can be pronounced very differently.

To help us learn how to pronounce Japanese words properly we need to understand a little about the sounds used in Japanese. The Japanese language has a much more limited range of sounds than English. Because English uses a much wider range of sounds than Japanese, there are no sounds that an English speaker will have problems with. Even sounds like tsu (a bit like the name Sue with a short T at the front) is not a challenge for English speakers whilst the Japanese have a much harder time with the wide range of English sounds. The tsu sound is found in the word mitsubishi and tsunami. The limited range of sounds used in Japanese sounds is stereotypically reflected in the Japanese pronunciation of London which is Rondon. There isn't a L sound in Japanese and R is the closest sound.

Conveniently, Japanese word pronunciation can be a monotone. There is no need to stress words or change the pitch like in English. In English for example we raise the pitch at the end of a question sentence. We can do the same in Japanese but we don't need to. In short Japanese pronunciation is much easier than English.

So if you look at the list of English words above, adopted by the Japanese, the actual pronunciation for all of these words will be different to English to fit in with the limited range of sounds available. Lets look at milk and toilet since these both have the letter L in them.

Milk = miruku

Toilet = toire

The spelling looks quite different since we only have a limited range of sounds to work with. These are written in a phonetic writing system in Japanese (which we aren't going to learn because it looks a bit scary) so the pronunciation is consistent.

In the case of toilet, there isn't a T sound on it's own available in Japanese for the T at the end. The options for T are

• to (like “toe” or “tow” but slightly shorter in length)
• ta (like data)
• te (like test)
• chi (like chihuahua)
• tsu (the tsu sound in tsunami)

Since none of these are a good fit to the hard T sound in toilet, the sound was simply missed out.

Similarly for milk there isn't a hard K sound so the best match is the ku (koo) sound and the ru sound for L is used.

To help you with the pronunciation, I suggest typing the words into Google translate which does a pretty reasonable job of pronunciation so you can hear them. For “milk” you may need to type “milk” on it's own as Google translate picks a native equivalent when it's in a string of English words. Apologies for the scary writing that Google translate shows!

So the phonetic equivalent for these words is:

ice-cream = Aisu kurīmu

beer = Bīru

coffee = Kōhī

cabbage = kyabetsu

milk = miruku

butter = batā

restaurant = resutoran

cider = saidā

sandwich = sandoitchi

salad = sarada

toilet = toire

tomato = tomato

The line above a vowel eg ā means the sound is doubled in length. This can be very important to the meaning for example biru means building whereas bīru is beer. As you'll probably want a beer it's easy to remember the sound is longer since beer has two E's to double the length of the sound and once you've had a few beers you will slur your words!

Let's now look at those Japanese words which have found their way into English.

Lets start with karaoke. It is in fact 2 words. Kara and oke. Kara means empty. Oke is actually derived from the beginning of the English word orchestra so karaoke means empty orchestra.

Similarly karate means empty hand. Kara means empty and te means hand.

For the word Kamikaze, we usually think of second world war suicide pilots. Kamikaze is in fact also 2 words. Kami means god and kaze means wind so it literally means god wind which is interpreted as divine wind.

Kami also means paper and hair so kami means either paper, hair or god. You're more likely to encounter paper or hair and when referring to god, sama is added to the end so it would be kami-sama. You've probably heard of origami which is the art of paper folding. Origami is another Japanese word and the gami is actually kami (paper) with a modified spelling. The Ori part means to fold.

First Grammar

You will probably want to ask for something in Japanese, maybe a beer or a coffee. There are lots of different ways to ask for this in English

Can I have a beer

Beer please

….

In Japanese, the way you would say this is …... o kudasai. So to ask for a beer you would say Bīru o kudasai or for a coffee Kōhī o kudsai. Kudasai means “please” so it literally means coffee please.

The o doesn't have an English translation. Unlike English, Japanese has words that describe the sentence structure or grammar. For example we will later cover the word “ka” which is a spoken question mark when it is at the end of a sentence.

The o is used to indicate that the previous word has some kind of action applied to it. In this sentence it indicates it is the thing that is wanted or more generally the thing which has an action against it.

Although the model is …...... o kudasai. It is the thing before the o that the action is being applied to.

Japanese word order can be very flexible so it is important to get used to this concept rather than thinking it is o kudasai.

Japanese is quite a vague language and so Bīru o kudasai can mean “can I have a beer”, “a beer please”, “beer please”, “some beer” or even “beers please” however if you want more than one beer it would be normal to say how many you want.

So now is your chance to practice. Translate the following into Japanese:

Salad please

A cabbage please

Translate these into English

tomato o kudasai

saidā o kudasai

You may already know the Japanese word for yes “hai” (sounds like high). Now you may think that “yes please” would be “hai o kudasai”. Well this is wrong. The “o” means the word before it has an action applied so it would in fact mean “May I have a yes”.

I said I wouldn't get all technical but I will use the term verb. Verbs are fundamental to grammar. They are the words that describe actions and add meaning to the language.

Desu – our first Japanese verb

In English one of the most common verbs is the verb “to be”. This verb is used as “I am, it is, he is, she is, they are etc”.

The verb “to be” in Japanese is desu. Desu has a silent u. It is pronounced dess.

Now I did say Japanese is vague but it is also simple.

Desu can mean:

Is

He is

She is

They are

We are

It is

You are

We don't have to say “it, he,she, you, we, they” and we don't need change it for “is” or “are”. All of these are covered by the word desu. How simple is that! No learning lots of verb tables!

In English if we say “he is ….”, the “is” is usually followed by “a”. He is a boy. She is a student. The “a” signifies the next word is a thing. The technical term for that is a noun.

Unlike English, verbs in Japanese come at the end of the sentence. If you've learnt German you'll be familiar with this idea. Japanese word order is in many ways the complete reverse of English.

The English model is “it is …..” whilst the Japanese model is “...... desu”.

So using the words we already know, we can construct some sentences. Look at the words we've learnt already and see which words are thing words (nouns). Below are some examples.

Sarada desu = It is a salad

sushi desu = It is sushi

kōhī desu = It is coffee

Earlier I mentioned the word “ka”. “ka” used at the end of a sentence is a spoken question mark so it isn't a word we can translate into English. So look at the 3 sentences above. How would you convert these into questions in English?

In English we would reverse the word order. This would change to “is it a salad?”, “is it coffee?”.

In Japanese we don't need to change the word order to create a sentence. We simply add the spoken question mark to the end. The “ka” must be at the end to be a question.

Sarada desu ka = Is it a salad?

Sushi desu ka = Is it sushi?

kōhī desu ka = Is it coffee?

So now it's time to practice. As a child you learnt to speak by repetition. You need to do the same. Look at the previous 24 words and see which ones you can experiment with. ~ please (~ o kudasai) , turning them into statements (~ desu) and turning them into questions (~ desu ka)

More Japanese Words You Already Know

So here are some more words we already know.

Firstly if you're over 30 and English and you're not American then you've probably heard the word “cha” or “char” used in the context of tea. For example “a cup of cha” or the “cha lady”. This has originated from the Chinese word “cha” which means tea and of course has found it's way into the Japanese language too. The Japanese have two words for tea:

o-cha which means green tea

ko-cha which means black tea

So if we wanted black tea we would say kocha o kudasai.

Here are Japanese surnames which are commonly found on vehicles:

Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Mitsubishi

Honda is two words “hon” and “da”.

Yamaha is two words “yama” and “ha”

Suzuki is two words “suzu” and “ki”

Kawasaki is two words “kawa” and “saki”

Mitsubishi is two words “Mitsu” and “bishi”

The “hon” in Honda means root or origin (we'll visit this again later) whilst the “da” means rice field.

The “yama” in Yamaha mean mountain whilst the “ha” is another pronunciation of “da” rice field.

The “suzu” in Suzuki means bell and the ki means tree so literally bell-tree

The “kawa” in Kawasaki means river whilst saki means cape which is a kind of headland geographical feature.

The “mitsu” in Mitsubishi means 3 and bishi should be hishi (the spelling has changed) which means diamond shape. The logo for Mitsubishi is 3 diamonds.

And here are some more English adopted words

Tōsuto = toast

Fōku = fork

Naifu = knife (there are other words)

Kōra = cola

basu = bus

hoteru = hotel

wain = wine

Linking Things Together

The word we use in English to join things together is “and”. The word in Japanese to do this is “to” (sounds like toe but a little shorter).

“To” can only be used to join things (nouns) together. Unlike English “to” cannot be used to join sentences together.

So here are some examples:

Naifu to fōku = knife and fork

Tōsuto to batā = toast and butter

Bīru to wain = beer and wine

Lets return to our earlier list of Japanese surnames. The Japanese usually refer to each other by surname rather than first name. First names are reserved for people we know very well. When we speak to someone, we use their surname followed by san. Think it of as a kind of Mr or Mrs equivalent.

Honda-san

Kawasaki-san

We never use ~san when talking about ourselves or referring to close friends and family members.

We can also use “to” to join lists of people together

Honda-san to Kawasaki-san Mr Honda and Ms Kawasaki

In English we avoid the repetitive use of “and”. For example we wouldn't want to say “wine and beer and tea”. In Japanese however that is exactly what we do

wain to bīru to kocha wine, [and] beer and tea

Kuizu (Quiz)

To practice what we've learnt chose the correct translations from the options:

Is it a restaurant?

1. resutoran desu
2. kōhī to miruku desu ka
3. resutoran desu ka
4. resutoran wa doko desu ka

Cider please

1. saidā desu ka
2. saidā o kudasai
3. bīru to saidā o kudasai
4. bīru o kudasai

kōhī desu ka

1. Is it coffee?
2. It is coffee
3. Coffee please
4. Is it black tea?

Find the odd one out for aisu-kurimu o kudasai

1. An ice cream please
2. May I have ice cream please
3. Is it ice cream?
4. Can I have ice cream please

Possession – It's mine!

The answers to the quiz were 3,2,1,3.

In English we have lots of different ways to show possession of something. Sometime we have words like “mine” and sometimes we use apostrophes “Mr Sukuki's car”.

Japanese uses the word “no” for this and it is very consistent unlike English!

It is used in the form “A no B”. B belongs to or is associated with A.

It's similar to A's B in English. So if we look at “Mr Suzuki's car”, the car belongs to Mr Suzuki. The order is the second thing said belongs to the first thing which is the order in Japanese.

In Japanese Mr Suzuki's car would be Suzuki-san no kuruma

In English we don't say I's car, me's car or even my's car we say “my car”. Even more confusingly if we don't mention the thing we possess we change the word to mine. We don't have to worry about any of these complications in Japanese.

The word for I in Japanese is watashi (wa-ta-she)

So “I” is	watashi
“me” is	watashi
“mine”	watashi no
So to say “my car” we say	watashi no kuruma

You can see Japanese is much more consistent than English! Later we'll do the same with his, hers etc which is also consistent.

Examples

Suzuki-san no desu

It's Ms Suzuki's

Suzuki-san no kuruma desu

It's Miss Suzuki's car

Suzuki-san no desu ka?

Is it Mr Suzuki's?

Suzuki-san no kuruma desu ka?

Is it Mrs Suzuki's car?

Watashi no desu

It's mine

Watashi no kuruma desu

It is my car

Watashi no kuruma desu ka?

Is it my car?

So lets build upon the A no B concept and start doing some more advanced things. If we wanted to say a Japanese car, it would be a car that it is associated with Japan. The word for Japan is Nihon (knee-hon). The rather derogatory term “nips” to refer to Japanese people is derived from Nippon.

Nippon and Nihon are different pronunciations for the same word.

Nihon no kuruma means Japanese car

The word for person is hito (hee-toh)

So a person from Japan or a Japanese person is Nihon no hito and a person from America is Amerika no hito

You may have heard of Japan being referred to as the land of the rising sun. The Japanese flag is a red circle (sun) on a white background. Ni-hon is two words. Ni (actually hi) means sun and hon means root or origin so Nihon means origin of the sun. It is the same hon we encountered earlier in Honda.

Back to A no B. English sometimes just uses words as describing words for example “sushi restaurant”. Sushi is a describing word saying what type of restaurant it is.

In Japanese we use A no B where the restaurant belongs to the type sushi so it is “sushi no resutoran”

The A no B approach also applies to locations so we'll quickly introduce some new Japanese words to describe locations. First let's look at the English location words:

here

there

where

These words all end in ~ere. The Japanese words follow a similar pattern but you'll have to learn them as they are different.

koko = here

soko = there

doko = where

These words all end in ~oko. Now Japanese has an additional word “asoko”. This is equivalent to the English “over there [but out of sight]” so the full list of words is:

koko = here

soko = there

asoko = over there

doko = where

Stop for a minute to memorise and learn these native Japanese location words.

We can use doko (where) to create a question. “Doko desu ka” means “where is it?”, “Where is she?” etc.

Before we continue, we'll introduce a new Japanese word “wa”. Wa is one of these Japanese grammar marker words. “Wa” identifies the thing before it as the topic of conversation or the thing we are talking about. Wa doesn't have a literal translation but you can think of it meaning “as for”. When placed after a word and said with rising pitch (in the same way in English we ask questions), in a very broad sense it means “What about ….?”, “How about …..?”, “Is …... OK?”.

Watashi wa?

What about me?

Resutoran wa?

Is the restaurant OK?

Koko wa?

How about here?

Bīru wa?

How about a beer?

Wa of course is used in more complex sentences since it is an important grammar marker which identifies the topic of conversation. We can use “wa” to create useful questions like “where is the resturant?”

Resutoran wa doko desu ka?

The literal word-for-word translation is:

Restaurant as for where is?

Or more naturally

Resutoran wa doko desu ka?

Where is the restaurant?

Toire wa doko desu ka?

Where is the toilet?

Although Japanese isn't specific about whether it is “a toilet”, “the toilet” or “the toilets”, it is useful to start creating a habit of thinking of “the” when using “wa”. We'll introduce other grammar markers later and “wa” implies “the” more than other markers.

If it is clear from the sentence, then we can leave out wa. Tpically this applies to very short sentences.

Resutoran desu ka?

It is a restaurant?

Resutoran wa desu ka?

It is the restaurant?

So returning to A no B we can use location information to cover things like “the restaurant here”. This would be translated literally as “here's restaurant” as the restaurant belongs to this area.

Koko no resutoran = the restaurant here

soko no resutoran = the restaurant there

asoko no resutoran = the restaurant over there

We can now use this to create some complex sentences like “Where is the sushi restaurant?”.

Sushi no resutoran wa doko desu ka?

Breaking this down

sushi no resutoran wa = the sushi restaurant

doko = where

desu ka = is it?

English is often described as a very rich language which probably is a polite way of saying it isn't very structured. English has many different ways to describe possession and relationships between things. For example, when taking a train journey, we might say “it's the stop after the next one”.

Before we introduce the equivalent model, we need to learn the word for “next” in Japanese which is tsugi (tsu-gee). To say “the stop after the next stop” it is “tsugi no tsugi”. You can think of it as next's next.

The A no B concept can be chained so we can do things like A no B no C.

So to say things like “the sushi restaurant over there” we would say

asoko no sushi no resutoran

This can be thought of as “over there's sushi restaurant”.

The order is that the most significant thing comes first which is almost the reverse of English.

You may be wondering why we say “sushi no resutoran” and not “resutoran no sushi”.

Both are valid Japanese but “sushi no resutoran” means a restaurant that only does sushi whereas “resutoran no sushi” means the sushi from that restaurant and they also do other types of food and not exclusively sushi.

So before we do our final exercise with the A no B lets introduce some new words. First we'll introduce the word “hon” which means book. You may remember that “hon” was also in Nihon which meant root or origin so “hon” means both book and root. 

If you enjoyed this sample, Bamboozle Free Japanese is available on Kindle