Thinking Japanese in Japanese

I find that the best way to learn Japanese is to try and not think in English. Let the Japanese flow through your mind without translating every single word and you’ll find that you’ll grasp the language a lot faster. This thought popped into my head in class today and made me realise the basic concept behind learning a new language. Don’t translate! As soon as I tried translating the words in my head, I stopped paying attention to the teacher. It took too long to mentally compute it and ruined everything but as soon as I stopped translating, I could pick up everything again. 

However that rule only applies for the spoken language. For the written, I find that doing some translation along the way helps a lot. I usually find the word in English and read the sentence in the subject-verb-object form instead of the Japanese s-o-v. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work all the time and then you’re pretty much up the creek unless you can get someone to explain it to you. 

My next tip to future ICSers is to learn as much kanji as possible. The amount you learn in two years at UTS is a pittance and you’ll require a lot more than that to get around and for your studies. You can pick it up here as you go along but the going is much slower. Better to have the preparation done before you come; after all you do have a break of four months before travelling to Japan. I know it sounds hypocritical of me since I didn’t do any studying, but now I wished I had because it would have made my life a lot easier!