How to Speak Conversational Japanese

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By eHow Contributing Writer

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If you want to learn the Japanese language as quickly as possible, learn to speak conversational Japanese. If you learn conversational Japanese, you don't need to worry about reading the characters or learning a new alphabet. Just grasp the basic tenets of the language, memorize a few phrases and start speaking.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

English-Japanese dictionary
Japanese audiotape

Step 1

Study Japanese in holistic form, rather than trying to translate English phrases into Japanese phrases. You can consult a Japanese dictionary to help expand your vocabulary, but few phrases in English have a direct Japanese translation.
Step 2

Memorize phrases essential to polite conversation first. To engage in minimal conversation, you must learn greetings, farewells, expressions of thanks and basic affirmative and negative replies such as "yes," "no" and "I don't understand."
Step 3

Listen to a native Japanese speaker live, on audiotape or on the Internet to hear subtleties in pronunciation. Memorizing phrases isn't enough to ensure that a Japanese speaker can understand you.
Step 4

Understand that the Japanese language has different levels of politeness you can use, according to your audience. Learn the most polite phraseology first, as it's better to be overly polite than to be perceived as rude.
Step 5

Learn verbs first. The Japanese language places a strong emphasis on verbs and you can frequently express yourself by using a verb and little else. Remember that the verbs in Japanese sentences always come at the end of the sentence.
Step 6

Make a common noun into a verb by saying "suru" or "kuru" after it. Suru means "to do something" and kuru means "to come."

How to Speak Conversational Japanese

Things You'll Need:

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