If you’re curious about how to learn Japanese (or Nihonggo, as they call it), you can begin by by appreciating just how it sounds. That's right, just start by doing some concentrated listening.
Japanese has 5 vowels and 15 consonants. However, for the Japanese, words are not made up of individual letters like in European alphabets, rather they made up of syllables. This helps explain why the Japanese have a particular accent when speaking other languages. This also is the reason why despite having less sounds than most languages, the Japanese scripts Hiragana and Katakana utilize a combined number of almost 200 characters.
Here’s another thing to put you at ease: Japanese grammar is quite simple! Japanese sentence structure is quite loose and only requires you to affix certain particles (which are constant) to words in order to denote a word’s function in a sentence. And, verbs do not change with the gender or quantity, making it fairly easy for you to construct sentences and have simple conversations even if you’ve only started
learning Japanese.
About the biggest hurdle that most English speakers will face with Japanese is how it has 3 systems apart from casual speech to emphasize politeness and respect. The teineigo (polite language), sonkeigo (respectful language) and kenjgo (humble language) are each used when conversing with or even referring to people holding varying degrees of authority in relation to the speaker.
But with a little effort and a lot of repetition, you should be able to master this as well. Besides, most Japanese will be thrilled that you've even bothered to learn their language, so they will probably forgive you for mixing these up.
Learning to speak Japanese is a great way for you to understand not justan interesting language but a culture as well.
