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Thinking back to my first few years in the country, I remember vividly an interview I had with the dean of a foreign language institute in Osaka. The man was originally from Scotland, but had been in Japan for the better part of a decade. He was married to a Japanese woman, and spoke Japanese quite fluently. Yet despite his extended stay, he remained illiterate and still required even the simplest day-to-day documents to be translated for him by his staff. “How sad,” I thought, and how inconvenient. I could just imagine the difficulties of trying to navigate the train system, particularly outside the big cities, or of filling out the forms required to open a bank account, sign up for a mobile phone service, or rent an apartment.

In a way, his predicament was perfectly understandable. Of the tens of thousands of visitors to Japan, how many actually make the effort to tackle the written language? To be fair, the challenge can seem daunting: the hiragana syllabary, which represents the bottom rung of the ladder, consists of at least 46 basic symbols and score of derivatives. The same is true of katakana, and when we come to kanji, the ideograms that make up the core of the language, we are faced with memorizing about 2,000 characters and at least as many compounds if we want to reach even high-school level literacy.

Yet many do manage to attain this level of mastery, or even beyond. Each year, the national Japanese Language Proficiency Test, the benchmark for language learning, is held at centers throughout the country. Hundreds come to try for a certificate, sitting tests held completely in Japanese, even at the lowest levels. Some do it for the prestige and job opportunities, but I suspect that most just want the satisfaction of knowing that they have progressed beyond the fumbling, Japanese-English bar conversation stage, and are on their way to real independence and cultural immersion.

I did it. After six years or so of piecemeal study while teaching English I decided to buckle down get ready for the examinations. Taking one a year, I finished with the highest certificate after four years. Along the way, I turned my hobby into a vocation by finding a translation agency willing to hire me, despite my “intermediate” ability. Years later, I still earn a living as a translator, though now from outside Japan. My customer base is worldwide, and I am rarely without work, which arrives on a regular basis by email (have laptop will travel!)

As another example, a friend came to Japan with no knowledge of the language, and after a year’s immersion course was accepted at Kyoto University, one of the most prestigious in the country. Writing all his essays and exams in Japanese, he completed an undergraduate degree in psychology, and then moonlighting as a translator, went on to continue his education in graduate school - not bad for an ordinary kid from the Philippines!

Of course, there is no such thing as a leap into literacy - like everything else worth doing, written Japanese is best tackled in manageable stages. And stage I is mastery of hiragana.

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Hiragana