Find a Japanese tutor near me in Birmingham

You are fascinated by Japanese culture? Draw to the aesthetic and elegance of Japanese calligraphy? Or you want to travel to Japan? You may want to take some Japanese language classes just to be able to comfortably get around whilst you’re there.

Learning Japanese may seem as hard as climbing Mount Fuji with a sprained ankle, at first glance. However, even for English native speakers, Japanese is actually easier to approach that you may think, some even say it’s easier than learning Mandarin.

Near the Selfridges Building, The Crown Inn or the Ikon Gallery, it is entirely possible to learn how to speak Japanese. 

For those living in Brum, looking forward to going to the country of the rising sun, here is how to learn the Japanese language in your city.

Japanese: An Island’s Language But A Major Player On The World’s Stage

Unlike English, spoken in many countries, from Canada to New Zealand and Scotland to South Africa, Japanese is only commonly spoken in Japan.

On the Japanese Islands, roughly 127 million natives speak Japanese - Nihongo 日

本語- as their first language. However, the Japanese’s influence does stops to Hokkaido or Okinawa. Several million Japanese citizens live abroad and tens of millions of Japanese tourists visit countries all over the world every year.

Japanese expatriates are often 3rd of 4th generation immigrants following successive waves of emigration during the 19th and 20th centuries. Faced with economic, political and social turmoil, many Japanese decided to leave their insular home country. Many of them chose Brasil as their destination and recent census estimated that around 1.5 million Japanese relocated in the South American country. Called nissei - these Brasilian-Japanese, still speak Japanese as their first language.

Japanese emigration waves started under the Meiji period, during the 1870s: when Japan open its doors to international traders after hundreds of years of isolation, many Japanese saw an opportunity to leave the country that at the time was facing social tensions due to increased population and the limited cultivated land available in Japan.

The US - one of the earliest choice for Japanese emigrants - stopped accepting new Japanese citizens which turned their attention to Brazil around the 1910s.

Today, the Japanese diaspora counts more than 3 million people in many countries: Brazil, Peru, the US, Chine, Australia, Canada, Thailand, Germany, France, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan.

Speaking English and Japanese can then be a huge plus. Japan is also a highly developed country with one of the highest Human Development Index in the world.

It is the third biggest economy in the world after the US and China and is a member of many international organisations, the UN, the World Trade Organisation, G8, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Plus Three.

An economic and political integration that should motivate you to study Japanese, perfect your language skills and increase your Japanese vocabulary.

A Short History of The Japanese Community In The UK

The first Japanese students in the United Kingdom arrived in the nineteenth century, sent to study at University College London by the Chōshū and Satsuma domains, then the Bakufu (Shogunate). Later many studied at Cambridge University and a smaller number at Oxford University until the end of the Meiji era. The reason for sending them was to catch up with the West by modernizing Japan. Since the 1980s, Japanese students in the United Kingdom have become common thanks to cheaper air travel.

Settlement first began in the late 19th century with the arrival of a few Japanese professionals, students and their servants. At least 264 citizens of Japan lived in Britain in 1884, the majority of whom identifying as officials and scholars. Employment broadened in the early 1900s with the growth of the Japanese community, which exceeded 500 people by the close of the first decade of the 20th century.

As tensions heightened between Japan and the United Kingdom in the buildup to World War II, some Japanese left their home country to settle in Britain while many more repatriated to Japan. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and assault on Hong Kong in December 1941, 114 Japanese men including expatriate businessmen and merchant seamen were placed in internment camps on the Isle of Man.

In the post-war period, new waves of migration rose in the 1960s, mainly for business and economic purposes. In recent decades this number has grown; including immigrants, students, and businessmen. Parts of the United Kingdom, in particular, London, have significant Japanese populations, such as Golders Green and East Finchley in North London. In 2014 the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated that there were 67,258 Japanese nationals resident in the United Kingdom. For British citizens of Japanese ancestry, unlike other Nikkei communities elsewhere in the world, these Britons do not conventionally parse their communities in generational terms as Issei, Nisei, or Sansei.

Why Taking Japanese Classes?

To learn how to speak Japanese will require focus. Learning a new language brings up new abilities. The more you learn the easiest it gets. Learning how to speak Japanese will grant you the satisfaction of mastering a complicated language.

Learning how to speak Japanese will also broaden your horizon by learning more about a different culture: Japanese food, Japanese History, …

Learning Japanese will also require that you study the Japanese writing system: hiragana, katakana, kanji and romanji and its grammatical architecture. That is when our Superporf tutors will be very helpful.

Learning Japanese can be a door opening skill and get you better career opportunities.

You could learn Japanese and relocate your professional career to Japan, become an English teacher for Japanese expats in the UK, start freelancing as a Japanese-English translator. 

The Japanese Language: Japanese Alphabet and Grammar

In the Japanese language, the most difficult aspect of it is learning the Japanese alphabet. One must learn a lot of kanjis by heart. According to linguists, there are more than 50,000 kanjis, however, to be fluent, mastering only 2000 would be sufficient to be fluent in Japanese.

Kanjis are Chinese characters used since Antiquity to describe the roots of Japanese words. Hiraganas, all 47 of them, are a Japanese syllabary, used to transcribe syllables. These can represent a single vowel (a, e, i, o, u) or a consonant followed by a vowel (ka, ki, ku, ko, ke, ta, chi, tsu, fu, ro, ri, etc…). 

Eventually, you will also have to learn 47 katakanas, used to transcribe foreign words, names, scientific idioms as well as Japanese onomatopoeia words.

These are simplified sinograms first used during the Heian period (8th to 12th century) to teach Japanese to those who did not master Mandarin Chinese. These results from Buddhists monks practice of writing down every single Chinese character for which they did not know the pronunciation. 

The last thing you will need to learn is how to pronounciate Japanese and building sentences. Japanese is not the easiest language to enunciate.  It is not a tonal language like Chinese and it shares many phonemes with Latin languages such as French. 

Note that Japanese verbs do not conjugate according to gender and numbers. Japanese is a SOV language - Subject Object Verb. 

Our Private Japanese Tutors In Birmingham

There are only 2 Superprof tutors based in Birmingham but the good news is there are hundreds more on our platform that offer online tutoring for prices ranging from £10 to £30 an hour.

Our UK based teachers will be able to teach you Japanese through Skype or FaceTime. No commute, easier and more flexible scheduling, the perfect combo to learn Japanese easily.

Those tutors will be able to: 

• Teach you Japanese calligraphy
• Teach you Japanese business etiquette
• Teach you Japanese conversational skills
• Prepare you for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test
• Teach you hiragana, katakana, kanji and everything related to the Japanese writing system

To choose your tutor simply compare all the profiles, their experience, their fees and diplomas.  With regular work and constant focus you should be able to speak Japanese in a matter of weeks.