Advice on Learning Japanese? 285
Piroca asks: "During the last years, a huge amount of (modern) Japanese culture has invaded the Occident, mostly in the form of anime, video games and TV shows. Part of that content can't be understood completely due to the complexity and subtleties of the Japanese language. Due to that, it seems the interest on learning Japanese is steadily growing, specially for anime addicts. Much of the problem stems from the fact that Japanese is not an easy language, being classified as very difficult by most standards (of course, this depends on one's native language). I'm searching for courses and material that can help me to learn Japanese without attending to classes or hiring people to teach me. I've found things like Pimsleur and japanesepod101 but I wonder if other people in the Slashdot crowd have not passed through this process before and have useful hints to share."
ummm.... (Score:5, Funny)
How's abouts ya learn English first?
Re:ummm.... (Score:3, Funny)
<FreshBrew> HELL FUCKING YES
<kolby> you still in english?
( http://www.bash.org/?4602 [bash.org] )
Re:ummm.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:ummm.... (Score:2)
http://www.webster.com/dictionary/specially [webster.com]
But yes, "especially" would have been a better choice in this case.
So you want to lean Japanese? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So you want to lean Japanese? (Score:2)
Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously. The question is not how do you learn Japanese without taking classes, the question is how many classes and lectures and tutors and other resources do you need to get to a basic Japanese comprehension level. How many years until
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2)
I've decided to put a 'passive effort' on learning Japanese. That is, I'm not going to drive myself nuts trying to learn it, and whatever I pick up is whatever I pick up. I decided on this because I like learning stuff, enjoy language in general, and Japanese is both reasonably learnable IMHO (as opposed to, say, Arabic or Hindi) and is NOT Latin/Germanic. I don't ever expect to be proficient at it, though. As I said,
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2)
To which I say: good luck. If the poster is trying to do this without taking classes or tutoring, he'll never get there. To understand the "complexities and subtleties of the language" you need to be extremely dedicated and naturally talented, and this guy doesn't seem to have that yet.
If you're happy listening to other peopl
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2)
To be more than fair, English is far, far worse when it comes to obscure rules and exceptions to those rules.
And if for some reason I find myself in Japan with a food allergy, I'd make it a point to learn how to say "I'm allergic to [foodstuff]" - that kind of information strikes me as so
Arabic hard? (Score:2)
What makes you think that Arabic is difficult? I think it is difficult to read because they string the letters together... but I'd certainly not put learning to read that on the level with learn
Re:Arabic hard? (Score:2)
Arabic is not necessarily harder on a technical level. Fact is I wouldn't know since I barely ever see any - that makes it harder on a practical level. Again, your results may vary.
(*It is understood that the culture that is exported has little or no resemblence to the actual culture
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2)
WTH ?
Arabic and Hindi are both alphabetic languages. This means that letter represent sounds, which has two advantages: 1) there's only a few of them to learn and 2) if you see a word, you can actually pronounce it.
Compare with Japanese, where the gist of a text is usually composed of Kanjis, i.e. Chinese characters which represent things and ideas - so for each different idea you must learn a new character. You'll be thrill
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2)
I think Japanese is fun. At moment I'm studing Hiragana - because that's what you need to start learning Kanji.
Writting system is nuts - but well among all the languages I know - Russian, Belarusian, French, English & German - there is no language w/o some weirdness in it.
As to the
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:3, Insightful)
First, Kanji are hard, but not insanely hard. The basic jist is that each kanji has a pronunciation when used by itself, and a pronunciation when used in a group. Of course there are exceptions. The general meaning of an individual kanji stays about the same. Each kanji by itself is a word. You get new words by combining them. Wow. What's nice is that these new compound words are the japanese words you were learning anyways. To say it's
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2)
For the most part that's true, but there are two different series of numbers (native Japanese numbers: hito-tsu, huta-tsu ..., and Chinese-derived numbers: ichi, ni, ...). Luckily, the Japanese series of numbers is never really used above ten. Even a lot of Japanese people arean't always sure which counting suffix to use for which type of thing, and there are a couple generic suffixes that you can generally use when you're not sure (-tsu w
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2)
Oh noes!!1! it takes effort!!11!!
I took Japanese for 8 years (4 in HS, 4 in college), and I also studied in Japan for a semester. Am I completely fluent? No. Can I hold conversation with people beyond a 1st grade level? Most definately. While I was in Japan, I held conversations with people my age and above all the time. In my time studying Japanese, I learn
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:2)
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:5, Informative)
5 year olds don't know that much Kanji. When I stayed with a family in Japan, their 4 year old son could read hiragana and some katakana, and was just learning to write hiragana. He didn't know any kanji.
Also, kanji isn't as hard as you imply. Most kanji have common shapes in them that appear all over the place, and so you learn very quickly. The major radical even typically gives you some hint as to the meaning of the word. Know the kanji for "to say"? Great! If you see it as the left half of another kanji, chances are it has to do with communication (eg, to talk, to read, etc). And with as many radicals as are common between kanji, stroke order isn't that hard to remember, and sometiems helps in remembering the kanji. Besides, native speakers of Japanese don't always get the stroke order right - why should you be expected to do better?
Most kanji only have two or three readings you need to know. One is the kun-reading. The native Japanese reading, which is used when the kanji is a standalone word by itself of with okurigana (hiragana used for inflectional endings and the like). The other readings are the on-readings. Those borrowed from Chinese at some point, and are used when the kanji is part of a compound with other kanji. I find that knowing the kanji for a word helps me remember the word itself. Of course, there are exceptions. For example: "shinjiru" (to believe), where "shin" is the on-reading of the kanji and "jiru" is okurigana, or "maiasa" (every morning), where "mai" is the on-reading of the first kanji, and "asa" is the kun-reading of the second.
Yes, to some extent, it is typically more polite to not complete a thought, but that generally when the rest of the tought it obvious. Why spell it out if everybody already knows what you're going to say? If it's a case where it's not obvious what you're getting at, of course there's no problem with finishing the thought.
Where on earth do you get your facts from? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a second grade tutor in a Japanese Junior High School in Hokkaido, but I am originally from the UK. I am exactly the same as all the other Japanese teachers in the school except for the fact that I have a different nationality. All of my work, meetings, communications and everything I do daily is in Japanese (I'm the only non-Japanese staff in the school). 5 years ago, I barely knew a word. Now I work in an entirely Japanese environment.
Let's start with Kanji. I believe 5 year-olds in Japan average about 500 of these
Firstly, take it from me (as a professional educator), most 5 year olds do not know 500 kanji. In fact none do. I'd love to know where you got that figure from. Japanese children are taught approximately 80 kanji in 1st grade Elementary School (about 6 years old). At 5 years old they are still struggling to learn Kana.
You need to know A: the somewhat random symbol,
You really don't know anything about the language do you? Kanji are not "somewhat random symbol[s]". Common kanji generally contain 1 or more basic elements known in English as 'radicals' of which there are 214, which themselves have their own meanings. This also has the advantage of providing a basic method for sorting kanji (for example in a dictionary). If you don't believe me, take a closer look at a page of kanji and you'll start to notice that a lot of the characters contain similar looking parts.
B: the stroke order (Very important!)
Yes, there is a school of thought that says stroke order is important, and yes Japanese students are taught stroke order. But then there is also a popular TV quiz show in Japan where adult contestants have to identify the stroke order of (fairly common) kanji. At a rough guesstimate they get it wrong about 25% of the time. Stroke order is only VERY important in Japanese calligraphy, which is a different issue altogether.
How many years until you can chat with a kindergartener.
Study every day for an hour or more, and you'll be able to hold quite a decent little conversation with a kiddie within 6 months or so.
And forget reading newspapers
Oh, ok. Maybe I should cancel my daily delivery then.
don't be foolish and think one kanji equals one thing.
Go find yourself a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and look up the word "set". You'll find it has 126 different definitions. Japanese is hardly unique in having its characters take on more than one meaning.
Ok, how about saying hello? Thankfully, there is only about a dozen ways of doing this, depending upon if the person you're talking to is high above you, above you, at your level, below you, or really below you. Of course, there are variants for if there is a big age gap, or you're related, or you're a girl. Or any of a million other variants.
There are basically main 3 speaking forms (or levels of respect if you like) in Japanese, not "millions of variants". Teineigo, sonkeigo and kenjo~go, as well as a basic plain form. As a non-native speaker, you won't be expected to use anything more than teineigo. While it's certainly more complex than English, it's attainable with a little study. As for a dozen ways of saying hello, 99.99% of the time you'll be using just 3 different words (the ubiquitous ohayo~(gozaimasu), konnichiwa and konbanwa) to anyone you meet, regardless of rank or status. Just think about English for a moment - Hey, Hello, Hi, What's Up?, How's It Going?, Yo! well... I could go on, but you can quickly see just how many different greeting forms we have, without even taking into account whether we're being polite or not.
You also have to accept the fact that you will never speak well, you will never read a newspaper correctly
That would be why I meet numerous foreigners every week who speak excellent Japanese then. Making a blanket statement like "y
Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score:3, Informative)
Self-intro: 4 semesters Japanese study in college, 10 weeks in Japan in 2002, various periods of self study. Getting ready to leave next week for a year-long trip to Japan.
As others have said, the parent is exaggerating, but this is a common response to Japanese. The language requires you to almost rewrite all of the things you've come to expect in English or another Western language.
Let's start with Kanji. I believe 5 year-olds in Japan average about 500 of these, and the number just gets higher fro
Turning japanese? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Turning japanese? (Score:2)
Seriously, full immersion is really the only way to get a true mastery of a language.
Barring that, the very next best thing is to get a Japanese girlfriend (one who was born and raised there and came here after the age of 12 or so) and get her to tell you as much as possible. (This was advice given to me by a couple of retired NSA guys about learning Korean, though it works for any langu
Re:Turning japanese? (Score:2)
Wow, Slashdot really is a distinct culture.
Re:Turning japanese? (Score:4, Funny)
I tried that approach, but my wife was opposed to it.
Re:Turning japanese? (Score:2)
Do not... (Score:5, Informative)
The best way to learn is to take formal classes, preferrably as intense as possible. It helps if you can memorize the two basic character sets first, as any good class will start with rote memorization of those and drop romaji as quickly as possible. Beware the teacher that doesn't push or task you, as you can spend years in classes and learn nothing. Also, SPEAK. Speaking helps master the language faster than anything else and if you don't, oddly enough, even if you go to Japan no one will push you to speak. I learned first hand that they don't expect you to speak, and as such there's no push (or need) to do so unless you force yourself.
As for your interest I share many myself, however:
Anime - good for practicing listening, although technical/fantasy jargon will interfere. Live action shows are better, since they speak more naturally in those and are more difficult to understand, speech wise. Beware slang. Also, most shows drop keigo (polite speech,) which is ESSENTIAL to learn.
Games - good for reading, but suffers from the same problems as above.
Novels are better since you're forced to memorize kanji to move faster. Focus on things with furigana so you can get a handle on the readings of kanji and words, as they'll show them once for a kanji/word every few pages, which lets you pick it up faster. Also, consider browsing Amazon Japan for books on verbs and particles, since those will be the first problematic things you encounter, among amassing a vocabulary and kanji literacy.
And to promote a site that is -not- mine but is nonetheless excellent, http://www.nihongoresources.com/ [nihongoresources.com] -- be gentle on the site, but it's a great help.
Re:Do not... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if your primary reason to learn it _is_ games and anime?
Also - I find it is quite probably a good idea to pump tons of conversations (by native speakers of course) through your brain _before_ you start learning any foreign language. Reasoning - you will have quite certain idea how that language _should_ sound and in case of Japanese things like tonal stress will come very naturally. Otherwise you will obtain your own very wrong ideas about rhythms and sounds (probably through transliterating the words to your native tongue). Then you will need to relearn everything not even from zero level but from negative or otherwise your language "knowledge" will be wasted. And relearning is hard. I speak from my experience with English (not my native language). So in short - I think "parroting" the sound of Japanese is a good idea (even from anime as it is the most available source of Japanese).
Re:Do not... (Score:2)
While they could express themselves in English, would that be someone that you'd want to talk to?
Re:Do not... (Score:2)
Re:Do not... (Score:2)
Re:Do not... (Score:3, Insightful)
When you don't know a language, you don't know what's exaggerated and what isn't. So you don't know how to listen to any recorded conversations and separate the wheat from the chaff. Keep with questionable sources, and you soon speak very weird. You need to get *good input* from quality sources. JapanesePod is ok to start with, but anime is right out.
Re:Do not... (Score:2)
The Rosetta Stone (Score:3, Interesting)
it's fantastic.
Pimsleur and other courses of the like teach you through memorization; TRS uses photographs and the language, without ever translating anything. You have to match up each photo with the words given to you, and the connection is something you actually learn, not just memorize. verstehen Sie?
Re:The Rosetta Stone (Score:2)
Re:The Rosetta Stone (Score:2)
I got a demo of that on a cover CD, way back in about '96 or so. It was bloody amazing. If there's a Japanese version to be had, count me the hell in, because even that demo really helped me get started with high-school German way back when...
Re:The Rosetta Stone (Score:2)
Actually, you've remembered something good, that there's a second person plural in German. But you failed to realize that the formal personal pronoun is used for both single and plural forms.
Also, the correct congution of "verstehen" for "ihr" is "versteht" so "Versteht ihr?". It's argued whether one should be formal or not with people you meet over the internet, the tendency is to be quite informal ov
Re: German plural address (Score:2)
But we all digress: This article is looking for hints on learning Japanes
Re:The Rosetta Stone (Score:2)
The Turkish version of The Rosetta Stone worked well for me, and English is not derived from Turkish. It's as easy as beer, icky, ooch, dirt, besh, though they spell it diffferently. The only cognate I found was the word for man is Adam.
Here is the the Japanese version [rosettastone.com]. There's a link near the bottom of that page to the free onli
Japanese is not difficult! (Score:5, Informative)
At least from a speaking and listening point of view, which is what you want if you are going to just watch anime. Most of the verbs and nouns are regular, the grammar is not often too complex, pronounciation is straightforward on the whole, etc. It only gets hard when you need to master reading and writing, or when you need to understand the cultural issues behind the language, which is not a thing a course is going to teach you very well.
I'm sure this thread will get lots of references to things like Tae Kim's grammar guide or Heisig's book, both of which have as many rabid fans as an average Linux distribution, although I personally don't rate either very highly.
My chosen route to polish my Japanese skills is my blog, which in fact has a related entry about why people learn Japanese [whatjapanthinks.com], although "To understand comics and cartoons" was not one of the reasons given.
Agree (Score:2)
There are, however, three pitfalls:
1. Kanji. Yes, you do need to learn them. It's time-consuming, but necessary. One hurdle with learning Japanese is that you can't really practice your language through reading like with many other languages since you need the kanji to do so. SO picking them up will enable you to
A few things... (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I'm not totally ripping on Anime. Watch it if you want to, but mix it up with some live action Japanese films (Ringu is one of my favorites).
2) If you're into video games, I suggest downloading an Emulator and some ROMs of old Japanese video games. Ones that have a decent deal of text (SNES era RPGs), but not ones that require to much reading. Also, pick games that you may be somewhat familiar with. I'm a big Front Mission 3 fan, so I got the Japanese SNES (or should I say Super Famicom) ROM of the original. Fun times!
3) Get a good dictionary. You'll need it for everything.
4) Also, get a Grammar guide. Japanese Grammar is crazy compared to English, and is, IMHO, comparable to some programming languages.
Well, formal Japanese grammar may be difficult. Casual Japanese is more forgiving when it comes to particle usage.
Othe rthen that, all I can recommend is taking some actual Japanese classes. It's a hard language to learn, but not impossible. It will take a great deal of time before you get any good at it, but after 2 years of studying it myself... I'm still learning, but I have no regrets!
Re:A few things... (Score:2)
Good advice from an anonymous coward, but hey, I really must object to the reasoning behind #4. If Japanese grammar were comparable to some programming languages in complexity then it must be very easy indeed. I used to learn how to program in one language and write nontrivial programs in many of them in a matter of weeks. I learned Java in less than a week. Scheme took a little longer, maybe a month, but at the end of it I was writing a simple expert system of sorts, and after that, Common Lisp, Haskel
On Abandoning the Kanji (Score:2)
I know what you mean, however there are some children's storybooks I have that make minimal use of kanji, roughly less than a dozen in each book, all with furigana, and they are not hard at all. As a parallel example, the Koreans have actually managed to almost completely do away with Hanja, and now nearly everything they write is in the Hangul syllabary. I find it hard to believe that there are truly insurmountable technical difficulties for the Japanese to do something similar and abandon Kanji in favor
Re:On Abandoning the Kanji (Score:2)
Well, there is only one space character in English. There are more than 2000 kanji. If that's the main reason for their existence, I believe anyone would consider that crazy. There are certainly many trivial and far easier ways of breaking up text into something more intelligible than peppering the text with thousands of distinct characters that are a pain to study and learn. If you want to argue that the kanji are useful to distinguish the many homonyms of Japanese, I believe that it has been cogently ar [pinyin.info]
Re:On Abandoning the Kanji (Score:2)
Re:On Abandoning the Kanji (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A few things... (Score:2)
Not to defend either side of this argument, but what negative effects would you expect from learning English from the Simpsons and Family Guy?
Perhaps they'd use "d'Oh" a bit more than the average native E
Re:A few things... (Score:2)
Homer, for one, frequently mauls the English language horribly. Of course that's the joke - the guy's a buffoon - but if you're learning English from Homer you're not going to know that. You're going to end up with an embiggened vocabulary full of perfectly cromulent words.
Re:A few things... (Score:2)
1) Anime is not a good place to learn Japanese. A useful anecdote for this would be to imagine a Japanese person learning English from episodes of Simpsons and Family Guy. While such thoughts are no doubt filled with hillarity, they do prove just how silly Anime-bin Japanese would seem to native speakers...
I disagree. As far as English is concerned, at least... Amerikans and Britons learn English as their native language, but for the rest of the world it's a learned, second language. Here in Europe, mos
Konnichiwa - watashi no adobaisu (Score:5, Informative)
From personal experience (been studying Nihongo for over six years; and I'm far from fluent):
Yokoso! Welcome to the club. Japanese is a very interesting language. It is much more challenging than the Romance languages (it took me only a year to develop near-fluent Spanish skills, in comparison). However, you will gain access to another culture and will allow you to translate all of that anime. I got interested in Japanese through Pokemon, by the way.
Re:Konnichiwa - watashi no adobaisu (Score:2)
JLPT 4 - Basic Japanese
JLPT 3 - Competency
JLPT 2 - Proficiency
JLPT 1 - Fluency
Re:Konnichiwa - watashi no adobaisu (Score:2)
But what is true is that there exist kanji in the 1,945 Joyo Kanji that your average Japanese person cannot write on command.
Re:Konnichiwa - watashi no adobaisu (Score:2)
Yeah, I just noticed that after posting. I know better. Thanks.
Misconceptions (Score:2)
Regardless of which, I belive the "best" way to learn japanese is figure out what you want to do with it. If you simple want to watch anime and understand, then listen to things like the pimsluers audio books, etc. Anything to help you get the very basics down, even "tourist" leasons work. Once you unders
Anime style... (Score:2)
Re:Anime style... (Score:2)
Resources I use (Score:2, Informative)
Kanji Gold http://web.uvic.ca/kanji-gold/ [web.uvic.ca]
Pera Pera Penguin http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/columns/0002/ [yomiuri.co.jp]
Kanji Trainer Penpen http://www.coolest.com/penpen/ [coolest.com]
You could always ask Homer Simpson! (Score:2)
[[D'oh]]
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Easy (Score:2)
More seriously...
I got hold of a Taiwanese boxset of DBZ. Got into the habit of pausing it just as the Japanese episode title came up, and before the subtitle translating it did. Then try to read out the title (thank Kami-sama for furigana!) and then hit play and see what the voiceover guy says.
By the time the Cell Games came round, I was gett
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Easy (Score:2)
Rosetta Stone (Score:2)
It's quite effective at forcing you to think in another language - after a short while of trying the french course, I found that I was thinking in that lauguage which I believe is the most natural way to learn. For example, parts of the courses work by giving you 4 pictures of things to choose from and you have to pick based on what word you hear - there's no handholding if you don't want it. The later courses comb
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:2)
Its like learning through immersion. Sure there is a text book in english but you dont even have to look at it. Just start it up and go, there is no english in the app itself translating what was just said so it forces you to think in japanese so to speak. If you really get stuck you can always take a peek at the english listing to see what the hell they are talking about, but when you figure it out in your head its much more effective.. i
Good luck - it's a fun language to learn (Score:2)
If that isn't possible (immersion) I have a few specific suggestions
Focus more on learning the kana, nouns, verbs, and adverbs.
Focus less on honorific and polite forms. These will come in time and you need an understanding of Japanese culture and social contexts to make effective use of them anyways. Native Japanese do not exp
why not take a class? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know you said "without attending to classes", but I'd suggest you reconsider. I'm taking a class at the local community college and finding it well worth the time and money. (A class at a community or commuter college may be much better suited to the part-time student - the intro Japanese class at UMCP [umd.edu] is six credit hours, which would be difficult to fit into my schedule, while the one I'm taking [aacc.edu] is only three.)
I was motivated to finally take a class after my second trip to Japan last fall. After meetin
Slime Forest (Score:2, Informative)
Japanese for Programmers? (Partial Threadjack) (Score:2)
I was going to submit an Ask Slashdot myself, but from a different perspective. I'm a professional software engineer. I'm not one of those simpletons with a ju-co degree writing Windows logon scripts because they heard there was good money. No, I get up in the morning and write RSX-11M device drivers just to wake up. I've learned maybe 30 or 40 languages, from various assemblies to Haskell. I became fluent in Spanish in four years. Languages are easy, and many /. readers are in the same predicament.
Re:Japanese for Programmers? (Partial Threadjack) (Score:2)
Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you male, or female? (Score:2, Informative)
Can anyone verify this?
Re:Are you male, or female? (Score:2, Informative)
The right question (Score:2)
I know people
It's not hard, but it's not possible either. (Score:2, Interesting)
advice (Score:5, Interesting)
At the same time, don't let Japanese scare you. The best asset for learning a language is confidence. If you don't have any confidence, you won't be able to communicate or learn any language.
1) If you can, take a course at your University. This is the best way to start learning. If you're lucky, you'll get a rigorous course. If you're unlucky, you'll get a very easy course that uses romaji. The key to learning the language is to push yourself. I learned at University of Chicago, which has one of the best (and most difficult) Japanese programs (I did terribly
2) Learn Kana right away. You will be sorry if reading kana doesn't come as second nature to you after a year. Make sure you begin at least studying Kanji, too. The sooner you start learning Kanji, the less scary it will be later. (check out the book "Kanji and Kana"!)
3) Be prepared for a long road. You should ideally spend at least 2 years studying the language before you can even think about being "fluent." Then, if you want to be able to speak the language, you should spend a good amount of time in Japan. Maybe you'll learn faster (some people have a natural ability for picking up languages), but you might learn more slowly, too. If you have the time and resources, there are many schools in Japan where that you can study Japanese for anywhere from 4 weeks to a year.
4) a) If you want to learn Japanese because of anime, don't worry about it. Getting interested in learning a language just because you enjoy something that country produces is no worse than getting interested because you want to make money, or something. Just make sure you realize there are other interesting things about Japan. Get involved in really learning about the whole culture. I find talking with Japanese people is much more revealing than reading about it somewhere.
b) If you want to read manga or watch anime, first off, realize that ou need a very strong Japanese base to understand them in the first place. There's a lot of stuff you're just not going to get unless you really have a strong background in Japanese. It'll probably be a year or two (at least it was for me) before you'll actually be able to use the simplest anime or manga for practice. But if you do use it to study, don't worry about ruining your skills somehow. Major universities use Miyazaki films to teach courses. Just be aware that they do use some words or phrases that will get you laughed at in everyday conversation. For example, you may end up sounding either like a little girl or a stupid high school kid.
So other than that, the most important advice is of course, Practice, Practice, Practice. If you do go it on your own, I wish you best of luck, and I warn you that you will need much self-motivation to get anywhere, because it will take a lot of time.
Learning a Language (Score:2)
Now, I'm definitely not fluent in German, but I'm getting better and better by simply talking to Germans and going to class and conversing in the language as much as possible. Watching foreign tv shows and reading foreign webs
DS (Score:2)
It ain't so hard / it's very hard (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a book which I unfortunately do not have with me now, Tuttle Press I think, possibly called Basic Japanese Grammar. Looking around the Amazon web site, I found a book, ISBN 0804819408, which looks close, but I won't swear it to be what I have at home. If you respond to this and leave a request, I can look it up this weekend and post it. It is not perfect, but it is an excellent cheat sheet. It is almost like a tech sheet for hardware, a basic summary of grammar rules with simple explanations of how to use them, when, and why.
OK, the good. Japanese grammer is incredibly regular, almost mathematical. I believe there are only three irregular verbs in the entire language, and then only in how they form their root for further conjugation. The verb you find in the dictionary is the familiar present tense. There is no distinction between singular or plural, first second or third person. Purists will cringe, but the dictionary form is perfectly acceptable for starters. Natives will be so surprised that you are even making an attempt at their language that the lack of politeness will not matter a whit.
I believe that anyone wanting to get along as a tourist can learn real Japanese, not pidgin, in a week of nightly study with this book. You will have crap pronunciation and almost no vocabulary, but you will be able to speak complete sentences, slowly.
I recommend this as the initial course, a week, a month, not to master it, but to see if you can grok it. The grammer may be very regular, but it is different, and you will have to think differently to make any headway. If you persist in thinking in your native language patterns, you will make no headway and had best give it up. This book will give you an excellent background in seeing if you can rewarp your mindset. You will not learn any useful reading or writing. Forget those for now. The purpose here is to introduce you to the thought patterns behind Japanese. Nothing else matters at first. If you can't get your brain into the Japanese mode, there is no point going any further.
If you want to continue, take college courses, community college courses, private school courses, or whatever you can. Here you will learn reading and writing, complete grammar including politeness levels, etc.
Reading and writing is both easy and hard. There is a pattern to the kanji, and there are only (I think) 212 basic kanji. All other kanji are built from those, and dictionaries are organized around them also. This will help considerably in memorizing them and in possibly (possibly!) understanding the meaning of kanji you have never seen before. Pronouncing kanji is another matter. There is almost no clue in the characters themselves as to their pronunciation. Here you rely on dictionaries and rote memorization.
I got to the point of around 500 kanji before I stopped trying to learn more. I was only going to class twice a week, it took me an hour to read a single page in a book (including waga hai wa neko de aru for you who snicker
On the other hand, once you get into the pattern of kanji, you can draw them in your hand for natives, and you can make a lot more sense of maps and bus signs. Traveling is a lot easier when you can memorize kanji long enough to find
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Learning Japanese (Score:3, Insightful)
speaking to japanese is much like speaking to english people. they're polite. therefore they avoid touchy subjects. but once you've built trust, they'll speak about things like anyone else.
learning japanese is anything BUT useless, for several reasons:
a) you learn how to communicate with people who communicate differently from what you're used to. you'll learn a lot about people that way. people skills are useless... since when?
b) you learn a language that works differently from
Japanese is not hard - access is difficult (Score:2, Informative)
Japanese is not intrisically hard. The problem is - it is very difficult to come across situations where japanese is required to do something - or at least very useful.
First, lear katakana and hiragana by yourself (just copy it from somewhere on the internet) spend a week or two memorizing it, and using it to write all sort of stupid stuff: your name, your your favorite anime char's name
Learning Japanese (Score:2, Informative)
Before we begin, I'd like to address the "hard language" meme. This depends on your definition of a "hard language", so YMMV. Unlike German, French, or other western languages that English is related to, you won't get any "freebies" in Japanese. In German, "house" is haus, "mouse" is maus, "brown" is braun, etc. There's a lot of words that are either near-identica
My advice.... (Score:2)
Find a good school and use flashcards (Score:2)
In my case, London has an excellent school called Alpha Language Institute [alpha.ac.jp]. Alpha is an amazingly social school. I'd take 4 hours a week and a good mix of students and teachers would head out to the pub after the lessons. This gave us even more chance to talk about culture and speak in mixed Japanese/English. They'd also organize parties every few months for even more Japanese immersion. After I left London, I couldn't
I'm doing the same thing!! (Score:2)
First, learn hiragana and katakana. You have to do this. Without these you are basically illerate, no matter how well your speaking or kanji-reading skills are. Depending on romajii will set you back hard. I didn't bother really learning these for a while. What a waste of time before that. I'm more of a visual learner, so being able to see the language in it's native form is huge.
T
Re: (Score:2)
Japanese difficult? (Score:2)
I speak some japanese. I've never really been fluent, but I can easily get around tokyo, talk to people, conduct simple business transactions, ask for and undestand directions, etc. From a speaking standpoint, japanese is not really that difficult. For example, there's only one verb conjugation rule and almost all the verbs follow it. Japanese only has a few irregular verbs. Compare that to english which has three conjugation rules and 273 irregular
Lies about learning Japanese (Score:2)
After studying it for 4 years (and counting), I've learned the following are lies people tell about the language. Some people here had some good advice, including this post [slashdot.org]
Japanese is Hard. No, it isn't. It's just different from your everyday life. People learn to speak and listen to the language without writing it and without classes in Japan. Most famous examples are the Iranians in the Tokyo area who teach each other Japanese and they get quite good.
Never use anime or manga. The better advic
Re:typing (Score:5, Informative)
And no, I can't read Japanese or understand at all, but it's still fun to play with the Japanese IME tool.
Re:typing (Score:2)
Re:typing (Score:2)
The total number of Kanji in wide use for Japanese is something closer to 2500 rather than 7000 (even Chinese only regularly uses some 3000 or so), and it appears to be necessary to know something like 1800 to 2000 characters to be able to read a typical Japanese newspaper like the Nihon Keizai Shimbun [nikkei.net]. The Japanese also make use of syllabaries known as kana, of which there are only some 40 characters, which easily fit on a normal keyboard. The way most Japanese keyboards work is they type a word in kana,
Characers (Score:4, Informative)
So there is a standard set of characters defined today - about 2200 general Kanji and another 2-300 that are used only in names. These are the ones learned in school, and I believe that "state-supported" texts, like official documents, signs, textbooks and so on (and perhaps newspapers too?) are limited to this set only.
But then there are a lot of subject-specific characters in use, especially in academia. Someone said that the typical well-educated Japanese will know around 3-5000 characters total. On the other hand, about 800 characters are considered the minimum for literacy, and with the first 1100 - learned by sixth grade - you're going to be able to parse most general texts (you may not recognize everything, but you'll have enough context to figure out the meaning).
Characters (Score:2)
Of course, this isn't that relevant to LEARNING the language. I highly recommend finding a way to get to Japan for a while, it's by far the best way to learn a foreign language. Of course, you can learn to read without traveling or being around native speakers, just with a book like Heisig's 'Remembering the K
Re:typing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:typing (Score:2)
- The space bar is super-tiny, leading me to switch to Japanese input mode toof.
- The " is where @ was
- The ' is where & was
- The & is where ^ was
- The ( and ) are both shifted over one key
- The * is where the " was
- The : is where the ' was
- The + is where the : was
- The ~ is where the + was
- The ^ is where the = was
- The = is where the _ was
- The _ is to the RIGHT of the ?
- The \ is the shift of the _
- There is a \ to the
Re:typing (Score:5, Informative)
Interestingly, the typists still had to stop and manually write in about every 10th character.
Gotta give them points for tenacity, if nothing else.
Re:Don't rely on imported J-pop culture (Score:2)
Dude, this is Slashdot. We aren't even able to get Wapanese girlfriends.
BTW, I don't think "Will you go out with me so you can teach me a new language?" will work as a good pick-up line. Not that I would know, since, again, I'm a Slashdotter.
Re:General Language Advice (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm bilingual. I speak English, and French. Why? Because I have spent my entire life in Quebec, a province in which the primary language is French. I've taken innumerable French courses (since they're mandatory by law), and graduated from "french immersion" schools (This is where the government forces English speakers to take things like geography and history in French).
Can I speak French? Yes. Can I understand it? Yes. Can I read it? Yes. Can I write it? Horrible grammar, but yes. Am I good at it? Hell no! After having had French education since kindergarten, and being immersed in a French culture my entire life, I am still nowhere near fluent. People talk about taking a few years to become fluent. Now, maybe I'm just not good at learning languages, but my 20 years says that's unlikely.
I'm sure there are mitigating factors. There are differences between living in a French province, but an English community (where most of my friends speak English), and living in Japan where you have NOTHING but Japanese to communicate in. For me, French is just something that I am exposed to daily, not something that I need to use on a daily basis. My verb conjugation in French is still guesswork. Thank goodness so many verb endings in French are pronounced the same, so that I can speak French much better than I write it!
So what am I trying to say? Well, immerse yourself and take lessons all you want, chances are the best you can hope for even after decades is merely to be able to communicate with relative ease. Forget about fluency.
I'll be honest, I'm interested in learning Japanese as a third language. But what has stopped me so far is a nagging voice in my head that says "If you've spent your entire life taking French courses and living in a French culture and still suck at it, what makes you think you can ever learn Japanese, idiot?".
Maybe I just suck at learning other languages.