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Advice on Learning Japanese?
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."
How do people type on a computer with Japanese? The language has 7000+ characters... that has to be one large keyboard
Advices on Learning Japanese?
How's abouts ya learn English first?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Usually, the word "advice" is not used in plural when it is used to mean "counsel", "a proposal for a course of action", or "an opinion on what should be done".
I can't understand a Japanese Professor where I work either - and he asks questions about his mac. Ek.
This is definitely my reccomended first reading. Beware ;-)
In the inmortal words of Dave Barry, the best way to learn japanese is to be born japanese and raised by japanese parents in Japan.
No sig
Do not try to learn anything from games or anime. You -will- pick up bad habits if you try and learn that way that will be both hard to drop and impede your progress.
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/ -- be gentle on the site, but it's a great help.
The Rosetta Stone. Language learning software that is based on the way you learn a language naturally. I've used it for a couple of months to teach myself German,
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?
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, although "To understand comics and cartoons" was not one of the reasons given.
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...
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!
Best way? Live in Japan. I'll leave the details up to you.
Gambatte!
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.
I think the first step to learning Japanese is to get rid of the misconceptions. Japanese is really not as hard as people make it out to be, at least the verbal portion. Yes, the writing is difficult.
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 understand the basic grammer (which I personally belive is relativly easy), you can get vocab books.
If you don't worry about the written language, you should be ok. And of course once you can speak it, you can learn to read it.
I took several simesters of Nihongo about 6 years ago. Didn't follow it much after that, though I wanted to. Recently I picked up the Primslers from Audible.com and found it reasonably good - especially if you know nothing about the language.
snowulf.com
Learn Japanese? This guy reccommends against it.
When you speak Japanese, make sure your English subtitles mean something entirely different.
I recently have tried to learn Japanese, and can pass on a few tips.
The first thing I would recommend trying to learn is the written language. Of this there are three forms: Hiragana ('Traditional Japanese'), Katakana (For borrowed and modern words), and Kanji (The advanced characters). I worked on this by just trying to learn five characters a day, and then constantly repeating them until the whole set was memorized. A good reference, at least for the hiragana, is http://www.thejapanesepage.com/, which has decent exercises to remember everything.
After learning at least the hiragana and katakana, you can start working on grammar and vocabulary. Two books I used for grammar were 'Japanese Step by Step' by Gene Nishi and 'Easy Japanese' by Jack Seward, both of which I recommend. I also used the Rosetta Stone software for a little bit, although found it a bit difficult. All it does is show you a picture and has you say a phrase associated to what's going on in the picture with little explanation as to what is being said.
The one thing I truly wish I had was a tutor to check myself against instead of flying blind. At times, I feel like if I were to go to Japan and try out what I've learned, I'd end up like that guy in the Monty Python skit saying the dirty phrases instead of the true language.
Most importantly, if you're really serious about learning Japanese, stick with it! Make your learning a fun experience!
Steve-
I've been taking japanese here at college for almost 2 years, and having had some immersion thanks to anime, I've been used to the way it sounds for a while. Seriously, I find it easier than french, like alot easier, when learned at a slow but steady pace. It's gonna take a while for me to learn all those kanji, but at least I don't feel like everything is being crammed down my throat at an impossible-to-digest rate. One option is to look at the Genki textbook series, I found a good price earlier on thejapanshop.com, and you can get the texbook, workbook, associated audio CDs, and an answer book which has answers for the textbook and workbook exercises for both Genki 1 and Genki 2. This seems like a reasonable plan for self study, and it's not priced anywhere near that of normal texbooks. Many people seem to like the genki series (although we use Nakama for our classes here).
As a general quick reference, I've been using nihongoresources.com as kind of a quick reference dictionary, although there are a few little language guides on the site too. Once you're used to it though, and can find little mental things to relate words to, it's really not too bad. Most conjugations do follow patterns, with not many exceptions to the ones I've seen. Word order is rather flexible, so generally as long as the verb is last everything is ok. Casual speech gets more complicated, and it'll probably be like another year before I'll ever be able to translate japanese song lyrics, but getting started in japanese really isn't too bad. Posting as AC because I haven't logged in for like a year. Ganbatteyo!
What's peoples obsession with learning Japanese? The only two reasons people learn Japanese is to either watch their bootleg anime, or actually move to Japan (and supposedly watch more anime, I dunno). These are the same people who use Japanese suffixes (chan, san, etc.) in an english conversation, making themselves sound like a dumbass. Get a new obsession.
JWPce http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/jwpce.html
Kanji Gold http://web.uvic.ca/kanji-gold/
Pera Pera Penguin http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/columns/0002/
Kanji Trainer Penpen http://www.coolest.com/penpen/
Don't expect to learn too quickly, Unless you have an amazing aptitude you'll need to study pretty hard for several years before you can even get the gist of most anime. Is that going to be worth it to watch Naruto without the subtitles? (And still miss most of the subtext). And that's taking lessons several times a week plus hours of homework, study, and memorization.
Spend time learning the culture as well as the language.
I'd start with the "Minna No Nihongo" books and stay way from the "For Busy People" books since they don't provide near as much depth, usage, or have as good of exercises. The "Minna No Nihongo" books also let you focus your attention as much as you want with optional listening CD's and Kanji exercise books that go with the lessons.
And of course, go to Japan and go somewhere outside of Tokyo/Kyoto and learn to sink or swim.
I agree with what other posters have said about learning Anime Japanese because it's pretty much socially unacceptable. See if you can rent or download Japanese drama's to listen to, since they have more common speech.
"Shimatta-baka-ni!"
[[D'oh]]
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Get Dragonball Z on DVD. Start watching in Japanese with English subtitles. About half-way through the battle with Freeza (episode #5259) turn off the subtitles.
[Insert pithy quote here]
The Rosetta Stone software is brilliant - check it out here: http://www.rosettastone.com/
:)
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 combine those words into phrases and you really are thinking in the lanuguage as opposed to translating it (from english) in your head. This happens because you associate the image with the word specific to the language you're learning - very cool and very fast. There are many other sections to the courses but they all work the same way - associate a word or phrase in the language you're learning directly with objects or things you can see or hear, etc. By the way, I spent a while after a couple of hours on the course walking around and noticing things I could name in the new language - it worked very well and there was no manual conversion from english going on in my head.
Most other software or books, cd's, etc I've tried seem to teach through repitition and what I've found is that I end up translating the language in my head from english to whatever other language. If you can *think* in that language from the start, it becomes far easier to become fluent and retain the language - after all, Japanese people think in Japanese, they don't convert it from english first!
Hope that helps
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
I used a two-pronged approach to teach myself some Japanese.
1. Use the Rosetta Stone software to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary, sound, and appearance of Japanese language. I found this to be useful for learning-by-repetition.
2. At the same time, get a Japanese textbook and learn the details of the grammar. Start by memorizing the hiragana alphabet. Learn about the particles.
If you simply use the language - i.e. take approach #1 alone - then you miss out on essential understanding of *why* the language works the way it does. If you simply study it like a science - i.e. take approach #2 alone - then you prevent your brain from learning a language the most natural way, by imitation.
Good luck, and I hope this helps...
A few things to remember.
It sounds like you are currently unilingual - don't underestimate the amount of internal training that you will have to do.
Children learn slowly, adults try to learn quickly, give your self time.
Never assume the a translation carries the meaning, it won't.
Now on the learning
Learn with Hiragana and Katakana if at all possible, Romaji will end up adding more complexity to learning, it is only a standardized approximation to the actual language.
Don't rely on electronic-only methods, write read and use a paper dictionary.
Get children's books - they are simple and give you the basics
Get a hiragana based japanese-english/english-japanese dictionary
Get a kanji based japanese-english dictionary
For Linux software I use gjiten, edit and uim
I learned Japanese as a teenager by living in Japan and immersing myself while cutting out my native language as much as possible. This is by far the best way to learn any language.
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 expect you as a beginner to use these correctly.
Don't sweat the particles (ga, ha, o, ni) so much - they are a little tough to get used to but pattern recognition will get you there eventually.
Don't worry at all about Kanji in the beginning - it's a complete waste of time for a beginner and they will come easily when you are ready to absorb them (late in the learning process)
After you get some basic vocabulary down then start to learn to conjugate verbs - there are only a couple of patterns to remember and you will suddenly be able to conjugate verbs a dozen different ways as fast as you can learn the verb bases.
Enjoy the fact that Japanese has no real plural forms, no future tenses, and no articles. It makes it much simpler as a language.
Also enjoy the fact that Japanese has a highly regular pronunciation that makes it a snap to pronounce.
Ignore the regional dialects in the beginning - it's very important to learn these if you are going to live somewhere where they speak but you'll be able to make yourself understood and if you know standard Japanese you can puzzle these out when the time comes.
Focus on listening comprehension by watching Japanese TV/movies/radio and get yourself a conversation partner. There are people who are dying to trade English conversation for Japanese and you can do this over the net. There is no substitute for speaking and listening when learning any language. Don't worry about mistakes just try to speak as much as possible.
Get yourself a pen pal or an email/IM partner so you can practice reading quickly and responding in writing.
Whatever you do - don't try to learn Japanese primarily by watching anime or reading manga. You will sound like a complete dork.
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 is six credit hours, which would be difficult to fit into my schedule, while the one I'm taking is only three.)
I was motivated to finally take a class after my second trip to Japan last fall. After meeting one Spanish woman who spoke four langages, and a Polish woman who was there teaching English and studying shodo, I was embarassed that after twenty years of karate training in a Japanese style, and shiatsu training, and two brief trips to Japan, I knew only enough Japanese to say "thank you", "excuse me", and "please bring me a beer". (Well, and "roundhouse kick to the neck", but that's not a phrase that comes up much in polite conversation.)
The class is sociologically interesting, though - a bunch of 18 and 19 year old anime fans, and me at 36.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I learned from high school courses. One last year (An introductory class), and then independent study this year (Not enough interest for a second-year class but it worked out). The thing is, I'm already forgetting. This tells me that the only way for me to really know the language properly is to constantly practise it. That probably means either moving to Japan or getting a job as a sushi chef like I'm kind of half-assedly planning to.
I also second not learning from games/anime. That won't teach you Japanese, that will just make you into a wapanese jackass. Commitment to learning a language properly doesn't mean playing video games and watching cartoons.
Advices on Learning Japanese?
I think "advice" is it's own plural. How about mastering the English language before going on to greener pastures?
I found this: http://lrnj.com/ to be a fun way to help me learn the characters (although probably writing them repeatedly is the best for drilling them into your brain)
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.
So how can people like us learn Japanese? We don't have the patience to work through the standard type of "learn a little bit at a time with no view of the big picture" learning material. What we want is a big-picture view of the entire language, from which we can pick individual pieces of lexeme, grammar, vocabulary, and usage to study. We long ago stopped using the hopelessly verbose SAMS $LANGUAGE Bible books to learn programming languages, and we would still prefer BNF to the front of a Nutshell book. What is the equivalent for conversational languages, especially Japanese?
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
First, I highly recommend a site: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html. This site has everything from java character input recognition for the dictionary, to a Japanese dictionary with examples for every word.
Second, to help learn all of the hiragana, katakana, and kanji (and everything else Japanese related) you should check out a program called SuperMemo. This program is a simple flashcard program, but it uses a spaced repetition algorithm to help you remember things before you forget them. (btw, I've read that people have used SuperMemo and MASTERED a language in something like 2-3 years.)
Also, having a friend that attempted to learn kanji on his own (also he has a very good imagination), he created a method called Kanji Town (just google it, he has a blog about it).
Finally, you need to immerse yourself in the language - through Pimsler, any Japanese music you can listen to, watch Japanese TV shows... every bit of audio stuff you can find to add to your reading studies.
Well, I'm no language teacher, but I am a pretty good non-native speaker of Japanese... I recommend learning hiragana and katakana on the web first. Shouldn't be too hard, that's how I learned and I think it took at most a few weeks. Also, the basic grammatical structure of Japanese isn't too complicated, in fact it's extremely simple, so it shouldn't be too hard to learn basic stuff from books/the web. It's kanji that makes Japanese "hard" (learn how to do radical lookup in a dictionary program like JWPce as soon as possible, and get good at it). Even if you don't want to pay a teacher, maybe you could find a Japanese person to practice with (or other otaku learning Japanese). I'm not sure how far you can actually get without formal instruction, but either way, pumping that anime addiction of yours is what you want to do. Anime itself is pretty hard to follow at a beginner level, but you'll have a fair amount of luck with shows like Pokemon, aimed at younger viewers. An even better way to practice is video games. Many games for PS2 etc. have subtitles and speech at the same time, which makes things much easier to understand, as your abilities in reading and listening will supplement each other (trust me, this is amazingly helpful)... Older games (PSX, etc. once you learn how to look up kanji) will help your reading, and you can go through text at your own pace rather than being force-fed at fluent-level. Well, at the level you're at, there are plenty of good GB games with all the text in hiragana with spaces, which might help. And when doing any of these, especially now, don't expect 100% comprehension, just do your best to learn what you didn't understand. Use the dictionary all the time, quiz yourself, and double-check your ideas about grammar using Google (as in, use it to see if things you want to say in Japanese have ever been said before, a clear sign of at least semi-validity). Without taking a class, it all hinges on how much effort you put into this, but learning Japanese can turn into a fun hobby. Expose yourself to the language as much as possible, though, or you won't have much fodder for your self-learning. Not sure what other advice I can give. Good luck!
Sendou Wave Kick!!
If you want to learn Japanese solely on account of games and/or anime, I can tell you now to not bother. It's not worth the effort, nor is it a particularly useful language. That said, if you're insane like me, your best bet is to find a college with a good Japanese program, study a few years, then go live in Japan for a while. No matter how much you study, you'll never reach any useful level of fluency if you don't go over there for a while. Learning Japanese inherently requires you to learn Japan as well. GLHF
I've been told by a fellow traveller that most Japanese taught to foreigneers is woman's Japanese. He found this out while living in Japan. He was talking to a local in a bar and the local told him that he speaks Japanese very well for a woman. My understanding is that the two sexes have either their own words or mannerisms/inflections in the language. Maybe this is something you don't have to worry about in the beginning or are only interested in a certain level of understanding.
Can anyone verify this?
I know people who learned english from games like Maniac Mansion when they were teenagers, but that meant spending several hours every day on the games, and they didn't have to learn any new alphabets to get started. I don't know what would happen if you gave a japanese graphic adventure to a teenager (but I'd be interested to know :)
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
So while it's always good to learn another language, A) you're not going to learn Japanese anywhere but in Japan, and B) you're never going to be that good at Japanese (I'm at least at the point where I can tell the gaijin personalities on TV who may even know more about Japanese culture speak with strange accents and have strange word usage).
On a side note, I loved anime in America, but coming here, it really is rather obvious how childish it is. If you're caught watching it here, girls will be screaming "AKIBAKEI!" and shit at you. A gaijin even saying the word "anime" here makes me feel hiku (umm.. like embarassed, sorta).You are about to learn a difficult language. The basics, and even the way of thinking can be quite different than English. I studied for about 3 years, took 2 years off and forgot a lot of it, then studied another year, and now I work a tech job in Japan.
:). If you can't take a course, try and get "Communicating in Japanese" by Hiroyoshi Noto. Make sure you get the tapes, too. It's an excellent book, and will take more time but teach you more than, say, "Japanese for Busy People."
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.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Get a Japanese girlfriend.
then I can read ans say "All your base belong to us?"
Cool!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
This might be a good resource. Speak with others via Skype. The internet limitations themselves might be hurdles, but its worth a shot.
I am doing the same thing although I will likely eventually take classes as I would like to be able to put this on a resume. Heres one interesting approach to learning the alphabets and even some simple words. http://lrnj.com/ Its a retro style adventure game (think Final Fantasy) that trys to teach you the japanese alphabet's along the way.
Japanese, the language, is not difficult at all. The grammar is very regular, and spelling problems are nonexistent. I've found it substantially easier than either English or German in this regard.
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 practice a lot more. On the upside, learning kanji makes for a nice shortcut to pick up new vocabulary.
2. Politeness. By convention or habit, all textbooks and courses tend to focus on polite language, only covering the familiar language to the extent you need it for grammatical correctness. That's often not how Japanese speak, however.
Your early contacts with Japanese in the real world will tend to be shopkeepers, waiters and so on, and they will not use the polite language to you; they'll use honirific language - which often isn't covered until fairly late in any introductory course. So you'll have no idea what they're saying, which makes them nervous so they start using even more polite language, which just makes it worse.
And once you start to know people, they'll drop the politeness (just like you do in any other language) and speak more familiar language - but since you haven't practiced it in class, you're lost again.
In television or radio, you'll often have either familiar language (dramas, comedies, game shows or anything with shouting, laughing and so on) or honorific language (news, debates or other 'serious' matters), again neither of which you've actually studied or practiced.
The politeness thing isn't difficult, really, but you do need to get an ear for those ways of speaking or writing as well, not just the safe-but-boring middle level. I'd wish that was covered much earlier.
3. Dialects. Japan is not a small country, and it has a large population. Dialects a numerous and varied. Of course, what you're learning is some abstract "television-presenter Japanese", that isn't too dissimilar from an attenuated Tokyo dialect. But go to Osaka further down the coast (where I reaside), and the language changes drastically. If you've only ever studied and heard "standard Japanese" you won't stand a chance. I've lived here a couple of years, and I still don't understand a word when someone starts speaking in a broad Osaka dialect.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
By looking for ways to learn a language without classes you are really setting yourself up for failure. I'm not saying it can't be done, and I'm sure a couple people throughout history have been somewhat successful, but it leaves out the best way to learn a language: Experiencing it.
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 websites is a great way to supplement your learning, but ultimately understanding a different language (especially one as apparently difficult as Japanese. I'm scared of it, and I'm learning German) is something that will definitely not happen overnight. It really requires lots of interaction with other people who speak various levels of whatever language one wants to learn.
Experiencing a language takes 2 forms: Class, and going to the country. At first going to the country is obviously out of the question, leaving only class.
I spent 5 months in Germany and have been speaking my broken German for about a year and a half now and am not even close to where I'd like to be with the language, but I will tell you that my 5 months in Germany helped my language more than anything else.
Technically, any character that is valid Hanzi (Chinese character) is valid Japanese too. Old "comprehensive" multi-volume dictionaries used to list around 50000 characters; of course when it came to usage statistics, the majority of characters was only ever used in the dictionaries themselves, and never anywhere else.
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).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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 of exclusive use of the Kana. But certainly, and cultural or social obstacles to such a move abound. I read about what happened (PDF link to the introduction of Remembering the Kanji III) when the Occupation Government attempted to curtail the number of officially used kanji to only 1850 and how well that went over with the public, with people growing up legally nameless rather than abandoning the kanji they had been using. I imagine a move to totally abandon the Kanji would be greeted with even more disdain.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
First of all, so that you know I'm not talking out of my ass, I am an American who has successfully learned Mandarin, Thai, and Lao. I have also tried but failed to learn Khmer and Korean (a language similar to Japanese in many ways).
...), take lessons in your free time, and get totally immersed in the language. I don't think that there's really any other option for you. Even immersion will probably take two to three years.
Last time I checked, the US DoD rated Japanese as a level four language, meaning that in order to get a working proficiency, they expect a full time language student to take about a year and a half of five to six hours a day in small classes with two to three hours of homework a day. My guess is that, as a gamer, you don't have the two thousand free hours they expect you to study for, nor do you have qualified native-speaker teachers to help you. You are therefore extremely limited in what you can achieve without going to live in Japan.
In the end, that is what I suggest if you REALLY want to become proficient in the language. If you have a four year degree, you can become an English teacher there (though it looks as though you'll need to improve your English skills before you go
Sorry for the bad news.
Put identity in the browser.
1. Get good textbooks. I have used the series of Kenkyusha, and found them very good for self study -- beginner thru intermediate. Here's da links (and nope, unfortunately I ain't getting commission on them):
. html. html. html
;)
http://webshop.kenkyusha.co.jp/book/4-327-38420-8
http://webshop.kenkyusha.co.jp/book/4-327-38424-0
http://webshop.kenkyusha.co.jp/book/4-327-38439-9
I have tried a lot of other books (and have seen probably the bigger part of all available texts) and find these to be very good to beginners. Part of the goodness is complete lack of English and romanized characters in the books, which helps you concentrate on the Japanese (as opposed to what you think Japanese is).
2. Read and write a lot, nothing beats that. Do each exercise several times over
3. Try to find Japanese who'd be interested to learn English from you. You'd be surprised how helpful having someone to talk to you is. If in Japan, search for International exchange center (kokusai kouryuu kaikan/center) in your area -- and hook up with a retired Japanese volunteer for language exchange - works WAY better for picking up the language than a girlfriend.
4. Read and write a lot.
5. Try to spend some time in Japan, and if you do that, stay away from English-speaking environments. Work in a Japanese Japanese company is a huge boost. See 3 as well.
6. If available, spend 5 years before you start studying Japanese to learn Chinese well, better in a place that uses the traditional Characters.
I'm hoping for a DS based Japanese teaching program....
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
The list can be found here, and it actually grew a bit since I first wrote it, so I can say it worked.
Buy every single game you want to buy in the Japanese version from now on and slowly try to understand it using a tourists English-Japanese dictionary. :)
I learned some Japanese 30 years ago while stationed in Japan in the Navy. I was mostly self taught originally and took some courses after I got out, and have been back for several month long vacations since. My biggest problem as a tourist is that it takes several days to get my accent back and remember the body language, and then somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd week, I remember them too well, and the locals assume I know more than I do about social norms in general.
:-), and I got so used to my dictionary that I could open it to within 5 or ten pages of the kanji in question. But I was forgetting kanji as fast as I was learning them, and evetually gave it up. 500 kanji is probably around 4th or 5th grade level. Not very impressive.
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
Infuriate left and right
Pardon, but no amount of starry-eyed fanboyism will teach you Japanese. Japanese is, as stated frequently above, a heavily nuanced language, completely tied to the culture that evolved alongside it. Unless you are willing to study Japanese language, culture, and history thoroughly (either at a university or with a private tutor), it will be entirely useless toward the ends for which you seek to learn it (...that content can't be understood completely due to the complexity and subtleties of the Japanese language). Complexities are complex and subtleties subtle expressly because they are acquired through years of immersion in Japanese culture, not through practice or schooling. And self-taught Japanese will only be useful in impressing your similarly-minded American friends that have yet to take up this fruitless hobby. Of all the reasons to study a language, your pretentious loathing of English dubbing is silly-bordering-on-stupid.
Basically, if you are serious about learning Japanese, move to Japan. If you are not serious, and I would say that your stated reasons point this way, don't bother.
Why, just read Slashdot in Japanese!
actually, I read it using an interesting web service that shows the definition of each word when you mouse over them. Try it!
My other account has mod points.
DISCLAIMER: Sweeping generalizations of Japanese people and culture ahead based off biased personal and anecdotal evidence!
Seriously guys, DON'T DO IT!
I spent a good deal of my life living in Japan, learning Japanese, teaching English, working in a Japanese IT company, speaking Japanese all day, using chopsticks, etc... and at the end of doing all that I am now what you guys hope to become and I am not proud of myself.
First of all, Japanese is freaking hard. I have learned easier languages that have taken less time and actually been more useful. The time taken up is considerable given the benefits (or lack thereof as I will explain).
On that topic, Japanese is essentially USELESS. The reason for its uselessness is dictated by the fact that you can already speak English. Yes, believe it or not, English is superior in the minds of Japanese people (owing to WW2 perhaps), so if you speak Japanese with them, you actually bring yourself down to their level. It is almost as if you give up your status as an exotic gaijin, and you lose respect in their minds immediately. Who would want to be Japanese?
I have found that my conversations with Japanese people actually go much better when I force English upon them. As soon as I speak Japanese, the people here seem to want to start treating me like a non-human piece of crap... I will not speculate as to how Japanese feel about dealing with other Japanese people they do not know... but given the look of it, *shudder*.
This also explains why English is so popular in Japan. If it wasn't the status one gains from being able to speak it, it's also a chance to escape from a Japanese company (who treat their employees as a low-wage serfs) and work for a foreign company who belives in human rights. Unfortunately for the many English teachers in Japan who are wondering why the Japanese never seem to learn English, a lot of it has to do with certain interests in Japan who deliberatly want to stifle English education so that they can achieve two things: 1) So that the Japanese people never escape from their Japanese company low-wage serf-dom and see the better opportunities. That could have disasterous economic effects. 2) So that the yakuza run NOVA, and other English schools can get rich quick by "teaching" students rubbish so they never get good and keep coming back for more lessons.
Learning Japanese is hard enough if you can actually find someone who wants to speak it with you. The problem is, most Japanese people have poor social skills and really don't like speaking much at all.... (even to other Japanese) so unless you're speaking and teaching them English.... good luck. If you are ever able to find someone to practice with (best bet is a drunken old man who reeks and wants company), you end up with really boring conversations about food or the weather or something anyway. Furthermore due to the reasons above, your attempts to speak Japanese are usually further insulted by certain Japanese people who would just wish you spoke Japanese properly the first time instead of trying this "learning" thing.
Not many people are anime freaks in Japan, so please remember that if you wnat to have "interesting" conversations with Japanese people, that you talk about something really benign like the food, the weather, travel, and how learning English is fun. Do not confuse them by asking their opinion on deep topics. They only know how to communicate in a few safe topics to avoid giving offense... and this means that asking for an opinion on anything is a no-no.
Also do not get offended when Japanese people rudely brush you off for no reason. You're getting a valuable cultural experience here! Namely, a full understanding of what it's like to be "Outside" rather than "Inside". Unless you yell at them and get angry at them, and slap them upside the head to show that you are not Japanese and not interested in their culture, they will stop acting like primadonnas and like you, and laugh at all your jokes.
Want to get a Japanese gir
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Don't make the book Making out in Japanese your bible. It was the first book on slang out there, it's amusing but a little dated. It's also it's the #1 favourite of all high-school boys taking Japanese class. You can spot them a mile away rattling off the phrases in it.
As my Japanese professor once said in College: You can study Japanese every waking hour of every waking day, struggle through the hardest classes you have ever taken, and after 10 years emerge from the other side with a PHD in the language and a 1st grade speaking level.
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 you can chat with a kindergartener. And forget reading newspapers.
Let's start with Kanji. I believe 5 year-olds in Japan average about 500 of these, and the number just gets higher from there. You need to know A: the somewhat random symbol, B: the stroke order (Very important!), and C: about 6 different contexts within which each can be used, because the meaning and pronunciation changes constantly. And don't be foolish and think one kanji equals one thing... Kanji can be their own words, or they can be put next to eachother to create certain bigger words. It is like a second langauge, but one basically devoid of pronunciation clues. Each Kanji needs to be appended with a certain number of hiragana characters to complete the word and or change the ending. Except when they don't. And don't forget: no spaces between words!
Let's move on to how to count. No, no, don't start counting yet, because the numbers you use to count with change by the shape of the thing which you are counting. If you are counting people, you use different numbers than if you are counting big boxy things, or pencils, or days. In fact, there are hundreds of these variations. Are those place settings you're counting? Years? Stuffed Animals? Gallons of water? Are you counting all of these 'freaking counting systems? Don't worry, you'll NEVER get it quite right.
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.
The grammar is cool, but completely alien and quickly compounding. Early sentences are simple and fun. For example, (my) Car is old is. However, real sentences are quite ugly. Tomorrow's Party in prep for breakfast since (your) Roommate (my) Car is.... Yes, that ellipsis is in the sentence. It would be impolite to finish a thought, even though it would be helpful for figuring out what the sentence means.
Really, Japanese is just insanely difficult for not a lot of payoff. In order to learn enough to be at all useful, you have to be totally dedicated to the language. You also have to accept the fact that you will never speak well, you will never read a newspaper correctly, and you are pouring your heart and soul into this thing which you will never be good at simply because you weren't born into it.
Just get subtitled Anime, and find something better to do with your life. There are millions of people who speak spanish, or german, or french... learn all three of the languages in the time that it would take you to get a kindergarten proficiency at Japanese.
The ______ Agenda
I think TV is one of the quickest and most natural ways to learn a foreign language (short of real-live nonstop conversation). TV pretty much represents normal conversation with normal vocabulary at normal speeds, and if the content is interesting enough it gives you an incentive to actually understand what's happening and in a certain context, instead of the somewhat pointless conversation exercises you might find in traditional learning material. Even if at first you don't really understand what's being said, TV supplemented with vocab lists and dictionaries and such can go a long way, especially for the listening part of it.
On a side note, out of the non-native English speakers that I know that speak English really well, they share one thing in common - a natural interest in things like movies and music (and TV). Which means that they seek these things out on their own and in a way are forced to learn English to understand what's actually happening, not to mention the increased exposure to the language via those media.
... then continue learning by watching animes. reading manga and playing japanese games. it's the same advice for any language.
japanese is difficult not because of complex grammar but because it's a high-context language. the same words repeated in a different context might mean a different thing. western languages work in a rather different manner. so the key to learning japanese is to learn to read the facial expressions and body language of whoever you're talking to. the maddening thing is that japanese use very subtle body language (partly, i guess, because their language makes it easy to be misunderstood if they look the wrong way). you can't learn that without having real people to talk to.
If this is the first time you tackle a new language (aside from your native language), then you're in for some difficulties. You'll have to learn three new writing systems (two of which are doable within a few hours for each), new grammar structures, new vocabulary sets. And you'll have to learn how to switch off your native language when you try to use the new one.
My Japanese classes were limited to a few months, due to conflicting schedules, but I'm a graduate in Chinese studies, and some issues are comparable.
If you can take them in any way, I'd recommend classes, especially for something as different as Japanese. Even if it's boring or tedious sometimes, it ensures that you'll study steadily and that you have someone to ask when you run into problems. And you will run into problems. Also, having a teacher means that you'll have someone point out your mistakes to you.
Don't even think about not learning the characters. Even if you don't learn how to write them by hand, make sure you know how to compose texts on the PC. There's no excuse for not being able to read characters, and you'll seriously cripple your use of the language if you can only read Romaji. Don't get a textbook that uses Romaji beyond the first few chapters. It's a constant temptation.
You'll need to budget a few hours per week, regularly. If you lack that persistence, then you won't get anywhere with your studies. Classes help here, since it means you're in a schedule and you have to meet regular goals.
This is a useful place to pick up some tricks. Not all of it is applicable, and some parts need to be taken with a rather large grain of salt, but pick through it. Stuff like flashcards and regular scheduling is quite helpful.
Speaking as an ESL here, had to learn both english and japanese as non-native tonges (native tonge is a romance language):
;-)
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, your dog's name, etc.
Then get into a formal japanese course.
Seriously - you should get off the ground by yourself, but you'll need help at this point or the learning curve will hit you hard on your face.
After you're reasonably sure you can say anything you need to that can be construed with one sentence - go to japan, and take intensive courses here.
AND don't let yourself be sucked into the "english bubble" here. Foreigners - specially english native speakers, can get by in japan with only english by hanging around with other foreigners - cultural shock helps that - but then you'll go back bitter and without really knowing japanese (that's another reason why you should have a basic grasp of japanese before coming).
For materials, once you have the hang of the basic grammar, I would reccoment NES RPGs... NES RPGS, specially the final fantasy series, do not use kanji, which is helpful for the beginner. Mangas are also quite nice to read with a dictionary by your side, but avoid "weekly jump"-like compilations, and go for one-series books (tankohons), specially if you can get your hands on the first of the series (so you don't get lost).
Anime is nice, but you must listen to it with the goal of learning japanese: i.e. - go back and forth listening the phrases over and over again, repeating yourself as needed.
But your main material for learning japanese should be talking to japanese people - everyday. If coming to japan is not feasible in the medium future, I would reccomend that you check with your nearby "kenjinkai" : association for japanese emmigrants - there should be some of those wherever there are japanese abroad.
Talking about websites, you could try:
http://mixi.jp/
It is a social network all in japanese, but with a growing foreign userbase. It is more friendly than 2ch.
Last but not least:
http://www.slasdhot.jp/
with Moji (firefox extension)
It seems to me that the Japanese would resort to a stylus before a 7000+ key keyboard. Maybe, our handwriting recognition software would be better then. If the Japanese had used a 7000+ key keyboard instead, we would probably all be using unicode now instead of the current mixed mess we are in. If we did have these hugh keyboards, I would recommend that anyone wanting to learn Japanese start with the 7000+ key keyboard. Since that is not an option, I would recommend they instead install Chinese/Japanese/Korean fonts and get their input all figured out. Maybe, they could still get a stylus, and write the kanji recognition software. I imagine anyone who takes the time to write software to recognise kanji would also learn Japanese.
For those interested in how computers play a role in all of this, it can be a great advantage. Allow me to paste the conclusion from my learning site and then pimp it.
a nese/computerlearning.php
:P
Using computers to discover Japanese is all about choice. You can choose the words you look up faster, choose your dictionary, choose what online texts and video you would like to look at, choose which words are cool or relevant to today's culture, choose to stick to copying and pasting from documents or use kanji handwriting recognition dictionaries with printed texts. Assume that anything is possible and know what to search for. These are ways Japanese language learning had not established before because computers themselves never had those choices.
http://www.users.on.net/~luffy/diamonds/other/jap
Just for students already started, google is one of the most overlooked tools... you won't always need someone to tell you whether you sentence is right if google tells you 50,000 other people think it is at least "good enough"
There are 46 basic kana characters, but some characters require an additional voice mark. Unfortunately, these are located near the far upper right of the keyboard. Also, the small characters need to be shifted. If you were counting, you would notice that this is a *very* tight fit. With this layout, you don't have easy access to numbers, there is a whole lot of finger travel, and it appears to be rather brutal on your right pinky. (I considered learning it, but it looks to be far from optimal. It is insane that the standard keyboards put the most burden on the weakest fingers.)
That said, with a good romaji layout, you would only need two rows of keys. (Breaking the kana up into vowels + consanants basically requires 20 keys.) This could be made very optimal, and you basically don't need the shifted characters or the separate voicing marks.
Are there any optimized layouts such as this? The reduced travel, and extra keys available would definately be worth it.
On another note, the Windows IME completely sucks compared to the input system on the Mac. (That is when it is working at all; every now and then, it basically stops working until the next reboot. It also offers no method to type romaji in using dvorak, which is extremely obnoxious.)
But we all digress: This article is looking for hints on learning Japanese; maybe German is just too easy (and it's currently "in beta" - remaining issues will be settled right after the release of Duke Nukem Forever for Windows Vista though)... ;-)
If you can't sign up for a university class, get this book:
Genki 1 (and 2+3) by The Japan Times.
This has got to be the best book ever, we use it at the university of Ghent. Don't bother with crap like "Japanese for Busy People". Another good book is "Kanji&Kana" (or the other way around), it's a dictionary where you can look up kanji by readings, radical and stroke count. I use it every day.
More concrete, start learning the kana right now. Do not bother with romaji.
Ganbatte!
The best way to learn a language is to use it. The easiest way is to make Japanese friends or actually live there. This can be difficult for some people who prefer to do things alone, however. From what I have read I think the grandparent falls into the latter category.
I can't really speak from the same perspective because Japanese is something that came to me naturally. Though I can speak from my experience when I was learning Korean and Mandarin. Perhaps like the grandparent, I fell into the tegory who do things alone. Though remember that this is doing things the hard way. It has its benefits but learning Japanese will be at a much slower rate than otherwise. I found both Korean and Mandarin hard at first until I actually sat down and made an effort to learn them. It took a lot of academic discipline. One of the things that made a huge difference though was a cassette tape based learning that I used for Mandarin. Also learning whole phrases by daily repetition helped. I did have teachers and they were helpful in steering me in the right direction and pointing out mistakes such as grammar, but bulk of the learning came from actually practicing the languages physically by daily repetitions (vocal and writing), speaking, writing and by translating.
One of the first steps to do is to get some decent beginner level text books. I saw a few being suggested here in slashdot and they are good books. Then learn Hiragana (the gojyu-on). Get hold of cassette tapes or mp3s that pronounces them vertically down the column (a-i-u-e-o) and a set that pronounces them horizontally (a-ka-sa-ta-na). You can do this right now on day 1. Practice it vocally each day and don't stop the daily practice until you get onto the 2nd grade Kanji. Learn simple phrases from books/online/anime/tapes/whatever and again practice them. Practice writing Hiragana. The text books should teach you all the correct strokes. Getting a transparent paper and just writing over the template given in the book about 10 to 50 times will improve your calligraphy skills. (This may sound harsh but its a lot less compared with a calligraphy master that practices a single Kanji 1000 times minimum. As soon as he gets it wrong he starts the counter from 0 and repeats until 1000 consecutive correct forms are written!)
I'd say go for it and keep at it. Keep it motivated and watch anime and learn those phrases no matter how ridiculous it may sound. The key is daily practice. Learn like Naruto where he practices his skills each day to perfection. It will take at least a few years even at intense learning levels but the rewards are definitely worth it.
Hello, I'm an otaku (anime and manga addict) turned Japanese language student. I'm an older student returning to school to study Japanese.
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-identical, or close enough that you can "recycle" your English. On the other hand, though, every noun has a gender; as I recall from High School German, the walls, ceiling and floor each have different gender, even though they actually have none. You have to memorize those genders, because you can't derive them from looking at reality.
Now, looking at Japanese; loanwords from English aren't easily recognized, and rarely have the same meaning. Examples are wapuro, which is from the English "word processor". Or feminisuto, which comes from "feminist", but only took the meaning of "being nice to women" (and thus comes to be closer to the English word "gentleman"). My favorite is baikingu (pronounced like "biking"), which means "smorgasbord"! (dirived from the word "viking", as in "viking-style meal".)
What you get in exchange is regularity. Japanese has only two irregular verbs, and a handful more with an irregular form. There's a number of different verb forms, but they are regular. The sounds are regular, the vowels "a i u e o" being pronounced as in "ah, we soon get old", and for diphthongs you can just take the two sounds written and pronounce them together in sequence. You have to learn about 100 phonetic symbols (two sets of about 50, think of them as upper and lower case, though their usage of the secondary set is much closer to that of italics in English). There's 2000 ideographs (kanji), which will get you through about 90-95% of a newspaper. That sounds daunting, but if you consider that English uses over 1000 letter combinations to represent 40 sounds, and those letter combinations don't have any meaning of their own to guide you, the 2000 kanji don't seem so bad. (Tip: I recommend Henshall's "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters" for those interested in kanji and/or etymology.)
As for learning, I started with the excellent Japanese for Busy People books. They provide functional Japanese intended for business use, rapidly and easily. The "fatal flaw" with the books (for me) was the lack of an included native speaker of Japanese; without a practice partner, I was finding that what I learned didn't stick. The more language practices you use (producing spoken, producing written, interpreting spoken, and interpreting written), the faster you will acquire the language. Thus, I found classes to be essential for progressing past a certain point.
Second, take a general linguistics class, one that covers the mechanical (as opposed to the social) aspects of language. You will be better able to understand the regular mechanisms of what's going on in Japanese, simplifying the rules you have to remember. Well, that's how it's working for me at least, but I'm also Majoring in Linguistics.
Third, avoid learning from anime and manga until later in your studies (around 2 years of college level Japanese). a.) They are filled with countless variants and contracted forms, but you won't understand them until you know what they are varying or contracting from. b.) They are filled with slang, archaic forms, excessive formalism, dialects, gender-marked speech, and you won't ever learn what they are and when they are appropriate from anime or manga. For example, Tomoyo from Card Captor Sakura uses extremely polite and feminine speech...with her best friend; this is -not- normal usage for polite speech (it tends to be distancing), and the feminine forms are less common among younger women, but Tomoyo is go
I have been learning Japanese for the past year or so. My University uses the series Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. The entire series consists of two books, two workbooks, and two audio CDs. Everything is really well organized; in each chapter you learn some new grammar, vocabulary, and kanji, and there are plenty of exercises for you to practice what you have learned. The series assumes you know nothing of Japanese when you start, so it's a great book that takes you from a beginner to an intermediate level proficiency in Japanese. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4789009637/sr=8-1 /qid=1144323650/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0114107-8967059?_ encoding=UTF8
JAPANESE GRAMMAR (Carol and Nobuo Akiyama)
Japanese: a comprehensive grammar (kaiser, ichikawa, kobayashi, yamamoto) ISBN 0-415-09920-X
Kodansha's Furigana (dictionary) ISBN 4-7700-2480-0
Basic Technical Japanese (Daub, Bird, Inoue) ISBN 0-299-12730-3
an assortment of dictionaries, as many as you can afford.
flashcards, etc.
this is the online dictionary used by me and the other translators at my company
www.alc.co.jp
and
www.rikai.com provides a javascript bassed system to process Japanese webpages and give mouseovers that define each word.
GOOD LUCK, Perseverance, etc.
JAPANESE GRAMMAR IS MUCH SIMPLER THAN ENGLISH GRAMMAR! (Not that you've mastered that.)
Less look fast, more go fast.
I'm in my third quarter of Japanese, and although I'm probably repeating stuff already said, here's my advice: Try. I've been told it was the hardest language in the world. I failed misiribly in French in middle school, and thought it would be maddness to try and learn Japanese. How am I doing it? Great. But is it hard? Yes, unless your great with languages, it will take hours a week (especially when you learn new vocab). But this is ideally no different then the amount of time you'll spend on another complicated subject. To start with, there is nothing wrong with learning hiragana before you actually start learning the language. Although I tried that, and although I was motivated, it didn't really seem to work as well (I found it easiser to learn by far in class). Learn it. There are many that are able to learn Japanese on their own with their set of CDs and books. I could see someone learning alone with my current set used in the Classroom (Nakama I), but wouldn't advise it due to some things being easier explained in person then in a book. I tried learning alone a while ago, and found myself unable to focus. There are many that can learn alone, but not everyone can. If you can take classes, take them. My textbook could be a great resource (many CDs to help with pronounciation and a decent book), but it's pricy, and would be best researched if you pondered getting it. Use it. My biggest problem lies with direct usage of Japanese, and I tend to phrase it out in english first. I also am forced to hear a whole sentence before I hear it to decode it (since it really is rather backwards compared to english). This is also bad, because there is no way I could keep up in casual conversation. I'd suggest using it a lot as you learn it, and I should stop being a hypocrite. Use software. This one is debatable, but some good flashcard software that is very flexable can make learning vocab much easier. I would be lost without mine. Integration of images and spoken sound could make learning the definitions for what they are and not the English word they represent much easier. Learn about the culture too. I'm not talking just anime and games (which originally drew me to Japan). But their history, their modern culture, and traits unique to Japan. I've gradually found myself just as interested in those aspects of Japan, if not more interested. Sometimes courses in these will intertwine with language courses a bit (depends on professor), causing some usage of Japanese outside of the classroom. But then again, you don't want to take classes, so that isn't really rellivent. And lastly, more of a crituque about my book, learn dictionary forms of verbs before formal forms........ Anyone who has used Nakama will probably know what I am talking about, and agree..
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
There are 1945 general-use kanji, known as the "Jouyou" kanji. These are the ones that appear in books or newspapers without 'furigana,' which is the phonetic reading of it in super- or sub-script.
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 Kanji' plus some textbooks. If you watch anime, or can find some news videos, repeating exactly what you hear right as you hear it is good practice for listening and speaking at natural speeds.
For just vocab-building, I recommend getting a flashcard program, like iFlash (sorry, I'm a Mac user, there are sure to be plenty for Windows and 'nix as well). It's hard work, though, much harder than a European language for English-speakers.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
The first thing he needs is a grammar textbook, wherein he must study day and night, and slaughter a bull annualy at the alter of knowledge. I've had the misfortune of meeting several people who had lived in Japan for years and even tried to learn with all of their might, who would get lost quite quickly when trying to talk with me, despite my learning all of my Japanese in California. Of course, there is always the IQ difference.
Less look fast, more go fast.
just translate it. Spanish saying
Anyway, there are several nice disks to learn english. If you, like me want to do it the "pirata" way, goto emule and downlaod some japanese e-books (I downloaded an interesting reading about the basis of writting) and then look for some iso torrents.
Oh, for other languages (french, spanish and german) there are some Michel Thomas courses they are Sehr gute! I downloaded the french and german courses (although I studied German for 1 year).
Anyway, IMHO nothing is better than a course (a good one of course)I do not know about USA but in Mexico Universities, as a student you can subscribe to ANY language course free, that is how I studied my 1 year of German.
Oh! and for you people in USA(I know, maybe you already know Español) another nice way to learn Spanish is to go to some state in Mexico (yes, self advertisment here, sorry =-) for example to La Paz,BCS[English] where you will find everything cheap AND you can subscribe to the University Spanish courses (of course will also be able to practice).
I met a lot of American and Canadian people when I was studying there, they used to go in their boats to stay for the winter (they found pretty warm the water =oS). So, a year over there would be really nice (oh and it would be a great way to convince mom and dad to sponsor a year at the beach).
Anyway, sorry for the shameless plug, unfortunately there is no such thing for Japanese (although for French the east of Canada might be all right).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I am currently on my 4th year living in Japan and speak the language fluently. I found that, unless you have Japanese friends in your home country willing to speak Japanese with you (not as easy to find as you might think) then your best bet is to approach the language through it's media. Movies, comics, games, etc. My first introduction to Japan and it's culture was animation. I cut my teeth on Macross, Urusei Yatsura, and whatever other 3rd generation bootlegged VHS tapes happened to trickle in. These days, with the advent of the web and bittorrent, translations of new animations and comics are available all the time. Japanese music, TV commercials, and even dramas are only ever a google away. Yes, everyone finds "anime-dorks" who say things like "KAWAAIIII" and "(^-^)" in their respective forums annoying... but putting a language to use - any use - is a step in the right direction. After you get a solid base from formal classes, I recommend staying in Japan for no shorter than half-a-year. (opinions on time may vary) After staying on a small island with no other gaijin for miles around, I found myself pretty far along in my conversational Japanese. The anime was a gateway drug for me - but the irony is now that I am here I have almost no interest in it at all.
I'm not motivated enough to do it on my own, so I definitely needed a class to get me
In my case, London has an excellent school called Alpha Language Institute. 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 find anything like it but I'm certain that helped me learn fast and keep my interest going.
For studying, I made flashcards out of index cards and went through them about 30 minutes every day (I'd carry 30-40 cards in my back pocket so I could run through them whenever I was waiting around). Most of the cards were individual words, but I'd also make 4-5 sentence cards for each piece of key grammar. The cards really helped make sure I could fit studying in.
I have already followed all of Fabian's detailed instructions on how to setup X for Japanese input but it is still not working. Could some kind soul please post a link to a tarfile of all their setup files for KDE/X? e.g. tar zcf jfiles.tgz ~/.kde ~/.xim ~/.login ~/.bashrc And if your system has Japanese support, could you also please post the output of running
LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 locale charmap
and
LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.EUC locale charmap
which on my system both give the very unpromising ANSI_X3.4-1968, apparently meaning no locale support for Japanese, despite having installed the locales-jp packages and GNU locales.
I think I'm learning Japanese
I think I'm learning Japanese
I really think so....
I took two semesters of Japanese at U. They used the "Japanese the Spoken Language" (JSL) text. It was pretty good, but you're not looking for a classroom environment.
Right now, I am studying Arabic using Rosetta Stone software. It is the closest thing to an immersive, english free learning tool I have seen. I am enjoying it quite a bit. I feel this sort of instruction is about the only way to learn any language where the grammar is significantly different from English.
That said, the things I learned while studying Japanese that most impressed Japanese people were simple things that most texts don't cover. I learned them from a magazine called "Mangajin", which took manga, translated them, and explained them. Correctly using one word that they don't teach gaijin goes a long way toward making you seem like you know what you're doing.
Mangajin is no longer in print, but you should be able to find used copies for sale on ebay, etc.
I can't help it - I'm a 19D.
Except not for anime. I just enjoy the language. Ok... maybe I'd like to play imported video games and know what's going on. :)
:)
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.
Then buy these books http://www.thejapanshop.com/home.php?cat=270/. They are college-level books and used in many college courses. There are two levels, I and II. Each book corresponds to a year of college study. I have them and they are absolutely wonderful. I goofed off for a few years on and off trying out different books and worthless audio lessons on cd, like Pimsleur's. The Genki series kicks total ass. Everything progresses in a smooth manner, and there are tons, *tons*, of practice activities to give you enjoyable stuff to do at your skill level.
Some of the activities are where you have conversations or play mini-games with a partner, which is something you really only can get in a classroom. I've found that playing both parts of the conversation helps.
Make sure to get the workbook and the accompanying cd's. The workbook is nothing but exercises that correspond to whatever you are learning in the book. Perfect for making sure that you do learn everything you're supposed to. It's easy to skim through the main textbook and "think" you know everything. Doing the exercises in the workbook makes sure you really do.
The audio cd's are for listening comprehension tests. Also awesome. They really help to force you to think quicker and prevent the possibility that you continue to do runtime translation in your head, and instead make you think in japanese.
Also get the answer key. Absolutely essential for obvious reasons. I can't stress that enough.
Ok, so I know I just told you buy like 100 bucks worth of stuff. But it's all worth it. If you seriously want to learn you have to do it on multiple fronts. Reading, writing, speaking, listening. It's either all or none, really.
Grandparent is correct, parent is completely full of it.
Japanese is exceedingly difficult for native english speakers.
BTW GP forgot katakana, the third 'alphabet' you need to learn.
I went to Japan in October. About 4 months prior, I picked up the first lesson of the Learn in your Car series from Penton Overseas at Borders. I listened to it about 2/3 of the time on my commute to and from work (30 minutes each way). I'm very satisfied with the amount of Japanese I was able to learn and retain with that amount of studying, and would recommend these courses. No, I'm not affiliated with the publisher in any way.
What this course teaches you is travel dialogue - currency, air/train/taxi travel, hotel/restaurant phrases, giving/receiving directions, and numbers. I don't know what lessons 2 and 3 (i.e. CDs 4-9) teach you as I didn't buy them.
Lastly, kudos for you for wanting to learn a foreign language. Too many people in this world only learn one language in their lifetimes.
For a language as far from any Latin-based language as Japanese is (English-borrowed words aside), the best way to learn Japanese is to take a class, an immersion class if you can find one. I did this and in a short period of time, I was able to have small, mostly toy conversations and write a few things. Any language class is best taught as immersion, I believe, because it forces you to really start trying it out. After learning a few languages myself, I can honestly say that you progress much faster if you're just trying the language out as much as possible. Don't be afraid to make mistakes - laugh at them, really.
The Japanese immersion class I took was English on the first day, but beginning on the second day for the next 2 semesters, there was no English during class - all questions had to be asked in Japanese, all tests were written in Japanese (Hirigana/Kanji only after we learned some) and so on. It's really a great way to learn a language.
Use this
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I'm in about my 3rd month of doing exactly what it sounds like you want to do -- teaching myself Japanese. On the whole, I don't think it's as hard as people make it out to be. The key thing is, do you enjoy learning? If so, then it should be worthwhile to try.
There are a couple of resources I am using to learn:
Japanese in Mangaland - a fantastic book that is organized into simple lessons of grammar, culture, and vocabulary. Each lesson includes examples of actual Manga to apply what you have learned. (There are two more books in the series once you get past the first one.)
If you read that book and decide you want to learn more, then it's time to start learning Kanji (you should already have learned the two phonetic scripts -- Hiragana and Katakana by then). For Kanji, I have been very pleased with:
Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Henshall.
This book may or may not work for you depending on your learning style, but it's been fantastic for me (I'm up to 400 Kanji in 3 months). It basically lays out the history of each Kanji and explains why it came to have it's current meaning. It shows you how to break the characters down into their component parts (called radicals) and what the meaning of those parts is. Since radicals can be shared by many kanji, this gives you extra insight into what a Kanji is likely to mean, even if you don't know it to begin with. This is a great memory aid, since it means you're not just memorizing random symbols but actually learning a system of symbols with meaning and context.
The other tool I used to learn Kanji is King Kanji. This is a Palm program that has tons of different writing lessons. It does handwriting recognition and tells you when you are writing the characters incorrectly. You can use it to quiz either the kanji, katakana, hiragana, or the meanings or pronunciation of the Kanji. I basically do this whenever I have some down time (bathroom, bus, etc.) and that is what has allowed me to progress as far as I have on my own with learning the Japanese writing.
Finally, a couple of websites that I have found helpful:
Teach yourself Japanese has a great detailed explanation of Japanese grammar.
Japanese Online has fantastic language lessons.
There are a ton of other sites out there as well. Just spend some time with Google and I'm sure you'll find the ones that work for you.
Good luck! Learning Japanese has been a lot of fun for me, and isn't nearly as hard as people make it out to be.
Type something, will you? We're paying for this stuff!
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
being classified as very difficult by most standards
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 verbs. English also depends more heavily on slang and idioms, more than most langauages. Also, the spelling system in english is archane. Words are spelled that way because of history, not because of how things are pronounced. There are a vast numer of exceptions in english that you just have to know.
There are a few things that are notably more complicated in japanese, such as counting. The language also has more rules for politeness depending on who is talking and who is being spoken to, whereas english tends to rely more on word choice, body language, and tone of voice to convey the same things. Reading and writing japanese on the other hand is a nightmare. Only chinese is worse. You need to know about 2000 characters to read a newspaper for example. I know both phonetic alphabets (105 characters each) and only about 100 kanji.
American school children learn the entire alphabet in a matter of a few months, then spend years and years learning how to spell and use proper grammar and punctuation. Japanese school children learn those things fairly quickly, then spend years and years memorizing kanji.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
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 learning Kanji. :)
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Disclaimer: I haven't read the other comments.
Find a way to live in Japan for an extended period. I suggest Monbusho scholarship and/or the JET program (I was fortunate to get/do both for 4 short years of my life).
NOTHING will accelerate your learning faster than the necessity of your daily survival being tied into your ability to comprehend/communicate solely in Japanese.
Eric
Really, the absolute best way is to take Japanese courses. I studied many years, but learned more in my first semester of taking university Japanese classes than I had in all the time on my own.
If you just can't take classes, at least buy a good set of textbooks. I recommend Genki for starting out.
A good companion book would be A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, and later the Intermediate book. And of course a general dictionary, but since I haven't found one I really like I'll leave it to others to suggest one.
If you have a palm pilot, PADict is a useful tool, especially for looking up kanji.
And of course, listening and speaking is important.
For listening, anime and games are common enough. Japanese dramas and variety shows are also fairly easy to get.
Speaking is the hardest part. You could practice by writing a penpal, Japan-guide is a great place to find one. Perhaps you could get your penpal to install Skype.
If you're ever able to, spending time in Japan really is a great way to learn. I've been in Japan for 6 months now, and I can tell I've improved a lot. Feel free to browse through my Japan blog.
I definitely appreciate the comments above; however, if you want to learn the language, there is little point in wasting your time on it. Put up the money, and go to an intensive language school (Middlebury, FALCON, etc.) Then go to Japan. One summer of intensive language is enough to learn how to learn the language. Then going, immediately after, and making a concerted effort to use japanese as much as possible, and you can be passably good in a year. Ideally, find a teacher or class to continue your education and who can answer questions as they occur to you.
After a year, you'll be able to talk about serious things and fun things, hang out, even watch movies, etc. You won't be ready to work in a japanese company speaking japanese, nor will you have a strong understanding of the written language, but it'll be as much as you could hope to do in a year.
Any other approach, and it'll take you MUCH longer to achieve the same.
Just my 0.02.
Why not design a foreign variant of japanese?
What I am thinking about is simplifying and regularising a subset of japanese for foreigners to learn so they sound like understandable foreigners instead of sounding like a little girl or a stupid high school kid.
Sometimes it is better to create new culture than respecting an old.
Kim0
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
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 advice is "use anime and manga set in normal everyday life". There are lots of shows that are set in everyday life and have everyday conversations. Use those.
Formal Japanese is all you need to know. This is such bullshit. I've read posts from fresh graduates with Japanese degrees getting baffled at a KFC in Japan. Normal, everyday Japanese is not the polite, grammatically correct version you learn in school or from books. After you learn basic Japanese, buy this book. Then you'll understand what normal Japanese people say. :-)
Kanji is impossibly hard. No, not if you use the right book. Most kanji are composites and this book helps you see that.
Now some truths...
Get a penpal! Use the Pen Pal depot to find a friend that you want to talk with. Use MSN, Skype, whatever to have voice-video chats. I found a pen-pal this way and we use Skype to practice every week, and it really, really works.
Start reading/watching real material early. Don't wait until you get super proficient to start reading manga, short stories and novels. Push yourself because learning vocabulary from flashcards is hard, but learning a new word in context from a Japanese drama/anime or manga is a lot easier.
Buy dictionaries and grammar guides. You'll need them!
Buy an electronic dictionary. It's easier and portable.
Sasuga Bookstore. Sasuga Bookstore is your friend. Learn to buy from them early and often. :-) (I don't work for them, just a fan).
Ganbatte, kudasai! Hang in there, please. Have faith that you are progressing when all else says otherwise. EVERYONE who has studied any language can struggle, for years even, but they eventually get good.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I'm just a guest here, so my opinion (or "expertise"/experiences) on the subject might not be highly valued. Anyhow, I found alot of the replies here to be overly negative. ;)
I've been studying japanese as a hobby for nearly a year now, and I can read hiragana/katakana and approximately 200 kanji. My vocabulary is good enough to have a fairly good understanding of what's going on in variety shows such as Utaban. If you speak a second or third language, you'll get into it faster. The sentence structure is very different from english, but it's just a matter of restructuring your thoughts. You'll get into it fast. Build a vocabulary, learn hiragana/katakana as fast as possible. Learning to write in romanji is a long detour. Use Pimsleur to practise pronounciation, use kanji cards to practise kanji and watch alot of Japanese movies for immersion. Listen to webradio while at work
Hope that helps!
The Japan Foundation has some guides on their web sites that do help. (http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/kansai/index.html) Actually there are a lot of sites, dashboard gadgets and stuff out there to help you memorize kanjis or learn the weirdest combinations.. remember that even the japanese average citizen does not know all of them. Unlike our alphabet where one does learn how to read and then move on to grammar and vocabulary theirs recquire you to keep learning the kanjis virtually forever. Even they do, so, ??????????. This may help as well, ( http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl ) good luck
Maybe I missed it, but I can't believe nobody mentioned LRNJ. It's a role playing game that teaches you Japanese characters and words. It's also cross platform so it runs on Windows, Linux and OSX. In just a few days it helped me learn katakana, hirigana, and the meaning of about 500 or so kanji symbols. I highly recommend it.
Free will is just an illusion
So now I can go around Japan trying to impress people by sounding constipated and yelling out something about the attack of the turtle clan?
:)
Lovely
Grok.
It's difficult to read and write, but not to speak.
:-) "O-hashi ga jozu dekimasu ne"
Nearly all the verbs conjugate in one of two ways, and all the irregular verbs are based on the parrern of "suru" - to do, and "kuru" - to come - so once you have learned 4 conjugation patterns you have mastered Japanese verbs! No learning tables of irregular verbs like I tried (and failed miserably) to do with French and Spanish!
Although Japanese people are expected to master the intricacies of the language as regards to levels of politeness, a westerner who can even manage a couple of words, and who looks like they are genuinely trying, will be cut all the slack they need. I took two three week trips round Japan and never had a problem even though my Japanese was pretty basic.
The Japanese are also pretty impressed if you can use chopsticks
Ganbatte!
Neil
kish?gaku). They both misappropriate words and phrases from other cultures (compare English "bourgeois" with the French meaning of bourgeois or English clothiers' jargon "petite" with French petite). The big difference is that Japanese inflects verbs a whole lot (adjectives somewhat and nouns not at all), whereas English doesn't inflect much anymore.
Japanese honestly isn't really all that hard, despite what you've been told. All that about "verbs have no future tense" or "parts of speech are frequently omitted" is very easy to adjust to. Japanese culture is sometimes hard to deal with, but I think that's just because it's another culture--people go through just as much culture shock visiting France or Sweden as they do in Japan.
All that said, it's really worth your time (and money, if you're not too tight for cash) to take college courses in the language. The opportunity to interact (and be corrected by) native speakers is priceless, and even clumsy first-year students can help your pronunciation, rhythm, comprehension, etc etc etc (in particular if you're the sort to identify mistakes made by others better than to identify your own).
Seriously, the entire 10 CD set of Barron's version of Eleanor Harz Jordan's Beginning Japanese language laboratory materials I first heard in 1971 (!) fit in a few megabytes of your average iPod. This particular course is pretty steep, learning curve wise, but extremely valuable in the long run. There may be modern Japanese materials that are not as formal. If you launch the Barron set in iTunes, you can download the chapter and track descriptions from the internet.
After that, IMMEDIATELY familiarize yourself with Jim Breen's EDict from Monash University in Australia (Google it!), and any of the Japanese-English dictionary utilities that support it -- on Macintosh OS X 10.4, the best of these bar none is Sergey Kurkin's JEDict 4.0.
This will lead you to the realization that the best Pacific Rim computer system is Macintosh, for one simple reason: Kotoeri Input Method. Look into it, dude! Kotoeri is the quickest, slickest way to enter hiragana, katakana, 2-byte English(1) and MOST FREQUENTLY USED Kanji into Unicode text ever invented. The system modifies itself to some extent to match your preferences.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
This contains all the japanese you need to know:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/japanese/74a3
From my 7 years in Japan:
1. Get a Japanese girlfriend if possible. (Don't believe the sterotypes though, or you will be as disappointed that she isn't like Japanese girls in the movies as she is that you are not like Brad Pitt. Sample quote from mine: "submissive my ass")
2. Be sure to learn kana - hiragana and katakana. If you are good at English spelling, then kanji may also be easy for you to learn.
3. FOCUS ON SPEAKING, that is what you will need in Japan or in interviews to get there. If you lack social skills, you can also learn how to conduct basic conversations with other people by learning their names, hobbies, etc.
4. learn how to use chopsticks by eating a large can of M&M candies. They are small and hard, you'll be a pro by the time you finish.
5. go back to 3, FOCUS on SPEAKING. My gaijin boss in Japan could only speak, couldn't read a thing, but was awesomely effective and very highly paid.
Gee a topic about which I can speak with authority.
Japanese is the easiest language to learn. Also the hardest.
The grammar is extraordinarily simple. You can learn most of the basic grammar you need in a few weeks of intensive memorization.
Pronunciation is so easy for an English speaker you hardly even have to work at it.
Vocab works the way English works: combine some parts to make a whole. So once you learn a core set of words you can generate new ones relatively easily.
The writing system is extraordinarily difficult. Kana - you can memorize the entire hiragana/katakana system in a day if you really want to. But kanji! Count on spending years working at it.
Colloquial, socially appropriate speech - extraordinarily difficult. You can get the basic concepts from a book or class, but this level you can only really learn in-country, from native-speaker informants, and even then you may not get it completely.
In sum, you can learn enough J to communicate effectively verbally, and to understand manga, etc. pretty easily. Practical advice: find a Japanese bookstore or website - I'd bet there's more good printed material for students of J than for any other language. Memorize, memorize, memorize, and actually make the sounds. And find a native speaker to help you. And don't be intimidated. And don't waste your time if you're not serious about it. And if you _really_ want to learn the language, plan on a stay in Japan of at least one year. There's no other way to do it.
(I've studied J for years, Japanese wife, etc. but gave up trying to really master it since I've not lived in Japan. If you want to try a *truly* difficult language, try Arabic. I'm pretty fluent - 2+ years in Egypt, not enough. *Everything* about Arabic is *very* difficult. Makes Japanese look like a walk in the park.)
good luck.
I hope this isn't getting too off-topic, but you are the second person in this thread to quote the exact number of 1945 kanji symbols.
Is this just a natural number which falls out of being adequate for proficiency, or is it a somewhat arbitrary value? I assume it's a specific, standardized set that covers all the basics, or is that an over-simplification?
Yes, there is a set of kanji called the Jouyou Kanji ('General Use Kanji') that has been established by the Ministry of Education. Theoretically, these are the only kanji that are allowed to be used in newspapers and magazines, although there are exceptions for kanji used for people's names that fall outside the set. They are arranged into grade levels: 76 for first grade, 145 for 2nd grade, 195 for each of 3rd, 4th, 5th, 190 for 6th, and then 949 more you're expected to know by the end of high school.
I lived and worked in Japan for 7 years. Fortunately, I had the language skills already. For those foreigners around me who did not, I noticed that within 1 year they were able to comprehend most daily conversation and even speak basic language.
Remember, it's all about communication. NOT about grammar, rules, etc. Seriously, get a job and live in Japan. Especially the Slashdot crowd should *not* have probs getting a job with all the IT postings available in Tokyo. Good luck!
My humble advice: Get a Japanese girlfriend, and start talking. Not only will you learn the language very fast (or else :-)), you will also get to know a fascinating and very nice person.
//Johan
Trust me: Been there, done that, soon to be married. And speaks fluent everyday Japanese.
Really, when you speak Japanese, you speak with Hitler; their prime minister worships war criminals.
... the fact that Japanese is not an easy language, being classified as very difficult by most standards
This is such a myth. Japanese is just about the easiest language out there to learn. The kanji is only challenging if you don't like memorization, or if you're not really trying. The rest is cake, since the pronunciation is simple and static - and there are few exceptions to grammar rules (unlike romantic and germanic languages that are like 30% exceptions to the rules). There are no genders and fewer tenses. There are honorifics but they are fairly easy (and gaijin can usually get away with not using them).
Seriously, the only thing you need to learn japanese is a little effort, time, and immersion. Same as any other.
Related to this, I've been trying to figure out how to get Asian input (Japanese/Chinese) working in 'nix for some time now. I can *see* the characters fine, but trying to find+configure some programs that work similar to the existing windows apps (in KDE) has just been a pain. SKIM and others were just not functional (or at least not how I'd expect).
My first step towards typing Japanese would be in getting the input layer to work for me in my OS of choice. Anyone
Essential Japanese Grammar by Everett F. Bleiler, Dover, 486-21027-8. However, Amazon only lists a Basic Japanese Grammar by the same author, different press, different ISBN.
Infuriate left and right
You can use SKIM or SCIM, if you're on Linux. I use Mozilla-Firefox to enter URLs and terms in Japanese to bypass the Romajii (Romanized Kanjii). It's nice try to learn to use the language from the keyboard the way a native does, so you can make your keyboard input it directly or by using SCIM/SKIM.
IFFF you MUST use windoze, you have some plethora of tools available. You can go to User's Side, if you're in SF or San Jose, and pick up a computer made IN Japan or made FOR Japanese daily use. This way, you have a BIOS already set for it.
If you use a windoze-based, English/US BIOS, then you still can go to Flies Erectronics (not making fun of Japanese L/R problem... I'm doing a Spoonerism here...) and pick up J-Translate. Its a speech too, dictionary, and more. But, unfortunately, depending on your Lin/win skills, there's no cutting and pasting of the characters (English works, but I can't copy/past the Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji...)
IFFFF you have money, or an employer willing to send you there on business, you might be able to finagle some comp time there, too. If you're from the US, your blue passport will be a major effing drag: 'merkuns as visitors can ONLY stay in Japan up to 90 days at a time, and then you must leave at least ONE day before reentering. You can go to Korea or the Philippines or someplace, so long as your passport shows a timely, proper departure before another arrival.
Keep in mind that these days, Japan is beaten over the head by the US to get fingerprints on most classes of humans (dignitaries and certain immigrants and certain invitees are exempt by Japanese parliamentary rules/decrees, but expect to be fingerprinted there upon arrival at Narita.)
IFFF you do go, stay in a HOSTEL, for around $29 per night. IFF you go to Tokyo, then you can cheaply rent a bunk at that price in or near Ueno, (pron "oo-ehh-nho"), or Azabu Juuban, which is a sliver of community within/next to Roppongi and Roppongi Hills where zillions of expats and hundreds of "wealthy" Japanese go or live.
Check out Guess-T-House. It's NEW, under 3 years or so old. The owners are really fantastic, nice people-- A couple under 35 or so (owner (Mano) is Japanese,; her husband (M-Jay) is non-Japanese, but he speaks Japanese), and they have lived in the US and other places, so they have a quite hospitable demeanor. 2-part Bathroom in each bedroom. The front part of bathroom has a washbowl and clothes hanging area. The inner section has another washbowl, a western-style toilet, and a deep tub/shower combo. The lounge has a computer with Internet access paid for by your rent (at least when I was there). Each bedroom is a dormer, having 12 bunks. But, on a slow season, you could be the only one or one of 4 or 5 in the room for a whole week. I had that happen several times. I stayed my entire 3 months there, but traveled the area by foot. When it's a packed house, the fun REALLY begins. It' was exhilarating to be among and interacting with people from ALL over the world. It topped virtually any other happy moment in my life. It was also humbling and sobering and more to pleasantly and sometimes in debate talk about the US. I'm heretical anyway, so I was not out of water, so to speak... You'll met everyone from PhD types, to fresh high-schoolers learning the world. And you can learn just how big the REST of the world is when you take a breather from "home". I am grateful for it.
http://tokyohostel.com/english.html
As for the trains, you DON'T absolutely need English. Once you hang out with expats, and get an English-version of the subway map, you're much better of. The trains there put most of the US to shame. Even their buses are quiet. Some of the "kneeling" wheelchair buses in Santa Clara county piss me off with the loud-assed peiozo shrill and the high-power pneumatic hearing conservation destroying show. I wonder why VTA drivers don't weal earplugs when operating the damned things. But, in Tokyo I had my back turned at the stop wh
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Hi, I suggest you go to the local university and scan the noticeboards for Japanese language exchange partners. Many hot Japanese chicks post notices here... Alternatively, you can put your own notice up for 'language exchange partner'. good luck! :-)
Piroca and others might want to view this site:
k entei
s e_name
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/reference/kanji_
Kanji kentei means, basically, "Japanese Aptitude Test".
I stumbled upon it today, serendipitously...
It is a very informative site.
Japanese Name:
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/reference/japane
It has a TON of information, and I at first wondered how it fits into "astronomy", but I forgot my question after becoming absorbed by the site...
Enjoy!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"