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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."
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.
You type using Windows's Input Method Editor. You just type in romaji. Like you'd type in "watashi", then hit the space bar. As you're typing, it shows up as hiragana (), then after hitting space, it becomes Kanji ().
And no, I can't read Japanese or understand at all, but it's still fun to play with the Japanese IME tool.
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.
There are several different ways, actually. To understand how it works, you need to know a bit about Japanese orthography. Japanese is traditionally written with a combination of borrowed chinese characters, (called kanji) and two syllabic character sets called hiragana and katakana. However, it is possible to write Japanese without any kanji at all. (Although without the kanji it can actually be *harder* to read.) So keyboards in Japan, as far as I know, have keys for the syllabic sets, which only have about 50 or so different characters. Japanese computer programs take the syllabic characters and from them can detect where kanji characters should be. For example, if I typed "watashi" in hiragana, three characters would be displayed on the screen (WA - TA - SHI.) If I press the Space key, I will get a list of kanji that match those characters, and I pick the appropriate one.
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.
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/
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'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?
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.
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)
Indeed. That didn't stop them from trying, though - prior to the introduction of computers, Chinese typewriters for a long time had more than 2,000 individual characters on their keyboards. Take a look here:[http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2004/HI T4/HIT4-Images/25.jpg%5D and here: [http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts /chinlng2.html%5D (at the bottom of the page).
Interestingly, the typists still had to stop and manually write in about every 10th character.
Gotta give them points for tenacity, if nothing else.
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
5 year olds don't know that much Kanji. When I stayed with a family in Japan, their 4 year old son could read hiragana and some katakana, and was just learning to write hiragana. He didn't know any kanji.
Also, kanji isn't as hard as you imply. Most kanji have common shapes in them that appear all over the place, and so you learn very quickly. The major radical even typically gives you some hint as to the meaning of the word. Know the kanji for "to say"? Great! If you see it as the left half of another kanji, chances are it has to do with communication (eg, to talk, to read, etc). And with as many radicals as are common between kanji, stroke order isn't that hard to remember, and sometiems helps in remembering the kanji. Besides, native speakers of Japanese don't always get the stroke order right - why should you be expected to do better?
Most kanji only have two or three readings you need to know. One is the kun-reading. The native Japanese reading, which is used when the kanji is a standalone word by itself of with okurigana (hiragana used for inflectional endings and the like). The other readings are the on-readings. Those borrowed from Chinese at some point, and are used when the kanji is part of a compound with other kanji. I find that knowing the kanji for a word helps me remember the word itself. Of course, there are exceptions. For example: "shinjiru" (to believe), where "shin" is the on-reading of the kanji and "jiru" is okurigana, or "maiasa" (every morning), where "mai" is the on-reading of the first kanji, and "asa" is the kun-reading of the second.
Yes, to some extent, it is typically more polite to not complete a thought, but that generally when the rest of the tought it obvious. Why spell it out if everybody already knows what you're going to say? If it's a case where it's not obvious what you're getting at, of course there's no problem with finishing the thought.
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
Self-intro: 4 semesters Japanese study in college, 10 weeks in Japan in 2002, various periods of self study. Getting ready to leave next week for a year-long trip to Japan.
As others have said, the parent is exaggerating, but this is a common response to Japanese. The language requires you to almost rewrite all of the things you've come to expect in English or another Western language.
Let's start with Kanji. I believe 5 year-olds in Japan average about 500 of these, and the number just gets higher from there.
The first grade kanji run around 90, and from there it's about 200 new kanji per grade until you're out of high school and you know at least the 1,945 Joyo kanji intended for everyday use.
It is like a second langauge, but one basically devoid of pronunciation clues.
Kanji can seem this way, but that's not entirely accurate. For example, the second character of the word meirei (order, edict) is present in smaller form in other characters, such as the first character of reizouko (refrigerator). In this instance it operates by lending its pronunciation to the entire character. This pattern is present for many other kanji and is a result of the same system of pronunciation hints found in the original Chinese versions of the characters.
But please don't start with kanji -- as others have pointed out, you should definitely begin with the kana syllabaries, as mastery of these is both easier and more rewarding during your early studies.
Ok, how about saying hello? Thankfully, there is only about a dozen ways of doing this[...]
99.9% of the time you will need one of two politeness levels, both of which you should learn in college-level courses. (In the courses I took the polite form was taught first, which is incidentally opposite of the way Japanese students learn.) Finding out which one to use does not involve differential calculus -- it's mainly a matter of rank or age relative to yourself. After you've mastered the basic levels you can learn to understand the extreme forms of politeness and informality in speech without much difficulty.
The grammar is cool, but completely alien and quickly compounding.
This is where the mental rewrite comes in. Word order is very fluid in Japanese, so they use postpositions to tag parts of speech. If you work at it, you will be able to keep up. This is only accomplished through practice, preferably listening and speaking. As with all languages you will one day get to the point where you don't have to think and translate the sentence into your native tongue to understand it.
Just get subtitled Anime, and find something better to do with your life.
My advice on anime: it's good for listening practice, but don't expect to pick up a lot until you're well into your studies. I'm personally glad I didn't start watching a lot of anime until recently -- I picked up a lot more than I would have if I had started watching when I began my Japanese classes. The biggest advantage of anime (besides listening comprehension) is that it will teach you variations on the sentence forms you learned in class. If you ever go to Japan you will find out that the neat fill-in-the-blank sentences you learned in class aren't the only sentences used in everyday conversation. The trick is to become familiar enough with the language that you don't get thrown off track every time you hear something you haven't studied. If you're watching subbed anime and you find yourself commenting on the translation and suggesting a different one, you're probably there.
In conclusion, Japanese is just like any other language in that it requires a lot of work, and if you don't find a way to use it you will most certainly lose it. But I have found it to be a very rewarding experience, and I hope you will as well.