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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."
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
Do not try to learn anything from games or anime.
What if your primary reason to learn it _is_ games and anime?
Also - I find it is quite probably a good idea to pump tons of conversations (by native speakers of course) through your brain _before_ you start learning any foreign language. Reasoning - you will have quite certain idea how that language _should_ sound and in case of Japanese things like tonal stress will come very naturally. Otherwise you will obtain your own very wrong ideas about rhythms and sounds (probably through transliterating the words to your native tongue). Then you will need to relearn everything not even from zero level but from negative or otherwise your language "knowledge" will be wasted. And relearning is hard. I speak from my experience with English (not my native language). So in short - I think "parroting" the sound of Japanese is a good idea (even from anime as it is the most available source of Japanese).
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.
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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
pretty biased piece of crap.
speaking to japanese is much like speaking to english people. they're polite. therefore they avoid touchy subjects. but once you've built trust, they'll speak about things like anyone else.
learning japanese is anything BUT useless, for several reasons:
a) you learn how to communicate with people who communicate differently from what you're used to. you'll learn a lot about people that way. people skills are useless... since when?
b) you learn a language that works differently from your own. compare that to learning a pure functional programming language when your work requires object oriented programming only. you learn to think outside the box.
c) japanese might think it odd that you want to learn japanese, but most japanese are pleased at your effort. while that might not be the case with executive-type people, the average japanese will like you if you stammer a few japanese words and concede that you tried but failed. then switch to english because it's easier for both of you (don't persist). this goes for any culture, some more, some less. (interestingly enough, especially english speaking cultures seem to _expect_ that people speak their language)
d) learning a language as complex as japanese (and it isn't really complex, just different, as i pointed out it a previous post) will make it somewhat easier to learn other languages, because you've understood more completely _how languages work_.
e) if you're really that much into anime and manga and all that, you can't understand it unless you understand japanese.
japanese people are anything but socially inept. it takes a socially inept person not to recognize that. they communicate differently, altogether more subtly, but they communicate.
it's true that japanese want to speak english, and the reasons given for that are probably true as well. as for the rest of the post, i wonder where all that "information" comes from.
yeah, i had to vent a bit, now mod me down if you want.
Bullshit! English spelling is retained because we're used to it. Period! Everyone is used to seeing "night" and "through" and see no reason to change. It's not logical, and it drives learners crazy, but we're used to it. I ASSume it's the same with Japanese. They don't care that it makes things harder for the gaijin, THEY are used to it, and that's all that matters.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I learned the INFLections of the ENGLISH LANGAUGE from CARTOOOOOONS AND T.v.
When you don't know a language, you don't know what's exaggerated and what isn't. So you don't know how to listen to any recorded conversations and separate the wheat from the chaff. Keep with questionable sources, and you soon speak very weird. You need to get *good input* from quality sources. JapanesePod is ok to start with, but anime is right out.