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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."
Advices on Learning Japanese?
How's abouts ya learn English first?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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.
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.
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.
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]
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?
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 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
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.
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