help me learn japanese

mirroring the "help me learn mandarin chinese" thread but more relevant to what i'm actually doing, though both languages present similar obstacles. anyone else who has learned/is learning japanese please feel free contribute!

to begin: does anyone know of any good podcasts aimed at english-speaking learners? is japanesepod101 actually worth paying for?

are there any ilxors living in japan?

also i feel like it is not as common for english-speakers to study japanese anymore due to the economies of korea and china outshining japan's. confirm/deny

I have learned (very, very fundamental) basics over the course of 1,5 years in 2008-2009. It was great fun back then but for reasons I know longer can remember I dropped it completely.
Having returned from my first visit in Japan just last week I'm making some very serious plans to picking the stuff up again in the next few months.

Iirc a great appeal was the logic and clean structure of everything grammatical along with learning and using new writing systems. But then again it was only basic conversation in Hiragana/Katakana, without spending too much time with learning Kanji. Which of course is unavoidable at some point and will be the real challenge to face, I guess.

up to 400 kanji now

Yes! I've been wanting to start the exact same thread, but wussed out incase nobody was interested.

well, at least two people are! :D

how long have you been studying?

Will get a screed together after I get home from work, yay

pingu = penguin IIRC.

I nearly made a go of it in high school—I think I still have this packed away in some box of books—but the only people around me making a similar effort were hardcore anime nerds, which turned me off of it.

400 kanji is probably better than i managed during my ~4 years of high school level japanese (we had a beloved but not very strict teacher—perhaps partly beloved because not strict). it's been like 9 years since i last studied it but i still have an ok grasp of the grammar, all of the kana and some kanji. have been meaning to start studying it again for well, probably like 9 years, so i'm also interested in this thread.

wakarimasen

Totemo muzukashii desu, nihongo wa

I'm picking it back up again after almost a decade (college), and I'm trying to throw myself more into it than last time. There's a meetup in DC for people interested in Japanese culture, and that's been great for finding other people to practice with. And also people to drink with. I've been using the Android app Obenkyo to study vocabulary - anyone else use it or have other recommendations for apps for practice?

i've used anki in the past but never kept up w/ it enough to make a real judgement. it seems p widely used and also has phone apps that sync i guess (iphone one is a paid app tho)

i stick with paper flash cards for now. i'd like to work w/ an app though, if/when i get a smart phone/ipad/whatever.

the only people around me making a similar effort were hardcore anime nerds, which turned me off of it.

this is pretty much my entire class, ha. the weird thing is, none of them are very good at it, or at least don't seem to study outside of class.

i got into japanese because i was a hardcore anime nerd and was probably one of the best in my class until later on in high school when i stopped caring about school entirely (had also stopped caring about anime a while before that). but most of the anime nerds in my class were indeed totally lazy and really had no interest in wider japanese culture at all.

which actually just means they were on about the same level as most of the class tbh

teenagers

Made a few failed attempts to learn and swore I would never try again but perhaps will read this thread and even participate.

Used Anki for other purposes but not for Japanese. It is a pretty awesome tool, as long as you use as directed- "don't learn what you don't understand," etc. iPhone app is hella expensive but well worth it, try the desktop version first.

In 2011 I spent a couple of weeks in Japan on honeymoon, because we were travelling outside of the cities I decided to learn a bunch of phrases that might be useful, I got this 'Survival Phrases' Podcast to listen to on my commute.

Just simple stuff, but I started getting into it and by the time the holiday came around I had a couple of dozen little things down cold. When I got back I decided to try and learn.

There's an awesome ILXor I've known irl for yonks who is married to a Japanese girl and has been studying for 5 years or so, he helped me find a great teacher, gave me advice and patiently answers all my dumb questions. I've only really been studying for 6 months or so, I have a private lesson every 10 days and self-study in-between times.

I'm a habitual buyer of books on Japanese, there's a fantastic publisher called Kodansha who have a series of little books on different subjects (How To Tell The Difference Between Japanese Particles/What The Textbooks Don't Tell You/Handbook Of Verbs etc), so I try to read ahead despite being out of my depth most of the time.

I'm learning Kana, I have the Hiragana part pretty much down, time to move on to Katakana I guess, I'm scared the Hiragana will leave my head though. I started in with the Heisig book, it's okay but his tone annoys the crap out of me and his mnemonics didn't really click visually (rather obscure). There's a great little App called 'Kana Drills' that I use all the time.

I always have a ton of questions and I could make this an epic post but I'll stop for now.

I've used Anki as well, whilst preparing for a trip to Spain last summer. It was excellent for vocabulary building and for moral support, in that I felt I could actually measure the progress I was making. Much helped by the Android version being free.

Free? Now I've got Android envy.

Did you make your own cards or download someone else's deck?

I ended up making my own, as I couldn't find a pre-made deck to my liking (and didn't have the patience to wade through the hundreds of decks): an image representing the word on one 'side', word on the next. It was a bit of work but I was well-pleased with the result.

Right answer. That's what they recommend, I think, and when I've done it I've had better results as well.

http://ankisrs.net/docs/manual.html

Self-made versus pre-made
Creating your own deck is the most effective way to learn a complex subject. Subjects like languages and the sciences can’t be understood simply by memorizing facts - they require explanation and context to learn effectively. Furthermore, inputting the information yourself forces you to decide what the key points are, and leads to a better understanding.

If you are a language learner you may be tempted to download a long list of words and their translations, but this won’t teach you a language any more than memorizing scientific equations will teach you astrophysics. To learn properly, you need textbooks, teachers, or exposure to real-world sentences.

maresnest, i used heisig for kanji to begin with but stopped partially for the same reason, but also because his method doesn't even TOUCH readings until the 2nd book (after you've remembered the english "meaning" of each kanji, which is not always exact). i feel like in the long run it was a waste of time, but the one good thing he does is get you to think of kanji in terms of being composed of radicals, which i feel that most lower-level japanese classes (i.e. when it's most important to learn radicals) skip.

now i use a book that just presents the kanji along with stroke order, on and kun-yomi, and a couple compounds. kodansha is indeed very good - i have their furigana dictionary and it's awesome.

Which specific book are you using, clouds?

"essential kanji" by p.g. o'neill. it is super old-school (published in the 60s, still uses romaji) but v. thorough. the only odd thing about it are the example compounds, as it only lists examples using kanji that you've already learned (assuming you're working through the kanji in the order the book presents them), so you get some obscure examples — e.g. for 声 "voice" one of the example compounds is 少年の声変わり "breaking of a boy's voice", which is not very useful. to make up for this i just use the furigana dictionary or jisho.org to look up compounds.

actually jisho.org is probably the best japanese dictionary in existence, but i'm not always near a computer when i'm studying and actually prefer pen-and-paper.

does virginia plain still post? he was living in japan for a while iirc.

Thought VP was a lady.

oh, oops. i made the mistake of assuming an internet person was male until proven otherwise.

I don't recall her mentioning anything about Japan either but I'm not really sure.

i remember her mentioning it on the "do you speak a second language?" thread

Looks like you are correct.

While looking for that found an interesting discussion of Japanese levels of politeness here: Are you a different person when you speak a different language?

taught myself hiragana/katakana last year but my brain kinda went "wtf nope" with the whole at-least-two-ways-to-pronounce-each-kanji thing - funny cos i mainly just want to learn how to read japanese, so many books/rpgs that will never get translated into english :_;

I lived in Kyoto for 3 years in the late 90s. Learned about as much about the culture and the place as I could without ever getting good at speaking the language. My listening skills were much better than my speaking skills, and I could read quite a bit (though only slowly). Found it much easier to understand women than men in conversation (most of my students were women). Really liked kanji, spent a lot of time studying them, learned most of the elementary school ones (for recognition and at least 1-2 readings / uses). It was fun being able to read and understand more than I could say -- my clumsy spoken Nihongo led many people to believe I couldn't understand them, which could be interesting.

Married a Japanese woman who spoke excellent English. We've always spoken English to each other but she speaks Japanese to the kids, who are fluent for their ages. My 5 year old reads Doraemon manga (kanji with hiragana superscript) and follows the Nihon Daihyo on video and in magazines. He was barely 3 the first time he translated a Japanese word for me that I didn't recognize on TV ("kazaru", to decorate). I've forgotten a lot of what I used to know but can still understand most of what the rest of the family are saying to each other, and can make up jokes and little songs. Keep meaning to go back to studying but that hasn't happened yet. Meanwhile my boy's in French immersion so we'll share a language his Mama can't understand in another year or two.

I can probably help with some of your questions about the language (and I can ask a native speaker and former Nihongo teacher if it's too much for my limited abilities), but I don't know much about how to study JSL in terms of what books or courses to recommend.

Except one: "Remembering the Kanji" by Heisig. Weird, weird book of mnemonic tricks more or less divorced from Japanese as a language, but surprisingly effective if you follow through with it.

ya do not recommend heisig

it works, in a zen denial crush your soul kind of way.

Japanese Demystified, I kinda like this book, it's a good counterpart to Japanese For Busy People or Genki or whatever. It's no-frills beginners self study guide, it's concise and well laid out, good to lay yer hand on in moments of doubt.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Japanese-DeMYSTiFieD-Audio-CD-2nd/dp/0071797718/ref=sr_1_15?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366500650&sr=1-15&keywords=japanese

Back to the books after 3 weeks holiday and I've forgotten, maybe the last whole month of studies. Feels like I'm always playing catch-up.

me too. i will likely be working all the time this summer but i hope to fit in as much study as possible.

Still can't seem to retain the Hiragana for Me Nu Na & Re for any length of time, why lord why?

for the time being i suggest dumb mnemonic systems:

me can mean 'eye' and if you look at the hiragana of it it is kind of like a quick-sketched cartoon eye? め

re has like a little tongue flick on the end, like the shape of your mouth when you say 're' れ

nu is like a diagram of a knot, like maybe a... noose? ぬ

na i can't really think of anything but seriously you use it all the time so it's v hard to forget, you might have to just muscle memory this one. (it is from the 'na' of nara 奈良). な

Feel like the sole benefit of my attempt(s) to learn Japanese is that it makes learning any other language seem that much easier.

i've been trying to remember my old japanese teacher's hilarious mnemonics for hiragana, but the only one i can think of is for む: he turned it into a little drawing of a man mooning the moon

rabbits make mochi on the moon, apparently

I am taking a lead from the mandarin thread and chimping, chimping...

for some reason i remembered ぬ as being a rabbit... named "nu". i guess i've never really analyzed it, heh.

シ and ツ were the hardest kana for me to remember.

I still can't tell シ and ツ apart depending on the script, but context is usually enough. ぬ looks like め with a "new" tail, that's how I remember it.

シ often combines with subscript kana (ya, yu, yo etc) to make different vowel sounds like sha, shu, sho etc. The more horizontal aspect of the parallel strokes leads forward to the next character.

ツ shows up most often at the end of words and is sometimes used in subscript as a sort of exclamation point. The more vertical aspect seems more like an endpoint, not too different from our "!".

this article feels relevant to my struggle with 日本語

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/are-you-a-three-day-monk

righteous article, ty!

Getting into learning Japanese these days. Live in Korea atm and speak Korean reasonably well (studying it at a Uni here is the only thing I'm doing at the moment except for writing some stuff).

Started Japanese two weeks ago, learned Hiragana and Katakana without much trouble. Have moved onto basic grammar now. I started at this time because I'm fairly comfortable with Korean and Japanese grammer is so similar to Korean I felt it would be a big advantage once it was locked down. It is. The grammar and sentence structures are familiar enough that it doesn't feel like something foreign at all. Then there's kanja of course. I'm so motivated by the boost my Korean has given the Japanese learning process that I'm set on starting Kanji very soon. That's going to be something else.

Basically having no other worries than learning languages (and wasting money and having no future plans) is a rush, I'll tell you.

Started Japanese two weeks ago, learned Hiragana and Katakana without much trouble.

*weeps*

Basically having no other worries than learning languages (and wasting money and having no future plans) is a rush, I'll tell you.

^This, pretty sure if I could pare my life down to learning Japanese for even 6 hours a day and have nothing else to worry about I'd be pretty happy.

Well I've memorized them but of course the only writing I do so far is copying down the simplest structures with the few words I've learnt. Not exactly a natural user of the alphabets yet.

The link above rings too true, though. When I prepared for studying Korean here the only rule was that I had to study every day. I avoided boring excercises and just went through at least one 'lesson' every day and I never lost motivation because I had no expectations of progress except keeping it up every day.

It should maybe have been obvious to me before, but I've had a bit of an epiphany the last year when I've realized that studying even the most foreign language is simply a matter of motivating yourself to not stop. It's not magic or some vague thing or even horrible repetition. It falls into place and you learn it. Before coming here I chose the path of least resistance and in spite of / because of that it worked. Now I'm hooked on this language thing.

learning korean before learning japanese seems like the perfect order tbh - there's loads of japanese grammatical constructions that are effectively a simplified version of korean ones (and sino-japanese words that are easy to identify from sino-korean but harder in the opposite direction. japanese got most of its original chinese vocabulary from korea in the first place!)

Does Korean have the subject - object - verb construction?

yup

c sharp major -- That's my impression, talking to Japanese friends here and other Japanese learners. I'd be impressed if it was more complex, anyway!

Does Korean have the subject - object - verb construction?

and every other feature of Japanese language, from what I've seen so far.

I'm literally just starting in with Katakana this week, without the direct aid of MrHeisig this time.

how are you going about learning the scripts? You might be better off focusing less on remembering them now and more on just using them to write out the grammatical/vocab stuff you're learning, even if you have to keep looking them up.

(this does mean that you fall behind on rarely used katakana like ヌ etc, but I think in the end it'll leave your memory more solid)

For the Katakana this time I'm looking at the order that is outlined in the Heisig book and just writing and reading, over and over.

I'll sit with a pad and write it out starting with Hiragana then the diacritics, diagraphs and combined. Then I'll write out what katakana I know so far. I have a great little Iphone App called Kanadrills which is a multiple choice thing, but I cover the options up with my thumb, it's good for commuting with.

Reading wise, I'm verrrrry slow, I'm just looking at sentences from my Japanese For Busy People Book

a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, etc?

I suspect they'll be more memorable in word context - you've got a dictionary to hand, right? aren't there vocab lists in the back of JFBP? why not try finding some katakana words that start with each letter and writing those out -e.g.

アップル
インタネット
ウイルス
エンターテインメント
オーガナイザー

Good idea thanks! I'm sure I could find a bunch of katakana words on the net I could print off.

Yeah I mean I learned katakana years ago, and still find myself forgetting half of it. Don't even mention kanji...Using the katakana as much as possible is probably a good idea to get it into your head a bit more forcefully.

がんばって　ね！

enjoy reading this thread btw. don't know the numbers for us/uk but here practically no one apart from düsseldorf-japan-expats learns the language and so it's near impossible to share experiences.

How do you all study vocab? What processes help it stay in there?

can i make relevant suggestions based on my chinese learning?

Yes indeed!

I'm a fan of the mandarin thread.

i was going to say a combination of flashcards (with sound) and writing characters was a huge help to me. if you want to remember kanji you really need to write them down, again and again and again.

also, heuristics that combine the complete meaning of characters (i.e. the components) and their associated sounds. idk japanese but you might say e.g. 語 is five words that go out of the mouth.

and yeah, get a touchscreen smartphone/ipodtouch/tablet and a flashcard app that lets you write the kanji/kana on the screen with your finger. transformative.

Enjoying reading both the Mandarin thread and this thread. Although I've got my hands full so won't be trying to learn either in the near future. Also there's this quote from Babel No More:

The great Mezzofanti himself suffered a nervous breakdown after struggling with Chinese in Naples and lost every language he knew except his mother tongue, Bolognese.

That flashcards/writing idea is a good tip. I think I read somewhere that Japanese people themselves practice writing kanji in the palm of their opposite hand on the subway.

Yea, Mandarin bros have a Sisyphean task.

i keep seeing japanese out-sisypheing chinese on charts of languages that are sisyphean for english speakers

Also, can confirm that Kodansha's Hiragana/Katakana workbooks are working much better, more expediently for me than with Heisig.

heisig's technique is at least twice as useful as the actual books imo

My wife's nephew is visiting this week from Shanghai, where e has been living for 5/6 years, he's now fluent in Mandarin (not sure about writing tho') he's trying to learn Japanese and is saying that it's 'just not going in', I'm going try to find out why when we meet up.

(by that i mean there's greater power in building mnemonics that are meaningful to you personally than just relying on someone else's)

(also you'll remember something loads more effectively if you manage to put say some turds or a dick or a blowjob in there)

xp ooh very interesting

I've said this upthread I think, but his image associations just don't connect with me at-all.

Yea! I have heard that elements of rudery work somehow.

the whole point of mnemonics is to strengthen memory by building multiple associations with things that are already connected in your own brain, so it stands to reason that pre-baked mnemonics are never ever going to do that job as well as those that you come up with yourself. took me a little bit too long to come to that conclusion.

xp rudery works because it's hilarious and wrong. if you're struggling hopelessly with one kanji, turn the whole thing into a macarbe orgy. you will never forget it again.

Thanks for the advice, I'm in the early stages with Katakana, it's pretty austere by comparison. I wonder how far I could go to extrapolate something orgiastic from ツ :)

Maybe Katakana is more oananistic

Hi all, I usually lurk but as a long, long-time Japanese learner I couldn't pass up posting in this thread. I've been struggling with Japanese for years and years, including a five year stint living there. I've been back in the US for a couple of years now so my main goal is not forgetting everything I've learned.

Early on in my Japanese learning career these flashcards were an immense help. I remember trying electronic flashcards like Anki later on, but I was never able to focus as much as I was able to with real, physical flashcards.

Also I really, really recommend using the JLPT to set goals for yourself. I know the availability of the test outside of Japan is not great, and it is just another dumb standardized test, but it gives you something to work towards, broken down into steps. Because language learning goes so slowly it's almost impossible to notice your own improvement, it's nice to have some objective evaluation of your progress.

Also the rikaikun/rikaichan browser extensions are amazing, no matter what level you are at.

Some people warn and some recommend - I've got Heisig's book ready for my Kanji studies to set off anyway so we'll see how it goes. Think it could be a bit overblown when you're doing Kana. Anyway, whether his stories are good or not I got the official ios app which does feature the kind of finger-writing Kanji tools described above.

I had great success with mnemonics once when I wasn't learning language and just went at it for fun, reading a book about it - learned 800 decimals of pi and lots of cities in Middle America. No use for that knowledge so it's forgotten now but it was a fun experiment.

hiragana and katakana can be learned in a day each imo

In my experience it's not learning them, it's remembering them!

true

My two cents is that, yeah it's easy to learn them once and then start forgetting them but avoid the tendency to overstudy them- I think this is what I did. Instead just force yourself to read- and write I guess- using them, avoiding romaji when possible, and start learning the Kanji as soon as possible, which will make the kana seem that much easier.

Also I really, really recommend using the JLPT to set goals for yourself. I know the availability of the test outside of Japan is not great, and it is just another dumb standardized test, but it gives you something to work towards, broken down into steps.

this times a billion. if you pass, you feel ace. if you fail, literally nothing happens. you can't lose.

Now considering the JLPT, not ready for a good long while yet tho'.

Has anybody ever heard themselves speaking and flipped over the amount of fucking um-ing and ah-ing and errrrrr they do while parsing, I record all my lessons and can't bear the way I sound, like I don't know what the hell I'm talking about even when I kinda do, there must be a way to dial this out.

replace the ums and ahs with ano and eto, it's good for your language confidence to feel like you're still in japanese even when you're making mistakes/being slow.

So desu ne / nn / e are all useful for killing time while you're brain kicks into gear too. I'm sure there are more.

replace the ums and ahs with /ano/ and /eto/, it's good for your language confidence to feel like you're still in japanese even when you're making mistakes/being slow.

brilliant! thank you

and from me too!

i've been working 40+ hour weeks since i started my two jobs, but my commute is 1 1/2 hours each way, so i've been cramming in as much 日本語 as possible on the train/bus. i am kind of enjoying the challenge of writing 漢字 in a rocking train car, and walking around with the pimsleur lessons on, not caring who hears me repeating the lessons. :D

ス is my favourite character to write so far, only 25 in mind, maybe RO will be bitchin', also my Hiragana handwriting is getting totally baddass.

Remember to get yer stroke order right at the beginning, otherwise you'll get into terrible handwriting habits like I did.

i am fond of ネ as far as kana go.

Remember to get yer stroke order right at the beginning, otherwise you'll get into terrible handwriting habits like I did.

― OORT (Matt #2), Tuesday, 4 June 2013 00:41 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is so very important. even if you're one of those people who 'nah i don't need to handwrite, everyone types anyway', try writing a kanji in your phone in the wrong stroke order and see what happens.

ネ is really just a showoff ス

ヘ is the same for both, wonder why.

http://i40.tinypic.com/30rpevd.jpg

hiragana and katakana へ are both formed from shorthand for the character 部.

Both hiragana and katakana evolved as shorthand for kanji. Writing in Japan was at first in Chinese: before the invention of the kana, if japanese sounds needed to be expressed in writing, they used kanji phonetically. Since no-one had agreed specifically which characters would be used to represent which sounds, there wasn't a one to one correspondence. A sound could be represented by a number of different characters, usually not more than 5. So, e.g., the sound we write as え might be represented with 衣, or 江, or 得 -- usually in a reduced or simplified form. え itself is a simplified form of 衣; エ is a simplified form of 江. By the 9th century or so people were quite consistently used the simplified forms that we know as kana, but (especially in the case of hiragana) the choice of characters was a matter of style more than anything else. As late as the 19th century people were still using multiple characters to represent the same sound (and a lot of those variant hiragana look the same as the modern katakana).

Katakana were used for annotation and thus tended to be smaller and neater: they are by and large taken from small elements of the kanji associated with a sound. Hiragana tend to be formed from the whole kanji written cursively, and were used for writing running text and as an all-purpose syllabary for people who weren't in a position to learn kanji.

Really interesting ty! Do you know when and by what process Katakana were assigned to loanwords?

got into a conversation w/ a native 日本人 on the bus who noticed my flash cards :3

I never realised that back translating loanwords in Katakana would be as tricky, did anybody else find this a problem?

In what way?

Just simply figuring what the loanword is after it's been a bit mangled by Katakana.

It's okay with more common words, but something like ロッジ isn't so obvious

yeah, reading katakana words ends up as the hardest thing, soz like.

the process of assigning katakana to loan words: hm. you find katakana being used for grammatical information in official writing all the way through the tokugawa period - and it's used for official announcements written up on boards well into meiji - but maybe that's just in its role as the clearest and most legible of the scripts. It's being used for loanwords from Dutch and Portuguese in the 18th century at least. Loanwords could also pretty often have kanji characters assigned to them either by sound or meaning, e.g. lamian / ramen 拉麺, tobacco / tabako 煙草 ("burning grass"), holland / oranda 阿蘭陀, coffee / kōhī 珈琲 --- you'll still see these on e.g. signage, because they look cool, but since the early 20th century and particularly since the script reform of the 1940s they aren't in common use. (chinese words are often left as kanji, but subsequently can end up being given a japanese pronunciation)

The thing to remember about loan words into Japanese is that often they do not come from English - e.g. エネルギー is from German, ビール is from Dutch, タバコ is from Portuguese, レストラン is from French. So you can't necessarily use English pronunciation to predict what the loan word will sound like, or instantly tell from the katakana word what its source was.

Also you get just frankly weird ones, the way one does in any language that incorporates foreign words -- for example, the last time I was in Japan I went into a public toilet in a station and found a sign up saying something that I translated to "it is a crime to use the consent in these facilities" - with this katakana word in there, コンセント, that I didn't recognise but certainly read as "consento". So I was a bit baffled and maybe slightly worried by it? But eventually remembered that I had a dictionary and could look the word up, and it turns out that "consento" is short for "concentric plug" and means "the wall outlet", and so it was telling people not to, you know, charge their phones there.

コンビニ

I have trouble with some of the English ones! Was stumped by ボランティア yesterday, thought it was a proper noun.

http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef017eeb2b0a9d970d-pi

ブラジル - oh come on ffs, Brazil?

Guys, how do you render out a word like 'where' in Katakana? Specifically puzzled by a 'wh' sound.

at a guess it would be something like ho-e-i-ru
whip is ho-i-pu, white is ho-wa-i-to etc

The "wh" sound is just "we" I think, you see ウェ used for words like that. "Western" is ウェスタン for example. "Where" might be ウェアー?

Nm, disregard what I said. I think zappi's got it, was not aware of "h" being used as a sound for words like whip!

ウェア = ware (as in sportsware, warehouse, etc)

Thanks! D'y think my band's name, 'Nowherians' would be ノウエアリアヌス ?

probably with n rather than nu? also you'd need to lengthen the o on 'no' - ノーエアリアンズ ?

wikipedia tells me that the Ride album "Nowhere" was katakana-ized as "ノーホエア" tho, so maybe you're looking at something more like ノーホエアイアンズ

http://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=ノーホエア+&title=特別%3A検索

okay, that's not helpful - basically, ノーホエア seems to be the conventional transliteration. (ノーホエア・マン, ロード・トゥ・ノーホエア, ノーホエアズ・トゥー・ファー・フォー・マイ・ベイビー)

ノーウェリアンス apparently! Got that from the horses's mouth as it were, not that I'm calling my wife a horse you understand.

Thank you Emi! (and everybody)

Yet another take:

ノーウェリアンズ
[nōuerianzu]

chōonpu after "no"
trailing (small) "e" on "ue"
dakuten on "su" for "zu" (cf, vegetarians, barbarians, etc.)

Hope this helps!
Jersey Al ブロッコリー

lol, i hate katakana

I think I'm beginning to also.

Today I was feeling smug, I found a PDF with the first 103 Kanji for JLPT N5, so I abused the works printer and got it all bound up nicely at the copy-stop, only to find that near the beginning there is a big list of 'extended Katakana' which I haven't seen in the Kodansha books or elsewhere.

So now I'm sat staring at this page in mute horror like it's a big glass tube full of facehuggers.

fuck an extended katakana

extended as in like ヴァ or フォ or ディ? or extended as in like ヱ or ヲ？

The former, what the heck is ヱ ?

"we" (you are unlikely to ever see this in a modern text)

ゑ

yeah that's my fave

Well I started the big one, learning Kanji, the Heisig way for now. The ios app is really great for practicing each set, that's for sure. For those who know Kanji, how many did you do per day / session?

when i used heisig i was doing about 30 a day, but promptly forgot all of them. rote memorization of kanji/yomi has worked better for me.

Promptly as in you forgot them the next day when practicing or a month later earlier kanjis were forgotten.

i just forgot all the mnemonics provided by heisig as well as the ones i'd made up for the kanjis.

heisig was in fact useful for me though, in that it helped me think of kanji in terms of being made up of smaller parts that reoccur often, which made learning them afterwards a lot easier.

i usually try to do 5 a day but it's been a couple weeks since i've learned any new kanji :\ i've been reviewing the ones i know though, and there's probably a 95% retention rate.

So you went through the whole program?

Whether it sticks or not I'm having a good time, although only a few days and 100+ kanji in, it's nice to be able to understand some pieces of the puzzles.

Thought I'd link to this guy's JLPT related site, I'm a looooong way off N5 even, but It's insightful to hear about one student's ups and down. I also like the fact that he is kinda low-key and doesn't come across as super erudite, peppy and all HI THERE like some folk's websites or YT channels.

http://jlptbootcamp.com/

doesn't come across as super erudite, peppy and all HI THERE like some folk's websites or YT channels.

a big part of me wants to murder that "fluent in 3 months" dude for this reason

So after reading that alljapaneseallthetime article that Clouds linked to over a month ago (thanks again), I decided to take 5 weeks away from lessons to finish learning Kana and also to go back through my workbook from the beginning and try to lock in the basics.

The 'stop-stopping' advice really worked for me, even if is just 30 mins with my flashcards or scribbling out Kana some amount of study has been a daily constant for 5 weeks. I had my first lesson back today and it went really well and for the first time I didn't have that niggly catch-up feeling, in-fact I was relaxed enough to realise that my listening comprehension is complete shite and I act weird and panicky when spoken too, wtf!

Otherwise I'm happy.

yeah, i've taken that article to heart as well and have been more diligently studying as of late. almost up to 450 kanji now. ^_^

Another example is a school janitor in Japan was used to be called a kozukai-san (小使いさん "chore person"). Some felt that the word had a derogatory meaning, so it was changed to yōmuin (用務員 "task person"). Now yōmuin is considered demeaning, so there is shift to use kōmuin (校務員 "school task member") or kanrisagyōin (管理作業員 "maintenance member") instead.

Mister Saturday night...

http://i41.tinypic.com/mighm8.jpg

Crossed 500 kanjis last week myself. No issues recalling them from keywords, but using Heisig I do of course not know their pronounciation or use in words at all yet. The official app is essential - without it I doubt I would be able to write out any kanji at all, I'm too lazy to make elaborate systems myself, but through it I find myself practicing all the time and reinforcing my command over the ones I've learned.

I know I will at least spend this year getting to the end of all the standard kanjis, and that's before I start studying pronounciation. A long process and I'm sure many teachers would tell me to focus more on grammar and typical lessons first but I really want to get all the initial alphabet business out of the way.

The particle Ga is kinda pissing me off, and now I've just found out that it can act as an object marker with certain non action verbs and adjectival nouns. Go fuck yourself Ga

^^ UK Ga Rage

This thread is terrifying to me.

I'll be in Tokyo for six weeks this winter. I'm really crap at learning languages, mostly because I've never really gotten into it; languages just aren't my thing, I guess.

Currently living in Mexico and can't even summon up the fortitude to learn decent Spanish, gah.

Advice for the bare minimum Japanese I should strive for to get more out of my Tokyo trip? And how should I go about trying to get to "survival" stage Japanese? I don't know if I should focus on spoken language, or try to learn enough to read signs and such?

If you're just going to be in Tokyo, I don't think you need to bother learning to read signs. Probably more trouble than it's worth. All the trains have prominent listings in English and every station had someone who spoke English, I had no trouble getting around when I visited two years ago. Some basic Japanese phrases might be useful to learn, but I found no end of people that knew English and were happy to try it out. There were less of those people the further I got from the major cities.

just remember wakarimasen

One easy-to-learn thing that may be useful is how the Japanese say English words like "hotel". Sometimes I had problems getting people to understand what word I was saying because their have their own way of saying the word.

Yeah, aim for conversational Japanese. Signs are impossible unless you learn kanji, which takes forever. Lots of what you'll need on signage (like in the train stations or neighborhood maps) will be in romaji anyway.

In conversation, greeting and apologies are the easiest way to connect with people even if you can't speak a word otherwise. "Sumimasen" and "gomen" and "hajimemashite" and "onegai shimasu" and "arigatou" and "konnichiwa", etc.

Plus there are some one word exclamations that come up often and are easy enough to learn, like "samui, ne" (since you're there in winter), "ii, ne", "oishii", "kawaii", etc. If you can learn what to say when someone else says "samui, ne!" to you (and they will, at least 5 times a day -- you can say "sou da, ne!" in reply), you've got instant conversational Japanese.

When all else fails you can say "ah, sumimasen, nihongo wakarimasen" and most people will gladly try to switch to English.

Beyond that, you'll get a lot of mileage out of learning to read katakana and pronouce familiar English words in that style. Loanwords are everywhere, and many times a katakanized version of the English word will do the trick when you can't remember the Japanese word. Most Japanese learn at least 1000 English words in school but pronounce them in Japanese, using the katakana syllables, and have trouble deciphering them otherwise. So for instance they understand "kyatto" much more easily than the way we say "cat" as English native speakers. It's a lot easier to speak English with a Japanese accent than to learn Japanese itself (sad but true), and you'll probably find it easier to learn to communicate that way than memorizing a long list of actual Japanese words.

After that the best thing is to learn the numbers and money if you're going to be a tourist or doing some shopping, plus some common nouns for things you'll need around town, like "eki" or "konbini" (many of which will also be loanwords, like "takushii"). You can combine the nouns and the numbers to make simple sentences, which will be readily understood even if you don't master any of the grammar: "nikuman hitotsu" is readily understandable even if you don't add the "wo" particle or remember to be polite and say "kudasai".

Conversational Japanese is a forgiving language at a beginner level, and the effort to try goes a long way in most situations. When in doubt, smile and nod and apologize.

Oh thank you much for that info! Soooooo is there a particularly good place on the internets (or in book form) to learn about the differences and relationships between kanji, romaji, and katakana? Because that is how little I know about the Japanese language :(

I have been super lucky with the smile/nod/apologize approach in Mexico; without fail, everyone I have encountered has been very kind in trying to communicate despite my significant limitations. The next time I am in the U.S. and see one of those "this is AMERICA, speak ENGLISH" hanging on a shop door I am going to challenge the proprietor in a big way. That shit embarrasses me to no end on so many levels.

Unrelated: I am afraid that I am going to love it so much that I want to move there, which is a whole other can of worms.

^^^by "it" I mean "Japan"

You can learn Kana, which is Hiragana and Katakana combined, but I don't know if you'll really need it for six weeks in Tokyo, you would be better served learning some survival phrases like Plasmon suggests.

I think I might have a bunch of Survival phrase podcasts that I paid for a couple of years ago that got me through my first visit, If I can find them I'll organise a WeTr@nsfer link or something if you mail me.

You don't need to learn katakana (I wouldn't bother with hiragana as a tourist/visitor) for 6 weeks in Tokyo, but the world will seem a lot more familiar if you do and you'll have a much easier time going to a restaurant or shop on your own and figuring out what's what. With a few months lead time, it's a very manageable task.

Not sure what to recommend for studying, I learned them years ago by writing them out on a piece of paper and then making flash cards. There are some orthographical tricks to learn about how the characters combine ("shi" with a little "ya" is "sha" for instance) and some conventions to learn about how kana are substituted for English phonemes (words starting with "v" start with "b" for instance), but that's also not hard to oick up.

Almost all the katakana you see in real life are English words, most of the rest are from other European languages that you can decipher with a moment's thought (like "pan" meaning bread, from Portuguese I think originally but very similar to "pain" en francais). I learned to feel comfortable reading katakana by hanging around Tsutaya (video/music shop) and reading the movie titles and band names on the CDs. You could do a GIS for Japanese movie posters until "supiido" becomes recognizable as "Speed".

god dammit, i really dropped the ball on this

starting back school next month, chose japanese studies as my major — feel like i'm nowhere near being up to the level i should be at this point.

Me too, I've just taken voluntary redundancy whilst trying to start a freelance career and being terrible at multitasking found it hard to concentrate on studies. But I got 16 days in JP in April so imma start back again soon.

I got through Heisig's Kanji course but then had to finish up my Korean studies instead of repeating what I learned. Still left with lots of good knowledge from that, repeating now. Now done with Korean so Japanese takes a step up as full time hobby and only language being studied. Got a book teaching JP in KR.

More specifially 'Genki'.

Genki is what we use in the classes I take. It's kind of weird that they present all the new grammatical constructs for the chapter at the beginning and then have all the practice afterward (makes for a lot of switching back and forth) but it's a pretty solid book otherwise. I keep wondering whether Mary and Takeshi got together though - they are vague about it

i've been curious about genki for a while but haven't wanted to start another textbook after sticking with nakama for so long. the problem w/ nakama is that there are so many class-dependent exercises ("work with a partner", "work as a group" etc) that i end up skipping most of them. ideally, i would like a textbook that prioritizes grammar and sentence construction over situational language. i also need to find a better way to study vocabulary.

I'm not sure what you mean by situational language but Genki is pretty focused on grammar and sentence construction. The exercises are split about half for solo, half for groups, maybe more favored towards solo - sounds like it might be what you're looking for (nb: I only have Genki 2, but I assume Genki 1 is similar). It's a lot better at explaining concepts than the book I used in college, Yookoso. I still use the Android app Obenkyo for vocab practice, but I'm sure there are better ones out there. I haven't looked much.

situational as in "how to order at a restaurant" or "japanese weather reports"

iirc we used both youkoso and genki at different points in my "formal" japanese education but i don't think i remember enough to compare them. i do remember liking genki. also lol at me saying at the beginning of this thread that i've been meaning to start studying again—still haven't gotten around to it, don't really know how to go about starting. i've had a copy of rosetta stone sitting on my computer for a while now though

I'm getting ready for the final next week in JPN 401 at UHawaii @ Manoa. We've been using 上級へのとびら (Tobira) as our textbook for 1 1/2 years. Class has been brutal, but I've progressed in the language. Also kind of burned out by now. It feels like we hit a plateau where acquiring vocab is like an endless battle. The reading focus has taken precedence over situational stuff, but I suppose you should get that through watching TV/movies and listening to music. Vocabulary is supposed to be acquired well through "extensive reading", but you have to get through a lot of kanji to even start into native materials. I must be a masochist, because it's mostly been enjoyable, though having a great sensei helps.

just submitted my placement test for the upcoming semester at depaul — i'm expecting to start at JPN 105 instead 201, since the courses at my community college were probably a lot easier than depaul's. i don't mind a bit of backtracking, and it'll be good to have some structured learning again.

err, quarter not semester

XP I'm looking back at the grammar in my last post, I think I'm turning Japanese.

Anyway, what an insanely hard language to learn it is.

so classes have been going for a coupla weeks — this is my first class taught IN japanese and it's a challenge, but i feel like i've improved in the language already. after classes a few of the students and the t.a. chat in japanese for about an hour. she's a bit younger than sensei and so a bit easier to talk to, and actually knew who YMO were when i said i liked them... afterwards she asked if liked perfume because she thought they were similar. :D

:) I think you could draw a line between the two very easily, as you probably could with most JP pop acts.

the other day during my conversation practice i was having trouble explaining how people from where i'm from (georgia) can sometimes be very polite and friendly to your face, but insult you when you're not around/if you're perceived as an outsider — which made me realize that i have no idea how to talk about things that i don't like (apart from simple things like food and movies, and only then as the opposite of "like")! which made me wonder: does learning to talk about troublesome or unfortunate situations comes later than talking about positive things in language learning?

also finding it extremely jarring to go back to english after these chat sessions, like i've suddenly recovered an amazing power of description i'd forgotten i'd had. weird.

anyone have any experience with using ANKI for kanji/vocab learning? is there any way to "yoke" it to, say, jisho.org to streamline adding new cards? share tips with me!

There are amazing free apps for Android called Japanese Katakana and Japanese Hiragana that show you the symbol and the stroke order and you can practice as much as you like and just flip through the alphabet. It's pretty good for keeping in practice! I bet they have a Kanji one too.

i don't have a smart phone, but i'm thinking of getting one just so i can use apps like that. also carrying around my giant furigana dictionary everywhere is kind of impractical.

So I just started learning Japanese.

I'm doing the Pimsleur audio MP3s right now. It's going pretty good but slow. I'm doing 2 to 3 lessons/audio files a week because I don't advance until I got it all down. But I just started! I'm on lesson 4, going in to lesson 5.

I also acquired the Rosetta Stone for Japanese (1, 2, and 3). But I'm told not to start on that yet til I'm more advanced.

SO, my question is:

What are good resources to learn to write/read? Am I looking to write/read kanji, hiragana, katakana, or something else or what?

I signed up for WaniKani for now.

it depends on what your goals are. are you aiming just to visit for a few weeks days and want to be able to get around? are you trying for complete fluency?

for reading, start with getting down hiragana perfectly, then katakana before even thinking about kanji. write the characters over and over, reading the pronunciation out loud to yourself until it becomes mind-numbingly boring, and then do that again the next day, and again, &c. you'll never forget them.

for kanji, most kanji learners dictionaries will do. kodansha is a good publisher and i'd recommend picking up anything you find from them.

find a textbook. my university classes use nakama, but that book is really set up with the assumption you are taking a class with a teacher. a lot of people like genki and youkoso for self-study, but i haven't tried those myself.

pimsleur is okay for learning set phrases, but eventually you'll want to be able to express yourself in situations where those phrases don't quite fit, and so learning grammar and sentence construction is important. but pimsleur at least gives you a taste of the rhythm and pronunciation of japanese.

really the best thing you can do is: find a native speaker and talk to them. obviously you won't be able to do this until you've been working at the basics for a bit.

i can't speak on the rosetta stones, but to make a maybe specious anecdotal observation, i've never met a single person who was fluent in another language solely through RS. take that as you will.

n.b. i myself am not fluent, but i'm into my 2nd year of study and finally having tons of breakthroughs, and am now looking into study abroad options for next year. it's tough going, but worth it!

oh, and FLASH CARDS. USE THEM.

it depends on what your goals are. are you aiming just to visit for a few weeks days and want to be able to get around? are you trying for complete fluency?

I'm hoping to be near fluency. I speak other languages, so I understand one can never be completely fluent. None of them are Asian languages, though.

for reading, start with getting down hiragana perfectly, then katakana before even thinking about kanji. write the characters over and over, reading the pronunciation out loud to yourself until it becomes mind-numbingly boring, and then do that again the next day, and again, &c. you'll never forget them.

Cool. I'll look up resources to learn to read and write hiragana first. Do you recommend writing it out on a piece of paper as opposed to on a smartphone? I would think the former is better.

find a textbook. my university classes use nakama, but that book is really set up with the assumption you are taking a class with a teacher. a lot of people like genki and youkoso for self-study, but i haven't tried those myself.

I was debating on whether or not I should buy Genki 1. The problem is they don't teach you Kanji. There is a romaji/English version but I've heard it's not good for you, which makes sense.

really the best thing you can do is: find a native speaker and talk to them. obviously you won't be able to do this until you've been working at the basics for a bit.

Yes. The very first thing I did (many, many months ago) was go on a tandem language learning site. I met a bunch of Japanese people. BUT...it didn't work out with any of them. Mainly because, like you said, I needed the basics, which I didn't have.

I know one resource isn't going to cut it, and I'm perfectly happy with that. That's why I'm trying to get my hands on as many resources as possible. And choose a few and stick with them.

Actually, my girlfriend was born and raised in Japan. I've been seeing her for over a year and she always talks to me in English. She is incredibly patient but I know she secretly wishes I would learn a little bit of Japanese. She has taught me a few words but nothing consistently, so I always end up forgetting everything.

I'm finally going to stick with it and really learn the basics and start to have conversations with her in Japanese. I already told her and she loved the idea.

I'm hoping I can take a break from everything and go teach for a couple of years in Japan with my girl.

Anyway, thank you for all your feedback, @clouds!

Kana drills is the best App for keeping it in your head, it's a multiple choice setup but if you cover up the options with yer thumb it works better. However writing Kana is a different deal and it won't help you do that.

I'm on holiday in Japan as I type and even though I've only got six months of decent study under my belt, I'm enjoying the challenge.

@Maresnest, ah, lucky you! My girl is over there right now and comes back tomorrow. I can't wait to go to Japan.

I guess Kana Drill is only for the iPhone, because I don't see it on my Galaxy S4.

i would say pencil + paper is best because you get a feel for the formation of characters more than you would touching a screen (imo).

it might seem obvious, but one cool side effect of repeated handwriting in japanese is that eventually you'll develop personal shortcuts for writing the individual characters and form your own handwritten style.

to memorize kanji i was using p.g. o'neill's "essential kanji" which has nice models for the 2000+ kanji that one sees in newspapers and public writings. it is a bit dated though, and some of the sample usages he gives for kanji are strange.

i would also say that simply trying to memorize the individual kanjis can be beneficial, but the best thing to get them in your head and to understand their meaning is to use them, again and again. it's difficult to do this studying alone, i think, because you aren't being forced to write compositions or do any homework, so the challenge is to find ways to force yourself to write/type and get used to using them repeatedly.

i forgot to mention -- i really only use o'neill's book to check readings of previously-learned kanji that i've forgotten, but all new kanji i learn are in the context of my class, in the order the textbook shows them. it's a lot slower going than the rote method, but i almost never forget any of the readings.

@clouds, great info. thanks!

Also, get the correct pronunciation licked from the beginning, it's actually really straightforward and quite consistent, unlike some other aspects of learning Japanese.

Sitting at Kyoto Eki waiting for the train back to Tokyo, this is our last stretch, treating ourselves to three nights at the Park Hyatt, can't wait to see that view.

jealous!

i'm trying to decide between summer programs at hakodate (hokkaidou) and fukuoka (kyuushuu). going to either one would be a dream come true but i've had a crush on hakodate for a long time, but fukuoka looks amazing.

We did six straight days in Takayama, Gifu this time, with a couple of local side trips (Shirakawa Go, Furukawa). I think it's one of my favourite places on earth.

Sitting at Kyoto Eki waiting for the train back to Tokyo

This is my favorite building in the world

it might seem obvious, but one cool side effect of repeated handwriting in japanese is that eventually you'll develop personal shortcuts for writing the individual characters and form your own handwritten style

i dont recommend getting into the habit of doing this as stroke order is v imp if you want to be able to write intelligably, esp when u

...esp if u plan to take exams at some point. fucking tablet! anyway, i think its one of the first steps to falling in love w japanese, being able to see the strokes flow through the character, poised and purposeful

oh, i didn't mean to imply that i ignore stroke order (though sometimes it is hard to remember for some more complex kanji).

So, I've been in rote mode and been learning five hiragana characters a day. So far I've learnt 30 and I have them down pretty good; stroke order and all. The stroke so far comes naturally, because it's basically up, down, left, right.

I'm still on Pimsleur, but I will be ordering Genki 1 after I finish learning hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Though I guess there are thousands of kanji...so I'll reassess when I get to kanji.

I'm still doing Pimsleur, if only to have the decency to at least be able to say some words in Japanese to my girl and let her brain rest a little from English.

I find it is good for vocab right now, as well.

I'm starting to write characters on my phone but using a keyboard that turns romaji to kanji or whatever, and she's getting a good laugh. It's going so slow and I wish I could go faster, but apparently I'm doing a good job.

Oh, I got hiragana and katakana flash cards, as well.

Kana flash cards with words as well as characters on?

Those are good for the first steps in reading especially given the occasionally chaotic (imho) rendering of Kana-Eigo.

I'm not long back from my trip, tried to read as much Kana as I could, I found some of the fonts kinda troublesome especially the ones that mimic brush strokes.

Well, it's only hiragana and katakana (not kanji). And yes, one side has just characters, and the back has romanisation and English translations of words that use them.

Actually, the flash cards use brush stroke fonts, so, yes, the bottom curve in /sa/ for example disappears a bit then reappears toward the end of the curve. It was confusing at first, but I think I got the hang of it.

These are it: http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Hiragana-Katakana-Flash-Cards/dp/4805311673

I must dig through my cards and find the Katakana for 'Brazil' that was on one.

ブラジル

I'm 38 characters in hiragana.

I guess after I learn those, I should continue with the hiragana with diacritical marks and combos? Or should I learn these later?

There are soooo many. But I'm determined!

my sensei told me that japanese ppl learn the characters w/ diacritics and combos as separate characters, but it's not difficult to remember that き sounds like "ki" and ぎ sounds like "gi", and so on.

^That's what I'm thinking, as well

They are easier to learn but worth learning early. Assuming you're only reading words in hiragana right now, it helps keep your reading speed up not to have to think about it. Also there's some tricky ones like じ.

Ya, I think I'm going to continue with diacritics and combos soon. Then move onto katakana. Feeling pretty good about hiragana. Does it really get easier and easier the more characters you know?

Right now the only thing that troubles me is the fact that I'm learning pretty formal Japanese. So when I talk to my girl she laughs and answers in a way I have never heard before, so she teaches me how to talk informally. She insists I could use boku, for example, but is this really recommended? I'm 31 and I thought boku was for teenagers or used in anime/manga more. I'm still not sure which one to use with my girl. I heard things like anata could be used formally or with a significant other, but I sometimes read contradicting information, as I'm just going through forums.

Thoughts?

I think you're generally taught the formal version in case you need it - in Japan it'd be a hideous faux pas to be all "hey bro, like cool daddio" to your superiors. Once you've got a handle on that the more casual forms make a bit more sense.

I understand. I guess the logic behind not teaching both at the same time is it's just too much to retain? I've not been able to find a good resource for different degrees for formality.

Like, in Spanish, you have formal and informal third person, but they are taught at the same time. I think maybe the concept behind formality in Japanese is different, not just a matter of verb conjugation.

i think the level of formality that's taught to japanese beginners is m/l how you would speak to (most) strangers. talking to your boss would probably be a step up in formality
i assume you've encountered this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese

^I had not read about it, but I had heard about it casually in general terms, but never this specific.

Thank you

my four-year old daughter just got into a Japanese immersion school. super-stoked

Half way through katakana (finished hiragana), and now my question is:

What is the best method to learn kanji to a level where can I have normal, everyday conversations?

My goal is to be able to converse with natives on deeper subjects, such as literature and, if this is even feasible, philosophy, as well as current events.

I know, it's going to take a lot of effort, but I'm willing to do it!

I just want to hear people's experience

where I can* (maybe I should learn English first)

Oh, and previous suggestions haven't gone unnoticed, by the way.

I am looking to get a penpal. I think that should be good for writing in kanji.

Maybe even a chat/skype buddy could help?

Otherwise, I don't have any plans on going to Japan any time soon.

get started learning the ~2000 jouyou (general use) kanji, which are the kanji used in most newspapers and other publications which japanese students are expected to have learned upon exiting high school. kanji learners dictionaries are really helpful.

using some kind of flash card (digital or otherwise) and writing by hand and learning the stroke patterns are essential for learning kanji.

sounds good, clouds.

i'll search out for good jouyou kanji flashcards. i had a look at some kanji characters closer, and the stroke patterns in itself look daunting, because each character is so complex. i keep wanting to find hiragana or katakana characters in kanji but there is nary a trace of them in it.

has anyone used wanikani, by the way?

actually all kana are based on kanji, but they've been so abstracted it's hard to see unless you know which kanji they're based on. at one point japanese simply used those kanji to stand in for the morpheme, and in some cases that pronunciation is no longer common except in archaic usage.

here's a chart:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/FlowRoot3824.png

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ after 2 months what do you think was the best know nothing start from scratch way of going about this? esp spoken japanese.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ after 2 months what do you think was the best know nothing start from scratch way of going about this? esp spoken japanese.

― dylannn, Tuesday, June 24, 2014 12:18 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The best way was to learn basic phrases, any which way. I did it through Pimsleur's. That was just to start SAYING something. I think a lot of beginners have that desire to just speak. And honestly, it doesn't matter what or how you learn the phrases. I started with that audiobook but I also looked online. Translated phrases and asked Japanese friends/acquaintances/people. I used them any time I could.

Learning how to write hiragana/katakana helped tremendously because when people told me how to say something, I had no idea what sounds some were. With learning the basic writing system, I at least was able to visualize the sounds in my head, even though some are still romanized. I'm only just now getting to visualize sounds in kana or whatever.

Lastly, practicing it everyday and squeezing it in conversations with people here and there.

MY UPDATE:

So, after learning hiragana/katakana, I've picked up a "graded reader". It's cool because I can now actually read something and recognize every character, as opposed to reading Japanese newspapers, magazines, or web sites and spotting a few hiragana and katakana here and there.

I bought kanji flashcards and have kind of stopped using Pimsleur's audio CD and have instead bought Genki I + workbook, which is pretty much a standard in this part of the world.

I think I'm finally ready to learn some grammar rules and how to break down some sentences, plus verbs, conjugations, etc.

It helps that I am seeing a Japanese girl, so I ask her a lot of questions, and she talks to me in Japanese sometimes, and she explains some things, such as pronunciation, phrases, informal vs formal differences. She's from Osaka, though, so I know there is a small difference, which is fine, because the more I study Japanese, the less I'm digging Tokyo-style of things (no offence). I still really like and want to learn about Tokyo and many other parts of Japan.

wahh! that was my stream of consciousness opinion

Oh, I forgot to mention, now I watch Japanese movies and YouTube videos a little more and pay attention to pronunciation and phrases. I look to see if I can recognize anything. That helps a lot. This kind of passive and active learning method thing works, I find.

So, all of a sudden, I am extremely interested in Zainichi Koreans and their history and culture. I have always been obsessed with third culture kids, so this is kind of related. I'm kind of a third culture kid and was always interested in identity and definitions of the self that we as a society impose on all individuals.

So I found this girl's YouTube channel and have been watching that.

http://learnjapanesepod.com/kana-invaders/

Deciphered my first katakana word yesterday, karaoke

I'd have thought that would be in hiragana, shows what I know.

カラオケ

Genki III is coming out next year, apparently: http://genki.japantimes.co.jp/archives/3298

(3 columns into Hiragana via a couple of youtube videos but I need to get a rhythm going if I don't want this to fizzle out like most of my big plans :-) )

Have a look at Cure Dolly on YouTube. Once you get past the odd 3D avatar presentation the material is very good and a better introduction to Japanese grammar than most books.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkdmU8hGK4Fg3LghTVtKltQ

The LingoDeer app is pretty good for some basic grammar and practice.

Also once you get your hiragana down, time to get on the WaniKani train

thanks!

どういたしまして