I've decided to try to take up Japanese, I've heard it's a fairly hard language to tackle. I've purchased a beginner language book. I've read into it a bit, but I'm finding it really hard unless you hear it as well. I suppose I'm an audible learner as well.
Anyways, I was wondering if anyone knows of any good resources that are online (preferably free) for Japanese or any other languages you are all trying to learn. Nowadays, typing in "learn Japanese" into Google doesn't give you the most helpful links.
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You can pick up the Japanese course books from Mount Royal, they are fairly usefull for learning on your own. Make sure you learn both basic alphabets - Katakana (used for english words/hentai/manga) and hirogana (used for Japanese origin words). That will give you a good base for reading in Japanese. Write each letter out hundreds of times and that will help you memorize.
Japanese is not super hard to learn but is super hard to master. Nihongo ga dekimasen de####a.
Listen to Japanese music as well, it will help you distinguish between words if your not used to hearing Japanese and watch Japanese T.V.
There is another alphabet called Kanji which is based on symbols that make up a work similar to Chinese, there are thousands of them. I wouldn't start to get into Kanji letters though until you master Hirogana and Katakana.
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What's your purpose for learning Japanese? How you learn will depend on your function. In terms of grammar and general syntax, it's not an overly hard language compared to other languages. The things that make Japanese complicated are the different types of honorifics, as well as the emphasis on context.
Most courses and books teach you the polite Japanese, which is good for conversation. So if you're planning to travel to Japan and want to have a few sentences under your belt, that is the way to go.
If you watch a lot of anime, they speak very informally and impolitely. It's more of an everyday speak, and is very slangy. In you want to understand that, learning polite Japanese doesn't help you all that much.
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As someone who has learned a 2nd language, I find that 2 things are important.
1) Don't be shy - repeat things out loud. You need to build confidence to gain fluency.
2) Think in the language. By this, I mean really visualize the actions and object when you repeat things to yourself. It's one thing to have your brain memorizing words and syntax, but it is another thing to associate things in your daily life in another language.
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Last edited by FlamesAddiction; 07-20-2012 at 11:39 AM.
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What's your purpose for learning Japanese? How you learn will depend on your function. In terms of grammar and general syntax, it's not an overly hard language compared to other languages. The things that make Japanese complicated are the different types of honorifics, as well as the emphasis on context.
Most courses and books teach you the polite Japanese, which is good for conversation. So if you're planning to travel to Japan and want to have a few sentences under your belt, that is the way to go.
If you watch a lot of anime, they speak very informally and impolitely. It's more of an everyday speak, and is very slangy. In you want to understand that, learning polite Japanese doesn't help you all that much.
Yea, planning to make a trip to Japan sometime in the future so I guess that would be the best way to go. I understand that reading and writing is fairly difficult, but I'm mostly looking to be able to converse there. I do know some Chinese so it definitely helps with Kanji characters.
I can offer some insight into learning an Asian language but not Japanese specifically.
The first thing I would do is learn how to read and write - do your studying of Japanese in Japanese. This seems pretty straight forward but I have met so many people with messed up pronunciation because they learned it through romanized expressions (although this may apply more to Korean than Japanese...I don't know).
Reading and writing is not difficult for the most part - this came from my friends that were in Japan for quite some time. The hardest part about Japanese is the prevalence of Kanji in the language. But as you have some familiarity with this it should not be too bad.
The first thing I did when I learned Korean was to study and memorize the symbols/sounds and start reading/writing in Korean. Do not neglect saying these sounds as you learn as the speaking/listening skills can fall behind. When you read (even basic sentences) read them aloud. If you can get your hands on some children's books it is a good way to learn basic sentence structure and grammar implicitly - but once again read them aloud as much as possible.
Japanese and Korean are pretty easy languages to read and write - I learned how to read and write Korean (very slowly mind you) in a day or two. If it were Chinese I would just say screw it and learn through romanization heh.
Good luck.
One more thing - as mentioned above start thinking about the sentences in Japanese. It will help with word order as Japanese is SOV whereas English is SVO.
Last edited by SeoulFire; 07-20-2012 at 10:21 PM.
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We'll be spending some time in Japan next year so I'm in the process of learning some Japanese too! Here are a couple things I've found helpful:
Like everyone else has said so far, I would learn Hiragana and Katakana first.
I found Drag and Drop Hiragana/Katakana were helpful for practice when I was just starting out. This is really important so that you understand the sounds in Japanese.
Of course, if you actually want to be able to read and write Japanese, you need to learn a lot of Kanji as well - blegh!
- Human Japanese, which I got for my phone, is a great introduction to Japanese. Highly recommended. It's much better than a book since you can just click on the screen to hear a native pronunciation.
- lang-8 is absolutely wicked if you're serious about learning Japanese. Basically, the way it works is you correct native Japanese speakers' English, and they correct your Japanese. Even better, most people on there would be happy to Skype with you, so you can actually practice speaking face to face with a native Japanese person. It's a great community and everyone is happy to help out. Of course, you also need to do your part in return but it's easy.
Japanese is one of the easiest Asian languages to learn. It's not tonal (Chinese is tonal). The non-Kanji (Chinese characters) part of the writing is phonetic like Western languages (just learn the sounds of the characters and pronounce together like an Alphabet). There is the romaji system which means you can take Japanese words and spell them or read them phonetically which means that Westerners can learn spoken and written language with an alphabet like system and don't have to learn Chinese characters.
The sounds and pronunciation are very friendly to your typical western sounds and distinct and easy to pick up (again, the non-tonal) by ear. Many Japanese terms are taken from Western words. There is an easy to learn and comprehensive romanization system (Japanese words written in Latin character set) that doesn't have much variation (in comparison to other Asian languages).
Japanese is interesting to learn but why are you learning it? A lot of people seem to want to learn Japanese for entertainment/pop culture reasons and there's nothing wrong with that, but that seems to be a big part of the trend.
In today's world, one of the more major Asian languages to try to learn is probably Mandarin which I keep telling myself I will do but never get around to doing.
Learning a New Language (Japanese)...
