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Quichia
Joined: 03 Feb 2010
Posts: 17
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 Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 3:52 am Post subject: Learning Japanese before Japan |
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Hi all! I' ve posted asking for advice, but I wanted to give some pointers on learning.
So, I'm studying Hiragana now and then on to Katakana and phrases. I found a great site that has helped me tremendously with studying and it's all free!
http://www.studyjapanese.org/
Good luck! |
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gaijinalways
Joined: 29 Nov 2005
Posts: 2279
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| Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 7:48 am Post subject: |
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| Sorry, I'm not overly thrilled with the writing exercises given on the website, they seem more like brute memorization techniques than anything else. Good source for some vocabulary info though. |
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Bread
Joined: 24 May 2009
Posts: 318
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| Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 10:53 am Post subject: |
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Anything anywhere for kana, I can't imagine anyone having problems with kana no matter how they learn it. Just get something that shows the correct stroke order so you don't memorize it wrong and have to fix it later on.
Tae Kim for grammar: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar
Kanji Damage for kanji (much better than that Heisig book for various reasons): http://kanjidamage.com
Tagaini Jisho for dictionary and kanji stroke order animations: http://www.tagaini.net
This is all I've used and I've become conversational and memorized ~1000 kanji with their readings and jukugo with about half a year of off-and-on studying. I'd really strongly recommend both sites to anybody who really cares about learning Japanese. |
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namerae
Joined: 21 May 2010
Posts: 10
Location: USA
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mspxlation
Joined: 13 Jul 2007
Posts: 44
Location: USA
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| Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 3:19 am Post subject: |
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Why are you all talking about learning kanji? Japanese people are going to talk to you more than they're going to write to you.
Learning the katakana first teaches you a lot about the Japanese sound system by showing you how foreign words are distorted when they're borrowed into Japanese. There's also a h*ll of a lot of katakana on signs in Japan, and it's sad to see people who have lived in Japan for a long time and still struggle with katakana.
Then learn hiragana. However, very little except children's books is written entirely in hiragana.
After you've learned the two syllabaries, concentrate exclusively on speaking for a while. The reason is that the actual use of kanji is complicated, so that the same kanji can be pronounced different ways in different contexts, and you'll learn these better if you know the spoken language.
For example, the kanji for the number one can be pronounced ichi in some contexts and -itsu in some compounds. If you're counting small objects, the kanji for "one" with the hiragana tsu is pronounced hitotsu. The compound of "one" with "person" is pronounced hitori, and the compound of "one" with "day" can be either ichinichi "one day" or tsuitachi "first day of the month."
When I was teaching Japanese on the college level, I first tried to teach all these readings at once, but I found that students didn't retain the ones that weren't in their spoken vocabulary.
It doesn't hurt to memorize a few common signs, but on the whole, speaking will be more useful for your everyday life in Japan than memorizing kanji. You can always memorize the kanji on your own later. |
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Bread
Joined: 24 May 2009
Posts: 318
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| Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 4:16 am Post subject: |
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| mspxlation wrote: |
Why are you all talking about learning kanji? Japanese people are going to talk to you more than they're going to write to you.
Learning the katakana first teaches you a lot about the Japanese sound system by showing you how foreign words are distorted when they're borrowed into Japanese. There's also a h*ll of a lot of katakana on signs in Japan, and it's sad to see people who have lived in Japan for a long time and still struggle with katakana.
Then learn hiragana. However, very little except children's books is written entirely in hiragana.
After you've learned the two syllabaries, concentrate exclusively on speaking for a while. The reason is that the actual use of kanji is complicated, so that the same kanji can be pronounced different ways in different contexts, and you'll learn these better if you know the spoken language.
For example, the kanji for the number one can be pronounced ichi in some contexts and -itsu in some compounds. If you're counting small objects, the kanji for "one" with the hiragana tsu is pronounced hitotsu. The compound of "one" with "person" is pronounced hitori, and the compound of "one" with "day" can be either ichinichi "one day" or tsuitachi "first day of the month."
When I was teaching Japanese on the college level, I first tried to teach all these readings at once, but I found that students didn't retain the ones that weren't in their spoken vocabulary.
It doesn't hurt to memorize a few common signs, but on the whole, speaking will be more useful for your everyday life in Japan than memorizing kanji. You can always memorize the kanji on your own later. |
Kana shouldn't take more than a week for anybody who is actually serious about learning it. I don't think learning kana even deserves a discussion.
Focusing on speaking at first while you get down the basics of sentence structure and such is fine, but after a certain (fairly low-level) point I think it's just completely unacceptable to be a functional illiterate. Learning kanji also helps a TON for compound words, where you might forget a word but remember its kanji, since damn near everything is composed of combinations of shuu and shou and kou and other similar-sounding bits. Then you can reconstruct the reading from the kanji. A basic set of a couple hundred kanji can also be incredibly helpful in daily life.
I think the same people who get by with just speaking in Japanese are the same ones who make errors with there/their/they're and your/you're in English. I learned English by reading and I'm learning Japanese by reading. I mostly speak Japanese at my job and I almost never find myself unable to say something that I want to say, but it's all been learned via reading.
Your college students might have been terrible at remembering things, but that's likely because they didn't care all that much. If someone is living in Japan, primarily using Japanese, they have a lot more motivation to seriously learn and remember things.
And it's not like you just memorize "Oh, 一 is pronounced ichi and hito and itsu!" You just remember which kanji go to which words in cases like that. |
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Inflames
Joined: 02 Apr 2006
Posts: 486
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| Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 6:39 am Post subject: |
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| mspxlation wrote: |
Why are you all talking about learning kanji? Japanese people are going to talk to you more than they're going to write to you.
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Actually, when I first arrived, it was the exact opposite. I had people speaking Japanese to me in stores (but that was all mostly the same) but I was getting a ton of written things in the mail (notices, bills, flyers) and ads were (and still are) everywhere.
I think there's a bit of circular logic here. People speak to you, so you should focus on speaking. But you're not actually trying to read, so reading is useless. If you emphasized speaking in your class, then of course the students will have a hard time remembering readings. If you emphasized kanji, then of course they will remember the readings.
I think that one should learn all of the kanji for JLPT level 4 (old level 3) and focus on speaking, then just focus on kanji and reading (and not focusing so much on speaking) as you've already got a fair amount of vocab, but you don't know how to read it. |
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Apsara
Joined: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 2142
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 1:04 pm Post subject: |
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| mspxlation wrote: |
Why are you all talking about learning kanji? Japanese people are going to talk to you more than they're going to write to you.
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That totally overlooks the fact that being able to read Japanese signs, menus, and product packaging makes life much easier when you are here.
I learned Japanese at university in New Zealand, and once I arrived here I gave thanks every day for the hiragana, katakana and kanji that I could read. I felt that I had a much easier time settling in here than a lot of people I knew who arrived with zero Japanese reading or speaking skills. |
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